The OS community has learned that S&S doth not a profit make. But the universal conclusion seems to be that OS can't be profitable (after all, what else is there?)
Photoshop users know exactly how OS can be profitable. Corperate clients pay. Personal users do not. Since we all go to work, there should be at least some level of support from the corperate community. When we go home, it's free.
Xerox, laptops... there are many products that work has paid for, that we, for all intents and purposes, get free personal use out of. Heck, Windows is like that (ie, so much personal pirating, MS gets most of its money from corperate clients.)
I think most people will disagree with me, but oh well.
If you sit at the back, get you and your buddies to each select a 'keener' - ie, a student who is known for asking inane, overly complicated questions in order to demonstrate their attentiveness, interest, and intellect at the expense of about 50 students to who just want to learn the material in under an hour.
At any rate, each time your selected keener raises their hand, you get a letter; the goal, of course, is to spell bingo. You will be amazed at how attached you will become to your keener of choice.
> Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton
Isn't that because of takeoff? Once you get something going in space (ie, out of gravities way), it's cheaper to move shit in space than on earth. Basically, you get to stop paying tariffs to our good friends friction and air resistance.
I suppose once you start saying that you're going to mine the galaxy, you've already got some sort of low-cost method of escaping earths atmosphere, a la space elevator, or maybe even anti-gravity.
Anyone here read James Blish's City in the Stars? (I think thats what it was called)
The ad serving party (ie, the ad network serving the ad) will do nothing about complaints. They are getting paid money to show the ad, and unless you're willing to offer them more, they will likely show up at work in the morning, read your email, and snicker.
So email the actual company advertising.. and everyone that actually cares, DO IT! Companies, contrary to popular belief, are fairly sensitive to feedback from marketing campaigns.
While it may be difficult to trace a direct relation between your vote and the WTO et al, feel comfortable knowing that your government will generally get preferential treatment due to economic might. The WTO and co may be the super-governments in name, but like NATO, then the shit really hits the fan, it's US still has the most to hold over anyone's head. Not a dig, not a troll; but it's what I see!:)
BTW, your paragraph about cultures is spot on. I read an interesting article where it pointed out that the supposed globalization resulting from technology and free trade is not resulting in increased trade all-ways, but rather resulting in a kind of corperate centralization where by its easy for national corperations to 'promote' themselves to the states (for economic reasons, obviously) once they become big enough. To this end, I'm terribly frightened that the world will end up as the US being the seller, and the rest of the world ending up as buyers only. I think much attention should be payed to this by the US itself, even going so far as to reject foreign investment as a means of ensuring that the rest of the world doesn't end up as a consumer that blows the last of its money sometime in the future and suddenly realizes that they don't have enough domestic industry and export trade. I'm afraid countries will end up BEING the retail outlets for large compnies situated in the states; and when business slows, the population finds out that they're both the consumers that the market is depending on, and the first to be let go from Parent Co, USA for lack of profits. The potential for economic short circuiting is huge, in my opinion.
It happens every time. PC gamers are fundamentally in the dark when it comes to seeing why consoles are different than PCs. Are console gamers the/only/ people who actually like to/sit in the room/ with/other people/ when they play?
See what I'm getting at? Nothing beats a good 4 player game of [Bomberman/MarioCart/Etc/Etc..], and I've never seen that done on one PC. (LAN parties and cybercafes are the exception here, but still too uncommon.)
Also, consoles have more:
- side scrollers (still fun, I dont care what anyone says)
- fighting games (despite SF2 being on the biggest fighters ever, it never had a hope on the PC, even despite a low profile port back in the day)
- other types of games
PC gamers also forget that not all game designers think alike. This is why I think XBox will fail. MS has gotten so many PC'esque dev houses on board, and not realized that the market for those types of games is, by and large, already hooked up with a perfectly good gaming PC.
I, for one, have a kick ass gaming PC and RAQuake myself to sleep every night, but I'm tired of playing alone.. thus, I will pick up the gamecube so my friends and I actually have something to/do/ while we drink 'n smoke in the livingroom.
$60? For Console games? US sugested price for gamecube games are 50$ (ebgames.com), and then it comes down as the game gets older. Looking at ebgames, new PC games are/exactly/ the same cost.
Oh wait, I forgot that you could copy PC games. How silly of me not to realize that the cost in savings on the PC is due to the fact that its easy to steal games! (I do this myself, but I'm playing devils advocate here.) Throw in:
- comp management
- different hardware standards.. some games you may not be able to play on a PC
- shorter upgrade cycles (although at the benifit of games that can drive the hardware adoption, not vice versa)
But really, its apples and oranges. If you like to drive, SUVs and MGs are both legitimate means of getting around.. it's just where you're priorities lie.
Console vs. PC is about as useless as arguing Pad of Paper VS Word.. sure, they both do the same things at their core, but depending on your environment and demands on the technology, you will choose the approrpriate weapon.
