Neither can they say, "Give us your encryption password or we'll put you in jail."
Didn't England recently pass a law that says just that? Gotta figure they're thinking about it here too. I'm surprised they didn't manage to get that in the Patriot Act.
He wasn't "wiped", just modded down to oblivion. Apparently a lot of other people felt the same way, and some of them had mod points. Sometimes I wish Slashdot could implement some kind of semantic filter that would keep that kind of crap from getting posted. Ah well. Gotta take the good with the bad, I guess.
Interesting. I wonder if CompUSA is going to try and transition from brick-and-mortar to fully online the way NewEgg did. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off, particularly with the likes of NewEgg already in that space. Still, CompUSA does have a lot of name recognition.
Well, "neo" means "like or similar to" and I don't see these neocons being anything like actual conservatives. Maybe we should call them uncons instead, since they're unlike real conservatives and like unconstitutional things, and they've certainly conned us.
Personally, I think more of them should just be "cons", as in convicts. Probably, when Bush is out of office and all the dust settles, a few of them will be. A few, just enough to make us think that some kind of justice was done. Still, I don't know how many life sentences one should receive for throwing away some thousands of lives, some few civil liberties, and a few trillion dollars of public funds, but whatever.
How many people do you know that have ever experienced anything like a waterboarding? A heavy-handed formal interrogation? A polygraph test? Various forms of torture? It would be interesting to offer that as a service to people that want to know exactly what it is to which we're subjecting people in the name of counter-terrorism. Obviously nothing physically harmful, but it might be worthwhile to subject some of our political leaders to the stuff that's happening at Gitmo. Just for educational purposes, of course... odds are they might not be so accommodating of Bush's policies afterwards.
Well, true visionaries don't need guidance systems, in fact, the whole point of being a visionary is that you are a guidance system! Gates, on the other hand, isn't so much interested in discerning trends before anyone else and profiting by them, he's takes the approach of deciding what direction we should go in and then using his ill-gotten gains to push us that way.
Well, he did win the Lemelson-MIT award, half a million dollars. But still... given the hundreds of billions that have been earned from products derived from his work, you're right: he should have been better treated. I don't know enough about the man to know if that matters to him or not. I get the impression that he's just happy to see many of his ideas accepted and in widespread use. He also came up with the idea of a windowing system and demonstrated them to a live audience! He is certainly a visionary.
There are other concerns here than simple privacy. How about the fact that WE, THE PEOPLE, of these here UNITED STATES, do not want advertisers beaming auditory hallucinations into our heads? You may have the right to record me as I walk down a public street: but do you have to right to shove a speaker in my face to tell me how Geico can save me a bundle on my car insurance? You may... I don't know how the law will respond to this. Conversely, I reserve the right to take that speaker from you and break it into tiny pieces, which is what I suspect will happen to most of these installations once people figure out where the voices in their heads are coming from.
I can see this having some beneficial applications. "WARNING: you are approaching a hazardous area. Please exercise caution" or "This is an active crime scene. All unauthorized personnel should leave the area immediately" and so forth. However, as an advertising medium this is a supremely stupid idea.
Well, there have been a lot of changes in that regard, and the various broadband providers have had to come to terms with home networking. They didn't want to: when AT&T Broadband first bought out @Home's local infrastructure, I was told that any kind of NAT routing or home networking was grounds for termination of service! Forget about supporting such configurations either. The idea was that you should buy a separate address for each system on your home network at $3.95 per IP. Nuts to that, and why would I want to have to firewall each box independently? Well, home networking is here to stay, NAT isn't going anywhere until IPV6 gets popular (and maybe not even then) so these idiots have been forced to accept that there will be non-Windows TCP/IP stacks connected to their networks. Took them a while, but now... hell, they offer popular wireless routers for sale right on their Web sites.
