I use an iPod Touch, jailbroken, with the TouchPad Pro app installed. It's a VNC client that turns the Touch into a trackpad and keyboard. Since it's WiFi, range is not such an issue. It's not going to let me write a novel, but it's more than enough to let me control my Mac Mini when the Apple Remote can't help.
Most of the automated bots are looking for reasonably well deployed forum and blog software. The owner, or another script, googles for keywords that match such sites and the bots just start hammering away. The owners of the bots are not paying for computer time or traffic, since the bots are running on zombie PCs elsewhere in the world, so they really don't care if their bots are filling your site with non-links, or nofollow links, or gibberish.
You can defeat them by asking a trivial question, preferably one based on the context of the system you're running; should the spam bot owner even bother to look at your site and answer the question, they are most likely to also see that links don't work, and not bother updating their bots. If they do, just change the question to something else. Bot owners aren't out to destroy the intarwebs, that's just a side effect of what they're really trying to do, which is to make money without being productive. There's only so many times they'll look at your specific site to work out what the answer should be before they just give up and move on to one of the millions of easier targets out there, probably one of the ones using a CAPTCHA that's been long since broken.
Re:I need enlightenment...
on
ISO Approves OOXML
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think you're mistaken. There will be no applications that process OOXML perfectly. Would you, in all seriousness, prepare a slideshow for an important presentation using Office 2003 for Mac, when the presentation will be given by Office 2008 for Windows? Not twice, I'm sure. And of course, it's even worse if you do it the other way around. I'm sure glad I'm in a job where I have the luxury of simply deleting documents sent to me in MS formats and instructing the sender to try again.
So, um, all those costs that you listed, that were involved in making the movie, wouldn't they be part of, oh, say, the $100M *cost of making the movie* ?
Well, look, a grown person who still has an imaginary friend isn't coming from a very credible stance, so you might need to forgive people for thinking that you believe in all sorts of crazy crap.
Congratulations on the house purchase! But, uh, your bitterness at your total lack of disposable income is showing through. Don't worry, in 5 years when you've gotten past the Interest Hump you will be able to buy shiny toys again, and you will be able to look smugly upon the people who are trying to catch up to you in an ever worsening housing market.
Can someone tell me when the last time they tried to compete on innovation rather than vendor lock-in? The XBOX line of products, off the top of my head.
What does this have to do with anything? I don't play games and I never will. Computers are a tool for me to get things done. What about the people who are trying to accomplish a task?
It has nothing to do with your frustrations, sorry. But you asked for the last time MS tried to compete on innovation. The answer I gave you was that they tried to compete on innovation in a market they don't have a stranglehold on. I don't own either XBOX myself, either, but the point is that as a company they are capable of innovation, but in the retained market the decisions tend towards the low risk ones, ie, no innovation.
Microsoft does not provide binaries or CLRs for any other platform than Windows. You are an idiot if you try to deploy anything mission critical on another platform with Mono. Sorry. I've used Mono. It's not ready and it's not needed anyway.
No, MS doesn't provide binaries. But the spec is open. I don't think Mono is ready yet, but I find the CLR architecture interesting in several ways, most notably that it did a better job than the JVM of being accessible with other languages than its native language. I'm not saying that C# and the CLR are the way of the future, but you claimed that C# is proprietary, which is incorrect. The only proprietary part of the stack is the Win32 bindings; in effect this means that Windows targeted closed source applications remain Windows targeted closed source applications, but C# the language is open and not entirely without merit.
I can. Flash is ubiquitous and available to all. I'm not a big Flash fan, but you can't be serious about this? No one is going to use Silverlight. It will quietly die because it adds very little to what's available. But it carries a stigma that Microsoft will somehow mess around with it and create more issues down the road like they have with everything else.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear here at all. Flash is substantially better than Silverlight for the reasons you've outlined above, but Flash is a terrible choice for nearly all use cases of it, because it breaks the Web model. You may as well just provide a Java application or applet; at least Java runs on some mobile devices.
So instead of 25 years of experience using computers I need 35 and I'll surely understand! The only thing this tells me is that you're perspective is limited to the post Windows Era. You've never spent time on Unix systems, Linux systems, Amigas, CP/Ms, Macs (old and new), and very little time with DOS. I am about getting things done. If you had the perspective I do, you'd be frustrated too. I've been pretty well settled into Linux for the last 13 years at home because I like to get things done. It doesn't get in my way the way Windows does. I'll check in with you in 10 years to see what I've learned. How about that?
