You are morally bankrupt if you think this is a 'low' threshold.
The test you should use with Microshaft is ask yourself the following question: "Would I be willing to admit to my parents/spouse/friends that I as a person did what Microsoft did?" If the answer is no - then it is clearly wrong - even if it is technically 'legal'.
If nothing Microsoft has done bothers you - then please share your name with the rest of us so we can avoid you because you will obviously be the person who doesn't return the power tools you borrow, steals money from my kid's piggy bank, and thinks it's okay to enter my home uninvited and help yourself to the food in my pantry.
If it bothers you so much - go to Mount Vernon Virginia and review Washington's records yourself, or visit the national archives.
The issue of reliability of the information presented in any media will always be in question. The answer to that question is a question in itself, 'how important is this bit of information to me?' If your life depends upon it, then go the extra mile to validate it - otherwise accept the debunking that has taken place at face value - your odds are good in an open medium that it has been thoroughly reviewed. Not so with print Encyclopedias.
Take your own information as an example. How do you know - I mean really know that the time written on your birth certificate is accurate or not? Now expand that idea to all the information you think you 'know'. At a certain level trust is involved in everything - even scientific enquiry (your senses can be fooled).
The search for knowledge is not a clear unchanging picture, at best it is a large indecipherable moving mass with a few small kernels of truth poking out of the muck. In your lifetime you can never make sense of it all - you can only learn how to discern that which is useful learning enough to ascertain its truth and discard that which is not, and no more. You will always have to be willing to change your perceptions when what was thought a kernel turns into gray sludge.
As a child you are shown the 'known' kernels - as an adult you begin to see the size and scope of the sludge. When you are old you may realize you wasted your efforts aiming for the whole when focussing on a small part was quite enough.
Interesting dichotomy; I find just the opposite true.
I am a computer science major, and I started off as a system administrator and doing technical support at night in the operations department. I stayed in operations, and now I build tools for the operations team (so I do development - mostly, although I do get my hands dirty from time to time on my own projects) and have been on the job for 8 years.
I was offered a job several years ago in the 'development' part of the organization, but that part of the company is about building empires and not doing interesting work. Everyone over there is a code monkey - and their products stink (they break and/or don't meet the needs of their internal customers - it takes 10 people to do what I can do by myself). I don't find it glamorous to be part of an organization that is so topheavy and bureaucratic, with such a bad track record. One day the bugetary axe will fall - and I see that group being in deep trouble when it does.
I will say that I am very lucky - I got into a cutting edge group and was able to help shape the direction of my job to a certain extent. The key that helped me was the fact that I was intimately aware of how the operations side of things worked (network, servers, system administration, voice circuit engineering etc...)- and today that knowledge informs my projects and my advice in other areas when asked for my opinion. I can do things the 'development' group can't or won't do - so I have a certain value to the operations group as a result.
I've found my niche - and enjoy my job very much. I would advise any young compsci graduates to do the same if they are of like mind. I don't know how many times I have had to explain some simple things regarding system administration or networking to our DBAs and developers - being over-specialized is as bad as being incompetent imho - it lowers your value to your organization.
From an archeaological standpoint these things are a link to the past that is tangible and worth preserving for a better understanding of the culture and technology of the times. They should simply be donated to museums or private collections that specialize in that sort of thing.
What is the big deal?
Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down.
on
LokiTorrent Shut Down
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If you want to soak it in beer, or dress it up and put makeup on it, that's your call. It's a physical thing and you own it, and you can do whatever you want to it...
Actually that is only partially true. You still have to abide by other laws and regulations involving electromagnetic emissions by that device. For example, if you soak your PC in beer and as a result puts out strong FM signals that block military transmissions - you can bet law enforcement will show up at your doorstep and take your PC from you.
True story (although not a hacking story): a guy buys a new HD TV and plugs it in for the first time. Unbeknownst to him, the thing has a glitch from the factory that makes it broadcast on the same frequency used by emergency transponder beacons on aircraft. Pretty soon the FAA/NTSB and the FBI show up at his doorstep very angry. After they figure out what it is they unplug the thing and explain to him what happened - then tell him if he plugs it in again he can expect to pay a fine of $100,000 (or similar $). I believe the company that sold him the TV sent him a replacement and are now studying what glitch caused this to happen so it won't happen again.