The guy seems to be more interested in ruggedness and battery life than the cost. No platter drives, no case, a week long battery... sounds like a NASA project, and I'm sure he's well aware of that.;)
> your arrogance is exactly what causes CIOs NOT to go to open source...
And CIOs who don't do things because of the percieved 'arrogance' of a community as projected onto all of its members (especially considering that CIOs rarely have to interface directly with that community but rather delegate his/her employees to work with such and such tools) is exactly what causes software developers and engineers to think CIOs are morons. It's a two way street.;)
Actually, that may also sound trollish, but I do FreeBSD at work, w2k at home, so no trolling intended. I just like to flip things around.
Actually, as a developer, I think it's important that these exploits get distributed in a step by step case. Why? Because history proves humans are only proactive when they/have/ to be. MS's software is sometimes a little 'holey' because they have enough market share such that they really dont have to worry/too much/ about security. Their policy for updates is: 'the less you know, the less you need to do about it! the less you need to weigh your alternatives, cause you don't have any! boy, don't we make your job easy!'.
Microsoft is living proof of:
'People hate it when you make them think, but they love it when you make them think they're thinking.'
Giving you source forces you to think: "Everyone knows how to get into my system, so is it really worth leaving it up?" That should always be the right question to ask, if you are managing security. You should always weigh against the worst case. In fact, this forces you to accept that worst cases DO HAPPEN, and makes sure you never have your eggs all in one basket from an infrastructure and business process perspective. If you are truely locked into some system, and cannot live, at all, with it down, you've done something wrong.
Keeping the source from you forces you to ask: "Boy, how easy would this be for coders to recode somewhere else in an original form from the bullitens description, and might they target me? maybe?" You'd have a nice simple anbigous problem to solve, and I'll bet 9 of every 10 CIOs would rule in favour of the customers needs at the risk of security, just because they cannot devine how serious or easy the exploit is, and thus whether or not its worth unplugging mission critical stuff until there is a fix available.
By endorsing a single-path process (being 'just wait for us, dont worry your pretty little head'), they put their own customers at risk. As a CIO or technology manager, your bottom like is the WORST CASE scenario. If the guy who discovers the vulnerability doesn't distribute the source at large, but secretly distributes it to one or two black hats, what good does Microsoft's proposal do you? None. By distributing the code, you force the worst-case on everybody, and thats about the only way you get everybody to actually do something.
For chist sakes, books which describe how to build dynamite are available at your local library. Do you accuse the authors for every TNT related explosion? Of course not.. instead, this empowers/everyone/ to be able to make TNT, thus putting the blame where it truely belongs: the malicious exploiter.
Heck, its not even out of the question that some bitter MS employee internally takes the source to an exploit and distributes it secretly to black hat. You simply cannot control information, so it's best to empower everyone with it so that you're on the same playing field as the script kiddies or the well connected black hats.
Anyhow, it really comes down to accountability IMHO. Non relased source code allows CIOs or admins to justify not taking action because 'no one had the source and MS hasnt done anything about it yet'. Honestly, thats what I think.
Actually, the ability to process information in our brain is heavily dependant upon who were are and what we do for a living. Studies have shown that race car drivers (and humming birds, but lets stick to humans) can process information far faster than the average human being.. I remember hearing something about formula racing.. that typical time windows for instigating a successful turn around a corner was within a 10ms gap, with a potential crash being the consequence if you reacted too quickly or slowly(!!).
So, to that end, it would suggest that there is still lots of 'headroom' (pun intended) for boosting our processing and 'life frame rate' capacity, as others are actually dependant upon these higher levels of perception for their careers. Mind you, we could just put people at near the speed of light, and then they really/would/ experience time going by more slowly than for others.
I'm not sure all this is a good idea, tho! It may be nice to visit France for 2 years, in one second, but you'd return as a 'different' person, if you truely experienced it. My conclusion is that we'd have difficulty maintaing the relevence of friends/family/collegues in our lives as we depend on our situational contexts and shared experiences over time in order to form friendships. Being able to 'gain' so many experiences without the 'cost' of sharing them over time with other people can only lead to social isolation and strains in our collective relevence to each other and the rest of the world.
I am curious about extending 'laser tag' like games to include splash damage capabilities, wide beam fire.. basically, to facilitate all the features of modern FPS games into a laser tag like game, including a visor that projects a 3d world exacly the same as your physical 'arena'.
I'd imagine your walls, floors, etc would have to be set up to instruct your base computer when and where they were hit, and then distribute damage if players are within a blast radius set for the 'weapon' being used by the shooter... but can anyone divine whether this is technically feasible? Or has anyone attempted something like this?
I know it sounds like laser tag deluxe, but I'm thinking deluxe deluxe deluxe... laser tag taken to its utter extreme technological limits. I think that would be cool. Ideas? Comments? Anyone wanna work with me on just laying what this would require, technically, by catalog surfing or whathaveyou?
