"If there is a choice between a superior proprietary solution and an almost-works Open Source solution, _any_ user should choose the proprietary solution..."
Read that again. If that's the situation why should there be a law requiring any entity to use the inferior solution? That's ridiculous!
If there is a choice between a superior proprietary solution and an almost-works Open Source solution, _any_ user should choose the proprietary solution - you may not believe this but there are situations in which there is no viable Open Source alternative.
If you have a job that must get done, then bad software (no matter how idealogically pure it is) is just a waste of time. Computers are tools. If the job isn't important then by all means fuck about with something that almost works, improve it and give back to the community. But recognize that the latter process is not one that achieves an objective, like for example, managing a payroll - it's a luxury when you have nothing better to do.
No doubt many, many lawyers are waiting for some agency inside U.S. jurisdiction to try such a law. It will never stand up but it will be fun to watch them try, except that it will probably cost more tax $ than could be saved if all that proprietary software suddenly became free without even changeover costs.
Oh, and NOTHING stops ANY company? Wrong, this is 2002. Companies are supposed to show a profit these days. Or were you going to give them flooz?
The great thing is, you can get Microsoft Visual Studio.Net trial edition by clicking the advertisements shown right here on Slashdot. Isn't that convenient?
The thing about D&D that always bothered me was the Deities and Demigods manual. How do you go about assigning AC and HP to gods?
Can you imagine the arguments? Who's tougher out of Zeus and Odin? Heimdallr and Vulcan? No big problem in Nethack where you have just one pantheon but in a system where imagination sets the rules you could have them meeting.
(and there were plenty in that book who were neither Deities nor Demigods, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but that probably doesn't matter)
But will they give it serious graphics processing power? The PS2 is good, but it only has to display TV resolutions and it's a lightweight compared to state of the art PC/Mac cards.
The PS3 would be great if it had the power of a Geforce 4 (or some future generation, by then) with SVGA and DVI output. I hate having to go sit in front of TV to play a game.
Perhaps when I said 'the term "intellectual property" is bad,' he heard me as saying 'everything people call "intellectual property" is bad.' That, however, is exactly the sort of sweeping overgeneralization that the term 'intellectual property' leads people to form;
That, however, is the kind of underhanded sophistry that lets the president get a blowjob from an intern and then deny having had sexual relations with her. I've tried to respect Stallman, but in the end he's just as Ben Elton described hippies - the sort of person who will drink the last of your milk while saying "hey, it's only milk, man".
You bear some responsibility for allowing this to happen. Planning for an early integration is right, but you can't ignore everything up until that point. However, now it's happened...
you have to seriously assess whether the people you are involved with are competent. If you're absolutely stuck with them (assigned class group, nobody else available) then you have to do two things. These are to plan on doing all the work yourself and to come up with a new schedule based on you having to do the whole project. If they contribute anything, it's a bonus.
If you can get someone else who is competent, get them. Brooks was right but like most authors he is only 100% right when the situation exactly matches the one he experienced. If it just can't be done with only you then what choice do you have but to add someone else? I believe Brooks showed that you definitely experience gains when you go from one to two programmers, even from two to four. You just don't gain much at all when you go from one hundred to two hundred.
Whatever you do make it clear to your manager/professor that you did the whole damn thing. Make sure each module is owned by the person who actually completed it. And if every module has your name on it, perhaps you'll take some credit away from an otherwise bad situation and the others will be assigned tasks better suited to their abilities in future.
It's a weapon. It is designed to hurt things, and yes, people. On a weapon there is a safe end and a naughty end. If you are on the naughty end you are in deep shit, whether you are blinded, perforated or just plain vaporized.
Or maybe we should take the following approach:
"Dear Mrs. Hitler,
I regret to say that your son, Adolf, has been misbehaving again. We have a reliable report that he has invaded Poland, even though the Poles clearly asked not to be invaded.
Please ensure that he stops this at once, and that this behavior is not repeated.
Yours Sincerely, The Rt. Hon. Neville Chamberlain."
Oh wait, that was tried...
