I would however disaggree about "mainstream". Die-hard in-your-face online FPS clansmen are a very vocal minority. But make no mistake, the keyword is: minority.
The fact is, The Sims outsold any FPS ever made, including any Epic, Id or Valve game. Ever. (And for that matter, any other game.) Think about it.
Or how about these quick facts: Quiz games routinely outself FPS. EA's cash cows aren't some FPS franchise, but sports games. And between the N64 which had FPS games, and the Playstation which had Final Fantasy and Grand Turismo, the Playstation won by far. And for every single online FPS player, there are tens of PS2 and GameCube systems sold _without_ the broadband addapter.
As I've said, online FPS clansmen are awfully loud, but they're a minority. The majority of the world's gaming (or gamers) is off-line and _not_ FPS.
Either way, you're not alone. Some of the best PC games I've played over the last year include:
- yes, Pirates
- The Fall - Last Days of Gaia (third person post-apocalyptic RPG)
- Crusader Kings
- Vampire Bloodlines (based on the HL2 engine, but a third-person RPG. Well, more like action-rpg.)
- The Sims 2 (well, after disabling aging. Never liked that addition.)
- Evil Genius
None of them is a FPS or RTS. So, yeah, I'll fully aggree with you. I'd like to see more of _those_ supported on Linux, rather than yet another "but you have Doom 3 and UT2004" argument.
I can still play the old arcade games in Windows too, in an emulator. MAME, for example, works just as well in Windows as it does in Linux.
Others actually work better in Windows. E.g., I tried ePSXe in Linux. (For those who don't know, ePSXe is currently _the_ best Playstation emulator.) Seein' as, you know, it does have a Linux port and Linux plugins and all.
Except in Linux I was getting a whole 3 frames per second. Whereas in Windows it could do 200+ FPS even with FSAA and anisotropic filtering (for when I want to quickly skip over a lengthy animation) or be throttled reliably to the PSX-correct 60 FPS (when not.)
I'm suspecting that ATI's drivers are to blame there. Looked to me like I was still getting the OpenGL support from MESA instead of them.
But that's exactly the kind of hassle that Linux gaming means. Oops, you have to fiddle with the drivers and settings some more.
See, I _am_ one of those people who mostly use Windows for games. In and by itself, I have no problem with calling it "Wintendo" or whatever. Sure. This computer is an oversized console.
The real problem with starting with derogatory terms, is that that-a-way lies making a crap product.
Just as an unrelated example: if you get a bunch of people together that whine about "idiot windows lusers who just want colourful buttons and icons" and ask them to make a GUI, you get a crap GUI. Sure, you'll get lots of buttons and icons, but it will miss all the real points, like usability.
But to get back to "Wintendo", this distro is exactly such a case of missing the whole point. _Especially_ for "Wintendo users" like myself, dumping Tux Racer and a couple of other such mini-games on a CD does _not_ make it a gaming platform. _Especially_ for a die hard gamer (or "Wintendo user"), basically telling me "you could give up all those hundreds of Windows games and play Tux Racer and Kshisen" is idiotic and missing the whole point.
It'll be a gaming platform when I can go to the shop, pick one from an aisle full of games (either native or which are _well_ emulated), and run it on that platform. And by running it, I mean as in "pop the CD in and it runs", not as in "you could spend a week re-compiling and re-configuring Wine to run a 10 hour game. Oh, and you need to crack the game, 'cause the copy-protection isn't supported."
If they wanted to make it a gaming platform, how about compiling a database of settings needed to just run games off the shelf? That would help more to make Linux any good for gaming, than pointing me again at Tux Racer. I already knew about Tux Racer, thank you very much.
(And before someone points those out, yes, I knew about Doom 3 and UT2004 too. I'm not a FPS gamer. What about the other hundreds of games I actually want to play, and don't run on Linux?)
And as I've said, this is the kind of madness that starts when someone starts with derogatory terms instead of with trying to understand and solve a problem. They end up with something completely missing the point.
And I'm _not_ arguing that the Tower of Babel story is true or anything. Told you from the start that I'm an athetist:)
I'm just saying that, in fact, the scientiffic explanation isn't either of those two. Languages _do_ have a natural tendencies to diverge. They aren't different because two different tribes in two different regions first saw a boar and each thought up a different name on it. They did often started with the same name for it, and then diverged to the point where they are today.
No, of course not because someone built a big ziggurat in Messopotamia. Anything humans can possibly build even with today's technology, wouldn't get anywhere _near_ a height that can be considered "sky" before physics brings it down.
But they diverge none the less. I just find that interesting, you know.
Basically, you know, that a phenomenon can be true even if it's given a bogus explanation in the Bible. Sort of like how light is a fact, and a well explained one in science. Even though the "let there be light" in the bible is bogus, light still does exist. Same here, really.
I also find it interesting that anyone back then would notice the phenomenon. It takes a lot of data and quite a lot of brains to come up with the theory that wildly different languages evolved from a common language. Again, even if the divine-intervention explanation given is bogus, the assumption of a common language _is_ uncannily similar to what our linguists came up with scientiffically, millenia later. Sorta amazing, if you ask me.
You misunderstood my point completely. If languages progressed merely by taking new words from their neighbours, yes, Hindi would end up a mixture of Arabic and Chinese.
But the whole point is precisely that it didn't. It evolved in its own direction faster than it borrowed words from the Arabs and Chinese.
As for common characteristics, here's something to think about: ever heard of "indo-european languages"? The fact is: Hindi, as different as it is today, evolved from the same group as, yes, German, French, Spanish and English. And for that matter, the same group as slavic languages and the arabic that you mention: Hindi didn't just borrow from Arabic, it has a common root.
Search for "indo-european" on Wikipedia. You might be surprised.
Altaic languages are another big group, including Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian and Finnish. Needless to say, a speaker of any of them, wouldn't understand a speaker of any of the other three unless he learned that as a separate foreign language.
But even if you take European languages alone, and further more only those of a common ancestor, you can see how far they've diverged. A modern day Italian doesn't speak a language anywhere _near_ the Latin he hears in Catholic church. A modern day Greek would probably get a headache trying to read Herodot or Homer untranslated.
That's the divergence I was talking about: the divergence that resulted in the fact that although English and Hindi are in fact branches of the same tree, the English complain about communication problems with tech-support in India.
Before I get started, please note that I'm not religious at all.
That said, whoever came with the Tower of Babel hypotheis (yes, not theory, law or fact) did observe a very real fact: languages have a natural tendency to change and diverge. They do so continuously.
Even though there was a strong pressure to homogenize languages, e.g., the import of new words from neighbouring tribes/countries/etc, they still diverged much faster than that.
And they still do, in spite of having an official dictionary and an official grammar, and school and society pressure to stick to the official one.
Off the top of my head, words which changed or appeared very recently:
- "gay" used to mean "merry", then it meant "homosexual". And now it's changing its meaning _again_ to mean simply "uncool". (E.g., "Macs are gay". It doesn't mean "homosexual" as such, because computers don't even have any kind of sex.)
- "google" became a verb out of nowhere
- "cool" used to have something to do with temperature, but now your first thought would be something completely unrelated upon hearing "cool!"
Etc.
So the phenomenon does exist. It's a fact.
The more scientiffic explanation is that people like cool/new/hip/original/witty ways to say something. New words, new phrases, new metaphors, are cool. They enter the language, whether you want it or not.
The thing, however is that we don't know _why_ humans have this trait. Is it a survival trait that we haven't found out yet? A cultural phenomenon? (Bearing in mind that it existed in ancient and strictly conformist cultures just as well, not only in the modern days when it's hip to be different.) Or an act of an omnipotent God? We don't know.
Either way, again, the phenomenon described there is very real. It's a fact. Even if you or I don't believe the hypothesis that it's some act of an omnipotent god, it makes it no less real.
The comparison _is_ a bit unfair in that aspect, but I'm also hoping that hyperbole will serve as a reminder of where we are. And more importantly that no, it's not the end of the road, and giving up is not the way to go.
Because basically that's how I see it. Sure, computers have always been buggy, and we've always blamed the victims. (I.e., the users.) But, I don't know, there's a certain kind of both cynicism and fatalism in throwing a two-hands-up salute and locking down an OS so "idiots" can't break it. It tells me, "it won't get any better, folks".
