"This used to be primarily the domain of the "right""
I agree with your post but disagree with this statement. The left has *always* been on some "think of the children" garbage whereas the right used to have a respect for things like freedom of speech and personal responsibility. I suppose the difference is academic at this point because now all of our politicians, left and right, want to have a hand in forcing their morals on you, but I do think it's an important distinction that conservatism is supposed to respect market forces and personal responsibility, not foisting Christian morals on other people.
I have seen a disturbing trend of people dropping out RIDICULOUSLY close to getting their degrees. I understand money concerns, but it seems like people are really devaluing college quite a lot. Most of what I learned in college I did not learn in classes, so I do not buy into the whole brainwashing/conformity thing. In fact I would say it had the opposite effect on me...encouraging me to be my crazy self. College for me was very freeing and I think it's disappointing that people are unable to take advantage of college in a way that they feel will really benefit them. Dropping out is not something I see as being something positive to emphasize. Are there things about college which should be changed? Sure...a couple less liberal arts and more free electives would make it a better experience, but the point is that you can really get something out of it.
YES, 99% of the world are clueless fucktards. If adoption of Mac OS ramps up you will see the same problems there as we see with Windows now. When you hire people who are actually competant to run your network, Windows can be quite stable and reliable.
Let's be honest here. How many people have worked administering windows? Now, of those people I want to see the hands of everyone who runs windows (primarily) at home and don't really have problems with spyware. Okay, now, we're going to call those people "competant windows users". Among that group, how many of you would say that the majority of people you worked with administering Windows were competant? I am guessing not as many.
There are a lot of BAD admins out there and despite what the articles are saying, companies are just now starting to spend on security. Ihave a background in security and spent a year out of work looking for a security job. It's not the fact that I had a hard time getting hired that makes me so sure that companies weren't spending on security (maybe I suck) but it's the fact that I saw few listings and got no calls from recruiters for security related positions. If you listened to the articles at the time you would think that you could get a 100K security job just by knowing how to run windows update. That's starting to change, but things like patch management, firewalls, and spyware management are just starting to become real to the corporate world.
Let's not forget that when the SQL worm hit, there had been a patch available for that hole for OVER A YEAR. Now, come on, what OS is going to be secure if Administrators are installing the base OS and never, ever patching? OpenBSD is the most secure OS I know of, and you've got to patch that more than once a year to stay secure, so let's drop the bullshit.
Windows is easy enough to administer that there is plenty of room for hacks and paper MCSE's to make a living...until the next worm hits that is. Blaming Windows for being so easy to use that companies are able to hire incompetant, oblivious administrators is patently ridiculous. Should we make our OSes hard to administer and lacking in basic enterprise management features JUST so that only people smart enough to roll their own solutions can run it? Is that really the best way forward? If it is, then I pity home users since keeping things that esoteric is going to cause them major problems setting up that home network.
"Windows is complex, trying to be everything to everyone. This complexity comes at a terrible price: downtime, help desks, upgrades, patches and the inevitable failures."
So he doesn't think a large Mac deployment is going to require a helpdesk? What an idiot. Does he not think that the UNIX backend to OS X is complex? I personally don't find windows to be particularly complex, and certainly is nowhere near as complex to run as other OSes I have dealt with. There is certain baseline maintinance you have to do with windows, and precautions you have to take, and when you do that everything is fine. I haven't rebooted my work PC (XP) for weeks (months??) now and I don't get spyware. That's because I a.) Don't surf porn and pirate music at work, I let firefox block popups, and I run a decent AV program. I have anti-spyware programs installed, but rarely use them.
"When a new operating system or service pack is released, there are tons of changes to the functionality."
Uhhh...no, there's really not. Windows hasn't done anything revolutionary since Windows 95. My company only somewhat recently went from 95 to 2k (tens of thousands of machines) and the users really didn't have many problems with adjusting. Does he not think there are significant differences between OS X and System 9? Dumb.
"WinTel machines use different versions of BIOS. They are not all equal, nor do they all have the same level of compatibility."
Never had a problem.
"Some Windows software applications are well written; others take shortcuts. Shortcuts may work in some environments, but not all, and ultimately the consumer pays in lost time, availability and productivity."
Of all his "points" this is the dumbest one. He's blaming Windows for the work of app vendors. HA! I work in QA/App deployment so BELIEVE me I know how bad app vendors are, but that's not windows' problem.
I guess no one has mentioned the bug in Adobe's software under OS X that was causing it to take approximately 10 minutes to task between Illustrator and Photoshop.