Now your typical low-end router/firewall combo runs Linux or some other embedded OS. Consequently, DHCP is the rule, most operating systems come with DHCP configured right out of the box, and stuff just tends to work. Hell, at the moment I have a modified WRT54G V4 running the Tomato firmware as my front end. When I jacked it into my Comcast cable modem it just connected, no screwing around. That's the way connectivity should be.
No, you're wrong. Microsoft's "evil", insofar as I'm concerned, has to do with the companies and technologies that never had a chance because someone at Microsoft decided to steal it, buy it or just destroy it. That someone was often William H. Gates. The Personal Computer Revolution was largely stolen from us, because we all got forced to go the Redmond way.
There's no point in going over Microsoft's other evils, such as the fact that it is a Grade-A government-certified illegally acquired-and-maintained monopoly. Now, monopolies aren't necessarily evil or illegal... but Microsoft's is, on both counts. And don't try to excuse them as just being, you know, basically decent people who make honest mistakes. Microsoft is a criminal organization that has maintained a consistent pattern of unlawful activity throughout its entire corporate existence.
And so far as Apple and Google are concerned, it sounds like you're excusing Microsoft's bad behavior because well, you know, Apple and Google might be as bad, but we don't know yet so let's give Microsoft a pass for now. Look nobody knows whether we are alone in the Universe... but the question of whether that company is good or evil has been answered. They were taken to court over the issue of their monopoly status and lost.
So yeah, Microsoft is evil, and the pattern of general nastiness persists to this very day. Why do you think the European Union is giving them such a hard time? Have you been following the OOXML fiasco, with Microsoft attempting to buy their way into a standard? No, I suggest you keep Googling Microsoft: it's obvious you've not been around long enough to have experienced their evil firsthand. I've been in the software business since before Microsoft was a gleam in Bill Gates' eye, and I've seen the damage he and his brainchild have caused.
Bill can give all his money to charity if he wants, but there's no Undo button for what he's done.
No, actually the vision of a GUI came from Doug Engelbart. He was way out in the lead when it comes to conceiving and implementing an early graphical environment (using a mainframe no less.) Credit where credit is due... even Xerox PARC played off of Engelbart's work, because as the linked article points out, "Several of Engelbart's best researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing."
Xerox's people keep getting all the credit for conceiving the modern GUI, but in fact they were latecomers, and were partly composed of Engelbart's people! Jobs and Gates aren't even in the running, insofar as pioneering efforts are concerned. They were just the people that brought graphical computing to the masses... not to disrespect them for that, but you're right that they didn't innovate squat.
But you have to understand the Microsoft perspective on this issue. As the only relevant vendor of operating system software, hardware should conform to Microsoft's needs... not the other way 'round. Bizarre, I know... but really is how the collective brain of Microsoft thinks.
ou do what your paid to do, and you do whatever will make you the most money!:)
Or what will make you any money at all. As I mentioned in my previous post, my company used to sell systems based on various Unices (this was way before Linux happened) because, at the time, it was the best choice. Unfortunately, as you say, customers have all been brainwashed into wanting Windows applications so we had to deliver just that. If we hadn't, well, the competition would have just taken the market away from us.
That's why I said "vast improvements over Windows 9x. I run XP on a couple of my own workstations, but my server is Win 2K. NT4 won't run a number of apps that I need and has been EOL'ed for way too long anyway and is no longer supported by hardware vendors. Besides, I know a number of very large corporations that still deploy Windows 2000 on thousands of computers because... it's stable, does the job, and they don't see any reason to pay Microsoft more millions for something they don't need. Eventually, of course, they'll be forced to upgrade, if nothing else because of driver support.
True... on the other hand, you still have to know what you're doing which is the real problem the GP was addressing. What you're talking about is effective cooperation between workers. And yes, that is important, and good management knows how to make that happen. However, when the people above start giving irrational orders because they're nothing but clueless PHBs, it doesn't matter how well-liked anyone is. The organization is in serious trouble. Matter of fact, bad management is frequently the source of friction between workers.