And...
I know I'm a tortured soul for being somewhat idealistic. But I will never relent and have this "Yeah. Oh well." attitude. I've been in this industry too long to sit by and let it sour without making an effort to do something about it from the tools I develop to the architecture recommendations I make. More power to you for being one of the masses. I envy you.
I recommend and use Macs, for the most part. That's me doing something about it. Apple is no better than Microsoft, but they do not have a stranglehold market, and therefore need to find a selling point for their products, which leads to more innovation. Or at least more polish on the same 20 year old concepts. I develop for the Web, using the open standards (ie, not Flash or its inbred cousin Silverlight) that are freely available via the W3C and the ECMA.
The accepting attitude comes from the realisation tha
is when Microsoft is going to stop the shennannigans and start playing ball with the rest of the world.
When it's no longer profitable to play shenanigans. Which has two fewer 'n's in it, by the way... Firefox has an auto spell checker built right in these days, y'know.
Can someone tell me when the last time they tried to compete on innovation rather than vendor lock-in?
The XBOX line of products, off the top of my head.
Can someone make the argument that OOXML is all about document protection for the consumer and not about keeping everyone else on the run?
I'm sure someone could make the argument, but it'd be horse shit.
Can someone tell me that Vista was supposed to make everything better for the USER?
You're mistaking Microsoft's users for Microsoft's customers. MS sold Vista to media producers.
Can someone tell me why I need DRM in my life?
Want to watch recent release movies?
Can someone tell me that C# is open and not proprietary? It only runs on one platform, theirs? How is that better than writing natively? The UI is only for IE with.NET? Why would I want Silverlight over Flash?
Hmm, lots of questions! C# is open. The CLR is open. Microsoft's extensions for Win32 are proprietary. I've built and run C# code on Mac OS X and Linux. It's not better than writing natively, of course, but it looks better on paper, just like Java. I don't know, what UI? You would want Silverlight over Flash because it's got more accessible developer tools. I couldn't say why you'd want Flash over almost any other solution, though.
Can someone tell me why they took scripting out of the OS?
Microsoft's OSes have had scripting since the days of DOS. They're called batch files. They're pretty limited compared to a UNIX shell, I'll grant you, but they exist.
Can someone explain to me why Steve Ballmer still has a job?
Microsoft is still making money hand over fist and showing no signs of slowing.
Can someone tell me if they are offering ANYTHING I want? As a user? As a developer?
No-one but you can answer that.
Can anyone explain what I'm missing here?
Ten years' life experience and the healthy dose of pragmatism that will lend you.
I'm sick and tired of them making it unnecessarily difficult to do anything with computers. I know they are a business charged with profitability but is it too much to ask them to solve my problems with real solutions?
Alas, yes, you're a minority market with low profitability margins.
Is it too much too ask them to sell me something without a truckload of baggage?
They can't charge you through the roof for simple solutions.
The people who buy and use MS products are by and large locked in, and likely to stay that way for at least a few more years, if not decades. We're not MS's customers. The people who have a choice between MS and not-MS are the content producers: developers and media producers. Developers are pretty entrenched with MS, by and large; the Visual Studio toolkit and the target audience lock-in help that. So that leaves media producers as the people MS needs to sway. Apple with iTunes is a big audience, and growing all the time, so MS actually has competition for the media producer's interests. Hence, they're providing features in their software to satisfy that market. Hence, more and more restrictive DRM. It's not broken. It's fully working as intended. And you, and I, and most other slashdotters, are along for the ride no matter what our ideologies might say about it, because we're as locked in as anyone else.
Can you actually provide an example of even one person doing those two things? Or are you lumping everyone who isn't you as "the same people" without realising that the rest of the world consists of more than one individual? Just askin.
How many of the discs you buy are CDs, and how many are optical discs containing music in a similar format? I always look for the CD Audio logo when I'm considering a CD purchase, and I very rarely see it. As a consequence, I don't buy much music any more. Who knows if the discs that lack the logo are crippled or not? I don't, but I'm not going to take the chance.
