Nanotech civilization living on comet gets pissed, launches nanotech weapon the size of a marble to Earth, where it proceeds to turn the entire planet into grey goo.
I had problems with my DVD drive a while back, had to hard boot a couple times.
Guess what? XP - WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE DAILY, it's just on the machine (along with 2000 and RH 7.3) - decides not to boot when I DO want to use it. Tells me the "hal.dll" is corrupt or missing.
WRONG! The stupid boot loader is messed up, so it decides to send me on a wild goose chase looking for a perfectly good hal.dll. I do a bootcfg/rebuild, the problem goes away.
Now I reboot - my AVG AV crashes on bootup.
Reboot again - the AV now works.
Now the SBC DSL PPPoE connection (using the XP client) doesn't work.
Delete that, recreate it.
Finally, XP is functional again.
This on an OS that hasn't even been USED in six months! What is it? Bit rot?
At City College, in my Windows Support class (basically an XP class), XP has trashed partitions, repeatedly loaded McAfee AV and Microsoft Office from the server, and simply keeled over on various machines. The Windows 2000 (or 2003, I'm not sure which one the instructor has installed on his server) has bogged down repeatedly (on a lousy 20-odd machine network!), the DNS server has crashed repeatedly, and all sorts of other crap occurs weekly. The instructor has decided to bone up on Linux because HE's getting tired of this crap!
Oh, it's the students' fault, is it? No, pal, it's the OS's fault for being that goddamn fragile.
Windows is CRAP - bloated, inefficient, unstable, unreliable, insecure CRAP.
Bottom Line: NO XP patch issued over the network should have been accepted by the Windows 2000 workstations. The patch mechanism should have tested for OS release and version.
EDS triggered the stupid goof.
Microsoft created it.
Period.
End of story.
Now if you can prove that EDS created the patch system and was not using Microsoft's standard patch mechanism, you can have a point.
But as far as I can tell from the story, there is NO indication that EDS was doing anything other than applying a patch (probably Service Pack 2) to XP on a limited number of machines, and accidentally applied it to the entire network.
This doesn't surprise me. In my current Windows Support Technician class I'm taking (basically an XP how-to), the stupid lab server and XP workstations are repeatedly installing McAfee AV and Microsoft Office on every bootup. The teacher hasn't figured out how to stop this yet.
Not to mention that several XP lab machines have simply gone belly up for no apparent reason.
Just today my home machine's XP partition wouldn't boot because of "missing or corrupt hal.dll" - which in fact was nothing of the sort. The stupid boot loader was messed up and decided that it was too stupid to find the hal.dll, so it decided to send me on a wild goose-chase by telling me the dll was "missing or corrupt". Rebuilding the bootcfg fixed that.
Then it decided to bomb loading the AVG AV once or twice. That apparently went away on its own after another reboot.
Then the PPPoE connection to my ISP wouldn't work - had to delete and recreate it. Was working fine before.
Bottom line: Windows XP - like Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 95 before it - is a bloated piece of crap that is unstable and unreliable.
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait, make me sit in the corner again. Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Jesus Baron von Christ, geeks, this isn't nuclear fusion science!
Develop an XML layout standard for packages defining everything - names, file sizes, hash values for everything - in other words IDENTIFY EVERYTHING uniguely (and where it ISN'T unique, cross-ref) - then write a package manager.
You have heard that George Bush won re-election, right?
I'd get out of Korea as fast as I can, if I were you - it's about to be bombed and it's infrastructure totally wrecked and about a million people in both North and South are going to die.
Remember that the next time some US soldier gets his head hacked off - since war criminals who murder civilians shouldn't be given prisoner of war status either.
And how would the poor AFFORD to move somewhere else? And to where? Someplace with NO handouts?
I love it when well-off people - and nationally $70,000 a year is "well-off" even if you might think it isn't because you didn't like paying $2K/month for a studio in San Francisco - think all poor people have to do is pack up, jump a bus and move to...somewhere...to better their lot.
You are conflating two things - the PAES welfare to work system and the General Assistance program.
The PAES program offers job training and support services to people who want to work and have some vague possibility of finding work.
The General Assistance program gives out cash for people who are willing to sweep the streets. See my post elsewhere for how this program of using Welfare recipients as slave labor for the Department of Public Works got started. This program is where you find the drunks and whatnot who take the cash, sweep the streets, then go on a bender.
The PAES program is the only one where you might actually have a chance of getting off Welfare if you have the motivation.