The point is there are limits on what you can do in your own home. The key is to be aware of what those limits are so you do not get on the radar of the government or other powerful entities.
If you feel so strong about it - why not simply boycott the products of the MPAA and the RIAA. Instead download free/open source music/movies and share that with your friends; the MPAA/RIAA can't say a damn thing about that. And don't give me the BS argument that free music sucks - because it is not true - particularly in this day and age. The garbage that is on the pop charts today is the larger part - it has become purely a business with little thought given to musicianship with rare exception.
Doesn't Balmer and Gates have controlling stock in the company? If that is the case, then even if the shareholders have 49%, the 51% held by them would decide the thing. By the way those two hold onto their 'vision' of how the rest of us should be dutiful Microsoftites, I don't see them giving up - even as their influence wanes.
Seriously though, the local churches must do a brisk business at the confessional on Sundays in Redmond Washington.
I would almost believe their message, if it wasn't for the "I really don't like you but will pretend that I do" grins Balmer and Gates manage to eek out during public appearances. You can see it in their eyes - they don't believe what they are saying, they just want you to buy it.
Tell me honestly, if those guys weren't rich and in charge of Microsoft, would anyone listen to them at all? I don't know many used car salesmen I would enjoy spending the evening with - and that's what high level Microsoft employees remind me of.
various ways people are fighting distractions and points to some cognitive technology research done at Microsoft...
Cubicles are now out. Instead they are to be replaced by 'stalls' - which will save space and money in realestate payments. The 'stall dog', as MS likes to call the users in such an environment, would slide into the confines of their 'stall' to begin work (sides fully adjustable depending upon girth) - and plug in the head mounted 'cognitive helmet' which will beam only MS approved content into the user's head - controlling the productivity of the user, as a result.
With superior integrated Apple products being released on the market for consumers at prices they can afford, and more cost effective and stable Linux distributions available for scientific, development and server applications (and breathing life into older machines for such purposes), I am moving my desktop systems over to Mac Minis, and my backend servers onto Linux.
What would you say to stop me from migrating off of my current Windows solution in this environment?
"critics question whether the new system is reliable and safe enough to warrant the closure of these historical beacons of safety."...
Only as long as your electrical system/batteries hold out. Once the GPS/LORAN system becomes a boat anchor, you better damn well hope the lighthouse is still in operation.
You are correct - java is not an open standard - yet. If Sun wants it to have any relevance long term, that will change. That being said, it is still more 'open' than ActiveX - since it will interoperate with all the http clients I am aware of - not so with ActiveX.
On a side note, there are several text processing/number crunching applications at my shop that have been ported from Java to Perl - because the Java app couldn't hack it performance-wise (mainly due to the vendor's use of certain libraries - we were driving a tank, when all we needed was a motorcycle; robustness was not as important as throughput in our implementation - as the problem was a narrowly defined function). You don't use a sledgehammer to do fine engraving; smart developers know this and will produce systems that are right (in both its proper and metaphysical connotations).
A disk cache allows the machine to have more 'virtual' RAM than the machine physically contains - that differs from a ramdisk - that for all intents and purposes is another 'storage' object (like a hard drive) - mapped into ram (a virtual disk in RAM versus virtual RAM on Disk).
What you buy from the RAMdisk is fast startup of any apps located in ram. The cache helps applications after they are loaded - but you still have to wait for them to read from disk into memory when you launch them - probably the slowest I/O on any system; concievably you could set up a script on a machine to startup a ramdisk and load it with apps behind the scenes at bootup. From the user's point of view his key applications fly when he starts them. Of course, now you have two copies of the application in RAM - one on the RAMdisk, and one in system RAM executing - so you pay in RAM for what you gain in speed.
With cheap and plentiful memory this is the way to go imho. Think about how high performance internet systems work - routers and www server proxies - in both cases they use ROM (similar to a RAMdisk - only dedicated and not volatile) to hold the app - and no disks; storage, in the case of the www servers is either in a SAN or in a cluster of servers behind the proxies.
We could do similar things for consumer computers to give the impression of running faster/using less CPU cycles (when in fact what you are doing is managing the disk I/O bottleneck).
With Gigabytes of RAM available on systems in the near future - there is no reason not to provide some slight-of-hand to give the user a better experience.
