i just realized im probably the third person (mrchrist, tangram) posting on slashdot to have found and read the copy of Big U from mt. holyoke through interlibrary loan. wonder if theres anyone else out there?
also, did anyone else get the impression that The Big U was like stephenson's fantasy of what he wouldve liked to have been in college? or perhaps even that that was the way he did experience college, only slightly (well maybe more than slightly) exaggerated and with the names changed? maybe thats pretty obvious to most people but it definitely sounded to me like the work of someone who was bitter and swallowed up/overwhelmed by the mob at a large university.
As for LordChaos' post about geeks "always portrayed as the poor, innocent souls trampled on by society just waiting for revenge" you should remember that stephenson is almost definitely writing about himself and how he felt as a student. i personally thought it was a bit self-indulgent, but it was his first novel after all.
unc_
all i want for christmas.
on
The Big U
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· Score: 0
> Ahem. How much does it cost to crack systems when > private citizens can afford to do it? ---------
it costs plenty when the gov't has to pay people to do it for them. private citizens dont pay themselves for things they want to do. but who is going to work (for someone else) for free?
--------- > Anyway, your premise is faulty -- Russia isn't completely bankrupt. It's completely corrupt. ---------
that ends up being the same thing. do you think corrupt officials have the best interests of their government in mind when theyre skimming money? so you think the same bastards ripping off the system are going to turn around and give the money back to pay the salaries of people below them? give me a break. havent you kept up with any news? most of the russian military hasnt been paid in months.
also take a look at the most corrupt governments in the world. with the lone exception of china, those same governments tend to be the poorest. (latin america, southeast asia, africa, etc)
----------- Russian officials who are busy funneling as much as they can to Swiss banks aren't going to bother paying chem/bio warfare experts what they could be paid in the wealthiest nation on Earth or a major oil producer, especially since Russia has plenty of nukes as a deterrent. ----------- youre missing the point. russia has lost track of a lot of nukes- soldiers are deserting and in some cases stealing nuke components. the russian govt is falling apart. they dont have time or money for this kind of crap.
funny that this same government the fbi says may be sponsoring cyberterrorism is the same one that cant even afford to pay the soldiers guarding its nuclear arsenal. or the scientists that developed its chemical and biological weapons (and are being heavily recruited by the US and Iran).
does anyone else find the link to state-sponsorship just a *little* tenuous? as if the more likely possibility isnt a student or group of students with a little too much free time on their hands?
and besides, if the US is really stupid enough to have classified information even available (connected to) the rest of the internet i think we fricking deserve it.
as for the cuckoo's egg thing (yes i have read it), people should remember that that was in a time where the ussr still owned 1/4 of germany and werent completely bankrupt.
is that linux has a future. in case anyone hasnt noticed, the trend *is* towards "ubiquitous computing". desktop computers are going to be increasingly overtaken by simpler more specialized devices. of course, we're always going to have people using pc's for games and word-processing, i think.
but the real expanding market is in embedded devices, with the solid constant of server machines on the side. where is apple in this market?
nowhere.
apple's os is not reliable enough for server or embedded applications. its too big and too focused on the gui to be portable enough for embedded systems. i guess i should wait to see if apple's big leap into servers works or not, but it is their only hope for further success. and if they do, theyre gonna jump into a crowded market- and how can they compete with the most stable, efficient, secure, well-known server OS's on earth? (im actually talking about *BSD, especially FreeBSD and OpenBSD in addition to Linux) How can Apple's ridiculous prices compete with...free? is ease of use worth it in servers? especially when server people (at least i hope competent ones do) know unix anyway?
this makes more sense especially in that a lot of servers (*please* dont flame here- we all know its true) dont necessarily need the latest and greatest processing power. i mean, if you can run a simple webserver on a 486 or pentium, the market for huge servers gets smaller. but even in the high-end, apple has a good chance of getting nailed by ibm's attempts to open up powerPC architecture- because those guys are definitely going to be running linux or BSD, and slashing prices for very similar hardware to Apple's offerings. Even if Apple's entry into servers is everything theyve hoped for and more, theyre still screwed. the server market isnt big enough to support them, especially since they have a NEW UNTESTED product. itll be a while before they see a decent return.
linux's hope in the consumer market- to me- seems limited to web/set-top boxes. i know this wont make me real popular to say it, but linux is too damn complicated to set up or install anything. even with rpms if something goes wrong- youre screwed. but if it comes *pre-installed*- with ALL programs you might use set up correctly- linux will kick anyone's ass. this works especially well in limited/webTV-type applications, far better than windows because windows, well, crashes.
