Yes. I installed VS.NET a few days ago from some CDs I checked out from my MIS department. An email they sent after I was approved contained a license number, though I didn't have to enter it because the installer already had it greyed out and uneditable. The email also had a link to the license: http://msdnaa.net/EULA/NA/English.aspx If I'm audited, all that I have to prove is that I was attending school at the place associated with the license number.
It was a light-hearted jab at my fellow American IT "professionals". It's one thing to be an average or below-average coder. What's been depressing me lately are the numbers of total frauds that pass themselves off as technologists. I'm starting to think that in most brick and mortar companies the best strategy for making money is to pretend that you know absolutely nothing about the implementation side of things and just use a lot of buzzwords. That way, your biased boss will decide to put you in charge of the "geeks".
This has almost nothing to do with Iraq. Yes it's about oil, but it's about more than that. It's about maintaining US hegemony. For years people have talked about "regime change" (installing a puppet) in Iraq. But even before that they were talking about what might happen when China becomes an economic powerhouse.
People in the US (and Britain) don't like the idea of a future Earth where English is second to Mandarin. The aggressive game plan is to get a lock on the Earth's natural resources that will require China to play friendly with English speaking Westerners so that we have some degree of control over their economic growth.
This perspective also helps us understand why "North Korea cannot go nuclear". It may even explain why we'll probably never see a decent solar panel on the market until it's engineered and mass-produced in China.
BTW, I don't support this war. I'm not afraid of China. I'm not afraid to deal with demography.
This has almost nothing to do with Iraq. Yes it's about oil, but it's about more than that. It's about maintaining US hegemony. For years people have talked about "regime change" (installing a puppet) in Iraq. But even before that they were talking about what might happen when China becomes an economic powerhouse.
People in the US (and Britain) don't like the idea of a future Earth where English is second to Mandarin. The aggressive game plan is to get a lock on the Earth's natural resources that will require China to play friendly with English speaking Westerners so that we have some degree of control over their economic growth.
This perspective also helps us understand why "North Korea cannot go nuclear". It may even explain why we'll probably never see a decent solar panel on the market until it's engineered and mass-produced in China.
BTW, I don't support this war. I'm not afraid of China. I'm not afraid to deal with demography.
While I would never argue that every Indian can code, I will say that the percentages are in their favor. I bet you've known many more untalented Americans than talented ones.
Oh, and if you're looking for an ex-con, hire a black man. I just say that so that you know not to take me too seriously on this train of thought.
I could be wrong, but I thought that the FCC was ordering them to shut down analog broadcasts (they can't very well force someone to broadcast digitally if they would rather stop broadcasting entirely). There has been talk of using that spectrum for something else.
Notice that in Aliens, James Cameron wrote the android as an underestimated hero figure that wins Ripley over in the end. Still, I know what you're saying.
I would say that Cameron was ahead of his time in his anxieties about military robots, etc. Isn't it interesting that the Terminator mythology timeline, including the soon to be released T3: Rise of the Machines closely mirrors real events in the respective years when the films were released? Because of the time which elapsed between films, Linda Hamilton and Ed Furlong could even act out their parts at each stage in the story without troubling to play their characters older or younger. In T2, Sarah Connor looked exactly as she should have after those years had gone by, and now Furlong would make an exellent John Connor if he weren't having serious substance abuse issues.
Rise of the machines, indeed. Now we're actually killing terrorists with UAVs, and you can read (slashdot posted a story) about wireless technology being employed to create *independent* networks in the sky so that these killer robots can communicate with each other and make battlefield decisions at a moment's notice...can you say "SkyNet"!?!? It's hillarious, even as it is terrifying!
I'm not so worried about SkyNet "waking up", but because I do have a shred of empathy for people I've never met, I'm deeply concerned about what the future of war might be like for some poor family in some poor country that we have so carelessly labeled an "axis of evil". Those nightmarish scenes from the Terminator movies...people living like rats as they try to survive a merciless mechanical onslaught...could actually be what Bush and co. have in store for any "brown people" who don't kowtow to the new capital-first world order.
