I believe "bogan" refers to a member of the cult dedicated to the memory and glorification of Humphrey Bogart. What that has to do with this discussion I don't know.
I respectfully disagree. I was around thirty years ago at the start of the personal computer revolution, and believe me, things were progressing nicely. Lots of options, plenty of choices, no shortage of innovation. And Microsoft didn't make the Internet (really, the World Wide Web) accessible to all, they simply capitalized on the work of others. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, unless you happen to deliberately and with malice-aforethought destroy those others along the way.
All that the advent of Bill Gates and Microsoft accomplished was to eliminate anything that didn't happen to fit into their marketing paradigm (whatever that might be at any given time.) At the very least, they provided a barrier-to-entry in the operating system/office suite market that couldn't be touched until something free came along! Even the great Microsoft has a hard time competing with free, and isn't being at all aboveboard about it either. The sheer quantity of FUD spewn from Redmond these past few years has been remarkable.
It's easy to make comments about how we wouldn't have jobs without Microsoft's ongoing technical issues for us to resolve (over and over and over again) but that's not true: society became dependent upon the microcomputer with remarkable swiftness, and with or without a global OS monopoly there'd still be plenty of work for computer people. What you're really saying is that Microsoft forced their own customer base to subsidize millions of technical workers because they just didn't care enough about their own products to do the job right. Middle management around the planet is slowly waking up to this fact, and now that there are effective and free alternatives to Windows, Microsoft's own inadequacies are coming back to haunt it.
Had their been no Microsoft, the odds are that we wouldn't have spent untold billions of man-hours working around a seemingly endless supply of stupid problems. If anything, the lack of a Microsoft would have put us five to ten years ahead, just on the savings in development time alone. It's where we were already going.
Most of the NT-derived server OSes are fine if you select reliable applications, install everything properly, and then just leave it running and don't change anything.
It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.
Microsoft isn't unreliable, not when viewed from the proper perspective. Microsoft is almost one-hundred-percent reliable when it comes to pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible customers, which they have managed to do to a customer base numbering in the hundreds of millions. That kind of reliability doesn't just happen, you know. It takes true dedication and an unwavering belief in one's own rightness. Ask yourself just how many politicians would give their left testicle to dissemble with such awe-inspiring efficiency. When someone can perform some complicated task with the appearance of effortlessness, it is a sign of true competence in action. With Microsoft, lies and deceit come so naturally one has to believe that one is in the presence of greatness.
Of course, if they'd focused even a fraction of that effort to the end of producing reliable software, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Granted, in the past several years they've improved substantially, but that still leaves untold millions of copies of Windows 3.1, '95 and '98 to be explained.
All of us have complicated lives nowadays, between work and home life and all the things in between. There are only so many hours in a week, and if we choose to fritter them away in a chat room instead of spending them developing solid relationships, well... what else would you expect to happen? Friendships take time and energy to build and maintain, pure and simple, and nothing will change that. I spent a lot of time on IRC at one point, but then I realized that it was taking away from more important activities so I stopped it. Maybe some of those people involved in the aforementioned "shrinking social networks" might want to think about what they truly value in life, and whether that online time might be better invested elsewhere.
is that I'm already paying communications taxes (of various sorts levied by various taxing bodies) on my Internet connection. Actually, in my case it's a significant chunk of my monthly bill. In any event, this is a discriminatory tax squarely aimed at smaller companies providing an Internet-based service that inconveniences the incumbent telephone companies. So far as I'm concerned it's double-taxation as well, if I happen to use a VoIP service. Way to go, FCC. Let's just open the door to taxing everything on the Internet... if you can tax me because I happen to use packets formatted for this purpose, what stops the government from taxing packets formatted some other way. Ridiculous on the face of it.
I'd pretty much tell the stupid police to just do their job and STFU.