The fastest system I ever owned was a Toshiba T1200 laptop (basically an 8086 XT processor).
It had a ROM chip that booted DOS, and you could designate a section of memory as a ram disk. It had no hard drive.
I loaded Wordperfect, and several other DOS utilities in the RAM disk which was not volatile as long as you had battery power (you could put it into sleep mode and it would keep the ramdisk up).
It booted fast, but wakeup was even faster. Apps on the ramdisk loaded super fast (because they were small), and I got more done from startup to shutdown.
It had the first supertwist backlit LCD display on the market - and a CGA 4 color video adapter to drive it.
I would equate its quality to that of Apple Powerbooks today - but the simple applications it ran screamed in comparison. I still have files I created on that machine.
With all the RAM we have available today - why don't we see more ram-disks? I know Knoppix uses one - and it seems to load apps very fast in comparison to disk-based systems...if RAM is cheap, why not load alot of it, spin up a ramdisk on bootup and put your most common apps on it for access by the user?
I believe Mozilla (Firefox) has a module that supports ActiveX...don't know if it is ready for prime time or not.
So if you happened to work for a company that was brain dead enough to focus on ActiveX development (when they should have been going with open standards - jscript/java libraries) and still uses it exclusively, you might have an out in the Apple world.
I haven't encountered very many ActiveX-only sites in recent years - which might be a testament to how many customers screamed bloody murder when their Netscape/Opera/etc. browser didn't allow them to do the balance transfer they needed.
Gates is speaking to CIOs here. The writing is on the wall, and the change of tac, I believe is a last ditch effort to stave off the latest Apple attack (think about what most business desktop systems do, and look at the new Apple Mac Mini - for as cheap or cheaper price you can upgrade your aging windows ME and 2000 machines to something that just works - without all the problems with viruses and trojans; the added benefit is you can gather up all those old PCs and build a beowulf cluster for number crunching/modeling - a win-win situation, if there ever was one).
Of course, Gates will be happy to put the fear of god (or in this case, interoperability) in the minds of the people who make the decisions to buy or not to buy. If the CIO is not a computer guy - then he might just buy this latest broadside....
Before you know it you will have dynamic content coming out of your ears - and you won't have to muck about with a relational database at all (and the ZODB scales better anyway from my experience).
Many people think they are trying to be computer geeks; they either are, or are not (most are not).
Everyone has their own talents. It is an affront to computer geeks when hair stylists or marketeers try to be and don't grok it.
Sadly, there are so many of them...perhaps we should put them all on a ship across the galaxy; make up some doomsday story, then send them off first on a trajectory that will cause their ship to crashland on a deserted planet far away, without the possibility of return...
I don't use 10-key anyway - actually using the number/special character keys on the top row (some folks swear by 10-key - I don't like to take my fingers off the home row).
I started to get recurring bouts of mild tendinitis in my wrists after more than 20 years of typing and video games. It didn't get to the point of me needing surgery but the recurring nature of it made me look into split keyboards. As you say, I have not had any pain since; everyone thinks I'm crazy for using them ("I can't type on them", is usually the response I get from others), but I have now retrofitted my office and home with split keyboards over the past 2 years, and I won't turn back.
Now, if we can just get a split keyboard that has spring-loaded 'clicky' keyboards (like keys on the IBM selectric typewriter - or Toshiba 1200 laptop) so I don't feel like I'm typing on a piece of cardboard all day long (I am thinking I am going to have to buy a regular old keyboard and saw it in half...)
Holy cow! This is like stumbling onto a lost pigmy tribe in the dark jungles of Central America, still speaking and writing the language of their Toltek ancestors...
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked lying, cheating, and stealing were evil.
You are morally bankrupt if you think this is a 'low' threshold.
The test you should use with Microshaft is ask yourself the following question: "Would I be willing to admit to my parents/spouse/friends that I as a person did what Microsoft did?" If the answer is no - then it is clearly wrong - even if it is technically 'legal'.
If nothing Microsoft has done bothers you - then please share your name with the rest of us so we can avoid you because you will obviously be the person who doesn't return the power tools you borrow, steals money from my kid's piggy bank, and thinks it's okay to enter my home uninvited and help yourself to the food in my pantry.