"Global demographic trends suggestive of an overpopulated future? No problem!" (insert sounds of military laser canons here)
No conspiracy necessary. If you look around, you'll notice that market-driven media entities are constantly fearmongering. And they love this president, because his popularity too is positively correlated with popular fears. Boogymen abound. The end result is going to be (already is getting) ugly.
Why are handguns (for personal protection, obviously) so popular in America? Too many people watching their local evening news. We're a bunch of irrational sissies.
Do you remember seeing all of those ads for Mac clones in magazines? You could really only find them in the Mac magazines. VERY aggressive campaigns to get you to buy a Power Computing Mac instead of an Apple Mac. They offered side by side spec comparisons and boldly emphasized their slightly lower price.
This is all understandable, but I think Apple had gotten into this partially because they were fighting such an uphill battle trying to market the Mac to PC users all by themselves. Then when the program started, they didn't see UMAX, Motorola or (especially) Power Computing doing much to help. The competitors seemed to have the initial goal of getting their Mac clone operations started by cannabalizing what little remained of Apple's already dwindling revenue stream. Actually, I think I remember seeing Motorola ads in the non-computer press. Kudos to them for trying to grow the pie.
It would have been great for everyone if Apple could have survived long enought to benefit from it, but they really couldn't have.
I'm not an insider, but this is my guess at what the poster meant by "abuse" based on my recollection. The whole experience seemed so ugly. If only Apple wouldn't have hired such lousy CEO's. Gil Amelio and others are still making money off of their time spent there, and they nearly brought the company to it's knees by not putting the necessary emphasis on building exciting looking products. Steve makes it look so easy.
Ok, I didn't know what "p" was. If you're talking about variable includes/requires with register_globals turned on, then I would agree...that's incredibly stupid.
It's just hard to believe that anyone could actually have coded something like that without thinking first. It's especially difficult to imagine someone using something like that in a query string for all to see.
I've emailed several people notifying them of this problem but not one single person changed their code.
If you aren't able to get their passwd file, don't be emailing people about this. Assuming that blah.php is in the same directory as index.php, index.php?p=/etc/passwd would probably be a site-root relative link to http://host/etc/passwd
Maybe it depends on the script, but in most cases you would probably just get a 404 message. PHP isn't quite as stupid as you might think it is.
It's not because people in other countries are so poor that they pirate American movies. It's mainly a law enforcement issue. The cops in these countries could care less about the number of cars in the garages of our hollywood studio execs. I'm sure that they get their movies on the street like everyone else.
It's the same thing here in the states for movies made in other countries. I go to an Indian grocery where you can rent Indian movies. The wall behind the cash register is just covered with hundreds of VHS tapes, all with Sony, Memorex, Maxell, etc. covers.
I can see your point, but to be practical, I never had a lot of hope that community wireless was ever going to go nationwide, or even statewide in most parts of the country, and the spectrum is useless until someone provides the service and hardware to make it work for us...that's what we would be paying Cometa for (indirectly).
What have you been using your spectrum for? I've never used mine for solving any problem that couldn't have been solved by just stringing along some cable. I would guess that this is the story for most people, and I've been hoping that someone would do exactly this. I would actually travel a lot more.
In a way, I think it would have been worth considering doing this with tax dollars. It would probably have been the same companies managing it, but it could have been "free" like the interstate highways. Infrastrucure.
But somehow this seems better. For one thing, if you don't need the internet, you wouldn't have to pay for it.
By the way, I'm assuming that this isn't going to be prohibitively expensive. They aren't just targeting the business class. It's supposed to be for everyone...eventually. It will certainly be affordable long before a nationwide community network could have been established, and remember that Cometa wouldn't necessarily preclude the establishment of a nationwide community network. If anything it would be easier to create such a network alongside a known beast like Cometa than amidst the cacophony of wireless noise that would have sprung up in its absense.
This is just about the only way that we ever could have expected so many companies (the ISPs, etc.) to work together. They're just buying from wholesale. If it didn't exist for them to buy, they would definitely have created a terrible mishmash.
Also, when it comes to privacy, I trust my ISP a lot more than I trust John Poindexter. I'm sure that he'll be keeping an eye on us if we do anything "un-American" either way, but if you've ever watched hearings about what kind of cooperation congressmen are going to get from some non-profit entity in return for "our" tax dollars (I'm thinking of NPR, PBS, CPB), you could see why it could be better to keep them out of the loop as much as possible.