Not to be difficult, but Windows NT4, and its successors Windows 2000 and Windows XP, were vast improvements over Windows 9x. It's only now, almost ten years later, that Microsoft has taken a huge step backwards with Vista. That fact is disturbing, because I look at it as being indicative of major problems in Microsoft's design, development and QC processes: this mess should not have happened. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that complex software development is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Incremental, well-thought-out improvements made over time result in better products than huge quantities of completely new code (Vista is claimed to be what, a 70% rewrite?) If you try to change too much too quickly, you will have a disaster on your hands.
Like you, I develop Windows software for a living (in some fairly mission critical environments as well), none of which would have been possible had the NT kernel not become part of Microsoft's mainstream operating systems. Matter of fact, in those days we shipped Unix boxes because there was no way in Hell you could use Windows 9x for real-time data acquisition and process control. But NT4 was pretty solid, and the GUI improvements in Windows 2000 helped a lot too. I initially found XP to be less stable than Windows 2000, but XP did improve substantially over time, and nowadays is halfway decent.
But I agree about Vista. From my perspective going to Vista right now would be very risky. Maybe in a year or two when Microsoft has had a chance to fix some of the worst issues it'll be worth another look. Maybe... but for right now we're sticking with XP as long as we can.
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Neither can they say, "Give us your encryption password or we'll put you in jail."
Didn't England recently pass a law that says just that? Gotta figure they're thinking about it here too. I'm surprised they didn't manage to get that in the Patriot Act.
Yeah well, it sounded good when I said it anyway. Maybe next time I'll try without the beer.
He wasn't "wiped", just modded down to oblivion. Apparently a lot of other people felt the same way, and some of them had mod points. Sometimes I wish Slashdot could implement some kind of semantic filter that would keep that kind of crap from getting posted. Ah well. Gotta take the good with the bad, I guess.
Interesting. I wonder if CompUSA is going to try and transition from brick-and-mortar to fully online the way NewEgg did. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off, particularly with the likes of NewEgg already in that space. Still, CompUSA does have a lot of name recognition.
Well, "neo" means "like or similar to" and I don't see these neocons being anything like actual conservatives. Maybe we should call them uncons instead, since they're unlike real conservatives and like unconstitutional things, and they've certainly conned us.
Personally, I think more of them should just be "cons", as in convicts. Probably, when Bush is out of office and all the dust settles, a few of them will be. A few, just enough to make us think that some kind of justice was done. Still, I don't know how many life sentences one should receive for throwing away some thousands of lives, some few civil liberties, and a few trillion dollars of public funds, but whatever.
How many people do you know that have ever experienced anything like a waterboarding? A heavy-handed formal interrogation? A polygraph test? Various forms of torture? It would be interesting to offer that as a service to people that want to know exactly what it is to which we're subjecting people in the name of counter-terrorism. Obviously nothing physically harmful, but it might be worthwhile to subject some of our political leaders to the stuff that's happening at Gitmo. Just for educational purposes, of course ... odds are they might not be so accommodating of Bush's policies afterwards.
This one, you mean? Yeah, he really does have a point. Cecil Adams once called it "the twilight world of marketing."
Well, true visionaries don't need guidance systems, in fact, the whole point of being a visionary is that you are a guidance system! Gates, on the other hand, isn't so much interested in discerning trends before anyone else and profiting by them, he's takes the approach of deciding what direction we should go in and then using his ill-gotten gains to push us that way.
Well, he did win the Lemelson-MIT award, half a million dollars. But still ... given the hundreds of billions that have been earned from products derived from his work, you're right: he should have been better treated. I don't know enough about the man to know if that matters to him or not. I get the impression that he's just happy to see many of his ideas accepted and in widespread use. He also came up with the idea of a windowing system and demonstrated them to a live audience! He is certainly a visionary.