but more importantly apple definitely cant win there- they dont have economies of scale sufficient to compete with someone trying to give their work away in order to dominate (m-soft) or a completely free open system .
when cost becomes a factor, apple goes right out the window. they dont sell enough boxes, and they spend too much on marketing. in the long-term, this will prevent them from taking advantage of the next revolution- computing power so cheap and accessible you wont be able to walk around without using it.
i dont see why macworld would want to talk about it.
ibm's move isnt going to help APPLE any is it?
i mean, seriously, aesthetic considerations aside, people tend to like apple hardware but hate the (technically speaking, now...) OS. if this does spawn a clone war apple could be skrewed.
what if individual companies try to sell g3 boxes with more features and better price points than apple? apple cant very well revoke licensing or buy out competition THIS time...
who here would buy a g3, considering the architecture and processor power, if you didnt have to subsidize apple's os which youre not going to use anyway?
via is betting lots of money (as they have been doing for some time) that socket7 wont die just because intel says so.
think about it, now is the *perfect* time for via to expand. nat semiconductor told everyone that they lost their sorry ass making processors with cyrix, and were probably searching urgently for a way to dump cyrix and cut costs.
and idt, who probably also lost their ass, have also been looking to dump centaur- witness their statement about getting the fsck out of the x86 business.
in other words, via picked up two companies with tech it wants, for a bargain basement price. theyve probably been sitting on their cash, waiting for this kind of opportunity.
while amd is moving upscale to hit intel with k7 at the high-end market, who the fsck is left at the low end now?
information on how to reverse engineer is all over the web. fravia, the first site listed, is by far the most detailed, has been around a very long time, and has at least 6 mirrors, in europe, asia, a couple in the usa, etc.
The more interesting question is, given that most of these sites have been around so long, why dont we see more reverse-engineering of software going on? i think the availability of all this information (especially on fravia) weakens esr's argument significantly. regardless of what he says, reverse-engineering is really, really difficult, even for small pieces of code. i dont think he'll convince very many people based on that argument.
As for the appropriate tools, a while ago i found copies of wdasm and softice using ftpsearch (remember, one version of softice was a fully operational time-demo which could be cracked by itself). much of the other stuff you might need that ive seen are freeware or shareware.
taiwan's economy is very closely linked to china's, regardless of what the economist says. if you think about it, taiwan has a lot of "manufacturing". (you know, lots of stuff is "made in taiwan"). but taiwan is a fscking tiny-ass island. where are all their factories?
china.
hong kong does a lot of that kind of thing too. gets around tariffs, basically.
many taiwanese are *pissed* at the nationalists for trying to keep their market closed. the pragmatic ones know damn well that taiwan depends on china for just about everything- food, water, power, it all goes through china, just like with hong kong. how closed do you think the economy could possibly be?
taiwan's banking system was conservative compared to the rest of asia's, but its still pretty risky by american standards. taiwan's economy is not as protected as they like to say it is. compared to thailand, yeah, i guess they did all right.
but soros and the other speculators did rape taiwan along with thailand, south korea, philippines, malaysia, singapore, indonesia, and hong kong. (am i missing anyone?) there was more to it than just currencies- they also crucified the stock markets- but the taiwanese market was not as inflated, and hence "did better". their stocks still dropped a lot though. china's market dropped a lot too, but since they were (and are still) growing rapidly, it didnt hurt as much. china's a bit messed up right now... but i think thats more of a painful transition thing than anything else.
as for that army thing, yeah, youre right. but its still a lot of people with guns. and unlike americans, theyre less likely to let their kids check to see if theyre loaded in the classrooms.
russia is definitely screwed, and will be for a fairly long time. they are a superpower on their way down. ill agree with you on that. any way you look at it, though, they still got a lotta nukes.
did you know that russia developed "suitcase nukes"? smaller than conventional nuclear bombs, but how big a fricking nuclear bomb do you need to take out a city anyway? (not very big) they made several hundred of them- doesnt that make you sleep better at night? (theyve also LOST some of them....) so id say russia is still pretty dangerous, even when theyre spiralling down to postcommunist hell.
but china is very clearly on its way up.
some things you might wanna know about china, if youre wondering why everyone thinks theyre a threat.