This will be world class. It will work. If they did this with spectrum that they had paid for, it would be far more expensive. Because it's public spectrum, the expectation will be that they make this affordable. Remember that congress has sided with the consumer on the issue of cable rate hikes in the past. They'll have even more leverage here. This is probably how a post-Reagan interstate highway system would have been developed. It would be managed by Union Pacific, and you would pay a monthly service fee for access. Washington doesn't do "public" anymore.
You should try Yahoo again. I haven't gotten spam in the last six months or so that wasn't traceable to my own actions and easily fixed. They have a "This is Spam" link now that appears at the top of every message. It's a user-driven solution, almost Google-esque.
My main concern is with aesthetics and culture. When is the last time you saw a cityscape painting with a corporate logo in it? Nobody paints cityscapes anymore because our cities are fucking ugly.
Some people advertise here, and others have to live here. It would be fine if it was a valueable and necessary part of our culture, but it isn't. Unbridled advertising doesn't help consumers find the products that they're looking for as much as it helps them overlook products made by people or companies who can't afford saturation marketing campaigns.
It's an inefficient way of getting information about the market to participants in the market. It's all spam. Subject a million people to your message, and then let a hundred or so pay for it.
It's arguable that everything wrong with money in politics is equally wrong with money in advertising. The main difference is that our democratic institutions are more sacred to us. The inefficiencies are the same in each case.
Information, no matter what it's about, should be sought out by active minds, not merely accepted by passive ones.
The golden age of advertising is here, and it's only just beginning. If you think that you're immersed in marketing noise right now, don't even think that it won't get much worse.
Surely we're all supportive of freedom in the marketplace, but we don't have to be such market fundamentalists that we can't talk about legislation that would tell advertisers where they *can* advertise, rather than where they *can't*. We could settle this question of whether or not money equals free speech once and for all. We could create forums for advertising, and the market could be more equitable.
Why take such a step? Advertising is taking over our lives, and it's displacing many of the more meaningful aspects of human culture that have been developed over millions of years. It's all going away...
Use your imagination to see 50 years into the future...the people who are pushing the desceptive ads of today are just trying to be competitive....they and their successors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives because their competitors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives.
Imagine...we could actually end this spiral that's quickly taking human civilization down the toilet.
If I sound like a radical to you, it's only because we're all so perfectly accustomed to it, and we have no idea what things might be like without so much of it. As I type this, I can see logos and slogans on my screen, to my left, to my right, behind me...just look around...it's everywhere!!! AAAUGHHH!!!
It was probably a decision on the part of the studio to "spin" this as a love story. I've seen two different trailers, and one represents the movie that I saw today while the other one on TV now emphasizes a "love story" theme which is easily ignored.
Sci-fi films like Solaris have been in various stages of production for a while now, but audiences are more excited stories like LOTR lately. It's sad, but understandable. During times like these, LOTR's moral clarity is going to sell better than Solaris' moral complexity.
I hate to sound like a snob (I'm really not), but some people just aren't reflective enough for this kind of film. Instead of selling this as a love story (or a sci-fi film, for that matter), they should have marketed it as a thinking person's film. Soderberg's Solaris is not at all pretentious, but some people can appreciate it's intelligence and others will simply complain that it's too slow. Action, suspense, horror...these kinds of films reach us at a very primal level. If you want to see a slow film, go see Tarkovsky's Solaris. It makes this one seem rushed.
I can put it this way: If you like sci-fi, have an attention span, and you're the type of person who's always complaining that Hollywood increasingly caters to the lcd...you probably won't regret seeing this movie.
It's also kind of funny how something automatically becomes nothing more than a publicity stunt simply because it generates good publicity. This only works if it is taken as read that the subject is incapable of doing anything good.
Ahhh...western dualism. Nobody is just sort of evil or sort of good. Bill Gates is a monopolist...therefore, he is the darkness that lurks beneath the bed of every innocent child. Ellen Feiss fans, grab your chainsaws...
...and then there's the question: Will Sun ever recoup its investment in Java? Not likely.