Sony wanted to prevent porn studios from releasing their material on BETA. The licencing terms of Beta technology had this stipulation.. no non Sony-sanctionned content, as opposed to the far more openminded JVS who developed VHS (I think).
Since the porn industry is generally on the forefront of technology (think... streaming video/audio, popups.. they are always the first, because since wetern society is hellbent on making sure they never need to worry about PR or lowest-common-demoninator content delivery methods), they actually have a very interesting 'say' in what technologies receive significant adoption.
In the case of VHS and Beta, since pron was only available on VHS, and the major purchasers (at least back then) of VCRs and Porn was roughly the same demographic (salary earning male?), VHS permetated US homes far faster than Sony ever could have predicted.
Interestingly enough, I think the same thing will happen with MS 15 years down the road. When they get enough control over the net to effectively shut down non-MS sanctionned content (anything midly offensive, witty, anti-MS, whatever), they will essentially end up as their own worst enemy, and the market will drive them out. Well, that is, unless the US gets it together or the EU shows the US how its done.
Are the big companies, in using Linux here and there in order to gain developer-share in the community, hurting Linux and OS or helping them, in your opinion?
I mean, in a scenario like this, which looks like it will benifit the OS community, when/if things happen to sour (or Eclipse simply doesn't end up doing what IBM was envisioning).. can these types of OS minded projects as started by commercial giants end up hurting the OS community more than helping it?
> In addition, the company has modified a software timer so that Passport users must re-enter their password anytime they attempt to access the wallet service.
will be
> In addition, the company has modified a software timer so that Passport users must re-enter all the information associated with their passport account (including their Wallet account) anytime they attempt to access the wallet service.
Which might be shortly followed by the first time MS has ever been able to claim their technologies are relatively secure. (Yes, I'll avoid being a jerk and suggesting anyone can ever be 100% secure.:)
You can either make Kraft Dinner, market it right, and watch your population grow fat quickly, or make Duck a L'Orange, and wait for people to learn how to appreciate.
The two sides we are seeing here are the geeks and the suits.
The geeks (myself included) wish things moved slower, so that better decisions were made, and people were forced to LEARN about what they buy and use before they adopt it. This is what the RF is all about. You arn't going to become a millionaire.. you do something because you believe it's the right thing to do.
Suits are all about adoption as quickly as possible, probably because 'emerging markets' will make just about any suit cream his undies. As long as you can keep things moving fast enough (ie, money is the motivator, so us Westerners keep working the 45 hour weeks), emerging markets allow idiots to make shit loads of money off even more idiots, because no one truely knows why anything is being made or why people are using it until it's too late, other than the obvious answer: money!
To me, this is all a matter of scale. Things are becoming too fast, too big.. too centralized. RAND will only add to that, and people will be left with a complicated, unfeeling, uncompromising pro-business infrastructure for communication that will force revolution upon our very selves. Our system is beginning to turn against us, and this time it's not about being able to listen to music, or travel to another city. What were secondary goals in a world where we still cared about the primary goals are fast becoming primary goals, resulting in the inevitable discovery at some point that in trying to achieve happiness (isn't that what it's all about?), we became so preoccupied with the means that we completely forgot about the ends.
Our own values are being co-opted by our working selves.. in the same way that its difficult to say "Thank you" to someone who steps to the right on an elevator without sounding sarcastic anymore (just try being 20, in fasionable clothes and doing this.. i dare you), our desire to improve, innovate, and create solutions to what are ALWAYS going to be social problems is being co-opted by the desire to bring home a pay cheque big enough to buy a porsche for the son we can't even muster up the desire to care about anymore.
We're both providers and customers! But we go to work, we fool the customers into buying, and when we go home, we accept the role, either knowingly or otherwise, as a foregone conclusion. The joke that goes something like 'there are two seperate entities, consumers and companies' will emerge as a horrible truth somewhere down the line... with both sides being in each human, attempting to juggle TWO entirely seperate sets of values.
RANDs as applied to standards demanding an unprecentended amount of co-operation, detail and accuracy, being so closely linked to an effort to bring together the world and shorten the feedback paths, will only accelerate the delivery of the punchline.
> Broad Scope of Middleware Products- The proposed Final Judgment applies a broad definition of middleware products which is wide ranging and will cover all the technologies that have the potential to be middleware threats to Microsoft's operating system monopoly. It includes browser, e-mail clients, media players, instant messaging software, and future new middleware developments.
Since when is a media player middleware? Or an IM client? Arn't these just pieces of.. well, urm, software? Where along the line did those types of componants somehow become referred to as 'middleware'.. is that just a euphamism for 'applications that get shipped with an os'?
Being a developer, I'm used to middleware being your glue code between back (business logic) and front (view logic) ends.
cmon, losers, the rest of the world cant build a box for cheaper that does more... only us techies can do that.:)
Anyhow, release prices rarely stay at that.. I imagine the price will drop.