If you're sensible, you're doing one of three things. (1) Not buying from the iTunes store. (2) Buying, but immediately stripping the DRM. Or (3) Buying only the iTunes PLUS tracks, same cost, no DRM. If you don't understand that "DRM" means "we will fuck you in the ass sooner or later" then, well, you're going to get fucked in the ass, sooner or later.
It's not a matter of how I want to define murder, it's a matter of what murder really is: committing an act with the intent to kill or seriously injure. There are plenty of forms of killing that aren't murder, such as manslaughter, which is committing an act which a reasonable person would expect would lead to death or serious injury. The difference is the intent. I wouldn't argue that the people who died as a result of a decision made haven't been killed, because, clearly, they have. They're dead. But they haven't been murdered, because there's no specific intent to kill.
You can decide for yourself whether war is murder or not, but think about what you're doing before you compare a deliberate invasion of another country for socio-economic gains to redirecting a hurricane to a low population area instead of a high population area.
If you have the technology to steer the hurricane away from the big city, but are paralysed by tough ethical choices into inaction, and so allow the hurricane to hit the big city and kill 1,000 people, have you just murdered 1,000 people? Or just the 900 difference in body count? If failing to prevent a death is less ethically unsound than causing a death in the course of preventing ten other deaths, how MUCH less ethically unsound is it?
Causing death while endeavoring to save lives is not murder. It's something I expect most people would have a lot of trouble coming to terms with, of course, and shouldn't be done without due consideration, but if I were put into the unenviable position of choosing which people live and die, and had nothing else to base the decision on, I'd go with the fewest deaths possible even if those deaths wouldn't have happened if I did nothing. Then drink myself insensible. Possibly every day for the rest of my life, hurrah Winston Churchill.
It's been a long time since I bought new music. The combination of my increasing age, my decreasing disposable income, and the increasing rate of defective by design CDs has made me leery of the whole thing. So, were Radiohead putting out a traditional CD, I would pay nothing for it, and likely not even hear any of the music from it.
Now, I'd really like to support a distribution model that offers a way to let me pick up music at a more reasonable cost than the price of a CD in Australia. However, the web site is extremely scant on what I would consider to be critical details:
What format is the downloaded audio in?
Are any special tools required to download the audio?
Is the "download code" good for several download attempts, should the first fail?
Any single one of these questions would make or break the deal. I won't download WMVs. I won't use some proprietary tool to download. I won't pay for something that I may not be able to get.
Of course, I can opt to pay nothing at all, and thus be safe from any of these problems: the most I will be out is the time spent discovering the answer to those questions. But if I pay nothing at all, I'm not really showing my support for the basic idea. Is it worse, then, to pay nothing and download it, or to just ignore the whole thing? Which is more likely to cause the scheme to be abandoned rather than refined in the ways that would make it more palatable?
All you have to do to shut down the IE hole on Windows is to open Internet Settings and make your proxy 127.0.0.1 (assuming you're not running a proxy locally, of course). This will make IE fail every time it attempts to access any remote site. If you still want to do Windows Updates, and you probably do, then add exceptions for the sites it needs explicitly.
Or maybe they know that public key cryptography relies on a secret being kept, and you can't keep a secret from a user while also making it available to the software that user runs.
Slashdot Mirror
lrn2NoScript. There's a bit of JS on the page to prevent you clicking the image unless the checkbox is marked.
I assume he already has a remote for his TV. He asked for help using the computer as a computer attached to a TV.
Not holding the manufacturers responsible merely keeps the cost hidden, it doesn't get rid of it.
I use an iPod Touch, jailbroken, with the TouchPad Pro app installed. It's a VNC client that turns the Touch into a trackpad and keyboard. Since it's WiFi, range is not such an issue. It's not going to let me write a novel, but it's more than enough to let me control my Mac Mini when the Apple Remote can't help.
I have a way to ensure all my porn is perfectly safe. I store it on the Internet, instead of on my own PC.
Most of the automated bots are looking for reasonably well deployed forum and blog software. The owner, or another script, googles for keywords that match such sites and the bots just start hammering away. The owners of the bots are not paying for computer time or traffic, since the bots are running on zombie PCs elsewhere in the world, so they really don't care if their bots are filling your site with non-links, or nofollow links, or gibberish. You can defeat them by asking a trivial question, preferably one based on the context of the system you're running; should the spam bot owner even bother to look at your site and answer the question, they are most likely to also see that links don't work, and not bother updating their bots. If they do, just change the question to something else. Bot owners aren't out to destroy the intarwebs, that's just a side effect of what they're really trying to do, which is to make money without being productive. There's only so many times they'll look at your specific site to work out what the answer should be before they just give up and move on to one of the millions of easier targets out there, probably one of the ones using a CAPTCHA that's been long since broken.