It's really sad that this is the way it's going to happen for Sun. Java was a war that they waged against Microsoft on behalf of anyone who dreaded a Microsoft-only future. "...and, if we make it possible for developers to create platform-agnostic software, everyone will see the benefit of running that software on a superior OS like Solaris."
Java didn't quite live up to the hype of Sun's expensive PR campaigns, and Java isn't the future of programming. Commodity operating systems running on commodity hardware...this will be the new standard platform to target for server applications, and eventually will probably be the standard for single user applications as well (though you wouldn't know it here in the US).
Microsoft can only prevent a paradigm shift away from today's PC desktop experience for so long. When change comes, *n*x will be the obvious choice for most applications because it is quickly becoming infrastructure. The problem isn't even that Microsoft is too expensive...the problem is that Microsoft will never stop trying to dictate the user experience. If we don't need a PC, then we definitely don't need Microsoft. Chances are that we won't need Sun either. How tragic for them...that operating sytems are becoming infrastructure, and that they can't afford to keep up with "commodity" hardware forever.
I suppose that it might just be a "special form of ridicule" to simply propose a good ridiculing, but yes, let's hear the argument for the ridiculing.
Regarding your sig, and because so few people even know what IRV is, I wanted you to take a look at this, which recently dampened my spirits about promoting IRV. Of course, it's still better than plurality voting, but, well....you'll see. If you're short on time, at least skip to the bottom and study the illustrated example.
It may depend on what the load balancer gives you. It does look like they're moving more IIS into the back end. Eventually it will probably be all Microsoft. When someone pointed this out to me a year or two ago, it was pretty clear that most files were being served by IIS, but when you went to login (or do anything else) the form was submitted to FreeBSD.
Now I see that 64.4.14.24 is Running IIS 5, but 64.4.14.23 is running Apache on FreeBSD.
At least loginnet.passport.com is running Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about what it means to be a public servant. Were there no black people in his state? He served whites.
Yes. I installed VS.NET a few days ago from some CDs I checked out from my MIS department. An email they sent after I was approved contained a license number, though I didn't have to enter it because the installer already had it greyed out and uneditable. The email also had a link to the license:
http://msdnaa.net/EULA/NA/English.aspx
If I'm audited, all that I have to prove is that I was attending school at the place associated with the license number.
It was a light-hearted jab at my fellow American IT "professionals". It's one thing to be an average or below-average coder. What's been depressing me lately are the numbers of total frauds that pass themselves off as technologists. I'm starting to think that in most brick and mortar companies the best strategy for making money is to pretend that you know absolutely nothing about the implementation side of things and just use a lot of buzzwords. That way, your biased boss will decide to put you in charge of the "geeks".
This has almost nothing to do with Iraq. Yes it's about oil, but it's about more than that. It's about maintaining US hegemony. For years people have talked about "regime change" (installing a puppet) in Iraq. But even before that they were talking about what might happen when China becomes an economic powerhouse.
People in the US (and Britain) don't like the idea of a future Earth where English is second to Mandarin. The aggressive game plan is to get a lock on the Earth's natural resources that will require China to play friendly with English speaking Westerners so that we have some degree of control over their economic growth.
This perspective also helps us understand why "North Korea cannot go nuclear". It may even explain why we'll probably never see a decent solar panel on the market until it's engineered and mass-produced in China.
BTW, I don't support this war. I'm not afraid of China. I'm not afraid to deal with demography.
This has almost nothing to do with Iraq. Yes it's about oil, but it's about more than that. It's about maintaining US hegemony. For years people have talked about "regime change" (installing a puppet) in Iraq. But even before that they were talking about what might happen when China becomes an economic powerhouse.
People in the US (and Britain) don't like the idea of a future Earth where English is second to Mandarin. The aggressive game plan is to get a lock on the Earth's natural resources that will require China to play friendly with English speaking Westerners so that we have some degree of control over their economic growth.
This perspective also helps us understand why "North Korea cannot go nuclear". It may even explain why we'll probably never see a decent solar panel on the market until it's engineered and mass-produced in China.
BTW, I don't support this war. I'm not afraid of China. I'm not afraid to deal with demography.
While I would never argue that every Indian can code, I will say that the percentages are in their favor. I bet you've known many more untalented Americans than talented ones.