This still doesn't address the fact that while we're willing to sacrifice sound quality on the road (ie, MP3s), but I don't see any reason to lossy-compress my 200 CDs into an inferior sounding library of music.:)
I guess so, but then again, since the clones were mentioned in "A New Hope", "Attack of the Clones" isn't all that different from "Return of the Jedi" in the respect that both Jedi and Clones are entities of the SW universe. Obviously, Jedi is a far more explicit SW reference than "clones" is.
I think you have a valid point, although I believe my original comment about camp going out of style is still valid and applicable to at least a part of a public reaction to the title of the movie.
I think Engineers generally have a broader base of understanding of the impacts of technology and a generally more holistic view on the science/tech map. In a patent examiner, you'd hope they would be considering patents in the broader scope of technology.
My father is a physisist with a PHD and works as the prinicipal research scientist of a mass spectrometry company; while he holds several patents, I highly doubt he has the wide picture needed for assessing the validity of patents.
Also, engineers, and I'm just guessing here, are more used to dealing with reports in the vain of patent applications; with schematics, circuit diagrams, etc. I dunno, I think it just has to do with the broader knowledge base engineers are required to possesses, in light of the fact that they are the last layer of higher education before a product hits the market. R&D tell you what can be done; engineers do it.
Lets also not forget that they are doing this to deal with the new influx of technology related patents, as the western world increasingly becomes patent happy. In this respect, I'd bet that much of this influx relates to inventions stemming directly from the comp/ee world.
They are cool names only because you associate them with cool movies. They sound 'retro'. Today, audiences are very wary, if receptive at all, of 'camp' and in general, the 'pulpy' style. Lucas, if anything, is not bowing down to current trends in keeping the names of the movies in line with the original campy names. Unfortunately, I thnk audiences are far too cynical and pessimmistic to accept such campy names anymore, as evidenced by the furor over the name "Attack of the Clones". Personally, I think the more money you spend on something, the less likely people are going to accept camp as entertainment, especially since camp is one of the cheapest styles to infuse into movie productions. (Indeed, being 'campy' is partly defined as appearing articicial; thus, your sets/titling/acting need not be juiced for every possible production dollar.)
The media/advertising pipelines are more clogged than ever, and since camp is more often a tool used by lower budget productions (for obvious reasons), people are not hearing of movies that utilize camp very much, and consequently are not demanding it or appreciating it unless its associated with a previously prooven franchise (ie, Star Wars, Batman, Star Trek)
100% agreement. Any benifit procured by of/anyone/ centralizing all my information is far outweighed by the potential security risks associated with a central store approach like.NET
The only conceivable climate in which people would accept, in droves, this kind of information collection is if they perceive they have no choice or are unaware of the whole thing in the first place (as noted by the writeup, many hotmail users fall into this category). And guess what? MS is entrenched enough into our infrastructure such that you really/dont/ have a choice. I don't think we've seen the last of the anti-trust suits.
Unfortunately, I suspect that MS is relatively safe until the economy is back up 'n running, for obvious reasons. But I truely do believe MS is headed for a serious butting-of-heads with the public at large following their inevitable first security fiasco.
>and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?
Not if they:
a) didn't sacrifice performance for other games ONLY to get more out of quake3 (probably not the case)
b) admit that its true, if it is true
I suppose the alterior motive isn't better quake3 frame rates for ATI owners, but rather more impressive benchmarks, seeing as quake3 is such a standard graphics card benchmark. So if they are claiming that quake3 didn't get any special attention, but they DID give it special attention for benchmarks, well, thats a little misleading. Otherwise, I don't see anything inherently wrong with adding some post-design juice for the benifit of all the quake3 players out there.
Personally, I think they did it for better visibility in benchmarking.
From what I understand (having tried it a few times at various stages), beOS is like *nix with a kick ass graphics/windowing layer. Why not concentrate on bringing the beOS gfx layer to Linux... I mean, the whole world seems to be holding its breath for the death of X11/freeX86. I'm not aware of the technical details, but is it feasible that the beOS graphics/windowing/desktop layer could be slapped onto Linux? If this could happen, beOS would be the desktop *nix box's killer app.
I know/. is evidence-deficient in a serious way, (I myself am guilty of this) but that doesn't take away from the importance of evidence and supportive arguments... in fact, it just makes/. all the more ripe an orchard in which to pick at glib comments like the parent post.
Being glib is a terrible thing to be when you're trying to discredit people based on hypocricy. Glibness is practically the mother of hypocricy, as it takes an awful lot of work, attention to detail, and care for/anyone/ to avoid looking hypocritical to other people, especially when you consider that others will undoubtedly interpret your statements as supporting different values than those you originally meant to eshew.
Slashdot Mirror
The OS community has learned that S&S doth not a profit make. But the universal conclusion seems to be that OS can't be profitable (after all, what else is there?)
... there are many products that work has paid for, that we, for all intents and purposes, get free personal use out of. Heck, Windows is like that (ie, so much personal pirating, MS gets most of its money from corperate clients.)