"Hardware. There are hundreds of "WinTel-compatible" motherboards, each claiming to be better than the next. Whatever."
This is bad....why again? Here's a simple solution: buy ASUS.
"Memory. Not all RAM is equal. Some works well. Cheap stuff doesn't."
So don't buy the cheap stuff.
"Hard disks. Same problem: cheap or reliable. Your call. "
Never had a problem. Western Dig drives have been extremely reliable for me.
Listen, I'm no big fan of Windows, but these critisisms are just stupid and make no sense.
What's frustrating about this stuff is that 99% of these "no windows" rants that make it to slashdot are obviously due to incompetance on the part of the people maintaining the user's PC's. Yes, Windows certainly has it's gremlins, just like any OS, and you have to set your infrastructure up to deal with those gremlins. Is Windows the best OS for every application? Certainly not, but lobbing critisisms which are simply not that well thought out at it and then expecting OS X to wash your car and eliminate blackheads isn't going to help anyone.
It's not as if the Senator is reading it himself/herself. Their staff reads all that stuff and keeps track of how the constituents are feeling. Yea, MAYBE if you write a particularly wonderful letter it MIGHT make it to the hands of the senator, but who knows how often that happens. The letter is going to have the exact same impact on the Senator's staff as a fax will, and I would bet you that a mountain of faxes is going to have many times the impact of the few handwritten letters people can be bothered to write. Staffers can be young, and I'm sure the people reading the mail are...do you really know that many 25 year olds who are giving that much more creedence to paper mail than faxes and emails under these circumstances?
There are plenty of issues which I care a lot about, but don't have time to write a paper letter for. Have you not been paying much attention to politics lately? If I wrote a paper letter about every issue I was concerned about, I would literally do nothing but write letters all day. If I paired it down to the issues which really, really troubled me, maybe I could get the letters done before noon. Letter writing doesn't pay well.
Besides that, politics is not my job, it's my Senators job. The message is conveyed to the staff either way. If they ignore my concerns, it is at their peril as they will lose my vote. I'll take the time to write a cogent, grammatically correct response which covers the points I want to make. If they only take it seriously if I write a paper letter, that's their problem not mine. If there is one thing that is certain, it's that my views are not going to be represented either way. I do what I can...I write letters and make calls and give money and vote, but I am not interested in stopping my entire life just because America is a nation of misguided fools.
Well, the faxes are uniquely phrased and from different people, so we can discount that part of your reply right away. I find that it's usually a good idea to actually look at what you're talking about before debating it, but that's just something that helps me. YMMV.
Anyways...the point is that these web pentitions get a lot of people to take action that wouldn't otherwise. Let's be real...how many more people do you think are willing to shoot off an email or a fax through a website than are willing to send a hand written letter? If a Senator's fax machine is ringing off the hook spouting pages and pages and pages of opinions on an issue, I'm sure the staff takes notice. I have recieved replies to emails I have sent my representatives, which is something that a lot of people denounce as a method of communication which has no impact, so I am inclined to be skeptical of people critisizing one media or another as being something lawmakers don't pay attention to.
More than that, though, why are people so ready to accomodate the lawmakers? When did it become the case that we service the lawmakers in whatever manner THEY choose? I should not have to take extra time out of my day to cater to the needs of my senators when there is an isue I feel strongly enough about to write to them. Representatives SHOULD be e-aware and if they're not, and they ignore the feedback they get from their online constituents, then they should be out of office anyways. Let's be honest here, with the amount of legislation they are passing that affects the online community, they DAMN WELL BETTER be on the interenet and understanding that this is a valid method of communication which their constituents may choose to use.
Of course, it's all just symptomatic of the "either/or" state of American politics today. We don't see communication with our reps as something THEY should seek out and desire, we see it as them doing us a huge favor...that our SENATOR would actually pay attention to ME on an issue. Bullshit. They should be begging for every letter they get. The more feedback they get and the more responsive they are to that feedback, the more likely they are to be reelected. Of course, we all know that's not the way it works anymore. Everyone just votes down the party line regardless of what kind of nightmare they are putting in office, no one even knows about specific issues anymore, much less writes their reps about it.
I, for one, am tired of the political climate in this country and am especially tired of pandering to the people who are supposed to represent ME. I communicate with them, and I base my vote partially on how they respond to that communication. If others want to make their lives hard and continue to elect criminals and people who regulate things they have never even seen before, that's everyone else's problem because I've done everything I can to tell them it doesn't have to be this way.