I went through the entire 27 months of PAES, and have yet to get a job, but it looks like I'll be offered a high-paying position at City College in the near future if things work out, so the program did it's job of keeping me going and giving me access to education when I got out of the joint.
But without my own motivation, nothing would have helped.
"With all the charity they receive, they have a higher standard of living than most working families...their apartments are among the best I've seen"
Are you full of shit!
I live in a SRO on Eddy Street. A single room, for those of you who don't know what an SRO is (Single Room Occupancy).
This is NOT "the best apartment I've seen".
Besides the bedbug infestation (now abated - in my room, at least), this place is not one of the Hilton hotels - you won't see Paris wandering around here any time soon. And other places are worse.
This is not to say the place is not livable. I've been here for three years - others have been here in excess of ten. But it's NOT some great apartment.
If the poster is referring to the Federal Section 8 program, he is misrepresenting the state of Welfare recipients in San Francisco and their access to housing. Section 8 has nothing to do with the SRO housing available to the poor in San Francisco.
This is an example of the misrepresentation the "Care Not Cash" people used to justify their attempts to do away with any form of Welfare in San Francisco.
They advocate services instead of cash - but never had any way of providing the services promised - especially housing as there IS NO suitable housing in San Francisco for the poor - other than the existing SRO cheap hotel room system. Where was the city going to find 5,000 or 10,000 new housing for the homeless? Nowhere if the landlords in San Francisco had any say about it.
Care Not Cash was about doing exactly what the other posters suggested - eliminate services and money and drive the homeless out of San Francisco so they could be some other city's problem.
San Francisco did this years ago as well. Back in the Seventies, it was a laughing stock of the nation because of a report that street sweepers working for the Department of Public Works were being paid $18,000 a year (good money back then) and had a waiting list for the job for years.
So the city decided to kill two birds with one stone. They required Welfare recipients to sweep the streets in order to qualify for a Welfare check. By creating a slave labor class, they reduced their expenses for DPW and drove people off the Welfare roles.
This practice continues in San Francisco - although now with the PAES program, you can also get job training and support if you really want to work. The PAES program is far more useful than any previous Welfare programs have been. It got me through the past two years after I got out of the joint, got me current computer training, and has positioned me to potentially obtain a well-paid job at City College if things work out.
That is the kind of program that might be made to work to help the homeless and the poor.
But as with everything else, it depends on the motivation of the person participating.
The San Francisco public library already has umpteen computers with Internet access as well as plug-in access for laptops. One can sign-up for hour or half-hour access - although the wait is long as many people use this service.
Are you claiming US policies and actions in the Middle East are not "offenses" against the Muslim people?
While one might quibble over whether "cultural invasion" is an "offense", the supporting of the Israel oppression and genocide of the Palestinians is clearly an offense, as well as the supporting of the Arab monarchies in exchange for oil.
Not to mention colonialism and religious warfare going back centuries.
bin Laden's error was in killing US citizens who were clueless about any of this. Had he limited his attacks to the White House, Pentagon, and especially the CIA, I doubt anybody would have been as upset since it would have been obvious why he attacked those targets.
Still, from his viewpoint, it IS a war against the West - not because "they hate our freedom" (although many of them probably do) but because they hate our policies. This has been explicitly stated by bin Laden and numerous other Arab critics for years now.
And it is no surprise that bin Laden regards Westerners in any capacity as the enemy - since most fools in the West regard any Muslim as the enemy.
As for the Japanese, they could have been defeated in COMBAT BY COMBATANTS. Civilians did not need to be killed for this purpose. Any other statement is justification for war crimes. Period.
Of course, as a Transhuman, I couldn't care less about how many humans get killed by whatever means - as long as they aren't of value to the Transhuman purpose. But pointless killing is incorrect by any measure. And in that respect, both 9/11 and the nuking of Japan - and the continued slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US troops - as well as the random killing of Iraqis by Iraqis - are incorrect.
Go here for a video of the US continuing to murder civilians in Iraq in the name of "peace, democracy and the 'war on terrorism'.
"one of the local thugs is out on bail after his 10th arrest, with his first one from three years ago still in appeals."
And the reason he's a thug is because he was first arrested for "loitering" because he's black, then was sent as a juvenile to a county jail where he was educated as to the criminal "justice" system by other blacks with the same "history of criminal behavior."
Then he was framed for drug dealing by a fellow black who was offered a deal - instead of fifty years in prison, he'd get ten if he fingered all of his relatives and friends as drug dealers - with the prosecutor not giving a damn if any of them were actually guilty because he needed a career boost to become a judge some day.