That's basically what irks me about all these attempts to produce a dumbed-down locked-down crippled "idiot-proof" PC. It's entirely the wrong attitude and entirely the wrong way to go. If that's the road we take, and that's the best we even try to do for the users, then in 2104 we'll still having software that needs constant babysitting just to keep running. And we'll still blame the users for it.
The car industry never relied only on those. You'd be surprised at the kind of intensive testing that goes into everything.
E.g., the bucket seats in sports models. You'd think they'd just make a chair with raised edges and call it a bucket seat, right? That's what the software industry does.
Someone was telling me about the extensive kind of testing that goes even into a tiny aspect of it: that when you sit down into or get out of one of those, you'll have a leg over the raised edge. So they have a machine which does just that to the seat, millions of times: a simulation of putting a leg over that edge. (In his own words: "the Sharon Stone machine.";)
I'm choosing that as an example because it's not something that can be dismissed as just "yeah, well, they only do that because cars can kill people." No, that bucket seat's raised edge has no influence on road safety. They just don't want it to end up all worn up and deformed by normal use.
And IMHO maybe it's about time that software was tested just as thoroughly, instead of whining about idiot users who ruin our perfect seat by putting a leg over its edge.
No, those are actually additions that help the drivers. Sorry, I can't see how a PC on which you can't install software even compares to a car with ABS and power-assisted steering.
Most people actually _want_ ABS, TCS, ESP and other aides on their cars. Might not want a price hike for them, but they do want a car that brakes over a shorter distance or which doesn't go in a spin if you go too fast in a curve. That's just the kind of good stuff that the car industry did to help the users.
On the other hand, I have never heard anyone saying "damn, if my PC stopped me from installing all those games, I'd be so much happier." That's stuff nobody wants, actually, and which is born just out of the arrogance of blaming one's users and calling them idiots.
Basically the difference there is that the car industry treats you as a _user_, not as an idiot. They've asked themselves "how can we make it easier and safer for the user?" or "what would the user want in a car?" instead of "how can we stop those idiots from breaking our perfect product?"
Adding, for example, full use of the NX (No eXecute) flag, now that would be comparable to ABS. Yes, theoretically it's some extra limitation, just like ABS or TCS are, but in practice it's something which actually helps the users without putting much actual restrictions on them.
But that's also the kind of thing that needs one to start thinking of those people as "users" not as "idiots". When someone at AMD came up with that flag, you can be sure that that was one person who finally thought "ok, the users have a real problem. How do we help them?" It's a simple and elegant solution, but it starts with acknowledging that a problem exists, and that no, it's not enough to whine about those idiot lusers who click on all those crap links.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Instead of seeing yet another crippled product that's supposedly "idiot-proof", or "designed for idiots", I'd like to see one which does what the car industry did. Again: design it for _users_, not for idiots. E.g., a product about which they can claim with a straight face stuff like:
- "we did a complete code review, _and_ have an extensive battery of automated tests which tries to overflow _every_ _single_ buffer used in the program."
- "and additionally we make sure all buffers are in data segments flagged as NX"
- "we ship with a firewall activated by default, _and_ which needs one to physically flip a physical switch, to reconfigure or deactivate it. So no spyware or virus can automatically nuke it."
- "we have a spyware remover installed by default, with a daily updated list, and we have the balls to call Claria/Gator spyware. And, oh, our browser automatically pops a warning message when the user tries to install something that's on that list."
Etc. That's the kinds of things that would be the computer equivalent of TCS, ABS, ESP and so on. And then you won't need to cripple it to give it grandma. But you won't have them until someone stops blaming their users for all the problems.
And not only that, but I'm thinking that there's an inherent flaw in treating users like idiots and designing a product "for idiots".
This arrogance in the computer industry is getting on my nerves already, and I _am_ a programmer. The whole "if you get bitten by our bugs or piss-poor design, you're an idiot luser" attitude.
The fact is, since everyone just has to compare computers to cars, computers and especially software nowadays are at the point where cars were in 1900. They were a fragile, shoddy contraption that needed you to be an experienced mechanic just to keep it working. (Or rich enough to afford getting a mechanic to keep repairing it for you.)
That's exactly the point where computers are today. Each time grandma calls that her computer crawls to a halt, imagine her with a rickety 1900 car that broke down again. On flat ground. For no obvious reason, other than piss-poor primitive construction.
Yes, there probably is some invisible reason, such as that on the PC she clicked on the wrong link, or with the 1900 car she took a too tight curve. Guess what? In both cases the user shouldn't have to deal with that crap.
Except that wereas the car industry went and improved their product, the computer industry is content to call everyone an idiot. Cars eventually stopped breaking down each time you pushed the gas pedal too hard or drove over a small stone you didn't see, but computers didn't. The computers still break down for as little as a malformed packet. (See the buffer overflows.)
And instead of fixing their own damn deffective product, the computer industry keeps blaming the user. "Noo, our product is perfect. It's those idiots who broke it. Let's give them a crippled locked-down PC they can't break." It's an idiocy of the calibre of "let's give them a car which only goes in a straight line, so they don't break it by taking tight curves."
And IMHO those are the _real_ idiots. Not the users.
Sounds like a good case of natural selection to me. Both the sperm count issues and the tumours are enough of a reproduction probability difference to make a difference, if given enough generations to work their magic.
So the fucktards who just HAVE to talk on the cell phone all the time, even in a movie theatre or (loudly) on the bus, will eventually get themselves out of the gene pool.
And conversely the introverts will eventually inherit the Earth. Who would have thought that being a nerd would eventually be a survival trait?:P
Alternately, I've always fancied a plan that would help curb cell phone annoyance _and_ help stimulate the economy. Namely, if you talk loudly on the cell phone in public, or in a movie theatre at all, two helpful cops take it from you and shove it up your... erm... where the sun don't shine. Literally. By brute force if needed.
I figure that that ought to deter some of the fucktards. And for the others, the ones that physically can't shut the fuck up for more than 5 minutes, and just _have_ to talk into a phone... well, it would at least create a demand for smaller phones. Way to stimulate R&D, if you ask me.
Well, you can Google for more details, but the last time a star went supernova close enough, it caused the biggest mass extinction in history.
The short story goes like this: The pulse of gamma radiation completely wiped out the ozone layer, and replaced it by an opaque layer of nitrous oxide. That is, opaque but not to UV. So most living being on the surface _and_ in shallow water got deep fried by the Sun's UV. (UV goes a long way through water.) Additionally, that brown shell around the atmosphere caused a massive glaciation. ("Day After Tomorrow" style, except it lasted a million years, if I remember right.) The nitrous acid rain was also a nice bonus.
In fact, that's one theory as to why life in the Universe may in fact be very very rare, after all. Or Earth may in fact be an exception. Something like that happening near a planet can neatly wipe out a billion years of life evolution.
Whether Betelgeuse is close enough to do that to Earth, I wouldn't know. I'm not an astronomer.
Nobody gives a fuck about MS Bob itself, but it's a glaring example of the fact that MS didn't give a shit about security to start with. It extends to all their products as well.
Want non-Bob examples?
How about the NT file security I mentioned in the same post? That _is_ a corporate product, and was pushed as a corporate product. That design is so cretinous, idiotic, lobotomized and clueless, that there aren't enough words to that effect in the dictionary to express it.
How about the password protection for MS Office documents? It could be "cracked" in milliseconds flat. In fact, at least one company selling programs that allowed people to unprotect their files went on record to say that they built a delay in their program to look like there was _some_ effort involved. And yes, those were and still are pitched at businesses, not at clueless home users. (See the "Small Business Edition" variant thereof.)
How about Hotmail? That wasn't a decade ago, and a you could access anyone else's mail on it without even much effort involved.
How about the endless stream of buffer overflow exploits in _all_ MS products, because MS cared more about benchmarks than about security? Yay, their products were a few milliseconds faster, at the cost of being insecure.
Etc, etc, etc. As I've said, the list really is a mile long.
So you can get off the high horse, you know. It's not about Bob itself. It's just a clear cut case of MS not giving a shit about security in _any_ of their products until very recently.
And I'll aggree with you about that mindset and hipocrisy too. That's what ticks me off too. The doublespeak and double standards, where the same thing is a hanging offense if it's in Windows, but normal and doesn't even really need a fix if it's in Linux.