Re:American media companies are scared of interact
on
Net-Nexus Seoul
·
· Score: 1
Actually no. American media companies really want to keep the internet free of people who say:
1. "huk"! 2. "Please give me item I beginner"! 3. "^_^"
And believe me, everyone but the koreans are grateful.
Cleartype is awesome on a LCD display but I can't like much else about it. It's slower than Win2k (try a big project compiled in Visual C++ 6, around 10% slower) and has piles of dumb cute stuff that makes work slower. File find is terrible. You can turn off the cute doggy but it still takes more clicks than it used to. It eats 2G for a basic install! I went back to 2k.
(All new Macs are selling with OS X installed as well as "Classic" for applications that are not carbonized. If you choose to work with objects like images or songs and like to forget you are using a computer then OS X beats XP. If you like to manage your whole system, Windows wins.)
Nobody is so dense as to be incapable of understanding why spam is bad. You're just not trying because it suits your purposes - in fact it's better for you just to blither away as if what you say makes sense. If you're so sure you are right, tell us who you are. At least your company name...
Your plain text message leaped out, sure. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to defend spamming. I half think you're a troll, but if you are you're wasting a lot of time on this.
OK, so you might be a spammer who "only" sends me a 1k message. So are the other two hundred-odd spam emails I get every day. After only ten days a 2M free web-based email account is full, and that assumes there was nothing stored there to begin with. I pay for using the "free" web-based email service by viewing content the provider wants to show me. You on the other hand steal space on that service to show me garbage that is of no interest to me and of no benefit to the entity that pays for the connectivity and the drive space. You are a parasite. What, only the spammer who sent the message that sends the acount over the line is to blame? Even you don't believe that.
You know that spam is shotgunned out to every email address possible - probably some are made up, when you have a huge user base like yahoo or hotmail you could even send an email to every word in the dictionary @yahoo.com. What's the best way to generate a list of confirmed email addresses? Simple, harvest the ones that reply asking to be removed. Are you really that naive?
Should I set up an auto-spamkiller? What if it accidentally deletes a message from an old friend and I never hear from them again? Unfortunately each message has to be reviewed. If I didn't have a large network of people who know my email address I'd dump the account and get another one, hopefully with less spam. Why should anyone have to change email accounts just so you and others can advertise for free?
There is a stated standard in California, it's ADV: - but nobody uses it. Because every spammer knows that nobody wants their garbage. At the end of the day, that's what makes you such a reprehensible prick - you selfishly do what you know is against people's wishes and you use other people's resources to do it. Even if you did use "ADV:" you'd still be a waste of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how much. No doubt you'd like to say it's negligible, but it isn't when you consider the multipliers - thousands of spammers and millions of recipients.
For the same reason it doesn't matter how long it takes to hit delete. Two hundred spam emails a day, just how much time is that? Over a month? How long does it take to press delete 200 * 30 times? 6000 check marks, and 30 delete presses. Anything better you 'd like to do with that time? I thought so.
When you spam you are an abuser. It doesn't matter that you allowed people to find you in order to call you an abuser. It doesn't matter how many emails you send or how small they are. It doesn't matter whether you disagree with the definition of spam or whether you think you represent some kind of honorable minority. You're still a spammer, a freeloading turd.
Yeah, let's set up e-postage, and just like the ADV: convention the spammers will ignore it. You want to be the good guy? Then you should have sent NO SPAM. Send your message only to people who opt in. Like the rest of the world, pay for some advertising if not enough people opt in. If you can't afford that you don't have a viable business in the first place. You were never interested in dealing honestly and fairly, you were only interested in making someone else pay for what you wanted.
The only solution to spam is to aggressively track and prosecute spammers, with real laws and real penalties, including jail time for repeat offenders. Why not? Shoplifters get locked up on the third offence in some states - which costs people more, a shoplifter, or a spammer sending 80 million emails? How long does it take to hit delete 80 million times, and what is that time worth? What if I take 1/10 of a cent from your bank account - you won't miss that! What if I take 1/10 of a cent from 80 million bank accounts?
Nothing else will work because people prepared to send spam are either morally bankrupt anyway, or have some seriously flawed thinking concerning why spam is OK. I suppose you are the latter, but it's no better than the former. You're just a spammer and there is only one kind.
