"Why do you think Microsoft wont hire Americans anymore? I know, because stupid open source robots are willinng to code for free!! Why hire anyone when Microsoft can just take the open source code, use it in their closed source products, and no one would ever know because no one sees the code!"
"Also Microsoft, I'm assuming this is who the movie wanted to imply it was about, is one of the most honest corperations on the face of the earth, they support affirmative action and have donated millions of computers running billions of dollars worth of the best most well known software.
Bill Gates also gives scholarships, gives money to India, Africa, China, Europe, this man should be knighted."
I'm impressed by your ability to troll from both sides of the MS opinion spectrum
I've bought lots of stuff from Play with no problems. They even sent my friend a second set of disks after the post office lost his in transit. Part of the reason that Play is cheap is because it's in the Channel Islands, and I don't think they currently charge VAT. The other online retailers are moaning about that, so it may change in the future.
Oh, and don't forget that this system will be contracted out to someone like EDS, so it'll be a disaster. Does anyone know of any major UK government IT project in the last decade that wasn't a total abortion?
This whole thing is fucking sleazy, first the government runs an unpublicised "consultation exercise" which draws 1500 responses which are 2 to 1 in favour. Then El Reg and NTK run it on the front page, over 5000 people comment against it in a couple of days and the government appears to back down. Victory for the good guys, everyone can go back down the pub.
Like NTK said, "What's happened to their [my] comments? Do they count as one vote - a sort of giant Interweb representative? And if so, do we all get to use the same ID card?"
That's the British way of doing it, avoid messy things like public scrutiny, pay lip service to things like privicy and the Data Protection Act while quietly ignoring them. People can complain about the USA, but at least people there go to jail* when the government gets caught doing obviously illegal things. The Thatcher government used "national security" to cover up embarrassing things long before Bush discovered terrorism. Britain has a fair way to go before we can start condemnning other people.
*OK, they don't go to Federal-pound-you-in-the-ass-prison, and they tend to get out quickly, but at least they don't retire with a fucking pension like they do here.
Ion Storm was [is?] divided into two offices, Dallas and Austin. The Austin office did all that good stuff. Dallas did Daikatana and I think Anachronax. Guess which office Romero ran?
.. IIRC, it is illegal to market tooth-whitening products in England (though, I may be mistaken about this).
You are, we have a whole shelf (30+ products) full of them at work. There may be some kind of restriction on what you can put in them, but they look pretty ruthless to me.
"This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science.""
Rocket science is easy. It's rocket engineering that's a bitch.;)
From ApolloSaturn.com "The five F-1 engines [Saturn V] equal 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines." That's an engineering problem.
Ok, the fact that they're thinking about providing "commercial access" to this data. Probably on the same lines as the "trusted marketing partners" who seem to so enjoy the prospect of seeing my personal information.
You'd have to be breathtakingly naive to believe that one piece of technology can solve fraud. There is no magic bullet.
You also need to consider the present government's appalling record on major computer systems. It'll be way over budget and a horrible shambles.
Now that the revenue is at $42 and the profit is at $12, someone at the label is going to get fired.
And when sales and revenue go through the floor because everyone feels ripped off? Doesn't matter what the real profit margin is, customers think it's too expensive, and that's costing sales. They can't be upfront about the manufacturing/distribution/marketing costs, because they'd have to admit the raw deal artists get and the amount that's given to media companies to promote some tracks. So they need to either cut costs, accept less profit or convince people that CDs are good value.
Do they actually/need/ to spend that much creating movies though? Part of the reason that they are so fucking expensive to create is the expectation that they can make the money back easily. Producers might have to stop spending $millions on actors, but that doesn't nessesarily mean that there would be fewer movies released or they would be worse.
Reducing the amount of money that can be made by (and thus spent on) a movie could promote innovation and risk taking, people can risk hundreds of thousands of dollars, not even corperations can take big risks with hundreds of millions.
I don't know much about drug research, but I'm not really convinced that the capitalist model is the best way to pursue science anyway.