But just to add a couple of minor details:
A) I'd argue that Microsoft didn't start secure and slowly get down the drain. They started by ignoring security outright.
E.g., if I remember right, for example, the file server security in NT 3.5 and the pre-SP1 NT 4.0 was entirely in the client. Yes, the client was supposed to check for itself if it's allowed to access a file, and if not, back down. However, if the client was not that nice, it could go ahead and request the file anyway... and get it.
E.g., MS Bob, in the name of userfriendliness, asked you to change the password if you miss-typed it 3 times. No, not if you successfully logged in after mis-typing it 3 times. That's it. Three failed attempts in a row, and you can set a new password.
Etc. I could go on for ever, but these are ludicrious enough to illustrate the point: MS didn't start making a compromise here and there. It outright ignored security until it bit them in the ass.
B) But to be fair, so did everyone else, and some still do.
E.g., it's not a case of Linux eventually getting as insecure as MS Windows. Linux already _was_ less secure than Windows, oh, say around the time Windows 2000 was released.
Sorry, I'll probably annoy the pinguinistas, but taking a Linux system as root online back then, meant you had a script kiddie logged in withing hours at most. _And_ most distros made the same MS mistake of installing and starting every possible service by default, and no firewall either. I know my SuSE systems got Apache, MySQL and God knows what else if I didn't uncheck those at install time.
It took some code reviews paid for by RedHat and the like, before Linux was anywhere _near_ secure.
C) Basically, sad to say, much as nerds balk at "clueless lusers" running without a firewall or MS for having exploitable bugs, most are just as clueless themselves when it comes to writing secure code.
And I don't mean just bugs or lack of communication ("oh, I thought YOUR function checked the buffer length already.") I mean outright lacking even the most elementary clue about secure design, and not giving even the bare minimum thought to what could happen.
Just as end lusers think they're safe without a firewall because they don't directly see the script kiddie breaking in, coders tend to ignore the unseen threats just as well. Mentalities like "oh, surely noone will edit the id in the URL and make themselves superuser" are the norm, not the exception. Or at most they'll repeat mantras they've heard before, without even understanding what those mantras mean.
It's not even a MS vs Linux thing. Windows, Linux, Solaris, whatever. Unless you have some security minded people trying hard to find a bug or way in, you end up with a catastrophe. The average coder's work is a heap of security holes waiting to be exploited.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: piracy _does_ harm business and the economy. In fact, it harms it in the most insidious way: by helping those corporations stay the monopolies that they are.
My favourite example of how the economy _could_ work, is the Via C3. Precisely _because_ you can't download a CPU on P2P.
The C3 is, to put it mildly, a dog. It's not only low MHz, it's also low IPC (Instructions Per Cycle.) It doesn't even start to compete with an AMD or Intel CPU. It makes the Celeron look fast.
But Via still sells a lot of them in China. Why? Because the same Chinese who'll gladly pirate software, can't possibly pirate a CPU. So when they can't afford an Athlon 64 or Pentium 4, they either go buy a C3 or they won't have a computer at all.
So _because_ there is no piracy in that market, a smaller company and a less powerful product can find their niche. Which in turn provides jobs and taxes.
And the same _could_ apply to software, music or movies. People who can't afford MS Office, _could_ have went and bought Star Office instead. It wasn't as powerful, but it was good enough to write a resume and cost a tenth of what MS Office costs. That company could have found a good niche _and_ prevented MS from having a monopoly on file formats.
Except it didn't because of piracy. All those small companies _could_ have competed in a scenario like "do I buy MS Office for 500$ or Star Office for 50$". But they couldn't compete with "do I buy Star Office for 50$ or download MS Office for 0$". Guess which option has won? Guess why the MS Office wantonly-changing file formats are now a de-facto "standard"?
So Star was only saved by Sun, and an independent competitor basically disappeared: now it's a battle between two equally soulless corporations instead. Others weren't that lucky. There were a lot of good products that didn't get bought by a Sun or IBM, and just disappeared.
The same applies to music or movies. Everyone bemoans about how independent labels and artists are better, and how the MPAA and RIAA just rehash the exact same crap that sold before. But everyone goes and downloads Britney Spears and N'Sync and Eminem and god knows what other corporate-blessed crap on P2P. So instead of giving those independents a chance to make _some_ living, and maybe help supply us with new stuff instead of the corporate rehashes... we're all just helping reinforce the status quo where everyone listens to what RIAA wants us to listen to.
Sad.
And to go in a full circle and return to China, Russia and other countries which actively support piracy: that all goes double for them. They could have a thriving local market in locally-produced software, music and movies. A Russian or Chinese family who can't pay 50$ on HL2 or Doom3, could have paid 5$ for a locally produced game with cheap local programmers and artists. Providing jobs and taxes to their own country. But instead they all pirate Doom 3 and HL2, and that market never even started.
Aw poo... And I already wanted to give a couple of people laptops for Christmas. Guess now I'll have to find another (more permanent) please-get-out-of-the-gene-pool gift.
If anyone builds those in web-cams... I already shudder in ph34r.
_Some_ geeks have no qualms about stinking like a dug-up corpse in person at the office. And I don't mean as in "oh, it was summer and the poor guy got sweaty pulling some cable through the building", but as in "ye gods, the last time he looked like he's had a bath was in September, and he's been wearing the same shirt and pants ever since too. And that hair is not just dirty, it looks like a helmet already."
Somehow I don't think they'll start washing just for the webcam either.
More likely it'll be "jesus-fucking-christ, it's Mr Stinky calling me on Jabber again."
As you've said, China, like all totalitarian regimes, needs to focus its population's hatred outwards. They _need_ an enemy.
In Eastern Europe they even loved to wave the nationalism flag against their communist neighbours. Some of the silliness didn't go 40 or 60 years back, it went as far back as "but in the middle ages, those bastards occupied our mountain!" So if China stays its current course, I'm guessing that in 2500 A.D. it will still need to divert its people's attention towards Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and "what the English and Portuguese bastards did to us in the 19th century."
You know, it's not even a communism thing. The more piss-poor job a government does of its internal affairs, the more it tries to focus the people's attention outwards. You can see the same happening at least as far back as the 19'th century Europe, probably even before that. And, no offense, in some USA presidents too.
I'm generally pro-MS, and god knows I've pissed off enough Linux zealots even on Slashdot. But this kind of a crippled machine is just idiotic, plain and simple. Saying basically "we can't let you run OpenOffice or Mozilla" because it might be spyware, is like castrating someone so they can't get AIDS. It's missing the point completely.
And it might not even be Microsoft's idea. After all, they don't have a monopoly or patent on having greedy fucks as managers.
Letting the computer load other software too (e.g., Mozilla) wouldn't have cost _anything_. If it can already load the supplied software, i.e., it already has a loader, then it already has all it needs to run third party software too.
This machine is deliberately crippled. Plain and simple.
In fact, au contraire, it probably took extra programming (and thus money) to lock it down like that. Why? Probably some management fuck figuring they can make more money this way. E.g.,
1. To make sure it does not compete with the more lucrative Windows and Athlon XP markets.
To reuse your kitchen soup example, it's like deliberately adding a generous dose of laxative into the soup, just so the soup kitchen doesn't cut into the profits of your restaurants. You know, just to give everyone the idea "buy an expensive steak instead, you fucking bum."
2. To give the TCPA a jump start, since it doesn't seem to start on its own in the normal desktop market. Convincing PC people that it's in their best interest to give away all freedoms and let Microsoft decide what they can and what they can't run, is a tough sell. So they're sneaking it in from the other end.
Again, it's like generously adding laxative to the soup, only this time to jump start one's public toilet business.
3. To milk those people of more money in the long run, since they're already locked in and depending on your approval for every program they run and every media file they play. Which strikes me as a very heartless business plan: it's figuring out how can you milk more money out of the _poor_.
Again, feel free to fill in your own analogy with deliberately putting laxative in poor people's soup, for the sole purpose of lining corporate pockets.
In the end, it's not really whether the cat or the dog is smart, it's whether it does what you expect from a pet. That's usually (A) what people mistake for "intelligence" and also (B) what motivates them into grasping at straws for "proof" that their favourite pet is smart.