Oh, and if you're looking for an ex-con, hire a black man. I just say that so that you know not to take me too seriously on this train of thought.
I could be wrong, but I thought that the FCC was ordering them to shut down analog broadcasts (they can't very well force someone to broadcast digitally if they would rather stop broadcasting entirely). There has been talk of using that spectrum for something else.
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server
Notice that in Aliens, James Cameron wrote the android as an underestimated hero figure that wins Ripley over in the end. Still, I know what you're saying.
I would say that Cameron was ahead of his time in his anxieties about military robots, etc. Isn't it interesting that the Terminator mythology timeline, including the soon to be released T3: Rise of the Machines closely mirrors real events in the respective years when the films were released? Because of the time which elapsed between films, Linda Hamilton and Ed Furlong could even act out their parts at each stage in the story without troubling to play their characters older or younger. In T2, Sarah Connor looked exactly as she should have after those years had gone by, and now Furlong would make an exellent John Connor if he weren't having serious substance abuse issues.
Rise of the machines, indeed. Now we're actually killing terrorists with UAVs, and you can read (slashdot posted a story) about wireless technology being employed to create *independent* networks in the sky so that these killer robots can communicate with each other and make battlefield decisions at a moment's notice...can you say "SkyNet"!?!? It's hillarious, even as it is terrifying!
I'm not so worried about SkyNet "waking up", but because I do have a shred of empathy for people I've never met, I'm deeply concerned about what the future of war might be like for some poor family in some poor country that we have so carelessly labeled an "axis of evil". Those nightmarish scenes from the Terminator movies...people living like rats as they try to survive a merciless mechanical onslaught...could actually be what Bush and co. have in store for any "brown people" who don't kowtow to the new capital-first world order.
"Global demographic trends suggestive of an overpopulated future? No problem!"
(insert sounds of military laser canons here)
Deeply concerned.
You actually think that Michael Moore was the first person to notice and articulate this.
Go read something for a change.
No conspiracy necessary. If you look around, you'll notice that market-driven media entities are constantly fearmongering. And they love this president, because his popularity too is positively correlated with popular fears. Boogymen abound. The end result is going to be (already is getting) ugly.
Why are handguns (for personal protection, obviously) so popular in America? Too many people watching their local evening news. We're a bunch of irrational sissies.
Do you remember seeing all of those ads for Mac clones in magazines? You could really only find them in the Mac magazines. VERY aggressive campaigns to get you to buy a Power Computing Mac instead of an Apple Mac. They offered side by side spec comparisons and boldly emphasized their slightly lower price.
This is all understandable, but I think Apple had gotten into this partially because they were fighting such an uphill battle trying to market the Mac to PC users all by themselves. Then when the program started, they didn't see UMAX, Motorola or (especially) Power Computing doing much to help. The competitors seemed to have the initial goal of getting their Mac clone operations started by cannabalizing what little remained of Apple's already dwindling revenue stream. Actually, I think I remember seeing Motorola ads in the non-computer press. Kudos to them for trying to grow the pie.
It would have been great for everyone if Apple could have survived long enought to benefit from it, but they really couldn't have.
I'm not an insider, but this is my guess at what the poster meant by "abuse" based on my recollection. The whole experience seemed so ugly. If only Apple wouldn't have hired such lousy CEO's. Gil Amelio and others are still making money off of their time spent there, and they nearly brought the company to it's knees by not putting the necessary emphasis on building exciting looking products. Steve makes it look so easy.
Ok, I didn't know what "p" was. If you're talking about variable includes/requires with register_globals turned on, then I would agree...that's incredibly stupid.
It's just hard to believe that anyone could actually have coded something like that without thinking first. It's especially difficult to imagine someone using something like that in a query string for all to see.
I've emailed several people notifying them of this problem but not one single person changed their code.
If you aren't able to get their passwd file, don't be emailing people about this. Assuming that blah.php is in the same directory as index.php, index.php?p=/etc/passwd would probably be a site-root relative link to http://host/etc/passwd
Maybe it depends on the script, but in most cases you would probably just get a 404 message. PHP isn't quite as stupid as you might think it is.