Ie, Win2004 would expire in 2018. Win2004SP1 (released in 2005) would run until 2019. So the expiry date on the original version wouldn't change no matter what you did to modify it later. Obviously this could cause some problems of its own, deliberately making changes that break backwards compatibility just before the old version is due to expire is the first sneaky MS style trick I can think of.
A fourteen year term for software is still pretty long, (how much actual use is software from 1988 anyway?). Makes sense for most other things though.
Actually,/good/ DRM would be really useful for this sort of thing. Software that gave you the source code when the timer expired would be good. Of course, that's like saying that a total dictatorship could be good. Theoretically possible, but...
"Besides, turning on the jammer is going to make it real susceptible being attacked by a HARM missile."
Sending a manned aircraft to use an expensive HARM to kill a $50 jamming box would not be a good use of force, especially as cruise missiles are used to kill things that are too well protected for manned aircraft to attack in the first place. Even assuming that your manned aircraft can find the target in the first place without the GPS.;)
Hopefully the multiple antennas and alternative guidance systems will reduce the problem.
There's only a finite number of ways that you can mispell each word though. Unless they invent their own new language or start using really creative euphemisms. Which might at least make spam more interesting.
Might just be to reduce the stress on their server a bit. I think companies like DoubleClick use lots of distributed servers in different areas so the pictures will load faster and the stress will be distributed away from the main Wired server. Of course, they'd be very happy if you were also encouraged to read their ads.
How do sites tell if you're using an ad blocker? (other than by using this slightly brain-damaged software)?
when does handing the enemy a blueprint of the fortress make guarding the castle easier?
Never, but does employing a castle designer who won't tell you how the gates are secured make sense? Also, it's not going to take long for a smart enemy to find the holes in your security, do you trust the external designer to carefully check your castle every day? And quickly fix the problem? Even when it's expensive and embarrassing to fix?
Irregardless of the benefits Open Source can bestow on the government, it brings with it a flaw of extraordinary magnitude. Witness the problems caused when the latest flaw is discovered in BIND or ftpd, or when a trojan is actually placed in the software people use to protect their system (tcpdump)!
Excel 97 had a flight sim hidden in it, are you sure there are no trojans in your commercial software? Even the stuff that's been patched dozens of times? At least when there's an exploit in OSS, you find out about it as soon as everyone else does, not depending on how big a customer you are.
Open Source is a bargain that offers far more than what you pay for; however, its track record with security is spotty
Microsoft has a good security record? Software in general is insecure because it's all new and most people don't take security seriously enough. I don't think OSS is any worse than commercial systems, and I don't see security problems ever being completely solved, how long have people been trying to keep valuables locked up? Again, at least with OSS you find out about the problem fairly quickly.
who do you sue when things go wrong?
Who do you sue when you get shot dead? If your critical systems get destroyed then liability becomes academic, you're out of business. Has anyone ever won a software quality or security lawsuit against a large company?
For a start things like these were already tried with PC's, being closed server charged by the month, and proved to be failure, mainly due to competition with the open system (which MS has in standard PC games).
Everything that consoles do competes with PC games. And arcade games. And board games. And playing Doom on your video camera. Different people like different ways of playing games, XBL seems simpler, more reliable and possibly cheaper than playing on PC's, a lot of people will happily trade the abilty to run a server for that.
"Microsoft have also chosen to ignore console culture. Ask any twelve year old what multiplay gaming on a console means to them and they will say having your mates around for a quick bash of tekken 4."
Obviously that's why they put four pad sockets on the front. To make it hard for you to multi-play at home.
The fundamental mistake Microsoft have always made with the XBOX has been considering it to be just another computer.
Where have they done this? In their marketing? Looks pretty console'y to me. In their business model? Aren't they the only people doing the "classic" loss leading on hardware? In their relationship with developers? Name me a PC manufacturer that's spent $1/2 a billion+ on buying up game developers.
The final nail in the coffin of Live is the prior need of a broadband connection pretty much insuring you are marketing to people who have a computer already, why wont they simply play counterstrike.