china has and is still spending very very very large amounts of money to upgrade its military. their equipment sucks, and has for a while. but they have been quietly buying tech from russia and europe (and stealing from us). part of the way jiang got the military to support him was by promising to upgrade all their equipment, which he did and is still doing. china's also been building lots of factories- some of them with OUR money and expertise.
in terms of arms expenditures, china beats everyone else in asia. in fact, china has a larger military than any other country- in the world. yup. china's standing army (thats not counting reservists) is OVER ONE MILLION SOLDIERS. what happens if china can equip all of them (or even half of them) properly?
regarding education level, observe the current leader, jiang zemin. he likes to hide it, but in fact he speaks english fluently. his high school education was at an american missionary school and he studied engineering in china and in russia. hes an ee, but hes good at pretending to be ignorant.
in 1989, when he visited a university some students had put up posters quoting the gettysburg address. jiang gave an impromptu speech in which he recited the entire gettysburg address (in english) and then chastised the students for mistaking lincoln's meaning- because the civil war was fought to preserve the union, and to stifle rebels against the federal government.
the average person may not be well-educated. but anyone who can manage to stay afloat and rise to the top in a government as treacherous and corrupt as china's has to be pretty fricking smart, doncha think? and jiang's background means he has also attracted a larger number of intellectuals to china's government than ever before.
as for brain drain, there are a lot of chinese who come to the US for education. but there are also a lot of people who go back to make sh!tloads of money. and every factory opened by an american or european entrepreneur adds to china's industrial power.
china's economy is maybe the only one that didnt completely crash and burn in the last two years- can we say the same about south korea, singapore, taiwan, or even japan, the most advanced countries in asia?
so yeah, this was pretty long, but maybe you should know a little more about what youre talking about before dismissing such a large part of the fscking globe next time. specifically, the two largest countries on it.
um, i have a genuine ibm aptiva (dont ask) desktop and was much impressed that the entire thing came in black.
black keyboard, black mouse, black case, black evil-looking 17" monitor. unfortunately, its pretty much impossible to upgrade because they mustve *!@! superglued the screws into the case at the factory. but someone did make cool pcs before this intel thingie (it was given to me sept last year).
incidentally, does anyone know if this was *before* imac? that would be pretty cool. i mean, i know how people here love to bash ibm, but i actually think theyre pretty good...as industry giants go... cmon, copper, matchbox drives, you cant think theyre all bad.
> No, you're wrong. The fact that another OS can compete at all is indicative of the fact that MS is NOT a monopoly.
dude you have no fricking clue what you are talking about. the king of all monopolies the world has ever seen, standard oil, (rockefeller ring a bell?) NEVER had more than 90% of the oil market, and I'm talking ONLY about the United States. Standard Oil suffered heavily in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Monopoly does not mean 100%, where did you get that idea from?
By your definition, Standard Oil didn't have a monopoly, but he had plenty of competitors. Just because he didn't exterminate all of them doesnt mean he wasnt plenty powerful (or rich)...
Case in point, the old story about when the US government fined him $100 mill (note that this is before WW1, what would that be in today's money?!) Rockefeller raised the price of gasoline a penny the next day, and made it all back...
the only operating system ibm gets any money from now is what runs on their mainframes. and nobody else's software has been ported to as/400 and all the rest of ibm's mainframes. and regardless of what anyone says, ibm does have a vested interest in seeing microsoft go down. hard.
nobody has any doubt about the kind of ethics bill gates has exhibited in the business world. they screw all their partners. they try to humiliate and grind their potential rivals into dust. and they expand into everything they can.
as for ibm itself being evil, i think the company has probably learned from its mistakes. when they hired gerstner people were talking about how ibm was going to go bankrupt. do you remember all those news stories, talking about how the big corporations/blue chips were doomed, big spreads comparing ibm to the dinosaurs, etc.
gerstner turned the whole thing around by razing the rigid corporate culture to the ground and forcing everyone to adapt. it will be a while before ibm is ever that arrogant again. basic corporate cycle:
1. small company, starts up, everyone works hard 2. small company kicks ass, people do well 3. small company becomes big company 4. management gets arrogant, employees complacent 5. crisis- company adapts or dies.
ibm made the jump, but only because of gerstner, and his willingness to question everything (because if you look at his background youll discover that he has NO TECHNICAL BACKGROUND prior to ibm!!!) gerstner was at rjr nabisco before ibm hired him...he knew NOTHING about computers... so he asked lots of questions and brought in some common sense and plenty of humility.