And of course, after being released from his "10th arrest", he'll never work a legit job again, so...
And of course, he was "loitering" in the first place because his parents were in the same boat, as were their parents and so on back to the nineteenth century.
And prior to that, of course, they originated in Africa, where anybody with a brain had already left scores of millenia ago.
And of course prior to that, they descended from primates - by a few genetic percentage points, anyway.
Somehow, I don't think your "rough justice" is a solution to this area of discourse.
"the progress of history can be measured by how many people a group of ten dedicated men can kill"
The issue was never "how many", but "who".
Of course, in terms of the state, the "ten dedicated men" are the ones who can issue and execute the nuclear orders.
As for "making criminals out of everyone", this is the exact PURPOSE of the state in any form.
Also, "punishment" doesn't work - even Nietzsche knew that.
The only way to prevent "crime" is to raise humans who don't need to do it because of their mental and emotional deficiencies and resulting economic circumstances.
But that would put the State out of business - so it ain't ever going to happen. Fergeddaboutit.
So instead we Transhumans are going to put you all out of business.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is very excellent for debugging."
Heh, heh, well, it would be, right?
This is Microsoft - bugs are what they do.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
You live in Washington, D.C., right?
In a wealthy neighborhood full of politicians, right?
Nanotech civilization living on comet gets pissed, launches nanotech weapon the size of a marble to Earth, where it proceeds to turn the entire planet into grey goo.
Oh, wait, it already was grey goo...
Never mind.
Crap.
/rebuild, the problem goes away.
Let me repeat that so you do in fact hear it.
Crap.
I had problems with my DVD drive a while back, had to hard boot a couple times.
Guess what? XP - WHICH I DON'T EVEN USE DAILY, it's just on the machine (along with 2000 and RH 7.3) - decides not to boot when I DO want to use it. Tells me the "hal.dll" is corrupt or missing.
WRONG! The stupid boot loader is messed up, so it decides to send me on a wild goose chase looking for a perfectly good hal.dll. I do a bootcfg
Now I reboot - my AVG AV crashes on bootup.
Reboot again - the AV now works.
Now the SBC DSL PPPoE connection (using the XP client) doesn't work.
Delete that, recreate it.
Finally, XP is functional again.
This on an OS that hasn't even been USED in six months! What is it? Bit rot?
At City College, in my Windows Support class (basically an XP class), XP has trashed partitions, repeatedly loaded McAfee AV and Microsoft Office from the server, and simply keeled over on various machines. The Windows 2000 (or 2003, I'm not sure which one the instructor has installed on his server) has bogged down repeatedly (on a lousy 20-odd machine network!), the DNS server has crashed repeatedly, and all sorts of other crap occurs weekly. The instructor has decided to bone up on Linux because HE's getting tired of this crap!
Oh, it's the students' fault, is it? No, pal, it's the OS's fault for being that goddamn fragile.
Windows is CRAP - bloated, inefficient, unstable, unreliable, insecure CRAP.
Linux is crap, too - but it's FREE crap.
Windows 2014?
Wait - how about (from Marvel) - Windows 2099?
Bottom Line: NO XP patch issued over the network should have been accepted by the Windows 2000 workstations. The patch mechanism should have tested for OS release and version.
EDS triggered the stupid goof.
Microsoft created it.
Period.
End of story.
Now if you can prove that EDS created the patch system and was not using Microsoft's standard patch mechanism, you can have a point.
But as far as I can tell from the story, there is NO indication that EDS was doing anything other than applying a patch (probably Service Pack 2) to XP on a limited number of machines, and accidentally applied it to the entire network.
This doesn't surprise me. In my current Windows Support Technician class I'm taking (basically an XP how-to), the stupid lab server and XP workstations are repeatedly installing McAfee AV and Microsoft Office on every bootup. The teacher hasn't figured out how to stop this yet.
Not to mention that several XP lab machines have simply gone belly up for no apparent reason.
Just today my home machine's XP partition wouldn't boot because of "missing or corrupt hal.dll" - which in fact was nothing of the sort. The stupid boot loader was messed up and decided that it was too stupid to find the hal.dll, so it decided to send me on a wild goose-chase by telling me the dll was "missing or corrupt". Rebuilding the bootcfg fixed that.
Then it decided to bomb loading the AVG AV once or twice. That apparently went away on its own after another reboot.