BTW, Bob Metcalfe has been claiming all kinds of weird shit for years, it gets him noticed. Seems like he enjoyed the brief period of fame and he's been looking for it to return ever since. And you bring to mind the paedophiles from NAMBLA who like to argue that they're not all that bad.
Well I see you have no problems with the rest of my post. Now, Mr. Whale Shit, here's one big difference:
Magazine and TV advertisements can't stop me from getting the messages I'm looking out for. When your spam fills up my incoming mailbox I can't get any more. Magazine ads just make for a fatter magazine. TV ads are gone in seconds. Banner ads get ignored. Every single spam email has to be looked at and deleted. If filth like you would prefix every spam with "ADVERTISEMENT" they could be automatically deleted - but then nobody would get the message, right?
Here's another:
Businesses that place advertisements on Slashdot, TV and Magazines all pay the publisher to display the ads. A medium that I would otherwise have to pay for, or pay a higher rate for, is subsidised. Rather than a cost to me they are a financial benefit - I might not like the interruptions but I don't want to pay thousands for basic cable service. If you want to put yourself in those same shoes you would have to pay a subsidy towards my connectivity every time you send me spam.
You're a spammer. It's obvious. There's no way you can argue otherwise. The only similarity between you and a used-car salesman or a personal injury lawyer is that you too seem willing to believe your own lies. The difference would be that I have never received spam from the lawyer or the car salesman.
You're not better than other spammers, you're just a spammer. There's only one kind, and it's lower than whale shit. You're a thieving cretin who believes it's OK to waste my time. You're a cheap little bastard who wanted a free ride. You deserve pain. One of these days a spammer will be caught, and hurt. I wouldn't care if it was you with your "legitimate" spam, Sanford Wallace, or anyone else - you're all the same.
As for your distinction between shady and otherwise how about this: legitimate businesses take the cost of distributing their advertising on themselves rather than forcing ISPs and end users to pay for it. I got your email, or one like it - please die painfully. I don't care if you don't do it any more, once is enough.
Just like PalmOS, the Palm marketroids can't keep up. They claim in their PalmOS 5 "advantages" chart that there is no Pocket PC device with integrated wireless. iPaq 3875 anyone?
Fine, compare features, but why lose credibility by publishing outright lies?
Re:Information about cases from a noise angle...
on
Choosing a Good Case
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It takes some planning. The quietest cases are those with 120mm fans as opposed to 80mm. Using a heatsink like the Swiftech monsters with a 120-80mm converter and a 120mm fan is very quiet - same airflow at lower RPMs. Right now I'm using:
LiteOn FS-020 case (3 120mm fan mounts) Athlon XP 1900+ with Silverado heatsink "Magic Fleece" noise insulation from plycon.com - _really_ works. Seagate Barracuda IV drives All fans (including power supply) replaced with Papst fans (also from plycon.com)
It's much more expensive and time consuming to get all this together. But it's so quiet I have to keep looking down at the drive activity light:-)
Not being even vaguely involved with the legal system I couldn't say for sure. But if they showed that you did the mod and claimed it "cost" them n dollars in lost revenues I guess that's what they would ask. And you can bet n in this case would not be the worst case estimate:-(
Yes. If you accept a license that says that you can't reverse engineer what you're installing and you do, then legally you're screwed. Morally is a whole other issue, and I side with the "cleaners" - but they have grounds to make your life hard.
Spyware makers give themselves right to complain by making you grant that right when you download and install. Sadly courts do usually uphold click-through licenses (as the article says).
Re:Wrongful detention?
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sometimes it's great to live in the land of lawyers. Talk to one, Cherian. If you don't wind up being offered an apology AND a video card I will be very, very surprised. Oh, and if your legal advisor OKs it, talk to your local newspaper too!
Slashdot Mirror
"If there is a choice between a superior proprietary solution and an almost-works Open Source solution, _any_ user should choose the proprietary solution..."
Read that again. If that's the situation why should there be a law requiring any entity to use the inferior solution? That's ridiculous!
If there is a choice between a superior proprietary solution and an almost-works Open Source solution, _any_ user should choose the proprietary solution - you may not believe this but there are situations in which there is no viable Open Source alternative.