Some people seem to like the unconditional obedience of an animal hard-coded to obey the pack leader. Even if the "pack leader" is a human.
In that case it's "Bowser is soo smart. He comes here when I call him!" And typically also "bah, cats are dumb/evil/etc because they can't be bothered to obey."
Some of us, on the other hand, have no need for basically a biological Tamagochi hard-wired to obey.
We like a cat precisely _because_ it's independent and doesn't need a "master". Cats are not pack animals, so they really have neither a "master", nor "servants" or "staff". You may be a cat's room mate, or friend, or a danger to be avoided, or (in rare cases) even an enemy. Either way, you can know that it's the cat's genuine assessment of you, and not some hard-wired reflex kicking in.
So we tend to generalize and anthropomorphise the other way around. "Yay, Fluffy is so smart because she can think for herself and doesn't need a master." And conversely "Dogs are complete retards for _needing_ to be someone's slave."
In reality, both points of view are false and based on false premises.
An animal's intelligence is what helps it stay alive in its natural environment, _not_ how well it fits your emotional need. In that aspect, both felines and dogs/wolves are "smart", just in different ways.
Wolves have perfected survival by hunting larger prey in packs, so teamwork and having a pack leader is essential. A lone wolf can't kill, say, a deer, so acting as a pack is what their very survival depends on. So for the pack to work, the animals are basically hard-wired to follow and obey the leader. It's a survival trait.
Felines on the other hand, with some exceptions (e.g., lions), live on prey they can kill one-on-one. Not only they don't need a pack to hunt, and not only there isn't enough meat on their prey to feed a whole pack, but a pack would also get in the way of stealth. If you've watched a cat hunt a mouse, you've noticed that it relies on not being seen until it gets within relatively short range. Trying to do that as a whole pack of cats, would just dramatically increase the chances of being detected early.
Hence, for cats the survival trait was to _not_ follow someone else.
Both approaches work, so they're both intelligent.
This guy actually gave you a chance, and was willing to check that info right in front of you. Most don't.
HR and management these days is mostly about:
1. Avoiding responsibility, especially the kind that can spell "lawsuit",
2. Avoiding work,
You see "valuable" management advice all over, which basically boils down to "nah, just throw away half the applications, based on whatever excuse comes to your mind." It's less work.
Didn't like his email address? Drop the application. Didn't like the colour of his socks? "Thank you, interview is over." A couple of posts about guns with his name on them? (E.g., on a gaming board, talking about a game.) Gee, he must be one of those NRA crackpots, let's drop the application real quick. A couple of posts about using drugs in Fallout 2? (A computer game again.) Good grief, he must be a junkie IRL too, let's pretend we never even received that application. Someone from East Elbonia with a similar name posting some pro-communist crap? Surely it must be him, drop the application. A post defending the people's right to get married to whoever they goddamn please, even same sex? Gaah, he must be one of those sinners damned by the Lord, surely we don't want him in our company. Etc.
Most people don't even intend to do the work of actually sort through the mountain of google info, and put it all in context. They're just looking for an excuse to avoid work. They're just looking for that phrase, even if out of context, which cuts their work short.
You'd think noone would be that retarded and still get promoted to management, but think again. There are companies who hire based on Tarot or numerology. Even big ones. You can get your application dropped just because adding up the numeric values of the letters in your name, added up to a number they don't like. Literally.
And again, it's also all about avoiding responsibility. Confronting you about the data they found, is just begging for a lawsuit or press attention. What if they asked you about it and then didn't hire you anyway, for whole other reasons. Depending on what they asked about, it can be a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.
You see, we live in a society in which most people:
1. avoid personal responsibility like the plague,
2. don't want to even talk to their children.
Daddy is too busy doing overtime to impress the boss. Then daddy wants to spend the whole fucking eveing with a beer and the TV, or with a beer and the Linux kernel. Mommy is too busy between impressing her own boss, all those soap operas, and all those female friends she just has to spend hours a day talking to.
And the poor kid is just some pest that just gets in the way. Telling little Billy _why_ this and that is wrong, is a tiresome talk and you just know it'll go right over his little head anyway. Naah... better just avoid him and go watch that football/baseball/soccer/whatever game instead. Watching the idiot box is a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Can't let a kid get in the way of that.
So little Billy grows up basically without any guidance. But here's the fun part: just because Mommy and Daddy are too busy to explain things to Billy, it doesn't mean someone else won't either. So Billy picks up all sorts of wrong ideas off the street or, yes, off TV.
And when Billy finally does something wrong, we get to point 1 again: nobody wants to be personally responsible for it. Noo. It's not our fault that Billy grew up wrong. It's the TV's fault! The government should censor it!
1. For some people privacy really isn't worth as much as for the tin-foil crowd. E.g., so some third party can know I've visited this and that free porn site. Big deal. I'd give them the URL's myself if they asked.
2. A lot of the privacy threat is really blown out of proportion. When you have people whose income depends on convincing you that they protect you from the big bad wolf... they cry wolf lots.
Yes, key loggers are bad. On the other hand, idiotic programs who "clean up" my login cookies make me want to kill the author. No, it's not some spyware that tracks my every move, it's just a goddamn login cookie to a forum. I _want_ them to know it's me when I post.
3. In view of what you said, i.e., the effort and time cost of "privacy", a lot of the "solutions" are far worse than the problem they're supposed to solve. A lot of the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are far worse than having viruses and spyware.
To give an actual example, for a while I had McAffee's idiotic suite on my home computer. Gaah! That's _the_ biggest pile of festering crap I've ever seen.
E.g., their "privacy protection" made it impossible to log in to half the sites I visited. And made half the rest malfunction in weird ways. E.g., gamespy's fileplanet could no longer even make up its mind whether I'm logged in or not, due to McAffee's filtering the cookies.
E.g., with the McAffee crap installed, my computer took some 2 minutes to boot up, and some 5 minutes (literally) to shut down. Wasn't too fast in between either.
Partially because McAffee's idiotic auto-update was so retarded, that I ended up with multiple copies (and versions) of some of their programs in memory. Each update seemed to just add one more version to start up. I was running at least two instances of their anti-virus, and it actually tried starting two instances of the firewall too. Luckily, the firewall detected that a copy is already running, and gave me an annoying pop-up window each time I booted the computer.
E.g., their retarded auto-update and auto-scan slowed down my computer all the time. Each time I'd be playing an online game, what do you know, it's McAffee's idiocy _again_ clogging all my bandwidth with its downloads. The second time in the same day, no less. And then pops up a window asking that it reboots the computer, and causing the game to minimize. And occasionally crash.
Etc.
You know what? All in all, it was actually _worse_ than when I deliberately got a virus. (Short story: I was too lazy to go burn a firewall on a CD when installing Windows 2000 on a new computer, so I actually planned to get virused while I download one. Then I'd reformat and reinstall.) Looking at the bandwidth and CPU usage of that virus/zombie, it actually was _less_ bad than the effects of McAffee protecting me from them.
Yet it never seemed to occur to you to just obey the speed limit...
The thing about timed streetlights is that they're calibrated for a given speed. If they're, say, calibrated for 30mph and they're 1/4 of a mile apart, they'll turn green every 30 seconds regardless of your speed. If you go "only" 5-10 MPH faster... you just catch a red light, and still don't get home any faster than someone who obeys the speed limit.
I.e., you'd think people would get the idea already that there is really no reward for endangering everyone around. Someone who stuck to the speed limit got home in exactly the same time, and obviously with less stress. Didn't need to use up extra gas accelerating and decelerating all the time either.
And yes, I do mean endangering. Due to the elementary physics fact that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, so is the braking distance. E.g., the speed difference between 50 km/h and 70 km/h is 40%, but the braking distance _doubles_.
Add poor visibility at night (you might not see a kid dashing to cross the street until he's in front of your beams), the driver _and_ everyone around being tired, etc, and I really _don't_ need people doing "only" 10mph over the limit at night.
And again, as you've noticed, it doesn't even get you home faster. It just makes you stop at the next red light.
But naah... for some people speeding is like _the_ proof of their manhood. Obeying the traffic laws or not driving like an irresponsible maniac, that's like admitting sexual impotence. Or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
That was more or less what I was thinking too.
