I will never buy any software that has such functionality built in. I know its meant to triggered by pirated keys only, but I wouldn't take the risk that this couldn't ever get triggered by some bug.
that Microsoft funded/used/fronted SCO for a dummy run to see how the world would respond, and what mistakes not to make when MS do their own run against Linux.
Given that the SCO case is still ongoing (just), it seems Microsoft is setting up for the longest legal battle in history. This makes sense as it is just their same old tried-and-tested strategy where they would just basically tie competition up in so much red tape that they went under from excessive legal bills. It seems Microsoft can't innovative in their business or legal strategy as well as their products.
Microsoft can only win against Linux if they fight a war of attrition, because their argument has no real merit but MS do have almost limitless financial/legal resources so any sort of business entity that is in the Linux camp will really need to watch out.
The good thing is that the very nature of Open Source is that millions of individuals contribute, meaning Microsoft has to sue the world (read: including their own customer base) to really win.
Its interesting to observe the way that Microsoft have always really fought hard to guard the who-runs-who position. They've always tried hard to "embrace and extend" (read: kill) any independent software from running windows OS, but are fine with Windows OS being the top layer and running it. Very wierd and this is just the latest move in that long battle.
>> How does DRM increase consumer value. It absolutely doesn't. Thats why they need to use all the business doublespeak to justify themselves in their reply.
>> I wish Macrovision explained that statement They won't/can't ever do that because there's no rational argument to defend it.
I don't understand why this is tagged as humour. It seems like a truly accurate translation from business-doublespeak into plain English, and as such is insightful and scary, not humorous.
maybe I misunderstood but...
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
it seems like it would actually be 1400 years as he's presumed constant 1G acceleration towards the destination for the whole trip. Once you got there you'd need to go into a decreasing orbit and slow down for about 700 years (assuming 1G) too!
Re:This software cannot ever work properly.
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
Sure but my understanding from the article is that this software is intended to replace the need for code reviews by humans. My original comment was really trying to say why that could never happen.
This software cannot ever work properly.
on
PMD Applied
·
· Score: 1
This was proved to not be viable in 1936 when Alan Turing proved that no machine given a description of a program and a finite input can decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.
Thus a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist, let alone validate the semantic approach or validitiy of the code itself.
Unfortunately there are enough managers who want to devalue software development from a skilled art into a brain-dead process, so they will buy into this no matter how invalid it really is.
Because for some reason bosses think they have a right to your leisure time, and there are enough weak-willed employees giving in to them already to make you look bad if you don't answer the damn blackberry when you're not at work.
The difference is that I can choose to turn off my phone or leave it at home.
Also the chances that the government will require your cellphone to prove your ID, or make carrying a cellphone at all times obligatory is a lot less likely than them making RFID implants compulsory.
We need to stand united against this. No matter what, don't allow yourself to be implanted.
I'm really scared about this. The most scary part is that 222 people actually paid to have this done to themselves. What were they thinking? Can they really be that stupid?
They could simply prosecute the companies that are advertising their products via spam, after all they must have either directly been the originators of the spam, or at least know who they are funding to do the dirty work.
The businesses that exist solely to send spam would dissapear overnight if their client base dissapeared.
I'm sure any government could easily be able to determine who is ultimately behind spam, simply by buying some advertised product then either tracking the credit card transaction or by working out what the supply chain is from drug batch numbers on the product etc.
Microsoft are probably offering their bigger corporate customers the chance to buy a patent licence so that they can continue to use Samba while Microsoft attempt to sue the pants off whoever wrote samba.
The reason they're doing this is because from watching SCO, Microsoft fully expect to be able to drag the litigation out for years, during the early round of which they will get a restraining order on the samba developers hence no upgrades. They will then release some windows update "security patch" to Exchange that just concidentally happens to make the current Samba incomaptable.
The only people that will then get Samba upgrades legally will be those licenced to Microsoft. It may even be Microsoft themselves that release the fixes in a fake show of support for Opensource to placate the EU.
A place I used to work planned to move everyone from sun workstations to windows boxes as a cost-cutting exercise. It ended up costing way more overall because all of a sudden our IT department went from a single sysadmin who was hardly ever busy, because everything just worked, to a whole department of IT staff needed to second-guess MS exchange and a now very unreliable network (even though no network hardware or configuration had changed), and Windows PC's that were always slowing up or crashing, especially after that stupid automated windows update.
who honestly believe Microsoft didn't provide some backdoor to bitlocker for the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS, RIAA, MPAA and anyone wlse who can cook up some excuse to claim they need it.
