What if the weather outside is looking bad? So I decide to check one of the local channels for information but can't switch. I miss the tornado warning because I'm locked in to 5 minutes of commercials, and I get killed or injured because of it. This "feature" of a "comsumer product" is a safety hazard.
What happens if the weather is looking a bit nasty outside? I want to flip channels to check the weather, but I'm stuck watching 5 minutes of commercials instead. I miss the tornado warning and get killed. Or perhaps I just get injured, so at least I'm still around to sue the TV maker.
So long as television can provide critical and timely information, this "feature" is a threat to public safety. Keep this in mind when they go to congress and try to have it mandated.
Why would a station EVER enable channel changing. It's all about ratings. If you can change channels during a show, you may watch something else. So you're surfing through the channels, and suddenly you're stuck on a particular channel. You're either going to watch it or not watch anything. No, it wouldn't happen often, but I bet they'll do it for the first episode of new series and stuff like that.
Another thought: What if they prevent me from changing channels during an emergency? You know, it's getting nasty outside so I try to check the weather on a local channel but have to watch 5 minutes of commercials instead. I miss the tornado warning and get killed. Or worse (for them), I get injured and am still around to sue.
"Creationism is a completely valid viewpoint, and so is evolution. They're both *possible*."
The problem is that only one of them can be correct (or neither). You're demoting both of these ideas to mere viewpoints. Science doesn't care about viewpoints, morality, or opinion, only facts and theories to explain them.
When you say you're a Christian, you are implicitly saying people who believe in evolution are wrong. I suppose that's nicer than saying it outright. But you're not being entirely honest when you say both are possible - you don't actually believe that.
Global warming is either happening or it isn't. One side is right and the other is wrong. Make no mistake, reality is what it is regardless of what anyone thinks. There is a huge body of evidence that global warming is real, and very little that it is not. I seem to recall that NASA can measure average global temperatures, and that the data says it has increased. Given that, anyone who claims otherwise needs to have better (global) data or a valid refutation of the NASA data, else we can honestly say they're wrong.
"I've always thought the internet was a place where you could get away from people being judgemental, conservative or liberal, believer in global warming or not."
Why would you think people act any differently on the internet? Again, reality is independant of what you think. Sometimes you and reality don't agree, and we can say you're wrong. Other times you and reality agree, and we can say you're right.
For me, personal experience tells me the climate where I live has gotten significantly warmer over the last 30 years. It could be local, but I'm inclined to believe the other data. The week after 9/11 was also an interesting weather experiment that strongly suggests that air traffic can directly affect the weather. Unfortunately we can't stop all the planes just to repeat the experiment. There have been other smaller scale experiments too, so anyone who says humans can not affect the weather are mistaken - I mean wrong.
"Every gamer I know buys from Amazon, EB Games, Gamestop, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc... "
Sure, you and all of your like-minded friends represent the entire market right If the game companies believed people like you were their entire market this wouldn't be a story. Nobody cares where YOU buy their game, they care where they sell the most games. Wake up and realize the rest of the world isn't you;-)
"Congress will have to do it by making use of the Social Security number for anything but governmental purposes illegal."
They already did back in like 1974 I think. Not sure if they've changed the rules or just let all these companies ignore it.
The government is also making SSN required for lots of things because of the tax system. Why does my insurance company need my SSN? Because my employer covers part of the cost of insurance, and so it is considered compensation and subject to taxes - or some such. I don't remember what the whole story is there, and some of it may be excuses rather than requirements, but the ever expanding tax rules are pushing our "taxpayer ID" into new places.
I'd almost agree with you on that. The BSA just does enough to scare a portion of their customers into compliance. They need to be more effective. If people could not readily rip-off whatever software they felt like using and had to pay for it, more would switch to alternatives that are actually supposed to be free. BSA needs to be more like RIAA and MPAA to get the word out.
"I don't see why any of this is a big deal."