microsoft has yet to learn that particular lesson. but now it looks like the doj and ibm (and sun, and everyone else) are going to learn 'em some manners. how well microsoft does in the educational process is ultimately a test of the quality of their managers...
in addition to what the guy from cornell said, the way pons and fleischmann announced their results pissed everyone off. instead of publishing what they had done in a scientific paper (and hence subject to peer review, duplication of the experiment, etc) they held a press conference.
it was sketchy on details but long on speculating about future possibilities, and it attracted a lot of public attention. but pons and fleishchmann refused to tell anyone what their setup was, so guys at mit et al had to try reproducing the setup from what they saw on tv.
it was clearly ridiculous. they never had any real evidence; why wouldnt they have gone through the conventional channels? and dont say it was so they could make money- they couldve patented it, and still published what they did. and if, as conspiracy theorists claim, it was because big gov't and big industry shut them up, then why didnt they start out by telling everyone EXACTLY what they had done, instead of trying to keep it to themselves?
nobody has ever gotten their experiment to work. they never showed anyone any credible data. they couldn't possibly have accurately measured the heat/energy production in their setup, there was no significant radiation, and the amount of helium they claimed to have produced was within statistical bounds of what is already found in the atmosphere.
i cant believe that anyone is still looking at this crap. theyre wasting their time.
by the way, i doubt fravia is a great source of legal advice on cracking protection. but its still one of the best sites ive ever seen anywhere on the web.
ive felt really guilty over the last couple of years about not registering, especially since it looks like ill be moving my mp3s to linux. but now, i just feel glad.
but if you were nullsoft, and just had like two lawsuits thrown at you in recent history with many more probably on the way, wouldnt you want some... protection?
Wouldn't you want a parent who has enough money to fight off the entire music industry while you keep making your product in peace?
I think AOL will settle with the SDMI. But even that is better for Nullsoft than going it alone. How painful would that be, to try to fight off dogs-of-war lawyers while youre trying to code and make money off a shareware program?
i feel sorry for redhat. here you are, trying to be an idealistic company selling an unambiguously morally acceptable product, hiring people when you could very well have taken their work for nothing and charged the same price. on one side you have the empire just waiting to crush you and mobilizing their stormtroopers to kill you off before you can get powerful enough to really challenge their authority.
but on the other side, you have the rebel alliance who hates you because youre a corporation, because you actually require money to live (as do all companies) and because you have to pay for all those people you hire that write software that everyone downloads from your ftp site. because you have to support their gospel with your advertising dollars. because you have to pay technical support to help further their Cause.
and you have to listen to them all bitch about how expensive it is when nearly all of them got it for free.
redhat can never win.
if they ever can triumph over microsoft, every GPL freak, 3l337 h4xx0r, and libertarian psycho will ditch them because theyve "sold out".
A corporation's number one job is to make money. But there are a LOT of different ways to make money. Why can't people understand that? The idea that Redhat will "become the next Microsoft" is ridiculous. The instant they piss you off, you download their stuff FOR FREE. And there's NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT. Redhat doesn't know any more about Linux than any of us can, they can't hide any API's, they don't own any standards. Even the things they invent they have to put out for public inspection and usage, even in competing products.
People seem to think that Linux can get there on its own merits. But we all know thats not true. Tucker. Betamax. Amiga. (i hesitate here) Macintosh. Lets face it, money talks. Only big companies and the government have money, and, more importantly, power.
People should stop fearing Redhat because they are trying to get powerful. The judicious exercise of power by someone friendly to us (for once) is why everyone should support Redhat. Who can deny that they have already had a huge influence? Besides, we all know that if they ever do anything to piss us (the linux community) off enough, we'll kick their ass. This whole Raster thing makes my point, I think.
anyone else read william gibson's book virtual light and get weirded out by how truth imitates fiction?
the story includes a little thing about the sandbenders, a cult/organization in oregon that puts together computers out of natural materials like wood, piano ivory, etc.
the other thing is, you can definitely tell its a hoax, but wouldnt you want a case/keyboard/mouse made out of wood or natural material? i definitely would if i could afford it.
170-270 dollars for the CASE seems a bit much though.
Slashdot Mirror
i just realized im probably the third person (mrchrist, tangram) posting on slashdot to have found and read the copy of Big U from mt. holyoke through interlibrary loan. wonder if theres anyone else out there?
also, did anyone else get the impression that The Big U was like stephenson's fantasy of what he wouldve liked to have been in college? or perhaps even that that was the way he did experience college, only slightly (well maybe more than slightly) exaggerated and with the names changed?
maybe thats pretty obvious to most people but it definitely sounded to me like the work of someone who was bitter and swallowed up/overwhelmed by the mob at a large university.