Or alternately they want to offer a better service that's not dragged down by people using a 9600 modem on the wrong end of a third world telephone exchange. Maybe now people will stop bitching about how "broadband has no killer app". Oh, and not everyone wants to play Counterstrike all the time;).
What MS need to do is provide some innovation in games
This is a developer issue, and it's not exactly MS exclusive. It's hard to wade through the sea of sewage at my local Game, and thats on all the formats. Some (or most) developers seem to be slack-jawed locals (frustrated, unemployed wannabe developer thing creeping though there.)
I wasn't wild about them being bought either, but look at it this way, they (probably) made a shitload of money, and Halo sold a million copies. Would that have happened on the Mac? Or even the PC? I think they deserved that success.
We've just had the 20thC version of Railway Mania. I'm sure there was a short period in the mid 19thC when it was cool to discuss the differences between Bullhead and flat rail, or if 0-6-0 was the best setup for steep hills#. No doubt they had "*, but with a railway" patents too. Sooner or later the net will be as nerdy as trainspotting, and the besuited types will have to find something else to pretend to understand.
# I'm not exactly well informed about railways, so forgive my examples
Technology lobbies and companies must focus their energies and resources on candidates who have stuck their neck out for the high-tech industry, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), noting that the industry's campaign "piggy bank is less fat than it was last time around."
"Rather than dropping a little bit of money here, dropping a little bit of money there," ITAA is looking to help established "friends" on Capitol Hill, especially those locked in tight races, Miller said.
Aren't you glad to hear the tech industry has upright, honourable people like this to help them in times of need?
Slashdot Mirror
You're [a troll] with a [net connection]
"Oh no, I love [SlashDot], so when I leave a [post] full of garbage on the site, it's symbolic of my love for [discussion], not [trolling]".
YOU MAKE ME [YAWN]
Given the way the Tech industry is at the moment, surely it should be -1 Redundant?
Do you use a firewall and encryption? Or do you trust this "localhost" guy?
From your comment #6286101
"Why do you think Microsoft wont hire Americans anymore? I know, because stupid open source robots are willinng to code for free!! Why hire anyone when Microsoft can just take the open source code, use it in their closed source products, and no one would ever know because no one sees the code!"
From your comment #6286101
"Also Microsoft, I'm assuming this is who the movie wanted to imply it was about, is one of the most honest corperations on the face of the earth, they support affirmative action and have donated millions of computers running billions of dollars worth of the best most well known software. Bill Gates also gives scholarships, gives money to India, Africa, China, Europe, this man should be knighted."
I'm impressed by your ability to troll from both sides of the MS opinion spectrum
I've bought lots of stuff from Play with no problems. They even sent my friend a second set of disks after the post office lost his in transit. Part of the reason that Play is cheap is because it's in the Channel Islands, and I don't think they currently charge VAT. The other online retailers are moaning about that, so it may change in the future.
Do you have to make the the actors available to everyone you give the binary to?
Oh, and don't forget that this system will be contracted out to someone like EDS, so it'll be a disaster. Does anyone know of any major UK government IT project in the last decade that wasn't a total abortion?
This whole thing is fucking sleazy, first the government runs an unpublicised "consultation exercise" which draws 1500 responses which are 2 to 1 in favour. Then El Reg and NTK run it on the front page, over 5000 people comment against it in a couple of days and the government appears to back down. Victory for the good guys, everyone can go back down the pub.
Well, until the government decided to lose all those irritating negative comments submitted through websites (including mine), leaving them with 2000 mostly favorable comments.
Like NTK said, "What's happened to their [my] comments? Do they count as one vote - a sort of giant Interweb representative? And if so, do we all get to use the same ID card?"
That's the British way of doing it, avoid messy things like public scrutiny, pay lip service to things like privicy and the Data Protection Act while quietly ignoring them. People can complain about the USA, but at least people there go to jail* when the government gets caught doing obviously illegal things. The Thatcher government used "national security" to cover up embarrassing things long before Bush discovered terrorism. Britain has a fair way to go before we can start condemnning other people.