It's not. BSA is pro-business (the B) and the government likes to recruit people like that. No supprise. BSA has a reputation that people don't like, so people get upset about this. You're reading a site that has a heavy anti-microsoft attitude (among many readers), and BSA is practically an arm of Microsoft. A BSA guy in government is like MS getting a little more power so it's not going to go over well on slashdot. I agree, it wasn't really news.
If you really think "software pirates" are the only ones who need to look out for the BSA:
Ernie Ball has something to tell you. Not sure that's the best account of that story. Then there are the
school districts that have been attacked. They tend to pick targets and make examples of them. Sure, lots of places have "casual" violations, but the BSA comes in and asks you for affirmative proof of license for every piece of software on every computer you have - or else.
Apparently (IANAL) most people screw up by letting these folks in the door - they aren't the law after all. Some say the only thing you should show them is your middle finger.
See Ken Perlins page (yes, the Perlin noise guy) and check out the face applet. At the bottom there is a link to a story how it can help autistic children learn how to interpret peoples facial expressions. Best of all it's free.
The US congress controls NASAs budget. No, they don't just tell them how much money they're going to get. They have control down to the line items. Shuttle boosters and whatnot are made in certain peoples home states and you'll have a really hard time reallocating that money, even if the folks at NASA want to do so from top to bottom.
Here's an experiment: Find out what state NASAs big dollar items come from. Then look at who is on the committe that controls the NASA budget and what state they are from. Look for correlations. After that, we can talk about priorities at NASA.
"I highly doubt MS is going to shun their own proprietary technology... "
I guess you weren't around when they gave DDE the heave-ho. "yes, it's broken. No we're not going to fix it. Use OLE instead." or words to that effect.
No, the philosophy is not wrong - it does work. It really isn't old (my bad) as far as I know it was considered new in the 1990s when software (pkzip in particular) could be made popular by being free for most uses. MS did in fact capture the market. I never said they didn't.
I was just pointing out WHY balmer doesn't care what his kids think of Google and Apple, and instead focuses on getting them converted. MS doesn't care about product quality, only that everyone use their crap. This explains almost everything they do. "Features" rolled into Vista are there strictly so that people will not be tempted to use something else. MS can say "We have that too" even if it sucks rocks. It's all about getting the MS version of everything in front of everyone so they won't look to the competition - quality is welcome if it happens to show up.
Damn I can infer a lot from what Balmer tells his kids....
On a related note. If the MS version of something - say tabbed browsing - sucks, the masses will conclude that tabbed browsing is stupid, so Firefox users that promote it as a great feature will sound like fools to them. If you create a new product, and sell a poor implementation to the public it can be a long time before they'll buy something similar from anyone.
"First hand experience can tell you a lot more than market research sometimes, and might just give future MS products an edge."
Clearly he doesn't care about his kids opinion of Google. Microsoft believes only in the positive feedback of a strong market position - we're popular because we're popular. By forcing his kids to use MS instead of Google or Apple, he's just doing his part to convert the masses one at a time. He thinks Microsoft just needs to reach a critical mass and they'll come to dominate whatever market they want - product quality is not an issue. This is backed up by the history where inferior MS products beat out supperior competition just because they got on more desktops. Remember when Gates told the folks at Apple he didn't need a superior product? So long as he could deploy to the IBM compatible world he'd capture the market.
"And here's what they bank on: They can bankrupt the Linux movement financially, regardless of whether the patents would stand up, simply because there are so many of them."
People keep assuming that. Remember, someone who hates MS and holds the right patent can get a court to stop MS from shipping product. Sure, MS can stop a Linux vendor, but someone in the community could do the same to MS. Mutually assured destruction is where patent cross-licensing comes into play with big companies. All it takes is one company playing MAD against MS, and then the threat would be gone. Linux, and associated apps would continue without the corporations - that's how it started.
Free Software isn't a company, it's a social movement (as you said). You can have MAD between MS and IBM, or MS and Novell, but the movement will remain. Not to mention MS doesn't know whose IP they are infringing - may not be a Linux vendor, so no possible countersuit.