I think you're mistaken. There will be no applications that process OOXML perfectly. Would you, in all seriousness, prepare a slideshow for an important presentation using Office 2003 for Mac, when the presentation will be given by Office 2008 for Windows? Not twice, I'm sure. And of course, it's even worse if you do it the other way around. I'm sure glad I'm in a job where I have the luxury of simply deleting documents sent to me in MS formats and instructing the sender to try again.
So, um, all those costs that you listed, that were involved in making the movie, wouldn't they be part of, oh, say, the $100M *cost of making the movie* ?
Well, look, a grown person who still has an imaginary friend isn't coming from a very credible stance, so you might need to forgive people for thinking that you believe in all sorts of crazy crap.
Congratulations on the house purchase! But, uh, your bitterness at your total lack of disposable income is showing through. Don't worry, in 5 years when you've gotten past the Interest Hump you will be able to buy shiny toys again, and you will be able to look smugly upon the people who are trying to catch up to you in an ever worsening housing market.
It has nothing to do with your frustrations, sorry. But you asked for the last time MS tried to compete on innovation. The answer I gave you was that they tried to compete on innovation in a market they don't have a stranglehold on. I don't own either XBOX myself, either, but the point is that as a company they are capable of innovation, but in the retained market the decisions tend towards the low risk ones, ie, no innovation.
No, MS doesn't provide binaries. But the spec is open. I don't think Mono is ready yet, but I find the CLR architecture interesting in several ways, most notably that it did a better job than the JVM of being accessible with other languages than its native language. I'm not saying that C# and the CLR are the way of the future, but you claimed that C# is proprietary, which is incorrect. The only proprietary part of the stack is the Win32 bindings; in effect this means that Windows targeted closed source applications remain Windows targeted closed source applications, but C# the language is open and not entirely without merit.
Sorry, I wasn't very clear here at all. Flash is substantially better than Silverlight for the reasons you've outlined above, but Flash is a terrible choice for nearly all use cases of it, because it breaks the Web model. You may as well just provide a Java application or applet; at least Java runs on some mobile devices.
And...
I recommend and use Macs, for the most part. That's me doing something about it. Apple is no better than Microsoft, but they do not have a stranglehold market, and therefore need to find a selling point for their products, which leads to more innovation. Or at least more polish on the same 20 year old concepts. I develop for the Web, using the open standards (ie, not Flash or its inbred cousin Silverlight) that are freely available via the W3C and the ECMA.
The accepting attitude comes from the realisation tha
*cracks knuckles* Ok!
When it's no longer profitable to play shenanigans. Which has two fewer 'n's in it, by the way... Firefox has an auto spell checker built right in these days, y'know.
The XBOX line of products, off the top of my head.
I'm sure someone could make the argument, but it'd be horse shit.
You're mistaking Microsoft's users for Microsoft's customers. MS sold Vista to media producers.
Want to watch recent release movies?
Hmm, lots of questions! C# is open. The CLR is open. Microsoft's extensions for Win32 are proprietary. I've built and run C# code on Mac OS X and Linux. It's not better than writing natively, of course, but it looks better on paper, just like Java. I don't know, what UI? You would want Silverlight over Flash because it's got more accessible developer tools. I couldn't say why you'd want Flash over almost any other solution, though.
Microsoft's OSes have had scripting since the days of DOS. They're called batch files. They're pretty limited compared to a UNIX shell, I'll grant you, but they exist.
Microsoft is still making money hand over fist and showing no signs of slowing.
No-one but you can answer that.
Ten years' life experience and the healthy dose of pragmatism that will lend you.
Alas, yes, you're a minority market with low profitability margins.
They can't charge you through the roof for simple solutions.
Yeah. Oh well.
You got owned between steps 3 and 4, sorry. Should've put the hardware protection step at #0 or so.