There are other concerns here than simple privacy. How about the fact that WE, THE PEOPLE, of these here UNITED STATES, do not want advertisers beaming auditory hallucinations into our heads? You may have the right to record me as I walk down a public street: but do you have to right to shove a speaker in my face to tell me how Geico can save me a bundle on my car insurance? You may ... I don't know how the law will respond to this. Conversely, I reserve the right to take that speaker from you and break it into tiny pieces, which is what I suspect will happen to most of these installations once people figure out where the voices in their heads are coming from.
I can see this having some beneficial applications. "WARNING: you are approaching a hazardous area. Please exercise caution" or "This is an active crime scene. All unauthorized personnel should leave the area immediately" and so forth. However, as an advertising medium this is a supremely stupid idea.
There's plenty of competition in the Open Source world ... human beings thrive on a certain level of it. However, money is not the usual reward.
what if you write that password on a piece of paper, and then put it in a safe?
Well, there have been a lot of changes in that regard, and the various broadband providers have had to come to terms with home networking. They didn't want to: when AT&T Broadband first bought out @Home's local infrastructure, I was told that any kind of NAT routing or home networking was grounds for termination of service! Forget about supporting such configurations either. The idea was that you should buy a separate address for each system on your home network at $3.95 per IP. Nuts to that, and why would I want to have to firewall each box independently? Well, home networking is here to stay, NAT isn't going anywhere until IPV6 gets popular (and maybe not even then) so these idiots have been forced to accept that there will be non-Windows TCP/IP stacks connected to their networks. Took them a while, but now ... hell, they offer popular wireless routers for sale right on their Web sites.
Now your typical low-end router/firewall combo runs Linux or some other embedded OS. Consequently, DHCP is the rule, most operating systems come with DHCP configured right out of the box, and stuff just tends to work. Hell, at the moment I have a modified WRT54G V4 running the Tomato firmware as my front end. When I jacked it into my Comcast cable modem it just connected, no screwing around. That's the way connectivity should be.
Not arguing that Carlos Sim is a honkin' big Mexican multibillionaire ... but CompUSA is officially defunct.
fundamentally and intellectually dishonest.
That's our Bill. Oh, and Ballmer too.
No, you're wrong. Microsoft's "evil", insofar as I'm concerned, has to do with the companies and technologies that never had a chance because someone at Microsoft decided to steal it, buy it or just destroy it. That someone was often William H. Gates. The Personal Computer Revolution was largely stolen from us, because we all got forced to go the Redmond way.
... but Microsoft's is, on both counts. And don't try to excuse them as just being, you know, basically decent people who make honest mistakes. Microsoft is a criminal organization that has maintained a consistent pattern of unlawful activity throughout its entire corporate existence.
... but the question of whether that company is good or evil has been answered. They were taken to court over the issue of their monopoly status and lost.
There's no point in going over Microsoft's other evils, such as the fact that it is a Grade-A government-certified illegally acquired-and-maintained monopoly. Now, monopolies aren't necessarily evil or illegal
And so far as Apple and Google are concerned, it sounds like you're excusing Microsoft's bad behavior because well, you know, Apple and Google might be as bad, but we don't know yet so let's give Microsoft a pass for now. Look nobody knows whether we are alone in the Universe
So yeah, Microsoft is evil, and the pattern of general nastiness persists to this very day. Why do you think the European Union is giving them such a hard time? Have you been following the OOXML fiasco, with Microsoft attempting to buy their way into a standard? No, I suggest you keep Googling Microsoft: it's obvious you've not been around long enough to have experienced their evil firsthand. I've been in the software business since before Microsoft was a gleam in Bill Gates' eye, and I've seen the damage he and his brainchild have caused.
Bill can give all his money to charity if he wants, but there's no Undo button for what he's done.