I would however disaggree about "mainstream". Die-hard in-your-face online FPS clansmen are a very vocal minority. But make no mistake, the keyword is: minority.
The fact is, The Sims outsold any FPS ever made, including any Epic, Id or Valve game. Ever. (And for that matter, any other game.) Think about it.
Or how about these quick facts: Quiz games routinely outself FPS. EA's cash cows aren't some FPS franchise, but sports games. And between the N64 which had FPS games, and the Playstation which had Final Fantasy and Grand Turismo, the Playstation won by far. And for every single online FPS player, there are tens of PS2 and GameCube systems sold _without_ the broadband addapter.
As I've said, online FPS clansmen are awfully loud, but they're a minority. The majority of the world's gaming (or gamers) is off-line and _not_ FPS.
Either way, you're not alone. Some of the best PC games I've played over the last year include:
- yes, Pirates
- The Fall - Last Days of Gaia (third person post-apocalyptic RPG)
- Crusader Kings
- Vampire Bloodlines (based on the HL2 engine, but a third-person RPG. Well, more like action-rpg.)
- The Sims 2 (well, after disabling aging. Never liked that addition.)
- Evil Genius
None of them is a FPS or RTS. So, yeah, I'll fully aggree with you. I'd like to see more of _those_ supported on Linux, rather than yet another "but you have Doom 3 and UT2004" argument.
As opposed to... what?
I can still play the old arcade games in Windows too, in an emulator. MAME, for example, works just as well in Windows as it does in Linux.
Others actually work better in Windows. E.g., I tried ePSXe in Linux. (For those who don't know, ePSXe is currently _the_ best Playstation emulator.) Seein' as, you know, it does have a Linux port and Linux plugins and all.
Except in Linux I was getting a whole 3 frames per second. Whereas in Windows it could do 200+ FPS even with FSAA and anisotropic filtering (for when I want to quickly skip over a lengthy animation) or be throttled reliably to the PSX-correct 60 FPS (when not.)
I'm suspecting that ATI's drivers are to blame there. Looked to me like I was still getting the OpenGL support from MESA instead of them.
But that's exactly the kind of hassle that Linux gaming means. Oops, you have to fiddle with the drivers and settings some more.
See, I _am_ one of those people who mostly use Windows for games. In and by itself, I have no problem with calling it "Wintendo" or whatever. Sure. This computer is an oversized console.
The real problem with starting with derogatory terms, is that that-a-way lies making a crap product.
Just as an unrelated example: if you get a bunch of people together that whine about "idiot windows lusers who just want colourful buttons and icons" and ask them to make a GUI, you get a crap GUI. Sure, you'll get lots of buttons and icons, but it will miss all the real points, like usability.
But to get back to "Wintendo", this distro is exactly such a case of missing the whole point. _Especially_ for "Wintendo users" like myself, dumping Tux Racer and a couple of other such mini-games on a CD does _not_ make it a gaming platform. _Especially_ for a die hard gamer (or "Wintendo user"), basically telling me "you could give up all those hundreds of Windows games and play Tux Racer and Kshisen" is idiotic and missing the whole point.
It'll be a gaming platform when I can go to the shop, pick one from an aisle full of games (either native or which are _well_ emulated), and run it on that platform. And by running it, I mean as in "pop the CD in and it runs", not as in "you could spend a week re-compiling and re-configuring Wine to run a 10 hour game. Oh, and you need to crack the game, 'cause the copy-protection isn't supported."
If they wanted to make it a gaming platform, how about compiling a database of settings needed to just run games off the shelf? That would help more to make Linux any good for gaming, than pointing me again at Tux Racer. I already knew about Tux Racer, thank you very much.
(And before someone points those out, yes, I knew about Doom 3 and UT2004 too. I'm not a FPS gamer. What about the other hundreds of games I actually want to play, and don't run on Linux?)
And as I've said, this is the kind of madness that starts when someone starts with derogatory terms instead of with trying to understand and solve a problem. They end up with something completely missing the point.
And I'm _not_ arguing that the Tower of Babel story is true or anything. Told you from the start that I'm an athetist :)
I'm just saying that, in fact, the scientiffic explanation isn't either of those two. Languages _do_ have a natural tendencies to diverge. They aren't different because two different tribes in two different regions first saw a boar and each thought up a different name on it. They did often started with the same name for it, and then diverged to the point where they are today.
No, of course not because someone built a big ziggurat in Messopotamia. Anything humans can possibly build even with today's technology, wouldn't get anywhere _near_ a height that can be considered "sky" before physics brings it down.
But they diverge none the less. I just find that interesting, you know.
Basically, you know, that a phenomenon can be true even if it's given a bogus explanation in the Bible. Sort of like how light is a fact, and a well explained one in science. Even though the "let there be light" in the bible is bogus, light still does exist. Same here, really.
I also find it interesting that anyone back then would notice the phenomenon. It takes a lot of data and quite a lot of brains to come up with the theory that wildly different languages evolved from a common language. Again, even if the divine-intervention explanation given is bogus, the assumption of a common language _is_ uncannily similar to what our linguists came up with scientiffically, millenia later. Sorta amazing, if you ask me.
You misunderstood my point completely. If languages progressed merely by taking new words from their neighbours, yes, Hindi would end up a mixture of Arabic and Chinese.
But the whole point is precisely that it didn't. It evolved in its own direction faster than it borrowed words from the Arabs and Chinese.
As for common characteristics, here's something to think about: ever heard of "indo-european languages"? The fact is: Hindi, as different as it is today, evolved from the same group as, yes, German, French, Spanish and English. And for that matter, the same group as slavic languages and the arabic that you mention: Hindi didn't just borrow from Arabic, it has a common root.
Search for "indo-european" on Wikipedia. You might be surprised.
Altaic languages are another big group, including Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian and Finnish. Needless to say, a speaker of any of them, wouldn't understand a speaker of any of the other three unless he learned that as a separate foreign language.
But even if you take European languages alone, and further more only those of a common ancestor, you can see how far they've diverged. A modern day Italian doesn't speak a language anywhere _near_ the Latin he hears in Catholic church. A modern day Greek would probably get a headache trying to read Herodot or Homer untranslated.
That's the divergence I was talking about: the divergence that resulted in the fact that although English and Hindi are in fact branches of the same tree, the English complain about communication problems with tech-support in India.
Before I get started, please note that I'm not religious at all.
That said, whoever came with the Tower of Babel hypotheis (yes, not theory, law or fact) did observe a very real fact: languages have a natural tendency to change and diverge. They do so continuously.
Even though there was a strong pressure to homogenize languages, e.g., the import of new words from neighbouring tribes/countries/etc, they still diverged much faster than that.
And they still do, in spite of having an official dictionary and an official grammar, and school and society pressure to stick to the official one.
Off the top of my head, words which changed or appeared very recently:
- "gay" used to mean "merry", then it meant "homosexual". And now it's changing its meaning _again_ to mean simply "uncool". (E.g., "Macs are gay". It doesn't mean "homosexual" as such, because computers don't even have any kind of sex.)
- "google" became a verb out of nowhere
- "cool" used to have something to do with temperature, but now your first thought would be something completely unrelated upon hearing "cool!"
Etc.
So the phenomenon does exist. It's a fact.
The more scientiffic explanation is that people like cool/new/hip/original/witty ways to say something. New words, new phrases, new metaphors, are cool. They enter the language, whether you want it or not.
The thing, however is that we don't know _why_ humans have this trait. Is it a survival trait that we haven't found out yet? A cultural phenomenon? (Bearing in mind that it existed in ancient and strictly conformist cultures just as well, not only in the modern days when it's hip to be different.) Or an act of an omnipotent God? We don't know.
Either way, again, the phenomenon described there is very real. It's a fact. Even if you or I don't believe the hypothesis that it's some act of an omnipotent god, it makes it no less real.
The comparison _is_ a bit unfair in that aspect, but I'm also hoping that hyperbole will serve as a reminder of where we are. And more importantly that no, it's not the end of the road, and giving up is not the way to go.
Because basically that's how I see it. Sure, computers have always been buggy, and we've always blamed the victims. (I.e., the users.) But, I don't know, there's a certain kind of both cynicism and fatalism in throwing a two-hands-up salute and locking down an OS so "idiots" can't break it. It tells me, "it won't get any better, folks".