If it bothers you so much - go to Mount Vernon Virginia and review Washington's records yourself, or visit the national archives.
The issue of reliability of the information presented in any media will always be in question. The answer to that question is a question in itself, 'how important is this bit of information to me?' If your life depends upon it, then go the extra mile to validate it - otherwise accept the debunking that has taken place at face value - your odds are good in an open medium that it has been thoroughly reviewed. Not so with print Encyclopedias.
Take your own information as an example. How do you know - I mean really know that the time written on your birth certificate is accurate or not? Now expand that idea to all the information you think you 'know'. At a certain level trust is involved in everything - even scientific enquiry (your senses can be fooled).
The search for knowledge is not a clear unchanging picture, at best it is a large indecipherable moving mass with a few small kernels of truth poking out of the muck. In your lifetime you can never make sense of it all - you can only learn how to discern that which is useful learning enough to ascertain its truth and discard that which is not, and no more. You will always have to be willing to change your perceptions when what was thought a kernel turns into gray sludge.
As a child you are shown the 'known' kernels - as an adult you begin to see the size and scope of the sludge. When you are old you may realize you wasted your efforts aiming for the whole when focussing on a small part was quite enough.
Interesting dichotomy; I find just the opposite true.
I am a computer science major, and I started off as a system administrator and doing technical support at night in the operations department. I stayed in operations, and now I build tools for the operations team (so I do development - mostly, although I do get my hands dirty from time to time on my own projects) and have been on the job for 8 years.
I was offered a job several years ago in the 'development' part of the organization, but that part of the company is about building empires and not doing interesting work. Everyone over there is a code monkey - and their products stink (they break and/or don't meet the needs of their internal customers - it takes 10 people to do what I can do by myself). I don't find it glamorous to be part of an organization that is so topheavy and bureaucratic, with such a bad track record. One day the bugetary axe will fall - and I see that group being in deep trouble when it does.
I will say that I am very lucky - I got into a cutting edge group and was able to help shape the direction of my job to a certain extent. The key that helped me was the fact that I was intimately aware of how the operations side of things worked (network, servers, system administration, voice circuit engineering etc...)- and today that knowledge informs my projects and my advice in other areas when asked for my opinion. I can do things the 'development' group can't or won't do - so I have a certain value to the operations group as a result.
I've found my niche - and enjoy my job very much. I would advise any young compsci graduates to do the same if they are of like mind. I don't know how many times I have had to explain some simple things regarding system administration or networking to our DBAs and developers - being over-specialized is as bad as being incompetent imho - it lowers your value to your organization.
Fox, meet Hen-house...
So we need a new dictionary:
Privacy=Observation
Good=Bad
Sane=Insane
'RootFind found the following questionable 'root kits' on a non-windows partition and deleted them for your saftey:'
Linux
Emacs
Apt
Xorg
etc...
Thanks and have a nice day!
The day my computer tells me what I can and can not do with my computer is the day the computer gets thrown through the wall...
"Open the Pod Bay doors HAL"...
"I'm Afraid I can't do that Dave..."
From an archeaological standpoint these things are a link to the past that is tangible and worth preserving for a better understanding of the culture and technology of the times. They should simply be donated to museums or private collections that specialize in that sort of thing.
What is the big deal?
If you want to soak it in beer, or dress it up and put makeup on it, that's your call. It's a physical thing and you own it, and you can do whatever you want to it...
Actually that is only partially true. You still have to abide by other laws and regulations involving electromagnetic emissions by that device. For example, if you soak your PC in beer and as a result puts out strong FM signals that block military transmissions - you can bet law enforcement will show up at your doorstep and take your PC from you.
True story (although not a hacking story): a guy buys a new HD TV and plugs it in for the first time. Unbeknownst to him, the thing has a glitch from the factory that makes it broadcast on the same frequency used by emergency transponder beacons on aircraft. Pretty soon the FAA/NTSB and the FBI show up at his doorstep very angry. After they figure out what it is they unplug the thing and explain to him what happened - then tell him if he plugs it in again he can expect to pay a fine of $100,000 (or similar $). I believe the company that sold him the TV sent him a replacement and are now studying what glitch caused this to happen so it won't happen again.
The point is there are limits on what you can do in your own home. The key is to be aware of what those limits are so you do not get on the radar of the government or other powerful entities.