If MS does this, it'd be asking to see everyones cards, and they have no idea who might be holding an ace. They're not even sure who is at the table.
I'm hoping they'll have SVG animation for 2.0. For me personally, just constant rotations would do the job. There are other important things though. At least the status for animation features isn't all red any more. I suspect some of them will fall rather quickly once they have a couple done.
"Now if you say "I work in IT because I enjoy the challenge of new technology and solving difficult problems." that says something about you and might be a much better conversation starter. Bonus points if you add something like "not only with computers"."
Dude that's so lame. You need to tack on "I really need a good f**k on a regular basis to keep my mind clear for all that thinking. Think you could handle that?"
"I believe you will find that the kernel that is autocompiled beforehand will not accept the binary drivers...just like any other non-custom-built kernel that leaves out that option."
You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence conspiracy theories).
Someone F***ed up, didn't test properly, and isn't owning up to it.
Never mind that they don't test with proprietary drivers. They applied a patch that affected the functionality of tainted kernels - normal development practice would natrually require *that patch* be tested with a tainted kernel regardless. Throwing a patch over and saying it's OK because the automated testing didn't find a problem is like saying "it compiled - ship it".
So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).
Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.
You missed a key point. You quoted the article thus:
Microsoft argues that by integrating those user-oriented software packages thoroughly with back-end programs for data storage, communications, and business-process management, it puts companies' ordinary employees, rather than the geeks, at the center of the computing world. "Our innovations facilitate the power of people" in businesses, he said.
Microsoft has to sell software to those geeks in the back office. If the sales pitch is to take the effort out of the back room and dump it onto the employees, how are the geeks (who make the decisions on IT) going to keep their jobs with this decision? Even if they did opt for this, they don't want users building complicated ill-thought-out custom crap and then calling IT for support when the $h|t don't work.
Microsofts customer is not a desktop user - it's the IT manager.
"You can't however enforce a license that the other party hasn't agreed to."
To me, that was always the loophole for EULAs. "By pressing this button and installing this software you agree to these terms". Well no. No law (until recently) says pushing a button means you agree to anything. The only thing that applies meaning to the installation is the EULA, so if I don't agree then pushing the button doesn't mean anything.
Same with credit card companies changing their terms "your continued use of the card indicates your agreement". That form of acknowledgement is only valid if I agree to what they said. What if the letter got lost in the mail and I never even saw it?
CC Licenses and the GPL are quite different in that if you don't agree you've actually got less freedom:-) If someone doesn't agree, they're left with copyright law - which doesn't let them do much. If they then point out that the license says they can do something more, that's saying they agreed to the license terms.
How does one computer per child imply sharing the computers? Why would they need a network? I actually don't think computers belong in the classroom in most cases (Architecture and CAD classes aside). MS is using our public schools as a training ground for MS Office.
One teacher told me the kids were required to submit their history reports in MS Word format, with requirements to use X pieces of clipart and a number of other "features". It's history class, not MS training - using MS products effectively should not be part of the grade. Submitting it hand-written on paper should be good enough. BTW, the teacher was complaining to me - not supporting this silly stuff, but she was told they had to do it.
"And I _do_ care since I'm already running Fedora Core 4 x86_64 on an Athlon64 3200+."
I'm in the same boat. Nobody ever does 64bit benchmarks because you can't over in the Windows world. Taking the same code and compiling 64bit vs 32bit on the AMD parts can get a substantial performance increase. Running 64bit version on Intel parts (the few that can) generally degrades performance. It will be interesting to see how the 64bit performance of this new chip measure up - if it's even a 64bit part.
I personally don't care one bit about 32bit benchmarks.
"Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."
Apparently they think that if push comes to shove, the US can take the ports back by force. The problem is that simplistic view of the situation. Ports are highly automated, and good security measures (access controls) could lock out our ability to run the place in the event of a hostile takeback. You have to control the technology to run the port. So they're concerned about computer security technology (snort) leaving the country, but they're not concerned about who controls the tech that runs the ports that sustain our economy. Someone needs to open their eyes a bit.