As for LordChaos' post about geeks "always portrayed as the poor, innocent souls trampled on by society just waiting for revenge" you should remember that stephenson is almost definitely writing about himself and how he felt as a student. i personally thought it was a bit self-indulgent, but it was his first novel after all.
unc_
did you love the railgun? i know i did.
the suit of armor wasnt bad either.
> Ahem. How much does it cost to crack systems when
> private citizens can afford to do it?
---------
it costs plenty when the gov't has to pay people to do it for them. private citizens dont pay themselves for things they want to do. but who is going to work (for someone else) for free?
---------
> Anyway, your premise is faulty -- Russia isn't completely bankrupt. It's completely corrupt.
---------
that ends up being the same thing. do you think corrupt officials have the best interests of their government in mind when theyre skimming money? so you think the same bastards ripping off the system are going to turn around and give the money back to pay the salaries of people below them? give me a break. havent you kept up with any news? most of the russian military hasnt been paid in months.
also take a look at the most corrupt governments in the world. with the lone exception of china, those same governments tend to be the poorest. (latin america, southeast asia, africa, etc)
-----------
Russian officials who are busy funneling as much as they can to Swiss banks aren't going to bother paying chem/bio warfare experts what they could be paid in the wealthiest nation on Earth or a major oil producer, especially since Russia has plenty of nukes as a deterrent.
-----------
youre missing the point. russia has lost track of a lot of nukes- soldiers are deserting and in some cases stealing nuke components. the russian govt is falling apart. they dont have time or money for this kind of crap.
funny that this same government the fbi says may be sponsoring cyberterrorism is the same one that cant even afford to pay the soldiers guarding its nuclear arsenal. or the scientists that developed its chemical and biological weapons (and are being heavily recruited by the US and Iran).
does anyone else find the link to state-sponsorship just a *little* tenuous? as if the more likely possibility isnt a student or group of students with a little too much free time on their hands?
and besides, if the US is really stupid enough to have classified information even available (connected to) the rest of the internet i think we fricking deserve it.
as for the cuckoo's egg thing (yes i have read it), people should remember that that was in a time where the ussr still owned 1/4 of germany and werent completely bankrupt.
unc_
hi, im chip, your friendly computer.
im here to tell you that breaking into me is bad. i hate it when you change the way im set up.
you should leave that to people who know better.
people like microsoft, a corporate sponsor of the C.A.R.E. (Computer Abuse Re-Education) program.
So please, don't try to learn how i work.
What you don't know can't hurt you!
and just remember k1dd13z.
just s4y n0! to l33t h4xx0R sploits!
is that linux has a future. in case anyone hasnt noticed, the trend *is* towards "ubiquitous computing". desktop computers are going to be increasingly overtaken by simpler more specialized devices. of course, we're always going to have people using pc's for games and word-processing, i think.
but the real expanding market is in embedded devices, with the solid constant of server machines on the side. where is apple in this market?
nowhere.
apple's os is not reliable enough for server or embedded applications. its too big and too focused on the gui to be portable enough for embedded systems. i guess i should wait to see if apple's big leap into servers works or not, but it is their only hope for further success. and if they do, theyre gonna jump into a crowded market- and how can they compete with the most stable, efficient, secure, well-known server OS's on earth? (im actually talking about *BSD, especially FreeBSD and OpenBSD in addition to Linux) How can Apple's ridiculous prices compete with...free? is ease of use worth it in servers? especially when server people (at least i hope competent ones do) know unix anyway?
this makes more sense especially in that a lot of servers (*please* dont flame here- we all know its true) dont necessarily need the latest and greatest processing power. i mean, if you can run a simple webserver on a 486 or pentium, the market for huge servers gets smaller. but even in the high-end, apple has a good chance of getting nailed by ibm's attempts to open up powerPC architecture- because those guys are definitely going to be running linux or BSD, and slashing prices for very similar hardware to Apple's offerings. Even if Apple's entry into servers is everything theyve hoped for and more, theyre still screwed. the server market isnt big enough to support them, especially since they have a NEW UNTESTED product. itll be a while before they see a decent return.
linux's hope in the consumer market- to me- seems limited to web/set-top boxes. i know this wont make me real popular to say it, but linux is too damn complicated to set up or install anything. even with rpms if something goes wrong- youre screwed. but if it comes *pre-installed*- with ALL programs you might use set up correctly- linux will kick anyone's ass. this works especially well in limited/webTV-type applications, far better than windows because windows, well, crashes.