Photoshop users know exactly how OS can be profitable. Corperate clients pay. Personal users do not. Since we all go to work, there should be at least some level of support from the corperate community. When we go home, it's free.
Xerox, laptops
I think most people will disagree with me, but oh well.
If you sit at the back, get you and your buddies to each select a 'keener' - ie, a student who is known for asking inane, overly complicated questions in order to demonstrate their attentiveness, interest, and intellect at the expense of about 50 students to who just want to learn the material in under an hour.
At any rate, each time your selected keener raises their hand, you get a letter; the goal, of course, is to spell bingo. You will be amazed at how attached you will become to your keener of choice.
> Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton
Isn't that because of takeoff? Once you get something going in space (ie, out of gravities way), it's cheaper to move shit in space than on earth. Basically, you get to stop paying tariffs to our good friends friction and air resistance.
I suppose once you start saying that you're going to mine the galaxy, you've already got some sort of low-cost method of escaping earths atmosphere, a la space elevator, or maybe even anti-gravity.
Anyone here read James Blish's City in the Stars? (I think thats what it was called)
The ad serving party (ie, the ad network serving the ad) will do nothing about complaints. They are getting paid money to show the ad, and unless you're willing to offer them more, they will likely show up at work in the morning, read your email, and snicker.
.. and everyone that actually cares, DO IT! Companies, contrary to popular belief, are fairly sensitive to feedback from marketing campaigns.
So email the actual company advertising
While it may be difficult to trace a direct relation between your vote and the WTO et al, feel comfortable knowing that your government will generally get preferential treatment due to economic might. The WTO and co may be the super-governments in name, but like NATO, then the shit really hits the fan, it's US still has the most to hold over anyone's head. Not a dig, not a troll; but it's what I see! :)
BTW, your paragraph about cultures is spot on. I read an interesting article where it pointed out that the supposed globalization resulting from technology and free trade is not resulting in increased trade all-ways, but rather resulting in a kind of corperate centralization where by its easy for national corperations to 'promote' themselves to the states (for economic reasons, obviously) once they become big enough. To this end, I'm terribly frightened that the world will end up as the US being the seller, and the rest of the world ending up as buyers only. I think much attention should be payed to this by the US itself, even going so far as to reject foreign investment as a means of ensuring that the rest of the world doesn't end up as a consumer that blows the last of its money sometime in the future and suddenly realizes that they don't have enough domestic industry and export trade. I'm afraid countries will end up BEING the retail outlets for large compnies situated in the states; and when business slows, the population finds out that they're both the consumers that the market is depending on, and the first to be let go from Parent Co, USA for lack of profits. The potential for economic short circuiting is huge, in my opinion.
It happens every time. PC gamers are fundamentally in the dark when it comes to seeing why consoles are different than PCs. Are console gamers the /only/ people who actually like to /sit in the room/ with /other people/ when they play?
.. thus, I will pick up the gamecube so my friends and I actually have something to /do/ while we drink 'n smoke in the livingroom.
See what I'm getting at? Nothing beats a good 4 player game of [Bomberman/MarioCart/Etc/Etc..], and I've never seen that done on one PC. (LAN parties and cybercafes are the exception here, but still too uncommon.)
Also, consoles have more:
- side scrollers (still fun, I dont care what anyone says)
- fighting games (despite SF2 being on the biggest fighters ever, it never had a hope on the PC, even despite a low profile port back in the day)
- other types of games
PC gamers also forget that not all game designers think alike. This is why I think XBox will fail. MS has gotten so many PC'esque dev houses on board, and not realized that the market for those types of games is, by and large, already hooked up with a perfectly good gaming PC.
I, for one, have a kick ass gaming PC and RAQuake myself to sleep every night, but I'm tired of playing alone
$60? For Console games? US sugested price for gamecube games are 50$ (ebgames.com), and then it comes down as the game gets older. Looking at ebgames, new PC games are /exactly/ the same cost.
.. some games you may not be able to play on a PC
.. it's just where you're priorities lie.
.. sure, they both do the same things at their core, but depending on your environment and demands on the technology, you will choose the approrpriate weapon.
Oh wait, I forgot that you could copy PC games. How silly of me not to realize that the cost in savings on the PC is due to the fact that its easy to steal games! (I do this myself, but I'm playing devils advocate here.) Throw in:
- comp management
- different hardware standards
- shorter upgrade cycles (although at the benifit of games that can drive the hardware adoption, not vice versa)
But really, its apples and oranges. If you like to drive, SUVs and MGs are both legitimate means of getting around
Console vs. PC is about as useless as arguing Pad of Paper VS Word
The guy seems to be more interested in ruggedness and battery life than the cost. No platter drives, no case, a week long battery ... sounds like a NASA project, and I'm sure he's well aware of that. ;)
> your arrogance is exactly what causes CIOs NOT to go to open source...