It's not because people in other countries are so poor that they pirate American movies. It's mainly a law enforcement issue. The cops in these countries could care less about the number of cars in the garages of our hollywood studio execs. I'm sure that they get their movies on the street like everyone else.
It's the same thing here in the states for movies made in other countries. I go to an Indian grocery where you can rent Indian movies. The wall behind the cash register is just covered with hundreds of VHS tapes, all with Sony, Memorex, Maxell, etc. covers.
Do our cops care? Not at all.
I can see your point, but to be practical, I never had a lot of hope that community wireless was ever going to go nationwide, or even statewide in most parts of the country, and the spectrum is useless until someone provides the service and hardware to make it work for us...that's what we would be paying Cometa for (indirectly).
What have you been using your spectrum for? I've never used mine for solving any problem that couldn't have been solved by just stringing along some cable. I would guess that this is the story for most people, and I've been hoping that someone would do exactly this. I would actually travel a lot more.
In a way, I think it would have been worth considering doing this with tax dollars. It would probably have been the same companies managing it, but it could have been "free" like the interstate highways. Infrastrucure.
But somehow this seems better. For one thing, if you don't need the internet, you wouldn't have to pay for it.
By the way, I'm assuming that this isn't going to be prohibitively expensive. They aren't just targeting the business class. It's supposed to be for everyone...eventually. It will certainly be affordable long before a nationwide community network could have been established, and remember that Cometa wouldn't necessarily preclude the establishment of a nationwide community network. If anything it would be easier to create such a network alongside a known beast like Cometa than amidst the cacophony of wireless noise that would have sprung up in its absense.
This is just about the only way that we ever could have expected so many companies (the ISPs, etc.) to work together. They're just buying from wholesale. If it didn't exist for them to buy, they would definitely have created a terrible mishmash.
Also, when it comes to privacy, I trust my ISP a lot more than I trust John Poindexter. I'm sure that he'll be keeping an eye on us if we do anything "un-American" either way, but if you've ever watched hearings about what kind of cooperation congressmen are going to get from some non-profit entity in return for "our" tax dollars (I'm thinking of NPR, PBS, CPB), you could see why it could be better to keep them out of the loop as much as possible.
This will be world class. It will work. If they did this with spectrum that they had paid for, it would be far more expensive. Because it's public spectrum, the expectation will be that they make this affordable. Remember that congress has sided with the consumer on the issue of cable rate hikes in the past. They'll have even more leverage here. This is probably how a post-Reagan interstate highway system would have been developed. It would be managed by Union Pacific, and you would pay a monthly service fee for access. Washington doesn't do "public" anymore.
You should try Yahoo again. I haven't gotten spam in the last six months or so that wasn't traceable to my own actions and easily fixed. They have a "This is Spam" link now that appears at the top of every message. It's a user-driven solution, almost Google-esque.
My main concern is with aesthetics and culture. When is the last time you saw a cityscape painting with a corporate logo in it? Nobody paints cityscapes anymore because our cities are fucking ugly.
Some people advertise here, and others have to live here. It would be fine if it was a valueable and necessary part of our culture, but it isn't. Unbridled advertising doesn't help consumers find the products that they're looking for as much as it helps them overlook products made by people or companies who can't afford saturation marketing campaigns.
It's an inefficient way of getting information about the market to participants in the market. It's all spam. Subject a million people to your message, and then let a hundred or so pay for it.
It's arguable that everything wrong with money in politics is equally wrong with money in advertising. The main difference is that our democratic institutions are more sacred to us. The inefficiencies are the same in each case.
Information, no matter what it's about, should be sought out by active minds, not merely accepted by passive ones.
The golden age of advertising is here, and it's only just beginning. If you think that you're immersed in marketing noise right now, don't even think that it won't get much worse.
Surely we're all supportive of freedom in the marketplace, but we don't have to be such market fundamentalists that we can't talk about legislation that would tell advertisers where they *can* advertise, rather than where they *can't*. We could settle this question of whether or not money equals free speech once and for all. We could create forums for advertising, and the market could be more equitable.
Why take such a step? Advertising is taking over our lives, and it's displacing many of the more meaningful aspects of human culture that have been developed over millions of years. It's all going away...