That's basically what irks me about all these attempts to produce a dumbed-down locked-down crippled "idiot-proof" PC. It's entirely the wrong attitude and entirely the wrong way to go. If that's the road we take, and that's the best we even try to do for the users, then in 2104 we'll still having software that needs constant babysitting just to keep running. And we'll still blame the users for it.
The car industry never relied only on those. You'd be surprised at the kind of intensive testing that goes into everything.
E.g., the bucket seats in sports models. You'd think they'd just make a chair with raised edges and call it a bucket seat, right? That's what the software industry does.
Someone was telling me about the extensive kind of testing that goes even into a tiny aspect of it: that when you sit down into or get out of one of those, you'll have a leg over the raised edge. So they have a machine which does just that to the seat, millions of times: a simulation of putting a leg over that edge. (In his own words: "the Sharon Stone machine.";)
I'm choosing that as an example because it's not something that can be dismissed as just "yeah, well, they only do that because cars can kill people." No, that bucket seat's raised edge has no influence on road safety. They just don't want it to end up all worn up and deformed by normal use.
And IMHO maybe it's about time that software was tested just as thoroughly, instead of whining about idiot users who ruin our perfect seat by putting a leg over its edge.
No, those are actually additions that help the drivers. Sorry, I can't see how a PC on which you can't install software even compares to a car with ABS and power-assisted steering.
Most people actually _want_ ABS, TCS, ESP and other aides on their cars. Might not want a price hike for them, but they do want a car that brakes over a shorter distance or which doesn't go in a spin if you go too fast in a curve. That's just the kind of good stuff that the car industry did to help the users.
On the other hand, I have never heard anyone saying "damn, if my PC stopped me from installing all those games, I'd be so much happier." That's stuff nobody wants, actually, and which is born just out of the arrogance of blaming one's users and calling them idiots.
Basically the difference there is that the car industry treats you as a _user_, not as an idiot. They've asked themselves "how can we make it easier and safer for the user?" or "what would the user want in a car?" instead of "how can we stop those idiots from breaking our perfect product?"
Adding, for example, full use of the NX (No eXecute) flag, now that would be comparable to ABS. Yes, theoretically it's some extra limitation, just like ABS or TCS are, but in practice it's something which actually helps the users without putting much actual restrictions on them.
But that's also the kind of thing that needs one to start thinking of those people as "users" not as "idiots". When someone at AMD came up with that flag, you can be sure that that was one person who finally thought "ok, the users have a real problem. How do we help them?" It's a simple and elegant solution, but it starts with acknowledging that a problem exists, and that no, it's not enough to whine about those idiot lusers who click on all those crap links.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Instead of seeing yet another crippled product that's supposedly "idiot-proof", or "designed for idiots", I'd like to see one which does what the car industry did. Again: design it for _users_, not for idiots. E.g., a product about which they can claim with a straight face stuff like:
- "we did a complete code review, _and_ have an extensive battery of automated tests which tries to overflow _every_ _single_ buffer used in the program."
- "and additionally we make sure all buffers are in data segments flagged as NX"
- "we ship with a firewall activated by default, _and_ which needs one to physically flip a physical switch, to reconfigure or deactivate it. So no spyware or virus can automatically nuke it."
- "we have a spyware remover installed by default, with a daily updated list, and we have the balls to call Claria/Gator spyware. And, oh, our browser automatically pops a warning message when the user tries to install something that's on that list."
Etc. That's the kinds of things that would be the computer equivalent of TCS, ABS, ESP and so on. And then you won't need to cripple it to give it grandma. But you won't have them until someone stops blaming their users for all the problems.
And not only that, but I'm thinking that there's an inherent flaw in treating users like idiots and designing a product "for idiots".
This arrogance in the computer industry is getting on my nerves already, and I _am_ a programmer. The whole "if you get bitten by our bugs or piss-poor design, you're an idiot luser" attitude.
The fact is, since everyone just has to compare computers to cars, computers and especially software nowadays are at the point where cars were in 1900. They were a fragile, shoddy contraption that needed you to be an experienced mechanic just to keep it working. (Or rich enough to afford getting a mechanic to keep repairing it for you.)
That's exactly the point where computers are today. Each time grandma calls that her computer crawls to a halt, imagine her with a rickety 1900 car that broke down again. On flat ground. For no obvious reason, other than piss-poor primitive construction.
Yes, there probably is some invisible reason, such as that on the PC she clicked on the wrong link, or with the 1900 car she took a too tight curve. Guess what? In both cases the user shouldn't have to deal with that crap.
Except that wereas the car industry went and improved their product, the computer industry is content to call everyone an idiot. Cars eventually stopped breaking down each time you pushed the gas pedal too hard or drove over a small stone you didn't see, but computers didn't. The computers still break down for as little as a malformed packet. (See the buffer overflows.)
And instead of fixing their own damn deffective product, the computer industry keeps blaming the user. "Noo, our product is perfect. It's those idiots who broke it. Let's give them a crippled locked-down PC they can't break." It's an idiocy of the calibre of "let's give them a car which only goes in a straight line, so they don't break it by taking tight curves."
And IMHO those are the _real_ idiots. Not the users.
Sounds like a good case of natural selection to me. Both the sperm count issues and the tumours are enough of a reproduction probability difference to make a difference, if given enough generations to work their magic.
:P
So the fucktards who just HAVE to talk on the cell phone all the time, even in a movie theatre or (loudly) on the bus, will eventually get themselves out of the gene pool.
And conversely the introverts will eventually inherit the Earth. Who would have thought that being a nerd would eventually be a survival trait?
Alternately, I've always fancied a plan that would help curb cell phone annoyance _and_ help stimulate the economy. Namely, if you talk loudly on the cell phone in public, or in a movie theatre at all, two helpful cops take it from you and shove it up your... erm... where the sun don't shine. Literally. By brute force if needed.
I figure that that ought to deter some of the fucktards. And for the others, the ones that physically can't shut the fuck up for more than 5 minutes, and just _have_ to talk into a phone... well, it would at least create a demand for smaller phones. Way to stimulate R&D, if you ask me.
Well, you can Google for more details, but the last time a star went supernova close enough, it caused the biggest mass extinction in history.
The short story goes like this: The pulse of gamma radiation completely wiped out the ozone layer, and replaced it by an opaque layer of nitrous oxide. That is, opaque but not to UV. So most living being on the surface _and_ in shallow water got deep fried by the Sun's UV. (UV goes a long way through water.) Additionally, that brown shell around the atmosphere caused a massive glaciation. ("Day After Tomorrow" style, except it lasted a million years, if I remember right.) The nitrous acid rain was also a nice bonus.
In fact, that's one theory as to why life in the Universe may in fact be very very rare, after all. Or Earth may in fact be an exception. Something like that happening near a planet can neatly wipe out a billion years of life evolution.
Whether Betelgeuse is close enough to do that to Earth, I wouldn't know. I'm not an astronomer.
Nobody gives a fuck about MS Bob itself, but it's a glaring example of the fact that MS didn't give a shit about security to start with. It extends to all their products as well.
Want non-Bob examples?
How about the NT file security I mentioned in the same post? That _is_ a corporate product, and was pushed as a corporate product. That design is so cretinous, idiotic, lobotomized and clueless, that there aren't enough words to that effect in the dictionary to express it.
How about the password protection for MS Office documents? It could be "cracked" in milliseconds flat. In fact, at least one company selling programs that allowed people to unprotect their files went on record to say that they built a delay in their program to look like there was _some_ effort involved. And yes, those were and still are pitched at businesses, not at clueless home users. (See the "Small Business Edition" variant thereof.)
How about Hotmail? That wasn't a decade ago, and a you could access anyone else's mail on it without even much effort involved.
How about the endless stream of buffer overflow exploits in _all_ MS products, because MS cared more about benchmarks than about security? Yay, their products were a few milliseconds faster, at the cost of being insecure.
Etc, etc, etc. As I've said, the list really is a mile long.
So you can get off the high horse, you know. It's not about Bob itself. It's just a clear cut case of MS not giving a shit about security in _any_ of their products until very recently.
And I'll aggree with you about that mindset and hipocrisy too. That's what ticks me off too. The doublespeak and double standards, where the same thing is a hanging offense if it's in Windows, but normal and doesn't even really need a fix if it's in Linux.