;)
/have/ to be. MS's software is sometimes a little 'holey' because they have enough market share such that they really dont have to worry /too much/ about security. Their policy for updates is: 'the less you know, the less you need to do about it! the less you need to weigh your alternatives, cause you don't have any! boy, don't we make your job easy!'.
.. instead, this empowers /everyone/ to be able to make TNT, thus putting the blame where it truely belongs: the malicious exploiter.
And CIOs who don't do things because of the percieved 'arrogance' of a community as projected onto all of its members (especially considering that CIOs rarely have to interface directly with that community but rather delegate his/her employees to work with such and such tools) is exactly what causes software developers and engineers to think CIOs are morons. It's a two way street.
Actually, that may also sound trollish, but I do FreeBSD at work, w2k at home, so no trolling intended. I just like to flip things around.
Actually, as a developer, I think it's important that these exploits get distributed in a step by step case. Why? Because history proves humans are only proactive when they
Microsoft is living proof of:
'People hate it when you make them think, but they love it when you make them think they're thinking.'
Giving you source forces you to think: "Everyone knows how to get into my system, so is it really worth leaving it up?" That should always be the right question to ask, if you are managing security. You should always weigh against the worst case. In fact, this forces you to accept that worst cases DO HAPPEN, and makes sure you never have your eggs all in one basket from an infrastructure and business process perspective. If you are truely locked into some system, and cannot live, at all, with it down, you've done something wrong.
Keeping the source from you forces you to ask: "Boy, how easy would this be for coders to recode somewhere else in an original form from the bullitens description, and might they target me? maybe?" You'd have a nice simple anbigous problem to solve, and I'll bet 9 of every 10 CIOs would rule in favour of the customers needs at the risk of security, just because they cannot devine how serious or easy the exploit is, and thus whether or not its worth unplugging mission critical stuff until there is a fix available.
By endorsing a single-path process (being 'just wait for us, dont worry your pretty little head'), they put their own customers at risk. As a CIO or technology manager, your bottom like is the WORST CASE scenario. If the guy who discovers the vulnerability doesn't distribute the source at large, but secretly distributes it to one or two black hats, what good does Microsoft's proposal do you? None. By distributing the code, you force the worst-case on everybody, and thats about the only way you get everybody to actually do something.
For chist sakes, books which describe how to build dynamite are available at your local library. Do you accuse the authors for every TNT related explosion? Of course not
Heck, its not even out of the question that some bitter MS employee internally takes the source to an exploit and distributes it secretly to black hat. You simply cannot control information, so it's best to empower everyone with it so that you're on the same playing field as the script kiddies or the well connected black hats.
Anyhow, it really comes down to accountability IMHO. Non relased source code allows CIOs or admins to justify not taking action because 'no one had the source and MS hasnt done anything about it yet'. Honestly, thats what I think.
Actually, the ability to process information in our brain is heavily dependant upon who were are and what we do for a living. Studies have shown that race car drivers (and humming birds, but lets stick to humans) can process information far faster than the average human being .. I remember hearing something about formula racing .. that typical time windows for instigating a successful turn around a corner was within a 10ms gap, with a potential crash being the consequence if you reacted too quickly or slowly(!!).
/would/ experience time going by more slowly than for others.
So, to that end, it would suggest that there is still lots of 'headroom' (pun intended) for boosting our processing and 'life frame rate' capacity, as others are actually dependant upon these higher levels of perception for their careers. Mind you, we could just put people at near the speed of light, and then they really
I'm not sure all this is a good idea, tho! It may be nice to visit France for 2 years, in one second, but you'd return as a 'different' person, if you truely experienced it. My conclusion is that we'd have difficulty maintaing the relevence of friends/family/collegues in our lives as we depend on our situational contexts and shared experiences over time in order to form friendships. Being able to 'gain' so many experiences without the 'cost' of sharing them over time with other people can only lead to social isolation and strains in our collective relevence to each other and the rest of the world.
(And what would you call
VR can only take you so far.
.. basically, to facilitate all the features of modern FPS games into a laser tag like game, including a visor that projects a 3d world exacly the same as your physical 'arena'.
... but can anyone divine whether this is technically feasible? Or has anyone attempted something like this?
... laser tag taken to its utter extreme technological limits. I think that would be cool. Ideas? Comments? Anyone wanna work with me on just laying what this would require, technically, by catalog surfing or whathaveyou?
I am curious about extending 'laser tag' like games to include splash damage capabilities, wide beam fire
I'd imagine your walls, floors, etc would have to be set up to instruct your base computer when and where they were hit, and then distribute damage if players are within a blast radius set for the 'weapon' being used by the shooter
I know it sounds like laser tag deluxe, but I'm thinking deluxe deluxe deluxe
Not so fast, CapNPeet!
.. no non Sony-sanctionned content, as opposed to the far more openminded JVS who developed VHS (I think).