RIGHT! Doing nothing is MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE! Everyone, the government is trying to pass legislation to put tracking devices in everyone's ass! Quick, let's all sit around and read about the new XBOX...that'll stop em!!!
He obviously doesn't understand the nuances of the FPS, and I doubt very much that he plays online. The rise of the team-based FPS has added a COMPLETELY new dimension to the FPS genre that I think has yet to be fully explored. Enemy Territory took the team-based FPS a level farther by creating specific objectives that have to be accomplished in a certain order as a team. This is, to my knowledge, the only game with this type of setup. Yes, Couter Strike is somewhat similar, but it's not nearly as involved in terms of the types of objectives you have to accomplish. The addition of classes of people is also pretty new and adds a completely new dimension to the game.
Playing online really is the future. If people are playing single player games and expecting something new, then obviously they're going to be disappointed. I really don't buy FPSes for the single player anymore, although the gravity gun in Half Life is pretty damn fun. Playing online means that every single game is different every single time. Sports like basketball or baseball have been around forever, why have they not died out? The reason is that they are played by different teams and combinations of skill sets which make for a different game every single time. This is true with online FPSes as well. Each team has a different dynamic and way of getting things done. The team based aspect adds a HUGE amount of strategy to what is a relatively simple formula. Things like "bugs" in the engines (circle jumping, strafe jumping, bunny hopping,etc) add a level of improvement in skills and strategy for individual players, but it's the team tactics which make it really interesting.
What this means is that there will always be a market for FPSes. People love them...this has been proven. If the improvements to the games are incremental, people will still play them just as they continue to play basketball or baseball. Just because the parameters of the game don't change much doesn't mean that people are going to stop playing.
Both of the examples given on why this does nothing are shaky at best. In both examples it relies on the perpetrator to hack *at the time that the user is logged/logging in*. In both cases two factor auth has the advantage of not allowing subsequent logins after the one compromised one. Of course the damage can be done at the time the user logs in, but it ups the level of sophistication an attacker needs to be successful as well as the likelyhood the the user is going to notice.
In the case of remote servers and such, it really eliminates a substatial portion of the threat altogether. Yes, an attacker *might* be able to set up a fake server for a man in the middle attack, but that's pretty unlikely to succeed. Piggybacking and preventing the user from actually logging off could work, but how much is that really going to gain them if they are not able to log in again (gotta be careful who has access to add authetication methods of course).
Two factor also *GREATLY* decreases the threat that Kevin Mitnick claims is the biggest threat of all. Yes, an attacker can still get a user to give them the current pass code, but once again that's only good for one login. The likelyhood that the user is going to stay on the phone and keep reading passcodes is pretty low. Once again this relies on the idea that the two factor auth needs to be pretty secure in that it's not bypassable (i.e. log in with a passcode then issue himself a non changing password) but it adds a layer of security and eliminates a substantial threat.
I'm sure that there are other eventualities that I have not considered, but to claim that password issues are a security issue of 10 years ago is just stupid and out of touch. The author is obviously looking for a magic bullet that will solve all his security problems in one fell swoop. I have news for him: it doesn't exist. Two factor auth solves a few problems which anyone with an open port 22 the last few months knows for a fact still exists.
Hey listen, the RIAA are scumbags, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a legally sensible and valid case against these people. Would it please people more to have the RIAA take the suits seriously and *really* bust people's balls as bad as they could? If I wasn't as smart as I am I would probably have kept sharing files instead of stopping about a year before the suits started and I can tell you one thing: if I got busted for it I would thank my lucky stars every day that they turned me over to some pimple faced gopher in the customer service department rather than sending the types of lawyers that companies like the RIAA employ after me. That's not a case I would be likely to win.
The only sad part about this story is that there may not be as many new users of USENET if ISP's aren't offering it for free. Other than that, it's just a bunch of crap.
There are new and old people on USENET constantly. Why, exactly, do you think that this ISP decied not to offer USENET access anymore...because there was no one posting there? Uhm...no. The reason that they stopped offering it is that it is a monster to maintain because of all the traffic. USENET is the most valuable and the most underrated resource on the internet. Yes, I said it, and yes, I mean it. For detailed technical information and answers to tough questions there is nowhere else to go. Product reviews, information on music you want to check out, whatever. It's all there.