This whole thing sounds like a handout to the folks over at Armadillo Aerospace. They've been doing vertical takeoff, hover, and landing for some time. All they'll need to do is increase their altitude and throw in a command for lateral movement (I think their control system can already do this if they tell it to). So for this one team it's a mater of refining their existing design a bit and just doing it. For everyone else it may be more work.
There is a growing crowd of people putting rotary engines on experimental aircraft. Not much real data available now, but the Renesis is viewed quite favorably over at Canard Zone. Older RX7 engines have been used, but the new ones don't need a turbo to reach 200hp. The pure rotary motion (ok, it's like a planet orbiting and rotating on axis at the same time) makes for smooth and quiet operation. One guy had to remove one side of his headset during flight testing just so he could tell if the engine was runnning - it's that quiet and smooth.
Smooth, quiet, and costs under $6000 (far less than certified aircraft engines). Hopefully they will prove themselves reliable over the next few years. Don't start flaming - there isn't much data yet on real aircraft.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the weather outside is looking bad? So I decide to check one of the local channels for information but can't switch. I miss the tornado warning because I'm locked in to 5 minutes of commercials, and I get killed or injured because of it. This "feature" of a "comsumer product" is a safety hazard.
So long as television can provide critical and timely information, this "feature" is a threat to public safety. Keep this in mind when they go to congress and try to have it mandated.
Another thought: What if they prevent me from changing channels during an emergency? You know, it's getting nasty outside so I try to check the weather on a local channel but have to watch 5 minutes of commercials instead. I miss the tornado warning and get killed. Or worse (for them), I get injured and am still around to sue.
The problem is that only one of them can be correct (or neither). You're demoting both of these ideas to mere viewpoints. Science doesn't care about viewpoints, morality, or opinion, only facts and theories to explain them.
When you say you're a Christian, you are implicitly saying people who believe in evolution are wrong. I suppose that's nicer than saying it outright. But you're not being entirely honest when you say both are possible - you don't actually believe that.
Global warming is either happening or it isn't. One side is right and the other is wrong. Make no mistake, reality is what it is regardless of what anyone thinks. There is a huge body of evidence that global warming is real, and very little that it is not. I seem to recall that NASA can measure average global temperatures, and that the data says it has increased. Given that, anyone who claims otherwise needs to have better (global) data or a valid refutation of the NASA data, else we can honestly say they're wrong.
"I've always thought the internet was a place where you could get away from people being judgemental, conservative or liberal, believer in global warming or not."
Why would you think people act any differently on the internet? Again, reality is independant of what you think. Sometimes you and reality don't agree, and we can say you're wrong. Other times you and reality agree, and we can say you're right.
For me, personal experience tells me the climate where I live has gotten significantly warmer over the last 30 years. It could be local, but I'm inclined to believe the other data. The week after 9/11 was also an interesting weather experiment that strongly suggests that air traffic can directly affect the weather. Unfortunately we can't stop all the planes just to repeat the experiment. There have been other smaller scale experiments too, so anyone who says humans can not affect the weather are mistaken - I mean wrong.
Sure, you and all of your like-minded friends represent the entire market right If the game companies believed people like you were their entire market this wouldn't be a story. Nobody cares where YOU buy their game, they care where they sell the most games. Wake up and realize the rest of the world isn't you ;-)
They already did back in like 1974 I think. Not sure if they've changed the rules or just let all these companies ignore it.
The government is also making SSN required for lots of things because of the tax system. Why does my insurance company need my SSN? Because my employer covers part of the cost of insurance, and so it is considered compensation and subject to taxes - or some such. I don't remember what the whole story is there, and some of it may be excuses rather than requirements, but the ever expanding tax rules are pushing our "taxpayer ID" into new places.
I'd almost agree with you on that. The BSA just does enough to scare a portion of their customers into compliance. They need to be more effective. If people could not readily rip-off whatever software they felt like using and had to pay for it, more would switch to alternatives that are actually supposed to be free. BSA needs to be more like RIAA and MPAA to get the word out.