If you have a job that must get done, then bad software (no matter how idealogically pure it is) is just a waste of time. Computers are tools. If the job isn't important then by all means fuck about with something that almost works, improve it and give back to the community. But recognize that the latter process is not one that achieves an objective, like for example, managing a payroll - it's a luxury when you have nothing better to do.
No doubt many, many lawyers are waiting for some agency inside U.S. jurisdiction to try such a law. It will never stand up but it will be fun to watch them try, except that it will probably cost more tax $ than could be saved if all that proprietary software suddenly became free without even changeover costs.
Oh, and NOTHING stops ANY company? Wrong, this is 2002. Companies are supposed to show a profit these days. Or were you going to give them flooz?
I totally agree. User Friendly just isn't funny, not even witty. The writing is uninspired and the art just isn't strong enough to carry it.
The only funny strips involving User Friendly were done by Penny Arcade.
The great thing is, you can get Microsoft Visual Studio .Net trial edition by clicking the advertisements shown right here on Slashdot. Isn't that convenient?
Hypocrisy? Never!
The thing about D&D that always bothered me was the Deities and Demigods manual. How do you go about assigning AC and HP to gods?
Can you imagine the arguments? Who's tougher out of Zeus and Odin? Heimdallr and Vulcan? No big problem in Nethack where you have just one pantheon but in a system where imagination sets the rules you could have them meeting.
(and there were plenty in that book who were neither Deities nor Demigods, like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but that probably doesn't matter)
But will they give it serious graphics processing power? The PS2 is good, but it only has to display TV resolutions and it's a lightweight compared to state of the art PC/Mac cards.
The PS3 would be great if it had the power of a Geforce 4 (or some future generation, by then) with SVGA and DVI output. I hate having to go sit in front of TV to play a game.
"sole calibur"
Isn't that the awesome fighting game where enormous flat fish battle to the death? Or was it the one where big shoes attack each other?
Perhaps when I said 'the term "intellectual property" is bad,' he heard me as saying 'everything people call "intellectual property" is bad.' That, however, is exactly the sort of sweeping overgeneralization that the term 'intellectual property' leads people to form;
That, however, is the kind of underhanded sophistry that lets the president get a blowjob from an intern and then deny having had sexual relations with her. I've tried to respect Stallman, but in the end he's just as Ben Elton described hippies - the sort of person who will drink the last of your milk while saying "hey, it's only milk, man".
You bear some responsibility for allowing this to happen. Planning for an early integration is right, but you can't ignore everything up until that point. However, now it's happened...
you have to seriously assess whether the people you are involved with are competent. If you're absolutely stuck with them (assigned class group, nobody else available) then you have to do two things. These are to plan on doing all the work yourself and to come up with a new schedule based on you having to do the whole project. If they contribute anything, it's a bonus.
If you can get someone else who is competent, get them. Brooks was right but like most authors he is only 100% right when the situation exactly matches the one he experienced. If it just can't be done with only you then what choice do you have but to add someone else? I believe Brooks showed that you definitely experience gains when you go from one to two programmers, even from two to four. You just don't gain much at all when you go from one hundred to two hundred.
Whatever you do make it clear to your manager/professor that you did the whole damn thing. Make sure each module is owned by the person who actually completed it. And if every module has your name on it, perhaps you'll take some credit away from an otherwise bad situation and the others will be assigned tasks better suited to their abilities in future.
It's a weapon. It is designed to hurt things, and yes, people. On a weapon there is a safe end and a naughty end. If you are on the naughty end you are in deep shit, whether you are blinded, perforated or just plain vaporized.
Or maybe we should take the following approach:
"Dear Mrs. Hitler,
I regret to say that your son, Adolf, has been misbehaving again. We have a reliable report that he has invaded Poland, even though the Poles clearly asked not to be invaded.
Please ensure that he stops this at once, and that this behavior is not repeated.
Yours Sincerely,
The Rt. Hon. Neville Chamberlain."
Oh wait, that was tried...
Actually no. American media companies really want to keep the internet free of people who say:
1. "huk"!
2. "Please give me item I beginner"!
3. "^_^"
And believe me, everyone but the koreans are grateful.