*OK, they don't go to Federal-pound-you-in-the-ass-prison, and they tend to get out quickly, but at least they don't retire with a fucking pension like they do here.
Ion Storm was [is?] divided into two offices, Dallas and Austin. The Austin office did all that good stuff. Dallas did Daikatana and I think Anachronax. Guess which office Romero ran?
Halo.Bungie.Org has lots of mirrors for a Halo2 trailer (Dunno if it's the same one).
Actually, you'd be surprised how well that method works on video cards.
Unfortunately, even with good garbage collection you're never able to reallocate the memory properly afterwards.
You are, we have a whole shelf (30+ products) full of them at work. There may be some kind of restriction on what you can put in them, but they look pretty ruthless to me.
"This complexity is why we have the phrase "It isn't rocket science.""
Rocket science is easy. It's rocket engineering that's a bitch. ;)
From ApolloSaturn.com "The five F-1 engines [Saturn V] equal 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines." That's an engineering problem.
Ok, the fact that they're thinking about providing "commercial access" to this data. Probably on the same lines as the "trusted marketing partners" who seem to so enjoy the prospect of seeing my personal information.
You'd have to be breathtakingly naive to believe that one piece of technology can solve fraud. There is no magic bullet.
You also need to consider the present government's appalling record on major computer systems. It'll be way over budget and a horrible shambles.
Now that the revenue is at $42 and the profit is at $12, someone at the label is going to get fired.
And when sales and revenue go through the floor because everyone feels ripped off? Doesn't matter what the real profit margin is, customers think it's too expensive, and that's costing sales. They can't be upfront about the manufacturing/distribution/marketing costs, because they'd have to admit the raw deal artists get and the amount that's given to media companies to promote some tracks. So they need to either cut costs, accept less profit or convince people that CDs are good value.
Do they actually /need/ to spend that much creating movies though? Part of the reason that they are so fucking expensive to create is the expectation that they can make the money back easily. Producers might have to stop spending $millions on actors, but that doesn't nessesarily mean that there would be fewer movies released or they would be worse.
Reducing the amount of money that can be made by (and thus spent on) a movie could promote innovation and risk taking, people can risk hundreds of thousands of dollars, not even corperations can take big risks with hundreds of millions.
I don't know much about drug research, but I'm not really convinced that the capitalist model is the best way to pursue science anyway.
The "reset" would only apply to the /new version/.
/good/ DRM would be really useful for this sort of thing. Software that gave you the source code when the timer expired would be good. Of course, that's like saying that a total dictatorship could be good. Theoretically possible, but...
Ie, Win2004 would expire in 2018. Win2004SP1 (released in 2005) would run until 2019. So the expiry date on the original version wouldn't change no matter what you did to modify it later. Obviously this could cause some problems of its own, deliberately making changes that break backwards compatibility just before the old version is due to expire is the first sneaky MS style trick I can think of.
A fourteen year term for software is still pretty long, (how much actual use is software from 1988 anyway?). Makes sense for most other things though.
Actually,
"Besides, turning on the jammer is going to make it real susceptible being attacked by a HARM missile."
;)
Sending a manned aircraft to use an expensive HARM to kill a $50 jamming box would not be a good use of force, especially as cruise missiles are used to kill things that are too well protected for manned aircraft to attack in the first place. Even assuming that your manned aircraft can find the target in the first place without the GPS.
Hopefully the multiple antennas and alternative guidance systems will reduce the problem.
There's only a finite number of ways that you can mispell each word though. Unless they invent their own new language or start using really creative euphemisms. Which might at least make spam more interesting.
Might just be to reduce the stress on their server a bit. I think companies like DoubleClick use lots of distributed servers in different areas so the pictures will load faster and the stress will be distributed away from the main Wired server. Of course, they'd be very happy if you were also encouraged to read their ads.
How do sites tell if you're using an ad blocker? (other than by using this slightly brain-damaged software)?
when does handing the enemy a blueprint of the fortress make guarding the castle easier?