He rants on about Windows Search like its the greatest thing since sliced bread. Is it just me or have you noticed how hard it is just to search for a file with a given name?
You have to go to the start menu, click the search tool, select file (which is not the default), go to extended options, find and check the option to tell it you want to look in the system directories too, type the name, hit start button. If you missed you can't just easily retry a different spec, you get all this nonsense options that you have to wade through. I don't need the options to search for people on the internet or whatever repeatedly getting in my way.
Linux is either: locate filename or find . -name filename
Just look at the relative lengths of the description, let alone the time it takes to do it.
>> several scientists contacted for the article refused the offers on conflict of interest grounds."...now please can we have the email addresses of the ones that accepted the bribe?
They don't have any legal basis whatsoever. They're probably just bluffing and not at all about to attack you, but are trying to send a scary message to the people still working there not to leave.
For at least 4 years I've been using various flavours of Fedora and Red Hat Entprise in several large mission-critical commercial applications and also as desktop environments.
I've never had any significant issues, which from experience isn't true at all of any Microsoft products we'vetried as alternatives. They have repeatedly proved themselves to be of inferior quality and/or performance.
When I moved to the US from Europe I was amazed to see a really terrible pill-popping culture here, where you can (and most people do) get a pill for almost anything, even though adverts on TV make it clear most drugs side-effects are way more serious than the symptom they are attempting to address.
In the US it seems pefectly acceptable that normal people are on at least one presription at any one time, which is ridiculous. I'm amazed by the amount of perscriptions the average person (i.e. my frinds) have in their bathroom cabinets here. Its a massive marketing scam by the drug companies.
I'm sure this has a direct correlation to very low average age of natural death in the US comapared to most other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
I will never buy any software that has such functionality built in.
I know its meant to triggered by pirated keys only, but I wouldn't take the risk that this couldn't ever get triggered by some bug.
can anyone tell me if their ad blocking software prevents the user from blocking ads on Microsoft sites?
that Microsoft funded/used/fronted SCO for a dummy run to see how the world would respond, and what mistakes not to make when MS do their own run against Linux.
Given that the SCO case is still ongoing (just), it seems Microsoft is setting up for the longest legal battle in history. This makes sense as it is just their same old tried-and-tested strategy where they would just basically tie competition up in so much red tape that they went under from excessive legal bills. It seems Microsoft can't innovative in their business or legal strategy as well as their products.
Microsoft can only win against Linux if they fight a war of attrition, because their argument has no real merit but MS do have almost limitless financial/legal resources so any sort of business entity that is in the Linux camp will really need to watch out.
The good thing is that the very nature of Open Source is that millions of individuals contribute, meaning Microsoft has to sue the world (read: including their own customer base) to really win.
Its interesting to observe the way that Microsoft have always really fought hard to guard the who-runs-who position. They've always tried hard to "embrace and extend" (read: kill) any independent software from running windows OS, but are fine with Windows OS being the top layer and running it. Very wierd and this is just the latest move in that long battle.
he ought to publicise the names and email addresses of his accusers.
>> How does DRM increase consumer value.
It absolutely doesn't. Thats why they need to use all the business doublespeak to justify themselves in their reply.
>> I wish Macrovision explained that statement
They won't/can't ever do that because there's no rational argument to defend it.
I don't understand why this is tagged as humour.
It seems like a truly accurate translation from business-doublespeak into plain English, and as such is insightful and scary, not humorous.
it seems like it would actually be 1400 years as he's presumed constant 1G acceleration towards the destination for the whole trip. Once you got there you'd need to go into a decreasing orbit and slow down for about 700 years (assuming 1G) too!
Sure but my understanding from the article is that this software is intended to replace the need for code reviews by humans. My original comment was really trying to say why that could never happen.
This was proved to not be viable in 1936 when Alan Turing proved that no machine given a description of a program and a finite input can decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.
Thus a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist, let alone validate the semantic approach or validitiy of the code itself.
Unfortunately there are enough managers who want to devalue software development from a skilled art into a brain-dead process, so they will buy into this no matter how invalid it really is.