"I don't see why any of this is a big deal."
It's not. BSA is pro-business (the B) and the government likes to recruit people like that. No supprise. BSA has a reputation that people don't like, so people get upset about this. You're reading a site that has a heavy anti-microsoft attitude (among many readers), and BSA is practically an arm of Microsoft. A BSA guy in government is like MS getting a little more power so it's not going to go over well on slashdot. I agree, it wasn't really news.
Ernie Ball has something to tell you. Not sure that's the best account of that story. Then there are the school districts that have been attacked. They tend to pick targets and make examples of them. Sure, lots of places have "casual" violations, but the BSA comes in and asks you for affirmative proof of license for every piece of software on every computer you have - or else.
Apparently (IANAL) most people screw up by letting these folks in the door - they aren't the law after all. Some say the only thing you should show them is your middle finger.
See Ken Perlins page (yes, the Perlin noise guy) and check out the face applet. At the bottom there is a link to a story how it can help autistic children learn how to interpret peoples facial expressions. Best of all it's free.
Here's an experiment: Find out what state NASAs big dollar items come from. Then look at who is on the committe that controls the NASA budget and what state they are from. Look for correlations. After that, we can talk about priorities at NASA.
I guess you weren't around when they gave DDE the heave-ho. "yes, it's broken. No we're not going to fix it. Use OLE instead." or words to that effect.
did he not in fact, capture the market?"
No, the philosophy is not wrong - it does work. It really isn't old (my bad) as far as I know it was considered new in the 1990s when software (pkzip in particular) could be made popular by being free for most uses. MS did in fact capture the market. I never said they didn't.
I was just pointing out WHY balmer doesn't care what his kids think of Google and Apple, and instead focuses on getting them converted. MS doesn't care about product quality, only that everyone use their crap. This explains almost everything they do. "Features" rolled into Vista are there strictly so that people will not be tempted to use something else. MS can say "We have that too" even if it sucks rocks. It's all about getting the MS version of everything in front of everyone so they won't look to the competition - quality is welcome if it happens to show up.
Damn I can infer a lot from what Balmer tells his kids....
On a related note. If the MS version of something - say tabbed browsing - sucks, the masses will conclude that tabbed browsing is stupid, so Firefox users that promote it as a great feature will sound like fools to them. If you create a new product, and sell a poor implementation to the public it can be a long time before they'll buy something similar from anyone.
Clearly he doesn't care about his kids opinion of Google. Microsoft believes only in the positive feedback of a strong market position - we're popular because we're popular. By forcing his kids to use MS instead of Google or Apple, he's just doing his part to convert the masses one at a time. He thinks Microsoft just needs to reach a critical mass and they'll come to dominate whatever market they want - product quality is not an issue. This is backed up by the history where inferior MS products beat out supperior competition just because they got on more desktops. Remember when Gates told the folks at Apple he didn't need a superior product? So long as he could deploy to the IBM compatible world he'd capture the market.
That old philosophy clearly still exists.
People keep assuming that. Remember, someone who hates MS and holds the right patent can get a court to stop MS from shipping product. Sure, MS can stop a Linux vendor, but someone in the community could do the same to MS. Mutually assured destruction is where patent cross-licensing comes into play with big companies. All it takes is one company playing MAD against MS, and then the threat would be gone. Linux, and associated apps would continue without the corporations - that's how it started.
Free Software isn't a company, it's a social movement (as you said). You can have MAD between MS and IBM, or MS and Novell, but the movement will remain. Not to mention MS doesn't know whose IP they are infringing - may not be a Linux vendor, so no possible countersuit.
If MS does this, it'd be asking to see everyones cards, and they have no idea who might be holding an ace. They're not even sure who is at the table.
I'm hoping they'll have SVG animation for 2.0. For me personally, just constant rotations would do the job. There are other important things though. At least the status for animation features isn't all red any more. I suspect some of them will fall rather quickly once they have a couple done.