but more importantly apple definitely cant win there- they dont have economies of scale sufficient to compete with someone trying to give their work away in order to dominate (m-soft) or a completely free open system .
when cost becomes a factor, apple goes right out the window. they dont sell enough boxes, and they spend too much on marketing. in the long-term, this will prevent them from taking advantage of the next revolution- computing power so cheap and accessible you wont be able to walk around without using it.
unc_
i dont see why macworld would want to talk about it.
ibm's move isnt going to help APPLE any is it?
i mean, seriously, aesthetic considerations aside, people tend to like apple hardware but hate the (technically speaking, now...) OS. if this does spawn a clone war apple could be skrewed.
what if individual companies try to sell g3 boxes with more features and better price points than apple? apple cant very well revoke licensing or buy out competition THIS time...
who here would buy a g3, considering the architecture and processor power, if you didnt have to subsidize apple's os which youre not going to use anyway?
i know i would.
unc_
via is betting lots of money (as they have been doing for some time) that socket7 wont die just because intel says so.
think about it, now is the *perfect* time for via to expand. nat semiconductor told everyone that they lost their sorry ass making processors with cyrix, and were probably searching urgently for a way to dump cyrix and cut costs.
and idt, who probably also lost their ass, have also been looking to dump centaur- witness their statement about getting the fsck out of the x86 business.
in other words, via picked up two companies with tech it wants, for a bargain basement price. theyve probably been sitting on their cash, waiting for this kind of opportunity.
while amd is moving upscale to hit intel with k7 at the high-end market, who the fsck is left at the low end now?
the only company i see is...via?!
seems pretty smart to me...
unc_
fravia (east coast)
decompilation page
sandman
greythorne
The more interesting question is, given that most of these sites have been around so long, why dont we see more reverse-engineering of software going on? i think the availability of all this information (especially on fravia) weakens esr's argument significantly. regardless of what he says, reverse-engineering is really, really difficult, even for small pieces of code. i dont think he'll convince very many people based on that argument.
As for the appropriate tools, a while ago i found copies of wdasm and softice using ftpsearch (remember, one version of softice was a fully operational time-demo which could be cracked by itself). much of the other stuff you might need that ive seen are freeware or shareware.
unc_
taiwan's economy is very closely linked to china's, regardless of what the economist says. if you think about it, taiwan has a lot of "manufacturing". (you know, lots of stuff is "made in taiwan"). but taiwan is a fscking tiny-ass island. where are all their factories?
china.
hong kong does a lot of that kind of thing too. gets around tariffs, basically.
many taiwanese are *pissed* at the nationalists for trying to keep their market closed. the pragmatic ones know damn well that taiwan depends on china for just about everything- food, water, power, it all goes through china, just like with hong kong. how closed do you think the economy could possibly be?
taiwan's banking system was conservative compared to the rest of asia's, but its still pretty risky by american standards. taiwan's economy is not as protected as they like to say it is. compared to thailand, yeah, i guess they did all right.
but soros and the other speculators did rape taiwan along with thailand, south korea, philippines, malaysia, singapore, indonesia, and hong kong. (am i missing anyone?) there was more to it than just currencies- they also crucified the stock markets- but the taiwanese market was not as inflated, and hence "did better". their stocks still dropped a lot though. china's market dropped a lot too, but since they were (and are still) growing rapidly, it didnt hurt as much. china's a bit messed up right now... but i think thats more of a painful transition thing than anything else.
as for that army thing, yeah, youre right. but its still a lot of people with guns. and unlike americans, theyre less likely to let their kids check to see if theyre loaded in the classrooms.
unc_
russia is definitely screwed, and will be for a fairly long time. they are a superpower on their way down. ill agree with you on that. any way you look at it, though, they still got a lotta nukes.
did you know that russia developed "suitcase nukes"? smaller than conventional nuclear bombs, but how big a fricking nuclear bomb do you need to take out a city anyway? (not very big) they made several hundred of them- doesnt that make you sleep better at night? (theyve also LOST some of them....) so id say russia is still pretty dangerous, even when theyre spiralling down to postcommunist hell.
but china is very clearly on its way up.
some things you might wanna know about china, if youre wondering why everyone thinks theyre a threat.