The people who buy and use MS products are by and large locked in, and likely to stay that way for at least a few more years, if not decades. We're not MS's customers. The people who have a choice between MS and not-MS are the content producers: developers and media producers. Developers are pretty entrenched with MS, by and large; the Visual Studio toolkit and the target audience lock-in help that. So that leaves media producers as the people MS needs to sway. Apple with iTunes is a big audience, and growing all the time, so MS actually has competition for the media producer's interests. Hence, they're providing features in their software to satisfy that market. Hence, more and more restrictive DRM. It's not broken. It's fully working as intended. And you, and I, and most other slashdotters, are along for the ride no matter what our ideologies might say about it, because we're as locked in as anyone else.
Can you actually provide an example of even one person doing those two things? Or are you lumping everyone who isn't you as "the same people" without realising that the rest of the world consists of more than one individual? Just askin.
How many of the discs you buy are CDs, and how many are optical discs containing music in a similar format? I always look for the CD Audio logo when I'm considering a CD purchase, and I very rarely see it. As a consequence, I don't buy much music any more. Who knows if the discs that lack the logo are crippled or not? I don't, but I'm not going to take the chance.
If you're sensible, you're doing one of three things. (1) Not buying from the iTunes store. (2) Buying, but immediately stripping the DRM. Or (3) Buying only the iTunes PLUS tracks, same cost, no DRM. If you don't understand that "DRM" means "we will fuck you in the ass sooner or later" then, well, you're going to get fucked in the ass, sooner or later.
It's not a matter of how I want to define murder, it's a matter of what murder really is: committing an act with the intent to kill or seriously injure. There are plenty of forms of killing that aren't murder, such as manslaughter, which is committing an act which a reasonable person would expect would lead to death or serious injury. The difference is the intent. I wouldn't argue that the people who died as a result of a decision made haven't been killed, because, clearly, they have. They're dead. But they haven't been murdered, because there's no specific intent to kill.
You can decide for yourself whether war is murder or not, but think about what you're doing before you compare a deliberate invasion of another country for socio-economic gains to redirecting a hurricane to a low population area instead of a high population area.
Or they'd say that the game sucked, and the only thing that kept them from posting a record loss was the fact that they pre-sold advertising space.
If you have the technology to steer the hurricane away from the big city, but are paralysed by tough ethical choices into inaction, and so allow the hurricane to hit the big city and kill 1,000 people, have you just murdered 1,000 people? Or just the 900 difference in body count? If failing to prevent a death is less ethically unsound than causing a death in the course of preventing ten other deaths, how MUCH less ethically unsound is it?
Causing death while endeavoring to save lives is not murder. It's something I expect most people would have a lot of trouble coming to terms with, of course, and shouldn't be done without due consideration, but if I were put into the unenviable position of choosing which people live and die, and had nothing else to base the decision on, I'd go with the fewest deaths possible even if those deaths wouldn't have happened if I did nothing. Then drink myself insensible. Possibly every day for the rest of my life, hurrah Winston Churchill.
It's been a long time since I bought new music. The combination of my increasing age, my decreasing disposable income, and the increasing rate of defective by design CDs has made me leery of the whole thing. So, were Radiohead putting out a traditional CD, I would pay nothing for it, and likely not even hear any of the music from it.
Now, I'd really like to support a distribution model that offers a way to let me pick up music at a more reasonable cost than the price of a CD in Australia. However, the web site is extremely scant on what I would consider to be critical details:
Any single one of these questions would make or break the deal. I won't download WMVs. I won't use some proprietary tool to download. I won't pay for something that I may not be able to get.
Of course, I can opt to pay nothing at all, and thus be safe from any of these problems: the most I will be out is the time spent discovering the answer to those questions. But if I pay nothing at all, I'm not really showing my support for the basic idea. Is it worse, then, to pay nothing and download it, or to just ignore the whole thing? Which is more likely to cause the scheme to be abandoned rather than refined in the ways that would make it more palatable?
All you have to do to shut down the IE hole on Windows is to open Internet Settings and make your proxy 127.0.0.1 (assuming you're not running a proxy locally, of course). This will make IE fail every time it attempts to access any remote site. If you still want to do Windows Updates, and you probably do, then add exceptions for the sites it needs explicitly.
I don't need a driver's license to fairly and accurately judge that the guy who spends more time on the footpath than the road is not a good driver.
Or maybe they know that public key cryptography relies on a secret being kept, and you can't keep a secret from a user while also making it available to the software that user runs.
Setting the BROADCAST bit is not following the recommended approach, but it's still standards compliant.