If you feel so strong about it - why not simply boycott the products of the MPAA and the RIAA. Instead download free/open source music/movies and share that with your friends; the MPAA/RIAA can't say a damn thing about that. And don't give me the BS argument that free music sucks - because it is not true - particularly in this day and age. The garbage that is on the pop charts today is the larger part - it has become purely a business with little thought given to musicianship with rare exception.
You may have your soapbox back...
Doesn't Balmer and Gates have controlling stock in the company? If that is the case, then even if the shareholders have 49%, the 51% held by them would decide the thing. By the way those two hold onto their 'vision' of how the rest of us should be dutiful Microsoftites, I don't see them giving up - even as their influence wanes.
...is Linux.
Seriously though, the local churches must do a brisk business at the confessional on Sundays in Redmond Washington.
I would almost believe their message, if it wasn't for the "I really don't like you but will pretend that I do" grins Balmer and Gates manage to eek out during public appearances. You can see it in their eyes - they don't believe what they are saying, they just want you to buy it.
Tell me honestly, if those guys weren't rich and in charge of Microsoft, would anyone listen to them at all? I don't know many used car salesmen I would enjoy spending the evening with - and that's what high level Microsoft employees remind me of.
various ways people are fighting distractions and points to some cognitive technology research done at Microsoft...
Cubicles are now out. Instead they are to be replaced by 'stalls' - which will save space and money in realestate payments. The 'stall dog', as MS likes to call the users in such an environment, would slide into the confines of their 'stall' to begin work (sides fully adjustable depending upon girth) - and plug in the head mounted 'cognitive helmet' which will beam only MS approved content into the user's head - controlling the productivity of the user, as a result.
With superior integrated Apple products being released on the market for consumers at prices they can afford, and more cost effective and stable Linux distributions available for scientific, development and server applications (and breathing life into older machines for such purposes), I am moving my desktop systems over to Mac Minis, and my backend servers onto Linux.
What would you say to stop me from migrating off of my current Windows solution in this environment?
"critics question whether the new system is reliable and safe enough to warrant the closure of these historical beacons of safety."...
Only as long as your electrical system/batteries hold out. Once the GPS/LORAN system becomes a boat anchor, you better damn well hope the lighthouse is still in operation.
I have also run across a laptop that was damaged during...um...let's just say "coital activities"...
- or that is what he wanted you to believe...
Please name some systems that use this technique - I have never heard of this.
I have seen RAM cached to disk, but never the other way around.
Gate's new tac is a pretty weak salvo in the face of such low priced and superior engineered products.
If it is not a last ditch effort - well its pretty pitiful. Seems the SCO debacle might have been the best they had, and their shootin' blanks now...
You are correct - java is not an open standard - yet. If Sun wants it to have any relevance long term, that will change. That being said, it is still more 'open' than ActiveX - since it will interoperate with all the http clients I am aware of - not so with ActiveX.
On a side note, there are several text processing/number crunching applications at my shop that have been ported from Java to Perl - because the Java app couldn't hack it performance-wise (mainly due to the vendor's use of certain libraries - we were driving a tank, when all we needed was a motorcycle; robustness was not as important as throughput in our implementation - as the problem was a narrowly defined function). You don't use a sledgehammer to do fine engraving; smart developers know this and will produce systems that are right (in both its proper and metaphysical connotations).
A disk cache allows the machine to have more 'virtual' RAM than the machine physically contains - that differs from a ramdisk - that for all intents and purposes is another 'storage' object (like a hard drive) - mapped into ram (a virtual disk in RAM versus virtual RAM on Disk).
What you buy from the RAMdisk is fast startup of any apps located in ram. The cache helps applications after they are loaded - but you still have to wait for them to read from disk into memory when you launch them - probably the slowest I/O on any system; concievably you could set up a script on a machine to startup a ramdisk and load it with apps behind the scenes at bootup. From the user's point of view his key applications fly when he starts them. Of course, now you have two copies of the application in RAM - one on the RAMdisk, and one in system RAM executing - so you pay in RAM for what you gain in speed.