china has and is still spending very very very large amounts of money to upgrade its military. their equipment sucks, and has for a while. but they have been quietly buying tech from russia and europe (and stealing from us). part of the way jiang got the military to support him was by promising to upgrade all their equipment, which he did and is still doing. china's also been building lots of factories- some of them with OUR money and expertise.
in terms of arms expenditures, china beats everyone else in asia. in fact, china has a larger military than any other country- in the world. yup. china's standing army (thats not counting reservists) is OVER ONE MILLION SOLDIERS. what happens if china can equip all of them (or even half of them) properly?
regarding education level, observe the current leader, jiang zemin. he likes to hide it, but in fact he speaks english fluently. his high school education was at an american missionary school and he studied engineering in china and in russia. hes an ee, but hes good at pretending to be ignorant.
in 1989, when he visited a university some students had put up posters quoting the gettysburg address. jiang gave an impromptu speech in which he recited the entire gettysburg address (in english) and then chastised the students for mistaking lincoln's meaning- because the civil war was fought to preserve the union, and to stifle rebels against the federal government.
the average person may not be well-educated. but anyone who can manage to stay afloat and rise to the top in a government as treacherous and corrupt as china's has to be pretty fricking smart, doncha think? and jiang's background means he has also attracted a larger number of intellectuals to china's government than ever before.
as for brain drain, there are a lot of chinese who come to the US for education. but there are also a lot of people who go back to make sh!tloads of money. and every factory opened by an american or european entrepreneur adds to china's industrial power.
china's economy is maybe the only one that didnt completely crash and burn in the last two years- can we say the same about south korea, singapore, taiwan, or even japan, the most advanced countries in asia?
so yeah, this was pretty long, but maybe you should know a little more about what youre talking about before dismissing such a large part of the fscking globe next time. specifically, the two largest countries on it.
unc_
um, i have a genuine ibm aptiva (dont ask) desktop and was much impressed that the entire thing came in black.
black keyboard, black mouse, black case, black evil-looking 17" monitor. unfortunately, its pretty much impossible to upgrade because they mustve *!@! superglued the screws into the case at the factory. but someone did make cool pcs before this intel thingie (it was given to me sept last year).
incidentally, does anyone know if this was *before* imac? that would be pretty cool. i mean, i know how people here love to bash ibm, but i actually think theyre pretty good...as industry giants go... cmon, copper, matchbox drives, you cant think theyre all bad.
unc_
> No, you're wrong. The fact that another OS can compete at all is indicative of the fact that MS is NOT a monopoly.
dude you have no fricking clue what you are talking about. the king of all monopolies the world has ever seen, standard oil, (rockefeller ring a bell?) NEVER had more than 90% of the oil market, and I'm talking ONLY about the United States. Standard Oil suffered heavily in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Monopoly does not mean 100%, where did you get that idea from?
By your definition, Standard Oil didn't have a monopoly, but he had plenty of competitors. Just because he didn't exterminate all of them doesnt mean he wasnt plenty powerful (or rich)...
Case in point, the old story about when the US government fined him $100 mill (note that this is before WW1, what would that be in today's money?!) Rockefeller raised the price of gasoline a penny the next day, and made it all back...
unc_
the only operating system ibm gets any money from now is what runs on their mainframes. and nobody else's software has been ported to as/400 and all the rest of ibm's mainframes. and regardless of what anyone says, ibm does have a vested interest in seeing microsoft go down. hard.
nobody has any doubt about the kind of ethics bill gates has exhibited in the business world. they screw all their partners. they try to humiliate and grind their potential rivals into dust. and they expand into everything they can.
as for ibm itself being evil, i think the company has probably learned from its mistakes. when they hired gerstner people were talking about how ibm was going to go bankrupt. do you remember all those news stories, talking about how the big corporations/blue chips were doomed, big spreads comparing ibm to the dinosaurs, etc.
gerstner turned the whole thing around by razing the rigid corporate culture to the ground and forcing everyone to adapt. it will be a while before ibm is ever that arrogant again. basic corporate cycle:
1. small company, starts up, everyone works hard
2. small company kicks ass, people do well
3. small company becomes big company
4. management gets arrogant, employees complacent
5. crisis- company adapts or dies.
ibm made the jump, but only because of gerstner, and his willingness to question everything (because if you look at his background youll discover that he has NO TECHNICAL BACKGROUND prior to ibm!!!) gerstner was at rjr nabisco before ibm hired him...he knew NOTHING about computers... so he asked lots of questions and brought in some common sense and plenty of humility.