Dude that's so lame. You need to tack on "I really need a good f**k on a regular basis to keep my mind clear for all that thinking. Think you could handle that?"
You make it sound like it's supposed to be that way. IT'S NOT. FC3 and 4 both worked fine. You make it sound like Fedora decided to change policy on their default kernels. They didn't, that's why they've stated that an update will correct the problem. This is a bug introduced right before they created the images (commence conspiracy theories).
Someone F***ed up, didn't test properly, and isn't owning up to it.
So if I wait for 2.6.16 kernel on FC5 is that going to break with nVidia too? I saw a comment in the 2.6.16 story saying that doesn't work either (may have been distro specific).
Damn people, I understood the 4K stacks thing - make a good decision for good reason and let nVidia catch up. This utter disrespect for drivers used by a large number of people is really unacceptable. Actually, when a disto fails to test with drivers used by a large portion of their userbase, it is the user who feels the disrespect. Please don't make excuses - that's disrespectful too. Just get FC6 right.
That said, I'm downloading FC5 now ;-)
Microsoft argues that by integrating those user-oriented software packages thoroughly with back-end programs for data storage, communications, and business-process management, it puts companies' ordinary employees, rather than the geeks, at the center of the computing world. "Our innovations facilitate the power of people" in businesses, he said.
Microsoft has to sell software to those geeks in the back office. If the sales pitch is to take the effort out of the back room and dump it onto the employees, how are the geeks (who make the decisions on IT) going to keep their jobs with this decision? Even if they did opt for this, they don't want users building complicated ill-thought-out custom crap and then calling IT for support when the $h|t don't work.
Microsofts customer is not a desktop user - it's the IT manager.
To me, that was always the loophole for EULAs. "By pressing this button and installing this software you agree to these terms". Well no. No law (until recently) says pushing a button means you agree to anything. The only thing that applies meaning to the installation is the EULA, so if I don't agree then pushing the button doesn't mean anything.
Same with credit card companies changing their terms "your continued use of the card indicates your agreement". That form of acknowledgement is only valid if I agree to what they said. What if the letter got lost in the mail and I never even saw it?
CC Licenses and the GPL are quite different in that if you don't agree you've actually got less freedom :-) If someone doesn't agree, they're left with copyright law - which doesn't let them do much. If they then point out that the license says they can do something more, that's saying they agreed to the license terms.
One teacher told me the kids were required to submit their history reports in MS Word format, with requirements to use X pieces of clipart and a number of other "features". It's history class, not MS training - using MS products effectively should not be part of the grade. Submitting it hand-written on paper should be good enough. BTW, the teacher was complaining to me - not supporting this silly stuff, but she was told they had to do it.
I'm in the same boat. Nobody ever does 64bit benchmarks because you can't over in the Windows world. Taking the same code and compiling 64bit vs 32bit on the AMD parts can get a substantial performance increase. Running 64bit version on Intel parts (the few that can) generally degrades performance. It will be interesting to see how the 64bit performance of this new chip measure up - if it's even a 64bit part.
I personally don't care one bit about 32bit benchmarks.
Apparently they think that if push comes to shove, the US can take the ports back by force. The problem is that simplistic view of the situation. Ports are highly automated, and good security measures (access controls) could lock out our ability to run the place in the event of a hostile takeback. You have to control the technology to run the port. So they're concerned about computer security technology (snort) leaving the country, but they're not concerned about who controls the tech that runs the ports that sustain our economy. Someone needs to open their eyes a bit.
This whole thing sounds like a handout to the folks over at Armadillo Aerospace. They've been doing vertical takeoff, hover, and landing for some time. All they'll need to do is increase their altitude and throw in a command for lateral movement (I think their control system can already do this if they tell it to). So for this one team it's a mater of refining their existing design a bit and just doing it. For everyone else it may be more work.
Smooth, quiet, and costs under $6000 (far less than certified aircraft engines). Hopefully they will prove themselves reliable over the next few years. Don't start flaming - there isn't much data yet on real aircraft.
Makes me want to buy a set of Cozy IV plans...