That's pretty much what she did, and apparently it pissed some of them off. Although, interestingly the police aren't the ones that are threatening her... the Library's own Board of Directors (for some unaccountable reason) are not only not supporting her but are in the process of determining what punishment should be given to this woman for doing her job properly. That kind of in-your-face irrationality smacks of hidden politics: there's more to this story. Somebody has it in for Ms. Reutty, found an excuse to go after her, and is making the most of it. Either that, or she's simply being used as an example to show what happens to people that dare to tell the police to back off. I hope that the people of that fine city understand what's at stake here. Probably they don't.
What I find interesting is that the police were willing to deliberately obtain potentially tainted evidence. Maybe they didn't care: maybe they already had enough on the guy and simply wanted the Library's records to confirm what they already knew. But that's irrelevant: they wanted convenient access to confidential information without going through the proper channels. Frankly, it's not her job to make things easy for the cops: it is her job to, well, do her job.
No, he's pretty squarely in our reality, only it's our information that's in the process of being enslaved. If you were to take a good, hard look at the caliber of the people that run the media companies and their proxy organizations, you'd realize that what he is saying is precisely what they are trying to achieve. That they've not fully succeeded yet doesn't make their intentions any less of a concern. Actually, it makes them unenlightened capitalists, in my book, because they have absolutely no concern whatsoever for anyone or anything outside of the revenue stream. And, towards the end of maintaining that flow, they will do anything to anyone, buy any Congressperson they can lay bills on, pass any law that suits them, cause any degree of economic dislocation, as long as they own the distribution channels. Like all successful coups, it will happen because the majority are simply unaware of what is happening: all they'll notice is that "gee, it sure seems like I can't do as much with my computer and entertainment equipment as I used to, even though it's shiny and looks really high-tech and all" and will long for the good old days. Then, after some period of time, even that dim memory will fade and nobody will care because, so far as they can remember, it has always been that way. That's what these people want, total control over our media and usage habits, and total acceptance of that control. It'll take some time, but today's technology permits a level of remote authority that did not exist twenty-odd years ago when Sony was fighting the MPAA to keep the VCR legal.
I don't know about Linux-based solutions, but for Windows there's MDaemon. I believe they have an Exchange/groupware plug-in of some kind, although I've never tried it.
This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world.
The best people that money can buy, certainly... maybe not so many now that Google is on the scene. The problem with Microsoft is how little the use of that talent translates into actual products. One has to wonder if the reason that Microsoft keeps so much highly-paid intellect on staff is more a matter of keeping those brains away from the competition (or from becoming competition) than for developing new products. They've used that principle in their lobbying efforts in Washington: hire everybody who's anybody and make sure that nobody else can have them. A Microsoft spokesperson once called that "sucking the air out of Washington."
Actually, he's not being paranoid. The danger isn't so much that scammers might get away with his account information, as it is that Paypal might abscond with his money, or at least put a hold on it for an indefinite period. Paypal isn't a very reliable organization. I've had some grief with them myself.
He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?
He's right, of course, because as everyone knows there will never be any more bandwidth than exists right now, and that ISPs are never able to adjust routing to handle excessive traffic. Please. Stop trying to justify the telco's attempt to "fix" something which isn't broken in order to place proprietary controls on network traffic. So far as I'm concerned, if ISPs really want the job of Internet cop, they should be held responsible for what people do with their networks. Simply using selective routing to extort more money from their customers is not sufficient reason to tier the Internet.
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I believe "bogan" refers to a member of the cult dedicated to the memory and glorification of Humphrey Bogart. What that has to do with this discussion I don't know.
Nope. It was originally termed "Won'tFS", as in "Won't Fucking Ship."
I respectfully disagree. I was around thirty years ago at the start of the personal computer revolution, and believe me, things were progressing nicely. Lots of options, plenty of choices, no shortage of innovation. And Microsoft didn't make the Internet (really, the World Wide Web) accessible to all, they simply capitalized on the work of others. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, unless you happen to deliberately and with malice-aforethought destroy those others along the way.