... streaming video/audio, popups .. they are always the first, because since wetern society is hellbent on making sure they never need to worry about PR or lowest-common-demoninator content delivery methods), they actually have a very interesting 'say' in what technologies receive significant adoption.
Mr. Anon above me is right, I believe.
Sony wanted to prevent porn studios from releasing their material on BETA. The licencing terms of Beta technology had this stipulation
Since the porn industry is generally on the forefront of technology (think
In the case of VHS and Beta, since pron was only available on VHS, and the major purchasers (at least back then) of VCRs and Porn was roughly the same demographic (salary earning male?), VHS permetated US homes far faster than Sony ever could have predicted.
Interestingly enough, I think the same thing will happen with MS 15 years down the road. When they get enough control over the net to effectively shut down non-MS sanctionned content (anything midly offensive, witty, anti-MS, whatever), they will essentially end up as their own worst enemy, and the market will drive them out. Well, that is, unless the US gets it together or the EU shows the US how its done.
Are the big companies, in using Linux here and there in order to gain developer-share in the community, hurting Linux and OS or helping them, in your opinion?
.. can these types of OS minded projects as started by commercial giants end up hurting the OS community more than helping it?
...
I mean, in a scenario like this, which looks like it will benifit the OS community, when/if things happen to sour (or Eclipse simply doesn't end up doing what IBM was envisioning)
Just curious
> In addition, the company has modified a software timer so that Passport users must re-enter their password anytime they attempt to access the wallet service.
:)
will be
> In addition, the company has modified a software timer so that Passport users must re-enter all the information associated with their passport account (including their Wallet account) anytime they attempt to access the wallet service.
Which might be shortly followed by the first time MS has ever been able to claim their technologies are relatively secure. (Yes, I'll avoid being a jerk and suggesting anyone can ever be 100% secure.
You can either make Kraft Dinner, market it right, and watch your population grow fat quickly, or make Duck a L'Orange, and wait for people to learn how to appreciate.
.. you do something because you believe it's the right thing to do.
.. too centralized. RAND will only add to that, and people will be left with a complicated, unfeeling, uncompromising pro-business infrastructure for communication that will force revolution upon our very selves. Our system is beginning to turn against us, and this time it's not about being able to listen to music, or travel to another city. What were secondary goals in a world where we still cared about the primary goals are fast becoming primary goals, resulting in the inevitable discovery at some point that in trying to achieve happiness (isn't that what it's all about?), we became so preoccupied with the means that we completely forgot about the ends.
.. in the same way that its difficult to say "Thank you" to someone who steps to the right on an elevator without sounding sarcastic anymore (just try being 20, in fasionable clothes and doing this .. i dare you), our desire to improve, innovate, and create solutions to what are ALWAYS going to be social problems is being co-opted by the desire to bring home a pay cheque big enough to buy a porsche for the son we can't even muster up the desire to care about anymore.
... with both sides being in each human, attempting to juggle TWO entirely seperate sets of values.
The two sides we are seeing here are the geeks and the suits.
The geeks (myself included) wish things moved slower, so that better decisions were made, and people were forced to LEARN about what they buy and use before they adopt it. This is what the RF is all about. You arn't going to become a millionaire
Suits are all about adoption as quickly as possible, probably because 'emerging markets' will make just about any suit cream his undies. As long as you can keep things moving fast enough (ie, money is the motivator, so us Westerners keep working the 45 hour weeks), emerging markets allow idiots to make shit loads of money off even more idiots, because no one truely knows why anything is being made or why people are using it until it's too late, other than the obvious answer: money!
To me, this is all a matter of scale. Things are becoming too fast, too big
Our own values are being co-opted by our working selves
We're both providers and customers! But we go to work, we fool the customers into buying, and when we go home, we accept the role, either knowingly or otherwise, as a foregone conclusion. The joke that goes something like 'there are two seperate entities, consumers and companies' will emerge as a horrible truth somewhere down the line
RANDs as applied to standards demanding an unprecentended amount of co-operation, detail and accuracy, being so closely linked to an effort to bring together the world and shorten the feedback paths, will only accelerate the delivery of the punchline.
From the press release:
.. well, urm, software? Where along the line did those types of componants somehow become referred to as 'middleware' .. is that just a euphamism for 'applications that get shipped with an os'?
> Broad Scope of Middleware Products- The proposed Final Judgment applies a broad definition of middleware products which is wide ranging and will cover all the technologies that have the potential to be middleware threats to Microsoft's operating system monopoly. It includes browser, e-mail clients, media players, instant messaging software, and future new middleware developments.
Since when is a media player middleware? Or an IM client? Arn't these just pieces of
Being a developer, I'm used to middleware being your glue code between back (business logic) and front (view logic) ends.
cmon, losers, the rest of the world cant build a box for cheaper that does more ... only us techies can do that. :)
.. I imagine the price will drop.