With cheap and plentiful memory this is the way to go imho. Think about how high performance internet systems work - routers and www server proxies - in both cases they use ROM (similar to a RAMdisk - only dedicated and not volatile) to hold the app - and no disks; storage, in the case of the www servers is either in a SAN or in a cluster of servers behind the proxies.
We could do similar things for consumer computers to give the impression of running faster/using less CPU cycles (when in fact what you are doing is managing the disk I/O bottleneck).
With Gigabytes of RAM available on systems in the near future - there is no reason not to provide some slight-of-hand to give the user a better experience.
The fastest system I ever owned was a Toshiba T1200 laptop (basically an 8086 XT processor).
It had a ROM chip that booted DOS, and you could designate a section of memory as a ram disk. It had no hard drive.
I loaded Wordperfect, and several other DOS utilities in the RAM disk which was not volatile as long as you had battery power (you could put it into sleep mode and it would keep the ramdisk up).
It booted fast, but wakeup was even faster. Apps on the ramdisk loaded super fast (because they were small), and I got more done from startup to shutdown.
It had the first supertwist backlit LCD display on the market - and a CGA 4 color video adapter to drive it.
I would equate its quality to that of Apple Powerbooks today - but the simple applications it ran screamed in comparison. I still have files I created on that machine.
With all the RAM we have available today - why don't we see more ram-disks? I know Knoppix uses one - and it seems to load apps very fast in comparison to disk-based systems...if RAM is cheap, why not load alot of it, spin up a ramdisk on bootup and put your most common apps on it for access by the user?
I believe Mozilla (Firefox) has a module that supports ActiveX...don't know if it is ready for prime time or not.
So if you happened to work for a company that was brain dead enough to focus on ActiveX development (when they should have been going with open standards - jscript/java libraries) and still uses it exclusively, you might have an out in the Apple world.
I haven't encountered very many ActiveX-only sites in recent years - which might be a testament to how many customers screamed bloody murder when their Netscape/Opera/etc. browser didn't allow them to do the balance transfer they needed.
Gates is speaking to CIOs here. The writing is on the wall, and the change of tac, I believe is a last ditch effort to stave off the latest Apple attack (think about what most business desktop systems do, and look at the new Apple Mac Mini - for as cheap or cheaper price you can upgrade your aging windows ME and 2000 machines to something that just works - without all the problems with viruses and trojans; the added benefit is you can gather up all those old PCs and build a beowulf cluster for number crunching/modeling - a win-win situation, if there ever was one).
Of course, Gates will be happy to put the fear of god (or in this case, interoperability) in the minds of the people who make the decisions to buy or not to buy. If the CIO is not a computer guy - then he might just buy this latest broadside....
Zope plus Plone - if you are looking for a content management system, or Zwiki if you are looking for a wiki solution, or learn Python and roll your own inside of Zope's Management Interface (ZMI).
Before you know it you will have dynamic content coming out of your ears - and you won't have to muck about with a relational database at all (and the ZODB scales better anyway from my experience).
Many people think they are trying to be computer geeks; they either are, or are not (most are not).
Everyone has their own talents. It is an affront to computer geeks when hair stylists or marketeers try to be and don't grok it.
Sadly, there are so many of them...perhaps we should put them all on a ship across the galaxy; make up some doomsday story, then send them off first on a trajectory that will cause their ship to crashland on a deserted planet far away, without the possibility of return...
Ebay, perhaps?
I don't use 10-key anyway - actually using the number/special character keys on the top row (some folks swear by 10-key - I don't like to take my fingers off the home row).
Thanks for the info.
I started to get recurring bouts of mild tendinitis in my wrists after more than 20 years of typing and video games. It didn't get to the point of me needing surgery but the recurring nature of it made me look into split keyboards. As you say, I have not had any pain since; everyone thinks I'm crazy for using them ("I can't type on them", is usually the response I get from others), but I have now retrofitted my office and home with split keyboards over the past 2 years, and I won't turn back.
Now, if we can just get a split keyboard that has spring-loaded 'clicky' keyboards (like keys on the IBM selectric typewriter - or Toshiba 1200 laptop) so I don't feel like I'm typing on a piece of cardboard all day long (I am thinking I am going to have to buy a regular old keyboard and saw it in half...)
Holy cow! This is like stumbling onto a lost pigmy tribe in the dark jungles of Central America, still speaking and writing the language of their Toltek ancestors...