All that the advent of Bill Gates and Microsoft accomplished was to eliminate anything that didn't happen to fit into their marketing paradigm (whatever that might be at any given time.) At the very least, they provided a barrier-to-entry in the operating system/office suite market that couldn't be touched until something free came along! Even the great Microsoft has a hard time competing with free, and isn't being at all aboveboard about it either. The sheer quantity of FUD spewn from Redmond these past few years has been remarkable.
It's easy to make comments about how we wouldn't have jobs without Microsoft's ongoing technical issues for us to resolve (over and over and over again) but that's not true: society became dependent upon the microcomputer with remarkable swiftness, and with or without a global OS monopoly there'd still be plenty of work for computer people. What you're really saying is that Microsoft forced their own customer base to subsidize millions of technical workers because they just didn't care enough about their own products to do the job right. Middle management around the planet is slowly waking up to this fact, and now that there are effective and free alternatives to Windows, Microsoft's own inadequacies are coming back to haunt it.
Had their been no Microsoft, the odds are that we wouldn't have spent untold billions of man-hours working around a seemingly endless supply of stupid problems. If anything, the lack of a Microsoft would have put us five to ten years ahead, just on the savings in development time alone. It's where we were already going.
Most of the NT-derived server OSes are fine if you select reliable applications, install everything properly, and then just leave it running and don't change anything.
It's amazing the economy came to rely on a company so unreliable.
Microsoft isn't unreliable, not when viewed from the proper perspective. Microsoft is almost one-hundred-percent reliable when it comes to pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible customers, which they have managed to do to a customer base numbering in the hundreds of millions. That kind of reliability doesn't just happen, you know. It takes true dedication and an unwavering belief in one's own rightness. Ask yourself just how many politicians would give their left testicle to dissemble with such awe-inspiring efficiency. When someone can perform some complicated task with the appearance of effortlessness, it is a sign of true competence in action. With Microsoft, lies and deceit come so naturally one has to believe that one is in the presence of greatness.
Of course, if they'd focused even a fraction of that effort to the end of producing reliable software, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Granted, in the past several years they've improved substantially, but that still leaves untold millions of copies of Windows 3.1, '95 and '98 to be explained.
All of us have complicated lives nowadays, between work and home life and all the things in between. There are only so many hours in a week, and if we choose to fritter them away in a chat room instead of spending them developing solid relationships, well ... what else would you expect to happen? Friendships take time and energy to build and maintain, pure and simple, and nothing will change that. I spent a lot of time on IRC at one point, but then I realized that it was taking away from more important activities so I stopped it. Maybe some of those people involved in the aforementioned "shrinking social networks" might want to think about what they truly value in life, and whether that online time might be better invested elsewhere.
Even better, just disconnect your computer from the internet. Who needs internet? Let's face it, 99.9% of internet is just obnoxious anyway.
Mod +2 (Unintentionally Insightful)
is that I'm already paying communications taxes (of various sorts levied by various taxing bodies) on my Internet connection. Actually, in my case it's a significant chunk of my monthly bill. In any event, this is a discriminatory tax squarely aimed at smaller companies providing an Internet-based service that inconveniences the incumbent telephone companies. So far as I'm concerned it's double-taxation as well, if I happen to use a VoIP service. Way to go, FCC. Let's just open the door to taxing everything on the Internet ... if you can tax me because I happen to use packets formatted for this purpose, what stops the government from taxing packets formatted some other way. Ridiculous on the face of it.
You're welcome! It's one of my favorites as well. I think we all wish we had a Computer like the one in the story.
without invalidating the systems already in use.
Everyone knows that Intel and Microsoft have never invalidated a system already in use.
"New Age Patriot" is synonymous with "Hypocrite". Neither are tolerable.
I'd pretty much tell the stupid police to just do their job and STFU.