Let's keep it real here, okay? Most internet users (including IT "professionals") are too dumb to figure out how to use a newsreader, and FAR too dumb to understand how to evaluate the quality of information you get from google groups. People whine about, "Ohhh, the quality of information on message boards SUCKS, you can't learn ANYTHING from them". What a load of shit. If you have a brain in your head and understand the idea of crossreferencing information before you commit changes on a server that a few thousand people are connecting to, then you can really get a LOT of information from USENET and solve a lot of tough problems quickly. I find good, solid solutions to technical problems CONSTANTLY through google groups. I don't think a week goes by that I don't search it at least 10 times for various things.
Oh, but we have web forums! God forbid people should allow their words to convey their meaning rather than having pretty pictures and fancy emoticons to cover up for the fact that they are just stupid assholes who no one wants to hear from anyway. It's such a joke when you hear people complaining about how "rough" certain web forums are. They don't even know the definition of a "troll" and they think they invented flaming. (Can I get a rolleyes smiley here?).
This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot. I'm sorry, but it's true. USENET is a one-stop-shop for all kinds of amazingly valuable information and if you don't see that, then you're missing out. Go download agent and get a clue.
Funny how USENET is the first place I go for answers to technical questions and I get an answer every time. If it hasn't been asked already, you can count on an answer within a couple hours. Add to that the high traffic music groups I read, the always entertaining alt.slack...
Just because *YOU* are not saavy enough to derive any value from it, doesn't mean there is no value there. Do you know how many times a week I tell people at my office to "just search google groups" when they are stuck on a technical question? They constantly bother me for stuff that I just end up searching google groups for anyway. Many parts of my job would take twice or three times as long without the ability to find quick answers on there.
F-you and your condemnation of something which you clearly know nothing about.
Gee, you THINK??? And this is coming from the owner of a minidisc player (and an iPod). Sony's garbage ass software and ridiculously long wait to convert to ATRAC is what has relegated my minidisc player to excersize duty rather than daily music player. The minidisc players are great in terms of hardware and features, but not supporting MP3 natively was assinine.
Spyware and SPAM are technical problems. Yes, it would be nice to have it be illegal, but legislators are way too busy considering legislation to help big companies prop up failing business models to help the taxpayers. You can't blame them for that, I mean who is going to pay the bills if they can't recieve their bribes?
Anyway, these problems need to be solved with technical solutions. The government, these days, thinks technical problems can be solved by making things "more illegal" and that ain't the case. The internet community needs to get off it's ass, stop bickering, and adopt a solution.
Personally, though, I'd just as soon see a few hundred million noobs stop using the internet. It was a better system when the "if you use it try to give back to it" ethos was in effect...now everyone is just out to make a buck. Remember the time before banner ads? If not, unplug your computer and go to hell.
Some of the stuff in the article (the guy who lost the reciepts for example) are just dumb. He could have lost those reciepts just as easily to a HDD crash. People want all the benefits of technology, but none of the responsibility (backing up, patching your systems, etc.) and that's what you get when you don't take responsibility for your machines. This attitude is what keeps crappy developers employed while good, careful ones who are into things like standards and correctess are assed out. It's not an inexcusable offense...I've lost stuff I should have backed up, but then I'm not quitting the internet because I lost that data am I?
Whatever. everyone can go to hell. I'm tired of society being flabberghasted by problems which it creates for itself and then refuses to address in any really meaningful or lasting way. Fuck'em.
as I pondered the Playboy bunnies, the return of Leisure Suit Larry, and the slew of buxom virtual ladies headlining each booth
Give me a break. Men can't even be men in the fantasy world anymore. The feminization of our culture is now supposed to extend to male sexuality now? Fuck that.
Listen, I'm not saying that there aren't problems with gender representation in video games (no one mentioned the male stereotypes which are propogated by the gaming industry, but I don't really care enough to go down that road). Certainly there is a need for more female characters and especially female characters that aren't over sexualized. However, there is nothing wrong with the return of leisure suit larry or the plaboy game. Here's a newsflash ladies: men think about fucking you. A lot. And dating doesn't come into the fantasy. You know that guy at Starbucks that serves you coffee every morning? He would probably fuck you on the floor behind the counter if he got the chance...and if he wouldn't (which is certainly possible) then I guarantee you he's at least thought about it. It's biological programming...it's how we're wired.
Now we can either act on that or not. Some people might put forth the idea that getting to act on these impulses in video games might help us to not need to act them out as much in real life. What a concept. Denying the nature of male sexuality isn't going to make it go away. We sure have a lot of talk about how this or that repressed group feels, but what about the traditionally dominant group? Just because we need to work towards a climate of accepting all people's ways of being doesn't mean we should do it at the expense of the previously dominant groups way of being. They, in this case men, have a right to be as they are too.