Then the PPPoE connection to my ISP wouldn't work - had to delete and recreate it. Was working fine before.
Bottom line: Windows XP - like Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 95 before it - is a bloated piece of crap that is unstable and unreliable.
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait, make me sit in the corner again. Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
1) Criticize Microsoft.
2) Criticize Microsoft some more.
3) Profit!
This is definitely where Microsoft has the advantage over open source - a single proprietary source to criticize!
More importantly, it is deservedly so!
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait. Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Right - catch us begging Cowboy for the PRIVILEGE of posting...given the level of piss-poor karma ninety percent of /. posters should have.
Fuck him.
Jesus Baron von Christ, geeks, this isn't nuclear fusion science!
Develop an XML layout standard for packages defining everything - names, file sizes, hash values for everything - in other words IDENTIFY EVERYTHING uniguely (and where it ISN'T unique, cross-ref) - then write a package manager.
Do I have to do everything for you morons?
that the use of the pronoun "he" in the article in reference to Kim Polese's remarks was wrong - Kim is (very) female.
Korea, eh?
You have heard that George Bush won re-election, right?
I'd get out of Korea as fast as I can, if I were you - it's about to be bombed and it's infrastructure totally wrecked and about a million people in both North and South are going to die.
Want to be one of them?
Remember that the next time some US soldier gets his head hacked off - since war criminals who murder civilians shouldn't be given prisoner of war status either.
Your "Rapture" is coming - except it's going to be more of a "Rupture" in your case.
We Transhumans are going to eliminate your pathetic belief systems from the planet.
Go ahead, mod me down and put me in the corner again, asshole moderators.
Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
Same principles as cell phones or community wireless.
If everybody is a store-and-forward wireless node, obviously this works.
Can you imagine the hacking fun?
"Oooh, look at that blonde babe over there - I'll hack into her email server and change all the headers to porno invites!"
So it's the "handouts", is it?
And how would the poor AFFORD to move somewhere else? And to where? Someplace with NO handouts?
I love it when well-off people - and nationally $70,000 a year is "well-off" even if you might think it isn't because you didn't like paying $2K/month for a studio in San Francisco - think all poor people have to do is pack up, jump a bus and move to...somewhere...to better their lot.
$331 to $410 a month is not an "extremely generous stipend" depending on your circumstances.
And if you have to sweep the streets seven hours a day for three to five days to get it, it's not exactly "no strings attached".
There are PLENTY of strings attached to the San Francisco General Assistance program, let me assure you.
You are conflating two things - the PAES welfare to work system and the General Assistance program.
The PAES program offers job training and support services to people who want to work and have some vague possibility of finding work.
The General Assistance program gives out cash for people who are willing to sweep the streets. See my post elsewhere for how this program of using Welfare recipients as slave labor for the Department of Public Works got started. This program is where you find the drunks and whatnot who take the cash, sweep the streets, then go on a bender.
The PAES program is the only one where you might actually have a chance of getting off Welfare if you have the motivation.
I went through the entire 27 months of PAES, and have yet to get a job, but it looks like I'll be offered a high-paying position at City College in the near future if things work out, so the program did it's job of keeping me going and giving me access to education when I got out of the joint.
But without my own motivation, nothing would have helped.
"With all the charity they receive, they have a higher standard of living than most working families...their apartments are among the best I've seen"
Are you full of shit!
I live in a SRO on Eddy Street. A single room, for those of you who don't know what an SRO is (Single Room Occupancy).
This is NOT "the best apartment I've seen".
Besides the bedbug infestation (now abated - in my room, at least), this place is not one of the Hilton hotels - you won't see Paris wandering around here any time soon. And other places are worse.
This is not to say the place is not livable. I've been here for three years - others have been here in excess of ten. But it's NOT some great apartment.
If the poster is referring to the Federal Section 8 program, he is misrepresenting the state of Welfare recipients in San Francisco and their access to housing. Section 8 has nothing to do with the SRO housing available to the poor in San Francisco.
This is an example of the misrepresentation the "Care Not Cash" people used to justify their attempts to do away with any form of Welfare in San Francisco.
They advocate services instead of cash - but never had any way of providing the services promised - especially housing as there IS NO suitable housing in San Francisco for the poor - other than the existing SRO cheap hotel room system. Where was the city going to find 5,000 or 10,000 new housing for the homeless? Nowhere if the landlords in San Francisco had any say about it.
Care Not Cash was about doing exactly what the other posters suggested - eliminate services and money and drive the homeless out of San Francisco so they could be some other city's problem.