Because for some reason bosses think they have a right to your leisure time, and there are enough weak-willed employees giving in to them already to make you look bad if you don't answer the damn blackberry when you're not at work.
The difference is that I can choose to turn off my phone or leave it at home.
Also the chances that the government will require your cellphone to prove your ID, or make carrying a cellphone at all times obligatory is a lot less likely than them making RFID implants compulsory.
>> Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time"."
Wow. So its just like every other technology from Microsoft then. Acutally I think it actually working half the time is somewhat optimistic.
We need to stand united against this. No matter what, don't allow yourself to be implanted.
I'm really scared about this. The most scary part is that 222 people actually paid to have this done to themselves. What were they thinking? Can they really be that stupid?
just make spamvertising illegal?
They could simply prosecute the companies that are advertising their products via spam, after all they must have either directly been the originators of the spam, or at least know who they are funding to do the dirty work.
The businesses that exist solely to send spam would dissapear overnight if their client base dissapeared.
I'm sure any government could easily be able to determine who is ultimately behind spam, simply by buying some advertised product then either tracking the credit card transaction or by working out what the supply chain is from drug batch numbers on the product etc.
Microsoft are probably offering their bigger corporate customers the chance to buy a patent licence so that they can continue to use Samba while Microsoft attempt to sue the pants off whoever wrote samba.
The reason they're doing this is because from watching SCO, Microsoft fully expect to be able to drag the litigation out for years, during the early round of which they will get a restraining order on the samba developers hence no upgrades. They will then release some windows update "security patch" to Exchange that just concidentally happens to make the current Samba incomaptable.
The only people that will then get Samba upgrades legally will be those licenced to Microsoft. It may even be Microsoft themselves that release the fixes in a fake show of support for Opensource to placate the EU.
A place I used to work planned to move everyone from sun workstations to windows boxes as a cost-cutting exercise.
It ended up costing way more overall because all of a sudden our IT department went from a single sysadmin who was hardly ever busy, because everything just worked, to a whole department of IT staff needed to second-guess MS exchange and a now very unreliable network (even though no network hardware or configuration had changed), and Windows PC's that were always slowing up or crashing, especially after that stupid automated windows update.
who honestly believe Microsoft didn't provide some backdoor to bitlocker for the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS, RIAA, MPAA and anyone wlse who can cook up some excuse to claim they need it.
We should do a Slashdot Poll on this one.
ridiculously paranoid and power-crazy sys admins who lock our pcs down so tight its almost impossible to do any software development work on them.
He rants on about Windows Search like its the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Is it just me or have you noticed how hard it is just to search for a file with a given name?
You have to go to the start menu, click the search tool, select file (which is not the default), go to extended options, find and check the option to tell it you want to look in the system directories too, type the name, hit start button. If you missed you can't just easily retry a different spec, you get all this nonsense options that you have to wade through. I don't need the options to search for people on the internet or whatever repeatedly getting in my way.
Linux is either:
locate filename
or
find . -name filename
Just look at the relative lengths of the description, let alone the time it takes to do it.
>> several scientists contacted for the article refused the offers on conflict of interest grounds." ...now please can we have the email addresses of the ones that accepted the bribe?
They don't have any legal basis whatsoever.
They're probably just bluffing and not at all about to attack you, but are trying to send a scary message to the people still working there not to leave.
For at least 4 years I've been using various flavours of Fedora and Red Hat Entprise in several large mission-critical commercial applications and also as desktop environments.
I've never had any significant issues, which from experience isn't true at all of any Microsoft products we'vetried as alternatives. They have repeatedly proved themselves to be of inferior quality and/or performance.
When I moved to the US from Europe I was amazed to see a really terrible pill-popping culture here, where you can (and most people do) get a pill for almost anything, even though adverts on TV make it clear most drugs side-effects are way more serious than the symptom they are attempting to address.
In the US it seems pefectly acceptable that normal people are on at least one presription at any one time, which is ridiculous. I'm amazed by the amount of perscriptions the average person (i.e. my frinds) have in their bathroom cabinets here. Its a massive marketing scam by the drug companies.
I'm sure this has a direct correlation to very low average age of natural death in the US comapared to most other countries.
it also go to show how much the US government is corrupted and in the pocket of the large oil corp.s