... the Library's own Board of Directors (for some unaccountable reason) are not only not supporting her but are in the process of determining what punishment should be given to this woman for doing her job properly. That kind of in-your-face irrationality smacks of hidden politics: there's more to this story. Somebody has it in for Ms. Reutty, found an excuse to go after her, and is making the most of it. Either that, or she's simply being used as an example to show what happens to people that dare to tell the police to back off. I hope that the people of that fine city understand what's at stake here. Probably they don't.
That's pretty much what she did, and apparently it pissed some of them off. Although, interestingly the police aren't the ones that are threatening her
What I find interesting is that the police were willing to deliberately obtain potentially tainted evidence. Maybe they didn't care: maybe they already had enough on the guy and simply wanted the Library's records to confirm what they already knew. But that's irrelevant: they wanted convenient access to confidential information without going through the proper channels. Frankly, it's not her job to make things easy for the cops: it is her job to, well, do her job.
No, he's pretty squarely in our reality, only it's our information that's in the process of being enslaved. If you were to take a good, hard look at the caliber of the people that run the media companies and their proxy organizations, you'd realize that what he is saying is precisely what they are trying to achieve. That they've not fully succeeded yet doesn't make their intentions any less of a concern. Actually, it makes them unenlightened capitalists, in my book, because they have absolutely no concern whatsoever for anyone or anything outside of the revenue stream. And, towards the end of maintaining that flow, they will do anything to anyone, buy any Congressperson they can lay bills on, pass any law that suits them, cause any degree of economic dislocation, as long as they own the distribution channels. Like all successful coups, it will happen because the majority are simply unaware of what is happening: all they'll notice is that "gee, it sure seems like I can't do as much with my computer and entertainment equipment as I used to, even though it's shiny and looks really high-tech and all" and will long for the good old days. Then, after some period of time, even that dim memory will fade and nobody will care because, so far as they can remember, it has always been that way. That's what these people want, total control over our media and usage habits, and total acceptance of that control. It'll take some time, but today's technology permits a level of remote authority that did not exist twenty-odd years ago when Sony was fighting the MPAA to keep the VCR legal.
I don't know about Linux-based solutions, but for Windows there's MDaemon. I believe they have an Exchange/groupware plug-in of some kind, although I've never tried it.
This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world.
... maybe not so many now that Google is on the scene. The problem with Microsoft is how little the use of that talent translates into actual products. One has to wonder if the reason that Microsoft keeps so much highly-paid intellect on staff is more a matter of keeping those brains away from the competition (or from becoming competition) than for developing new products. They've used that principle in their lobbying efforts in Washington: hire everybody who's anybody and make sure that nobody else can have them. A Microsoft spokesperson once called that "sucking the air out of Washington."
The best people that money can buy, certainly
If registers start policing spam on their sites, they will have stepped onto a steep, slippery slope that leads to policing content.
I think it's more of a cliff than a slope.
Scientist: "The power of accidental discoveries."
Creationist: "The power of the Dark Side."
Actually, he's not being paranoid. The danger isn't so much that scammers might get away with his account information, as it is that Paypal might abscond with his money, or at least put a hold on it for an indefinite period. Paypal isn't a very reliable organization. I've had some grief with them myself.
I have only two words for you, Jeff ... YOU FIRST!
"It's not a chip or a cracker it's a Chacker!"
He's replacing Ballmer!?!?
No, he's balling his replacement.
An anonymous reader writes to mention an Economist article wondering how safe should robots be?
Three Laws Safe, of course. Didn't he see the movie?
He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?
He's right, of course, because as everyone knows there will never be any more bandwidth than exists right now, and that ISPs are never able to adjust routing to handle excessive traffic. Please. Stop trying to justify the telco's attempt to "fix" something which isn't broken in order to place proprietary controls on network traffic. So far as I'm concerned, if ISPs really want the job of Internet cop, they should be held responsible for what people do with their networks. Simply using selective routing to extort more money from their customers is not sufficient reason to tier the Internet.
Yes, but if it works we can all put on VR headsets and wave our hands around in the air like Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic.
Now, now. Think positive. These are just people with built-in degaussers.