microsoft has yet to learn that particular lesson. but now it looks like the doj and ibm (and sun, and everyone else) are going to learn 'em some manners. how well microsoft does in the educational process is ultimately a test of the quality of their managers...
unc_
in addition to what the guy from cornell said, the way pons and fleischmann announced their results pissed everyone off. instead of publishing what they had done in a scientific paper (and hence subject to peer review, duplication of the experiment, etc) they held a press conference.
it was sketchy on details but long on speculating about future possibilities, and it attracted a lot of public attention. but pons and fleishchmann refused to tell anyone what their setup was, so guys at mit et al had to try reproducing the setup from what they saw on tv.
it was clearly ridiculous. they never had any real evidence; why wouldnt they have gone through the conventional channels? and dont say it was so they could make money- they couldve patented it, and still published what they did. and if, as conspiracy theorists claim, it was because big gov't and big industry shut them up, then why didnt they start out by telling everyone EXACTLY what they had done, instead of trying to keep it to themselves?
nobody has ever gotten their experiment to work. they never showed anyone any credible data. they couldn't possibly have accurately measured the heat/energy production in their setup, there was no significant radiation, and the amount of helium they claimed to have produced was within statistical bounds of what is already found in the atmosphere.
i cant believe that anyone is still looking at this crap. theyre wasting their time.
unc_
australian mirror of fravia.org
anyway fravia's friend greythorne is still up.
greythorne
others:
sandman
decompilation
by the way, i doubt fravia is a great source of legal advice on cracking protection. but its still one of the best sites ive ever seen anywhere on the web.
unc_
ive felt really guilty over the last couple of years about not registering, especially since it looks like ill be moving my mp3s to linux. but now, i just feel glad.
but if you were nullsoft, and just had like two lawsuits thrown at you in recent history with many more probably on the way, wouldnt you want some... protection?
Wouldn't you want a parent who has enough money to fight off the entire music industry while you keep making your product in peace?
I think AOL will settle with the SDMI. But even that is better for Nullsoft than going it alone. How painful would that be, to try to fight off dogs-of-war lawyers while youre trying to code and make money off a shareware program?
It would suck. Lots.
unc_
i feel sorry for redhat. here you are, trying to be an idealistic company selling an unambiguously morally acceptable product, hiring people when you could very well have taken their work for nothing and charged the same price. on one side you have the empire just waiting to crush you and mobilizing their stormtroopers to kill you off before you can get powerful enough to really challenge their authority.
but on the other side, you have the rebel alliance who hates you because youre a corporation, because you actually require money to live (as do all companies) and because you have to pay for all those people you hire that write software that everyone downloads from your ftp site. because you have to support their gospel with your advertising dollars. because you have to pay technical support to help further their Cause.
and you have to listen to them all bitch about how expensive it is when nearly all of them got it for free.
redhat can never win.
if they ever can triumph over microsoft, every GPL freak, 3l337 h4xx0r, and libertarian psycho will ditch them because theyve "sold out".
A corporation's number one job is to make money. But there are a LOT of different ways to make money. Why can't people understand that? The idea that Redhat will "become the next Microsoft" is ridiculous. The instant they piss you off, you download their stuff FOR FREE. And there's NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT. Redhat doesn't know any more about Linux than any of us can, they can't hide any API's, they don't own any standards. Even the things they invent they have to put out for public inspection and usage, even in competing products.
People seem to think that Linux can get there on its own merits. But we all know thats not true. Tucker. Betamax. Amiga. (i hesitate here) Macintosh. Lets face it, money talks. Only big companies and the government have money, and, more importantly, power.
People should stop fearing Redhat because they are trying to get powerful. The judicious exercise of power by someone friendly to us (for once) is why everyone should support Redhat. Who can deny that they have already had a huge influence? Besides, we all know that if they ever do anything to piss us (the linux community) off enough, we'll kick their ass. This whole Raster thing makes my point, I think.
So give them a fscking break will ya?
unc_
its at www.2bsys.com/ra2wav
unfortunately its only win95,98,NT program.
anyone else read william gibson's book virtual light and get weirded out by how truth imitates fiction?
the story includes a little thing about the sandbenders, a cult/organization in oregon that puts together computers out of natural materials like wood, piano ivory, etc.
the other thing is, you can definitely tell its a hoax, but wouldnt you want a case/keyboard/mouse made out of wood or natural material? i definitely would if i could afford it.
170-270 dollars for the CASE seems a bit much though.