The articles credibility is somewhat suspect. They say, "LCDs are great as desktop PC monitors because they don't have to refresh pictures rapidly" uhhh...yes they do. You're talking about gaming where you're trying to get at least 85FPS on an 85HZ monitor versus a TV which is displaying 30FPS at max. So pretty much the opposite of what the article says is true there...
Thanks for the response. I do know the difference between aperature and F-stop...I did use the manual mode on my Elan ONCE in a while...and my K1000 was about as manual as it gets =].
I have to read the link you posted again because I'm only partially coming to the conclusions you stated in your second paragraph. I'll figure it out though...thanks for the pointer.
Okay, so I used to do a lot of photo back in the day. I've been wanting to do a darkroom setup so I can print since i lost my darkroom access. It doesn't look like it's going to happen...
So I go out and purchase a Canon A80 becuase it seemed to have many of the options I had come to expect on my Elan IIE. Obviously it was a point and shoot but I figured it would be a good entry into the digital world...see if I like digital enough to abandon my dreams of building a dark room. It's a good camera, but one of the things I noticed is the piss poor depth of field. I take pretty much all my pictures in aperature priority just so I can max it out as much as possible.
I figured this was a result of the smallest aperature on my A80 still being pretty large, and that if I ever bought a digital SLR (I would buy Canon so I can keep using my lenses) that I would be able to get better depth of field because there would be smaller aperatures available...
Is there something I'm missing here? Seems to me that if the A80 is a decent example of a good P and S digital camera, the maximum amount of depth of field would be much much better on an SLR. I don't need the noob lecture (well at least the photography noob lecture, the digital noob lecture maybe), I understand that SLR = control = complexity for those who don't know how to use it, but the article went to such a level explaining how apparently you can never ever get the same depth of field with an SLR that you would get from a P and S that now I'm confused. That doesn't make sense to me. Even if they said oh you have to have tons of sunlight to use the smaller aperatures because the effective ISO speed of the sensors were too slow that would make sense...but that doesn't seem to be what they're saying.
This is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen. Are you reading this Google? What the fuck it wrong with you? Why the fuck would you remove features such as date search and the dotted lines that helped you navigate threads more easily????
This is the kind of assinine bullshit that Google HAS NOT engaged in in the past and has made it successfull. What the fuck are you thinking with this crap?
I use google groups on a daily basis to help find information. USENET is one of the most valuable resources on the interenet and I was very scared when google took over. I did not like the interface at first, but I got used to it BECAUSE IT INCORPORATED THE IMPORTANT FEATURES OF THE DEJA INTERFACE. Now you are removing features which are absolutely critical to making your USENET archive functional and useful to people. Get your fucking heads out of your asses and put it back the way it was.
The thing is, the government is not supposed to be in the business of providing broadband internet access for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the reasons Verizon is citing...i.e. that the government has unfair advantages over private businesses. The question, in the long term, becomes whether you want companies to have viable business motives for bringing competitively priced broadband to an area or whether you would rather pay twice as much for a bloated government system which, in the end, provides substandard service and extremely questionable privacy anyway. It doesn't seem like this is a law that needed to be made, and certainly the process of buying the law is sketchy, but the ends do justify the means. There is a lot of debate over the role of government, but I am 100% certain that that role does not include providing free internet access to everyone. These kinds of socialistic policies have been proven over and over again not to work, regardless of whatever short sighted reasoning provides a jusification for doing it.
People here are excited about Verizon's move to FTTP, but do you honestly think that Verizon is going to have the money to build out the infratructure in areas where the government is already providing free internet access? Be honest, how many novice users are going to pay for internet access when the government provides it for free (and why should they)? Once again, this is an issue where private industry will drive innovation and cost reduction whereas the government will promote stagnation and bloat.
There is more to this issue than whether or not Verizon bought the law, or whether or not companies should be able to buy legislation. I heard a Verizon executive talking about how they're ready to jump into the pool of having to provide internet access to (traditionally unprofitable) rural areas, but that they just want to make sure there is some water in the pool first...and he is absolutely correct.
WTF is dude talking about. The unsuitability of LCD's for gaming is well known, and even if it wasn't you can look at the refresh rates and the blur on the screen and tell. Is this really the level of comment that goes up on the slashdot front page? Users who don't do there homework before buying hardware get featured? This is pathetic.