Use your imagination to see 50 years into the future...the people who are pushing the desceptive ads of today are just trying to be competitive....they and their successors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives because their competitors won't stop pushing advertising further and further into every moment of our lives.
Imagine...we could actually end this spiral that's quickly taking human civilization down the toilet.
If I sound like a radical to you, it's only because we're all so perfectly accustomed to it, and we have no idea what things might be like without so much of it. As I type this, I can see logos and slogans on my screen, to my left, to my right, behind me...just look around...it's everywhere!!! AAAUGHHH!!!
It was probably a decision on the part of the studio to "spin" this as a love story. I've seen two different trailers, and one represents the movie that I saw today while the other one on TV now emphasizes a "love story" theme which is easily ignored.
Sci-fi films like Solaris have been in various stages of production for a while now, but audiences are more excited stories like LOTR lately. It's sad, but understandable. During times like these, LOTR's moral clarity is going to sell better than Solaris' moral complexity.
I hate to sound like a snob (I'm really not), but some people just aren't reflective enough for this kind of film. Instead of selling this as a love story (or a sci-fi film, for that matter), they should have marketed it as a thinking person's film. Soderberg's Solaris is not at all pretentious, but some people can appreciate it's intelligence and others will simply complain that it's too slow. Action, suspense, horror...these kinds of films reach us at a very primal level. If you want to see a slow film, go see Tarkovsky's Solaris. It makes this one seem rushed.
I can put it this way: If you like sci-fi, have an attention span, and you're the type of person who's always complaining that Hollywood increasingly caters to the lcd...you probably won't regret seeing this movie.
It's also kind of funny how something automatically becomes nothing more than a publicity stunt simply because it generates good publicity. This only works if it is taken as read that the subject is incapable of doing anything good.
Ahhh...western dualism. Nobody is just sort of evil or sort of good. Bill Gates is a monopolist...therefore, he is the darkness that lurks beneath the bed of every innocent child. Ellen Feiss fans, grab your chainsaws...
It's really sad that this is the way it's going to happen for Sun. Java was a war that they waged against Microsoft on behalf of anyone who dreaded a Microsoft-only future. "...and, if we make it possible for developers to create platform-agnostic software, everyone will see the benefit of running that software on a superior OS like Solaris."
Java didn't quite live up to the hype of Sun's expensive PR campaigns, and Java isn't the future of programming. Commodity operating systems running on commodity hardware...this will be the new standard platform to target for server applications, and eventually will probably be the standard for single user applications as well (though you wouldn't know it here in the US).
Microsoft can only prevent a paradigm shift away from today's PC desktop experience for so long. When change comes, *n*x will be the obvious choice for most applications because it is quickly becoming infrastructure. The problem isn't even that Microsoft is too expensive...the problem is that Microsoft will never stop trying to dictate the user experience. If we don't need a PC, then we definitely don't need Microsoft. Chances are that we won't need Sun either. How tragic for them...that operating sytems are becoming infrastructure, and that they can't afford to keep up with "commodity" hardware forever.
Take a look at www.gentoo.org The whole site uses XML.
Also check out Daniel's articles for IBM developerWorks describing the site... Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4I suppose that it might just be a "special form of ridicule" to simply propose a good ridiculing, but yes, let's hear the argument for the ridiculing.
Regarding your sig, and because so few people even know what IRV is, I wanted you to take a look at this, which recently dampened my spirits about promoting IRV. Of course, it's still better than plurality voting, but, well....you'll see. If you're short on time, at least skip to the bottom and study the illustrated example.
It may depend on what the load balancer gives you. It does look like they're moving more IIS into the back end. Eventually it will probably be all Microsoft. When someone pointed this out to me a year or two ago, it was pretty clear that most files were being served by IIS, but when you went to login (or do anything else) the form was submitted to FreeBSD.
Now I see that 64.4.14.24 is Running IIS 5, but 64.4.14.23 is running Apache on FreeBSD.
At least loginnet.passport.com is running Windows.
Hotmail still runs FreeBSD...behind the Windows 2000 front-end facade.
Go to http://uptime.netcraft.com/ and type in one of the IP addresses that you find in the HTML source at Hotmail's login page.