But just to add a couple of minor details:
A) I'd argue that Microsoft didn't start secure and slowly get down the drain. They started by ignoring security outright.
E.g., if I remember right, for example, the file server security in NT 3.5 and the pre-SP1 NT 4.0 was entirely in the client. Yes, the client was supposed to check for itself if it's allowed to access a file, and if not, back down. However, if the client was not that nice, it could go ahead and request the file anyway... and get it.
E.g., MS Bob, in the name of userfriendliness, asked you to change the password if you miss-typed it 3 times. No, not if you successfully logged in after mis-typing it 3 times. That's it. Three failed attempts in a row, and you can set a new password.
Etc. I could go on for ever, but these are ludicrious enough to illustrate the point: MS didn't start making a compromise here and there. It outright ignored security until it bit them in the ass.
B) But to be fair, so did everyone else, and some still do.
E.g., it's not a case of Linux eventually getting as insecure as MS Windows. Linux already _was_ less secure than Windows, oh, say around the time Windows 2000 was released.
Sorry, I'll probably annoy the pinguinistas, but taking a Linux system as root online back then, meant you had a script kiddie logged in withing hours at most. _And_ most distros made the same MS mistake of installing and starting every possible service by default, and no firewall either. I know my SuSE systems got Apache, MySQL and God knows what else if I didn't uncheck those at install time.
It took some code reviews paid for by RedHat and the like, before Linux was anywhere _near_ secure.
C) Basically, sad to say, much as nerds balk at "clueless lusers" running without a firewall or MS for having exploitable bugs, most are just as clueless themselves when it comes to writing secure code.
And I don't mean just bugs or lack of communication ("oh, I thought YOUR function checked the buffer length already.") I mean outright lacking even the most elementary clue about secure design, and not giving even the bare minimum thought to what could happen.
Just as end lusers think they're safe without a firewall because they don't directly see the script kiddie breaking in, coders tend to ignore the unseen threats just as well. Mentalities like "oh, surely noone will edit the id in the URL and make themselves superuser" are the norm, not the exception. Or at most they'll repeat mantras they've heard before, without even understanding what those mantras mean.
It's not even a MS vs Linux thing. Windows, Linux, Solaris, whatever. Unless you have some security minded people trying hard to find a bug or way in, you end up with a catastrophe. The average coder's work is a heap of security holes waiting to be exploited.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: piracy _does_ harm business and the economy. In fact, it harms it in the most insidious way: by helping those corporations stay the monopolies that they are.
My favourite example of how the economy _could_ work, is the Via C3. Precisely _because_ you can't download a CPU on P2P.
The C3 is, to put it mildly, a dog. It's not only low MHz, it's also low IPC (Instructions Per Cycle.) It doesn't even start to compete with an AMD or Intel CPU. It makes the Celeron look fast.
But Via still sells a lot of them in China. Why? Because the same Chinese who'll gladly pirate software, can't possibly pirate a CPU. So when they can't afford an Athlon 64 or Pentium 4, they either go buy a C3 or they won't have a computer at all.
So _because_ there is no piracy in that market, a smaller company and a less powerful product can find their niche. Which in turn provides jobs and taxes.
And the same _could_ apply to software, music or movies. People who can't afford MS Office, _could_ have went and bought Star Office instead. It wasn't as powerful, but it was good enough to write a resume and cost a tenth of what MS Office costs. That company could have found a good niche _and_ prevented MS from having a monopoly on file formats.
Except it didn't because of piracy. All those small companies _could_ have competed in a scenario like "do I buy MS Office for 500$ or Star Office for 50$". But they couldn't compete with "do I buy Star Office for 50$ or download MS Office for 0$". Guess which option has won? Guess why the MS Office wantonly-changing file formats are now a de-facto "standard"?
So Star was only saved by Sun, and an independent competitor basically disappeared: now it's a battle between two equally soulless corporations instead. Others weren't that lucky. There were a lot of good products that didn't get bought by a Sun or IBM, and just disappeared.
The same applies to music or movies. Everyone bemoans about how independent labels and artists are better, and how the MPAA and RIAA just rehash the exact same crap that sold before. But everyone goes and downloads Britney Spears and N'Sync and Eminem and god knows what other corporate-blessed crap on P2P. So instead of giving those independents a chance to make _some_ living, and maybe help supply us with new stuff instead of the corporate rehashes... we're all just helping reinforce the status quo where everyone listens to what RIAA wants us to listen to.
Sad.
And to go in a full circle and return to China, Russia and other countries which actively support piracy: that all goes double for them. They could have a thriving local market in locally-produced software, music and movies. A Russian or Chinese family who can't pay 50$ on HL2 or Doom3, could have paid 5$ for a locally produced game with cheap local programmers and artists. Providing jobs and taxes to their own country. But instead they all pirate Doom 3 and HL2, and that market never even started.
Aw poo... And I already wanted to give a couple of people laptops for Christmas. Guess now I'll have to find another (more permanent) please-get-out-of-the-gene-pool gift.
If anyone builds those in web-cams... I already shudder in ph34r.
_Some_ geeks have no qualms about stinking like a dug-up corpse in person at the office. And I don't mean as in "oh, it was summer and the poor guy got sweaty pulling some cable through the building", but as in "ye gods, the last time he looked like he's had a bath was in September, and he's been wearing the same shirt and pants ever since too. And that hair is not just dirty, it looks like a helmet already."
Somehow I don't think they'll start washing just for the webcam either.
More likely it'll be "jesus-fucking-christ, it's Mr Stinky calling me on Jabber again."
As you've said, China, like all totalitarian regimes, needs to focus its population's hatred outwards. They _need_ an enemy.
In Eastern Europe they even loved to wave the nationalism flag against their communist neighbours. Some of the silliness didn't go 40 or 60 years back, it went as far back as "but in the middle ages, those bastards occupied our mountain!" So if China stays its current course, I'm guessing that in 2500 A.D. it will still need to divert its people's attention towards Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and "what the English and Portuguese bastards did to us in the 19th century."
You know, it's not even a communism thing. The more piss-poor job a government does of its internal affairs, the more it tries to focus the people's attention outwards. You can see the same happening at least as far back as the 19'th century Europe, probably even before that. And, no offense, in some USA presidents too.
I'm generally pro-MS, and god knows I've pissed off enough Linux zealots even on Slashdot. But this kind of a crippled machine is just idiotic, plain and simple. Saying basically "we can't let you run OpenOffice or Mozilla" because it might be spyware, is like castrating someone so they can't get AIDS. It's missing the point completely.
And it might not even be Microsoft's idea. After all, they don't have a monopoly or patent on having greedy fucks as managers.
Letting the computer load other software too (e.g., Mozilla) wouldn't have cost _anything_. If it can already load the supplied software, i.e., it already has a loader, then it already has all it needs to run third party software too.
This machine is deliberately crippled. Plain and simple.
In fact, au contraire, it probably took extra programming (and thus money) to lock it down like that. Why? Probably some management fuck figuring they can make more money this way. E.g.,
1. To make sure it does not compete with the more lucrative Windows and Athlon XP markets.
To reuse your kitchen soup example, it's like deliberately adding a generous dose of laxative into the soup, just so the soup kitchen doesn't cut into the profits of your restaurants. You know, just to give everyone the idea "buy an expensive steak instead, you fucking bum."
2. To give the TCPA a jump start, since it doesn't seem to start on its own in the normal desktop market. Convincing PC people that it's in their best interest to give away all freedoms and let Microsoft decide what they can and what they can't run, is a tough sell. So they're sneaking it in from the other end.
Again, it's like generously adding laxative to the soup, only this time to jump start one's public toilet business.
3. To milk those people of more money in the long run, since they're already locked in and depending on your approval for every program they run and every media file they play. Which strikes me as a very heartless business plan: it's figuring out how can you milk more money out of the _poor_.
Again, feel free to fill in your own analogy with deliberately putting laxative in poor people's soup, for the sole purpose of lining corporate pockets.
In the end, it's not really whether the cat or the dog is smart, it's whether it does what you expect from a pet. That's usually (A) what people mistake for "intelligence" and also (B) what motivates them into grasping at straws for "proof" that their favourite pet is smart.