Never, but does employing a castle designer who won't tell you how the gates are secured make sense? Also, it's not going to take long for a smart enemy to find the holes in your security, do you trust the external designer to carefully check your castle every day? And quickly fix the problem? Even when it's expensive and embarrassing to fix?
Irregardless of the benefits Open Source can bestow on the government, it brings with it a flaw of extraordinary magnitude. Witness the problems caused when the latest flaw is discovered in BIND or ftpd, or when a trojan is actually placed in the software people use to protect their system (tcpdump)!
Excel 97 had a flight sim hidden in it, are you sure there are no trojans in your commercial software? Even the stuff that's been patched dozens of times? At least when there's an exploit in OSS, you find out about it as soon as everyone else does, not depending on how big a customer you are.
Open Source is a bargain that offers far more than what you pay for; however, its track record with security is spotty
Microsoft has a good security record? Software in general is insecure because it's all new and most people don't take security seriously enough. I don't think OSS is any worse than commercial systems, and I don't see security problems ever being completely solved, how long have people been trying to keep valuables locked up? Again, at least with OSS you find out about the problem fairly quickly.
who do you sue when things go wrong?
Who do you sue when you get shot dead? If your critical systems get destroyed then liability becomes academic, you're out of business. Has anyone ever won a software quality or security lawsuit against a large company?
For a start things like these were already tried with PC's, being closed server charged by the month, and proved to be failure, mainly due to competition with the open system (which MS has in standard PC games).
Everything that consoles do competes with PC games. And arcade games. And board games. And playing Doom on your video camera. Different people like different ways of playing games, XBL seems simpler, more reliable and possibly cheaper than playing on PC's, a lot of people will happily trade the abilty to run a server for that."Microsoft have also chosen to ignore console culture. Ask any twelve year old what multiplay gaming on a console means to them and they will say having your mates around for a quick bash of tekken 4."
Obviously that's why they put four pad sockets on the front. To make it hard for you to multi-play at home.
The fundamental mistake Microsoft have always made with the XBOX has been considering it to be just another computer.
Where have they done this? In their marketing? Looks pretty console'y to me. In their business model? Aren't they the only people doing the "classic" loss leading on hardware? In their relationship with developers? Name me a PC manufacturer that's spent $1/2 a billion+ on buying up game developers.
The final nail in the coffin of Live is the prior need of a broadband connection pretty much insuring you are marketing to people who have a computer already, why wont they simply play counterstrike.
Or alternately they want to offer a better service that's not dragged down by people using a 9600 modem on the wrong end of a third world telephone exchange. Maybe now people will stop bitching about how "broadband has no killer app". Oh, and not everyone wants to play Counterstrike all the time ;).
What MS need to do is provide some innovation in games
This is a developer issue, and it's not exactly MS exclusive. It's hard to wade through the sea of sewage at my local Game, and thats on all the formats. Some (or most) developers seem to be slack-jawed locals (frustrated, unemployed wannabe developer thing creeping though there.)
I wasn't wild about them being bought either, but look at it this way, they (probably) made a shitload of money, and Halo sold a million copies. Would that have happened on the Mac? Or even the PC? I think they deserved that success.
We've just had the 20thC version of Railway Mania. I'm sure there was a short period in the mid 19thC when it was cool to discuss the differences between Bullhead and flat rail, or if 0-6-0 was the best setup for steep hills#. No doubt they had "*, but with a railway" patents too. Sooner or later the net will be as nerdy as trainspotting, and the besuited types will have to find something else to pretend to understand.
# I'm not exactly well informed about railways, so forgive my examples
Technology lobbies and companies must focus their energies and resources on candidates who have stuck their neck out for the high-tech industry, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), noting that the industry's campaign "piggy bank is less fat than it was last time around." "Rather than dropping a little bit of money here, dropping a little bit of money there," ITAA is looking to help established "friends" on Capitol Hill, especially those locked in tight races, Miller said.
Aren't you glad to hear the tech industry has upright, honourable people like this to help them in times of need?