Cleartype is awesome on a LCD display but I can't like much else about it. It's slower than Win2k (try a big project compiled in Visual C++ 6, around 10% slower) and has piles of dumb cute stuff that makes work slower. File find is terrible. You can turn off the cute doggy but it still takes more clicks than it used to. It eats 2G for a basic install! I went back to 2k.
(All new Macs are selling with OS X installed as well as "Classic" for applications that are not carbonized. If you choose to work with objects like images or songs and like to forget you are using a computer then OS X beats XP. If you like to manage your whole system, Windows wins.)
Nobody is so dense as to be incapable of understanding why spam is bad. You're just not trying because it suits your purposes - in fact it's better for you just to blither away as if what you say makes sense. If you're so sure you are right, tell us who you are. At least your company name...
Your plain text message leaped out, sure. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to defend spamming. I half think you're a troll, but if you are you're wasting a lot of time on this.
OK, so you might be a spammer who "only" sends me a 1k message. So are the other two hundred-odd spam emails I get every day. After only ten days a 2M free web-based email account is full, and that assumes there was nothing stored there to begin with. I pay for using the "free" web-based email service by viewing content the provider wants to show me. You on the other hand steal space on that service to show me garbage that is of no interest to me and of no benefit to the entity that pays for the connectivity and the drive space. You are a parasite. What, only the spammer who sent the message that sends the acount over the line is to blame? Even you don't believe that.
You know that spam is shotgunned out to every email address possible - probably some are made up, when you have a huge user base like yahoo or hotmail you could even send an email to every word in the dictionary @yahoo.com. What's the best way to generate a list of confirmed email addresses? Simple, harvest the ones that reply asking to be removed. Are you really that naive?
Should I set up an auto-spamkiller? What if it accidentally deletes a message from an old friend and I never hear from them again? Unfortunately each message has to be reviewed. If I didn't have a large network of people who know my email address I'd dump the account and get another one, hopefully with less spam. Why should anyone have to change email accounts just so you and others can advertise for free?
There is a stated standard in California, it's ADV: - but nobody uses it. Because every spammer knows that nobody wants their garbage. At the end of the day, that's what makes you such a reprehensible prick - you selfishly do what you know is against people's wishes and you use other people's resources to do it. Even if you did use "ADV:" you'd still be a waste of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how much. No doubt you'd like to say it's negligible, but it isn't when you consider the multipliers - thousands of spammers and millions of recipients.
For the same reason it doesn't matter how long it takes to hit delete. Two hundred spam emails a day, just how much time is that? Over a month? How long does it take to press delete 200 * 30 times? 6000 check marks, and 30 delete presses. Anything better you 'd like to do with that time? I thought so.
When you spam you are an abuser. It doesn't matter that you allowed people to find you in order to call you an abuser. It doesn't matter how many emails you send or how small they are. It doesn't matter whether you disagree with the definition of spam or whether you think you represent some kind of honorable minority. You're still a spammer, a freeloading turd.
Yeah, let's set up e-postage, and just like the ADV: convention the spammers will ignore it. You want to be the good guy? Then you should have sent NO SPAM. Send your message only to people who opt in. Like the rest of the world, pay for some advertising if not enough people opt in. If you can't afford that you don't have a viable business in the first place. You were never interested in dealing honestly and fairly, you were only interested in making someone else pay for what you wanted.
The only solution to spam is to aggressively track and prosecute spammers, with real laws and real penalties, including jail time for repeat offenders. Why not? Shoplifters get locked up on the third offence in some states - which costs people more, a shoplifter, or a spammer sending 80 million emails? How long does it take to hit delete 80 million times, and what is that time worth? What if I take 1/10 of a cent from your bank account - you won't miss that! What if I take 1/10 of a cent from 80 million bank accounts?
Nothing else will work because people prepared to send spam are either morally bankrupt anyway, or have some seriously flawed thinking concerning why spam is OK. I suppose you are the latter, but it's no better than the former. You're just a spammer and there is only one kind.
BTW, Bob Metcalfe has been claiming all kinds of weird shit for years, it gets him noticed. Seems like he enjoyed the brief period of fame and he's been looking for it to return ever since. And you bring to mind the paedophiles from NAMBLA who like to argue that they're not all that bad.