:)
Anyhow, release prices rarely stay at that
This still doesn't address the fact that while we're willing to sacrifice sound quality on the road (ie, MP3s), but I don't see any reason to lossy-compress my 200 CDs into an inferior sounding library of music.
I guess so, but then again, since the clones were mentioned in "A New Hope", "Attack of the Clones" isn't all that different from "Return of the Jedi" in the respect that both Jedi and Clones are entities of the SW universe. Obviously, Jedi is a far more explicit SW reference than "clones" is.
I think you have a valid point, although I believe my original comment about camp going out of style is still valid and applicable to at least a part of a public reaction to the title of the movie.
I think Engineers generally have a broader base of understanding of the impacts of technology and a generally more holistic view on the science/tech map. In a patent examiner, you'd hope they would be considering patents in the broader scope of technology.
My father is a physisist with a PHD and works as the prinicipal research scientist of a mass spectrometry company; while he holds several patents, I highly doubt he has the wide picture needed for assessing the validity of patents.
Also, engineers, and I'm just guessing here, are more used to dealing with reports in the vain of patent applications; with schematics, circuit diagrams, etc. I dunno, I think it just has to do with the broader knowledge base engineers are required to possesses, in light of the fact that they are the last layer of higher education before a product hits the market. R&D tell you what can be done; engineers do it.
Lets also not forget that they are doing this to deal with the new influx of technology related patents, as the western world increasingly becomes patent happy. In this respect, I'd bet that much of this influx relates to inventions stemming directly from the comp/ee world.
Return of the Jedi?
The Empire Strikes Back?
They are cool names only because you associate them with cool movies. They sound 'retro'. Today, audiences are very wary, if receptive at all, of 'camp' and in general, the 'pulpy' style. Lucas, if anything, is not bowing down to current trends in keeping the names of the movies in line with the original campy names. Unfortunately, I thnk audiences are far too cynical and pessimmistic to accept such campy names anymore, as evidenced by the furor over the name "Attack of the Clones". Personally, I think the more money you spend on something, the less likely people are going to accept camp as entertainment, especially since camp is one of the cheapest styles to infuse into movie productions. (Indeed, being 'campy' is partly defined as appearing articicial; thus, your sets/titling/acting need not be juiced for every possible production dollar.)
The media/advertising pipelines are more clogged than ever, and since camp is more often a tool used by lower budget productions (for obvious reasons), people are not hearing of movies that utilize camp very much, and consequently are not demanding it or appreciating it unless its associated with a previously prooven franchise (ie, Star Wars, Batman, Star Trek)
At least, thats my take on it.
Garret
100% agreement. Any benifit procured by of /anyone/ centralizing all my information is far outweighed by the potential security risks associated with a central store approach like .NET
/dont/ have a choice. I don't think we've seen the last of the anti-trust suits.
The only conceivable climate in which people would accept, in droves, this kind of information collection is if they perceive they have no choice or are unaware of the whole thing in the first place (as noted by the writeup, many hotmail users fall into this category). And guess what? MS is entrenched enough into our infrastructure such that you really
Unfortunately, I suspect that MS is relatively safe until the economy is back up 'n running, for obvious reasons. But I truely do believe MS is headed for a serious butting-of-heads with the public at large following their inevitable first security fiasco.
>and if ATI has invested a little extra time into pumping a few extra (meaningless) frames out of your Radeon 8500, is this really an act of treachery?
Not if they:
a) didn't sacrifice performance for other games ONLY to get more out of quake3 (probably not the case)
b) admit that its true, if it is true
I suppose the alterior motive isn't better quake3 frame rates for ATI owners, but rather more impressive benchmarks, seeing as quake3 is such a standard graphics card benchmark. So if they are claiming that quake3 didn't get any special attention, but they DID give it special attention for benchmarks, well, thats a little misleading. Otherwise, I don't see anything inherently wrong with adding some post-design juice for the benifit of all the quake3 players out there.
Personally, I think they did it for better visibility in benchmarking.
From what I understand (having tried it a few times at various stages), beOS is like *nix with a kick ass graphics/windowing layer. Why not concentrate on bringing the beOS gfx layer to Linux ... I mean, the whole world seems to be holding its breath for the death of X11/freeX86. I'm not aware of the technical details, but is it feasible that the beOS graphics/windowing/desktop layer could be slapped onto Linux? If this could happen, beOS would be the desktop *nix box's killer app.
I know /. is evidence-deficient in a serious way, (I myself am guilty of this) but that doesn't take away from the importance of evidence and supportive arguments ... in fact, it just makes /. all the more ripe an orchard in which to pick at glib comments like the parent post.
/anyone/ to avoid looking hypocritical to other people, especially when you consider that others will undoubtedly interpret your statements as supporting different values than those you originally meant to eshew.
..
Being glib is a terrible thing to be when you're trying to discredit people based on hypocricy. Glibness is practically the mother of hypocricy, as it takes an awful lot of work, attention to detail, and care for
Booyah! And this UID is all mine baby