San Francisco did this years ago as well. Back in the Seventies, it was a laughing stock of the nation because of a report that street sweepers working for the Department of Public Works were being paid $18,000 a year (good money back then) and had a waiting list for the job for years.
So the city decided to kill two birds with one stone. They required Welfare recipients to sweep the streets in order to qualify for a Welfare check. By creating a slave labor class, they reduced their expenses for DPW and drove people off the Welfare roles.
This practice continues in San Francisco - although now with the PAES program, you can also get job training and support if you really want to work. The PAES program is far more useful than any previous Welfare programs have been. It got me through the past two years after I got out of the joint, got me current computer training, and has positioned me to potentially obtain a well-paid job at City College if things work out.
That is the kind of program that might be made to work to help the homeless and the poor.
But as with everything else, it depends on the motivation of the person participating.
The San Francisco public library already has umpteen computers with Internet access as well as plug-in access for laptops. One can sign-up for hour or half-hour access - although the wait is long as many people use this service.
Are you claiming US policies and actions in the Middle East are not "offenses" against the Muslim people?
While one might quibble over whether "cultural invasion" is an "offense", the supporting of the Israel oppression and genocide of the Palestinians is clearly an offense, as well as the supporting of the Arab monarchies in exchange for oil.
Not to mention colonialism and religious warfare going back centuries.
bin Laden's error was in killing US citizens who were clueless about any of this. Had he limited his attacks to the White House, Pentagon, and especially the CIA, I doubt anybody would have been as upset since it would have been obvious why he attacked those targets.
Still, from his viewpoint, it IS a war against the West - not because "they hate our freedom" (although many of them probably do) but because they hate our policies. This has been explicitly stated by bin Laden and numerous other Arab critics for years now.
And it is no surprise that bin Laden regards Westerners in any capacity as the enemy - since most fools in the West regard any Muslim as the enemy.
As for the Japanese, they could have been defeated in COMBAT BY COMBATANTS. Civilians did not need to be killed for this purpose. Any other statement is justification for war crimes. Period.
Of course, as a Transhuman, I couldn't care less about how many humans get killed by whatever means - as long as they aren't of value to the Transhuman purpose. But pointless killing is incorrect by any measure. And in that respect, both 9/11 and the nuking of Japan - and the continued slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US troops - as well as the random killing of Iraqis by Iraqis - are incorrect.
Go here for a video of the US continuing to murder civilians in Iraq in the name of "peace, democracy and the 'war on terrorism'.
Of course they are.
Absolutely identical, in fact.
Combatants killing non-combatants.
What part of that is not "morally equivalent"?
"one of the local thugs is out on bail after his 10th arrest, with his first one from three years ago still in appeals."
And the reason he's a thug is because he was first arrested for "loitering" because he's black, then was sent as a juvenile to a county jail where he was educated as to the criminal "justice" system by other blacks with the same "history of criminal behavior."
Then he was framed for drug dealing by a fellow black who was offered a deal - instead of fifty years in prison, he'd get ten if he fingered all of his relatives and friends as drug dealers - with the prosecutor not giving a damn if any of them were actually guilty because he needed a career boost to become a judge some day.
And of course, after being released from his "10th arrest", he'll never work a legit job again, so...
And of course, he was "loitering" in the first place because his parents were in the same boat, as were their parents and so on back to the nineteenth century.
And prior to that, of course, they originated in Africa, where anybody with a brain had already left scores of millenia ago.
And of course prior to that, they descended from primates - by a few genetic percentage points, anyway.
Somehow, I don't think your "rough justice" is a solution to this area of discourse.
You forgot one:
Anarchist: Whatever the problem, the problem IS the government. The solution is obvious.
Actually, two:
Transhuman: Whatever the problem, the problem is human. The solution is also obvious.
Unless he has a split personality, of course.
"the progress of history can be measured by how many people a group of ten dedicated men can kill"
The issue was never "how many", but "who".
Of course, in terms of the state, the "ten dedicated men" are the ones who can issue and execute the nuclear orders.
As for "making criminals out of everyone", this is the exact PURPOSE of the state in any form.
Also, "punishment" doesn't work - even Nietzsche knew that.
The only way to prevent "crime" is to raise humans who don't need to do it because of their mental and emotional deficiencies and resulting economic circumstances.
But that would put the State out of business - so it ain't ever going to happen. Fergeddaboutit.
So instead we Transhumans are going to put you all out of business.
Have a nice day.