No, actually the vision of a GUI came from Doug Engelbart. He was way out in the lead when it comes to conceiving and implementing an early graphical environment (using a mainframe no less.) Credit where credit is due ... even Xerox PARC played off of Engelbart's work, because as the linked article points out, "Several of Engelbart's best researchers became alienated from him and left his organization for Xerox PARC, in part due to frustration, and in part due to differing views of the future of computing."
... not to disrespect them for that, but you're right that they didn't innovate squat.
Xerox's people keep getting all the credit for conceiving the modern GUI, but in fact they were latecomers, and were partly composed of Engelbart's people! Jobs and Gates aren't even in the running, insofar as pioneering efforts are concerned. They were just the people that brought graphical computing to the masses
I recall thinking that this was a probably inadvertent admission that the author could not really see the road ahead.
... he just couldn't see the onramp to the Information Superhighway.
Nah, he saw the back roads just fine
well lets just say 'fuck me', and leave it there.
... not the other way 'round. Bizarre, I know ... but really is how the collective brain of Microsoft thinks.
Yes, lets.
But you have to understand the Microsoft perspective on this issue. As the only relevant vendor of operating system software, hardware should conform to Microsoft's needs
ou do what your paid to do, and you do whatever will make you the most money! :)
Or what will make you any money at all. As I mentioned in my previous post, my company used to sell systems based on various Unices (this was way before Linux happened) because, at the time, it was the best choice. Unfortunately, as you say, customers have all been brainwashed into wanting Windows applications so we had to deliver just that. If we hadn't, well, the competition would have just taken the market away from us.
That's why I said "vast improvements over Windows 9x. I run XP on a couple of my own workstations, but my server is Win 2K. NT4 won't run a number of apps that I need and has been EOL'ed for way too long anyway and is no longer supported by hardware vendors. Besides, I know a number of very large corporations that still deploy Windows 2000 on thousands of computers because ... it's stable, does the job, and they don't see any reason to pay Microsoft more millions for something they don't need. Eventually, of course, they'll be forced to upgrade, if nothing else because of driver support.
Thanks a lot. I couldn't figure out who you were replying to so I hit parent.
Yuck.
True ... on the other hand, you still have to know what you're doing which is the real problem the GP was addressing. What you're talking about is effective cooperation between workers. And yes, that is important, and good management knows how to make that happen. However, when the people above start giving irrational orders because they're nothing but clueless PHBs, it doesn't matter how well-liked anyone is. The organization is in serious trouble. Matter of fact, bad management is frequently the source of friction between workers.
Not to be difficult, but Windows NT4, and its successors Windows 2000 and Windows XP, were vast improvements over Windows 9x. It's only now, almost ten years later, that Microsoft has taken a huge step backwards with Vista. That fact is disturbing, because I look at it as being indicative of major problems in Microsoft's design, development and QC processes: this mess should not have happened. They seem to have lost sight of the fact that complex software development is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Incremental, well-thought-out improvements made over time result in better products than huge quantities of completely new code (Vista is claimed to be what, a 70% rewrite?) If you try to change too much too quickly, you will have a disaster on your hands.
... but for right now we're sticking with XP as long as we can.
Like you, I develop Windows software for a living (in some fairly mission critical environments as well), none of which would have been possible had the NT kernel not become part of Microsoft's mainstream operating systems. Matter of fact, in those days we shipped Unix boxes because there was no way in Hell you could use Windows 9x for real-time data acquisition and process control. But NT4 was pretty solid, and the GUI improvements in Windows 2000 helped a lot too. I initially found XP to be less stable than Windows 2000, but XP did improve substantially over time, and nowadays is halfway decent.
But I agree about Vista. From my perspective going to Vista right now would be very risky. Maybe in a year or two when Microsoft has had a chance to fix some of the worst issues it'll be worth another look. Maybe
Trust me ... take the shark tank. You might lose a leg or an arm (or maybe you'll get away scott free), but the piranha will just leave your bones.
I'll leave it up to the reader to decide which party is more aptly described by a tank of sharks or a tank of piranha.