Some people seem to like the unconditional obedience of an animal hard-coded to obey the pack leader. Even if the "pack leader" is a human.
In that case it's "Bowser is soo smart. He comes here when I call him!" And typically also "bah, cats are dumb/evil/etc because they can't be bothered to obey."
Some of us, on the other hand, have no need for basically a biological Tamagochi hard-wired to obey.
We like a cat precisely _because_ it's independent and doesn't need a "master". Cats are not pack animals, so they really have neither a "master", nor "servants" or "staff". You may be a cat's room mate, or friend, or a danger to be avoided, or (in rare cases) even an enemy. Either way, you can know that it's the cat's genuine assessment of you, and not some hard-wired reflex kicking in.
So we tend to generalize and anthropomorphise the other way around. "Yay, Fluffy is so smart because she can think for herself and doesn't need a master." And conversely "Dogs are complete retards for _needing_ to be someone's slave."
In reality, both points of view are false and based on false premises.
An animal's intelligence is what helps it stay alive in its natural environment, _not_ how well it fits your emotional need. In that aspect, both felines and dogs/wolves are "smart", just in different ways.
Wolves have perfected survival by hunting larger prey in packs, so teamwork and having a pack leader is essential. A lone wolf can't kill, say, a deer, so acting as a pack is what their very survival depends on. So for the pack to work, the animals are basically hard-wired to follow and obey the leader. It's a survival trait.
Felines on the other hand, with some exceptions (e.g., lions), live on prey they can kill one-on-one. Not only they don't need a pack to hunt, and not only there isn't enough meat on their prey to feed a whole pack, but a pack would also get in the way of stealth. If you've watched a cat hunt a mouse, you've noticed that it relies on not being seen until it gets within relatively short range. Trying to do that as a whole pack of cats, would just dramatically increase the chances of being detected early.
Hence, for cats the survival trait was to _not_ follow someone else.
Both approaches work, so they're both intelligent.
This guy actually gave you a chance, and was willing to check that info right in front of you. Most don't.
HR and management these days is mostly about:
1. Avoiding responsibility, especially the kind that can spell "lawsuit",
2. Avoiding work,
You see "valuable" management advice all over, which basically boils down to "nah, just throw away half the applications, based on whatever excuse comes to your mind." It's less work.
Didn't like his email address? Drop the application. Didn't like the colour of his socks? "Thank you, interview is over." A couple of posts about guns with his name on them? (E.g., on a gaming board, talking about a game.) Gee, he must be one of those NRA crackpots, let's drop the application real quick. A couple of posts about using drugs in Fallout 2? (A computer game again.) Good grief, he must be a junkie IRL too, let's pretend we never even received that application. Someone from East Elbonia with a similar name posting some pro-communist crap? Surely it must be him, drop the application. A post defending the people's right to get married to whoever they goddamn please, even same sex? Gaah, he must be one of those sinners damned by the Lord, surely we don't want him in our company. Etc.
Most people don't even intend to do the work of actually sort through the mountain of google info, and put it all in context. They're just looking for an excuse to avoid work. They're just looking for that phrase, even if out of context, which cuts their work short.
You'd think noone would be that retarded and still get promoted to management, but think again. There are companies who hire based on Tarot or numerology. Even big ones. You can get your application dropped just because adding up the numeric values of the letters in your name, added up to a number they don't like. Literally.
And again, it's also all about avoiding responsibility. Confronting you about the data they found, is just begging for a lawsuit or press attention. What if they asked you about it and then didn't hire you anyway, for whole other reasons. Depending on what they asked about, it can be a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.
You see, we live in a society in which most people:
1. avoid personal responsibility like the plague,
2. don't want to even talk to their children.
Daddy is too busy doing overtime to impress the boss. Then daddy wants to spend the whole fucking eveing with a beer and the TV, or with a beer and the Linux kernel. Mommy is too busy between impressing her own boss, all those soap operas, and all those female friends she just has to spend hours a day talking to.
And the poor kid is just some pest that just gets in the way. Telling little Billy _why_ this and that is wrong, is a tiresome talk and you just know it'll go right over his little head anyway. Naah... better just avoid him and go watch that football/baseball/soccer/whatever game instead. Watching the idiot box is a tough job, but someone's got to do it. Can't let a kid get in the way of that.
So little Billy grows up basically without any guidance. But here's the fun part: just because Mommy and Daddy are too busy to explain things to Billy, it doesn't mean someone else won't either. So Billy picks up all sorts of wrong ideas off the street or, yes, off TV.
And when Billy finally does something wrong, we get to point 1 again: nobody wants to be personally responsible for it. Noo. It's not our fault that Billy grew up wrong. It's the TV's fault! The government should censor it!
Sad.
I was going to post along the same lines.
I would however add that:
1. For some people privacy really isn't worth as much as for the tin-foil crowd. E.g., so some third party can know I've visited this and that free porn site. Big deal. I'd give them the URL's myself if they asked.
2. A lot of the privacy threat is really blown out of proportion. When you have people whose income depends on convincing you that they protect you from the big bad wolf... they cry wolf lots.
Yes, key loggers are bad. On the other hand, idiotic programs who "clean up" my login cookies make me want to kill the author. No, it's not some spyware that tracks my every move, it's just a goddamn login cookie to a forum. I _want_ them to know it's me when I post.
3. In view of what you said, i.e., the effort and time cost of "privacy", a lot of the "solutions" are far worse than the problem they're supposed to solve. A lot of the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are far worse than having viruses and spyware.
To give an actual example, for a while I had McAffee's idiotic suite on my home computer. Gaah! That's _the_ biggest pile of festering crap I've ever seen.
E.g., their "privacy protection" made it impossible to log in to half the sites I visited. And made half the rest malfunction in weird ways. E.g., gamespy's fileplanet could no longer even make up its mind whether I'm logged in or not, due to McAffee's filtering the cookies.
E.g., with the McAffee crap installed, my computer took some 2 minutes to boot up, and some 5 minutes (literally) to shut down. Wasn't too fast in between either.
Partially because McAffee's idiotic auto-update was so retarded, that I ended up with multiple copies (and versions) of some of their programs in memory. Each update seemed to just add one more version to start up. I was running at least two instances of their anti-virus, and it actually tried starting two instances of the firewall too. Luckily, the firewall detected that a copy is already running, and gave me an annoying pop-up window each time I booted the computer.
E.g., their retarded auto-update and auto-scan slowed down my computer all the time. Each time I'd be playing an online game, what do you know, it's McAffee's idiocy _again_ clogging all my bandwidth with its downloads. The second time in the same day, no less. And then pops up a window asking that it reboots the computer, and causing the game to minimize. And occasionally crash.
Etc.
You know what? All in all, it was actually _worse_ than when I deliberately got a virus. (Short story: I was too lazy to go burn a firewall on a CD when installing Windows 2000 on a new computer, so I actually planned to get virused while I download one. Then I'd reformat and reinstall.) Looking at the bandwidth and CPU usage of that virus/zombie, it actually was _less_ bad than the effects of McAffee protecting me from them.
Yet it never seemed to occur to you to just obey the speed limit...
The thing about timed streetlights is that they're calibrated for a given speed. If they're, say, calibrated for 30mph and they're 1/4 of a mile apart, they'll turn green every 30 seconds regardless of your speed. If you go "only" 5-10 MPH faster... you just catch a red light, and still don't get home any faster than someone who obeys the speed limit.
I.e., you'd think people would get the idea already that there is really no reward for endangering everyone around. Someone who stuck to the speed limit got home in exactly the same time, and obviously with less stress. Didn't need to use up extra gas accelerating and decelerating all the time either.
And yes, I do mean endangering. Due to the elementary physics fact that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, so is the braking distance. E.g., the speed difference between 50 km/h and 70 km/h is 40%, but the braking distance _doubles_.
Add poor visibility at night (you might not see a kid dashing to cross the street until he's in front of your beams), the driver _and_ everyone around being tired, etc, and I really _don't_ need people doing "only" 10mph over the limit at night.
And again, as you've noticed, it doesn't even get you home faster. It just makes you stop at the next red light.
But naah... for some people speeding is like _the_ proof of their manhood. Obeying the traffic laws or not driving like an irresponsible maniac, that's like admitting sexual impotence. Or worse.
Geesh.