Well I see you have no problems with the rest of my post. Now, Mr. Whale Shit, here's one big difference:
Magazine and TV advertisements can't stop me from getting the messages I'm looking out for. When your spam fills up my incoming mailbox I can't get any more. Magazine ads just make for a fatter magazine. TV ads are gone in seconds. Banner ads get ignored. Every single spam email has to be looked at and deleted. If filth like you would prefix every spam with "ADVERTISEMENT" they could be automatically deleted - but then nobody would get the message, right?
Here's another:
Businesses that place advertisements on Slashdot, TV and Magazines all pay the publisher to display the ads. A medium that I would otherwise have to pay for, or pay a higher rate for, is subsidised. Rather than a cost to me they are a financial benefit - I might not like the interruptions but I don't want to pay thousands for basic cable service. If you want to put yourself in those same shoes you would have to pay a subsidy towards my connectivity every time you send me spam.
Got any more, you whining parasite?
You're a spammer. It's obvious. There's no way you can argue otherwise. The only similarity between you and a used-car salesman or a personal injury lawyer is that you too seem willing to believe your own lies. The difference would be that I have never received spam from the lawyer or the car salesman.
You're not better than other spammers, you're just a spammer. There's only one kind, and it's lower than whale shit. You're a thieving cretin who believes it's OK to waste my time. You're a cheap little bastard who wanted a free ride. You deserve pain. One of these days a spammer will be caught, and hurt. I wouldn't care if it was you with your "legitimate" spam, Sanford Wallace, or anyone else - you're all the same.
As for your distinction between shady and otherwise how about this: legitimate businesses take the cost of distributing their advertising on themselves rather than forcing ISPs and end users to pay for it. I got your email, or one like it - please die painfully. I don't care if you don't do it any more, once is enough.
1993? Apart from the fact that he was long dead in 1993 there were already well over 5 million in circulation by that time.
And the first thing the story about the spam-battling startup does is to load some popup advertising.
Wonderful.
Just like PalmOS, the Palm marketroids can't keep up. They claim in their PalmOS 5 "advantages" chart that there is no Pocket PC device with integrated wireless. iPaq 3875 anyone?
Fine, compare features, but why lose credibility by publishing outright lies?
It takes some planning. The quietest cases are those with 120mm fans as opposed to 80mm. Using a heatsink like the Swiftech monsters with a 120-80mm converter and a 120mm fan is very quiet - same airflow at lower RPMs. Right now I'm using:
:-)
LiteOn FS-020 case (3 120mm fan mounts)
Athlon XP 1900+ with Silverado heatsink
"Magic Fleece" noise insulation from plycon.com - _really_ works.
Seagate Barracuda IV drives
All fans (including power supply) replaced with Papst fans (also from plycon.com)
It's much more expensive and time consuming to get all this together. But it's so quiet I have to keep looking down at the drive activity light
Anyone remember the Amiga disk copy program that sang "yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me" as a background loop?
Telling statistic...
1) Intel x86 418499255 828297.950 years 17 hr 20 min 16.3 sec
2) Power PC 39258018 78416.680 years 17 hr 29 min 52.1 sec
G4-based machines take an average of 9 minutes longer than x86 machines to process one work unit. But they are supposed to be so much faster!
Wasn't Steve telling the truth?
Not being even vaguely involved with the legal system I couldn't say for sure. But if they showed that you did the mod and claimed it "cost" them n dollars in lost revenues I guess that's what they would ask. And you can bet n in this case would not be the worst case estimate :-(
Yes. If you accept a license that says that you can't reverse engineer what you're installing and you do, then legally you're screwed. Morally is a whole other issue, and I side with the "cleaners" - but they have grounds to make your life hard.
Spyware makers give themselves right to complain by making you grant that right when you download and install. Sadly courts do usually uphold click-through licenses (as the article says).
Sometimes it's great to live in the land of lawyers. Talk to one, Cherian. If you don't wind up being offered an apology AND a video card I will be very, very surprised. Oh, and if your legal advisor OKs it, talk to your local newspaper too!
"General Manager" Rod is going to be very sorry!