So because of your problems with wealth distribution, that means we should give up on addressing the *exact* problems ou mention on a governmental level? If you look at the party platform you'll see that a big thing with the LP is returning governmental power to the people rather than to politicians. The situation you describe in terms of wealth is already coming to pass by way of corporate welfare and favoritism...so would you rather be free and poor or enslaved and poor?
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"This used to be primarily the domain of the "right"" I agree with your post but disagree with this statement. The left has *always* been on some "think of the children" garbage whereas the right used to have a respect for things like freedom of speech and personal responsibility. I suppose the difference is academic at this point because now all of our politicians, left and right, want to have a hand in forcing their morals on you, but I do think it's an important distinction that conservatism is supposed to respect market forces and personal responsibility, not foisting Christian morals on other people.
I have seen a disturbing trend of people dropping out RIDICULOUSLY close to getting their degrees. I understand money concerns, but it seems like people are really devaluing college quite a lot. Most of what I learned in college I did not learn in classes, so I do not buy into the whole brainwashing/conformity thing. In fact I would say it had the opposite effect on me...encouraging me to be my crazy self. College for me was very freeing and I think it's disappointing that people are unable to take advantage of college in a way that they feel will really benefit them. Dropping out is not something I see as being something positive to emphasize. Are there things about college which should be changed? Sure...a couple less liberal arts and more free electives would make it a better experience, but the point is that you can really get something out of it.
YES, 99% of the world are clueless fucktards. If adoption of Mac OS ramps up you will see the same problems there as we see with Windows now. When you hire people who are actually competant to run your network, Windows can be quite stable and reliable.
Let's be honest here. How many people have worked administering windows? Now, of those people I want to see the hands of everyone who runs windows (primarily) at home and don't really have problems with spyware. Okay, now, we're going to call those people "competant windows users". Among that group, how many of you would say that the majority of people you worked with administering Windows were competant? I am guessing not as many.
There are a lot of BAD admins out there and despite what the articles are saying, companies are just now starting to spend on security. Ihave a background in security and spent a year out of work looking for a security job. It's not the fact that I had a hard time getting hired that makes me so sure that companies weren't spending on security (maybe I suck) but it's the fact that I saw few listings and got no calls from recruiters for security related positions. If you listened to the articles at the time you would think that you could get a 100K security job just by knowing how to run windows update. That's starting to change, but things like patch management, firewalls, and spyware management are just starting to become real to the corporate world.
Let's not forget that when the SQL worm hit, there had been a patch available for that hole for OVER A YEAR. Now, come on, what OS is going to be secure if Administrators are installing the base OS and never, ever patching? OpenBSD is the most secure OS I know of, and you've got to patch that more than once a year to stay secure, so let's drop the bullshit.
Windows is easy enough to administer that there is plenty of room for hacks and paper MCSE's to make a living...until the next worm hits that is. Blaming Windows for being so easy to use that companies are able to hire incompetant, oblivious administrators is patently ridiculous. Should we make our OSes hard to administer and lacking in basic enterprise management features JUST so that only people smart enough to roll their own solutions can run it? Is that really the best way forward? If it is, then I pity home users since keeping things that esoteric is going to cause them major problems setting up that home network.
"Windows is complex, trying to be everything to everyone. This complexity comes at a terrible price: downtime, help desks, upgrades, patches and the inevitable failures."
So he doesn't think a large Mac deployment is going to require a helpdesk? What an idiot. Does he not think that the UNIX backend to OS X is complex? I personally don't find windows to be particularly complex, and certainly is nowhere near as complex to run as other OSes I have dealt with. There is certain baseline maintinance you have to do with windows, and precautions you have to take, and when you do that everything is fine. I haven't rebooted my work PC (XP) for weeks (months??) now and I don't get spyware. That's because I a.) Don't surf porn and pirate music at work, I let firefox block popups, and I run a decent AV program. I have anti-spyware programs installed, but rarely use them.
"When a new operating system or service pack is released, there are tons of changes to the functionality."
Uhhh...no, there's really not. Windows hasn't done anything revolutionary since Windows 95. My company only somewhat recently went from 95 to 2k (tens of thousands of machines) and the users really didn't have many problems with adjusting. Does he not think there are significant differences between OS X and System 9? Dumb.
"WinTel machines use different versions of BIOS. They are not all equal, nor do they all have the same level of compatibility."
Never had a problem.
"Some Windows software applications are well written; others take shortcuts. Shortcuts may work in some environments, but not all, and ultimately the consumer pays in lost time, availability and productivity."
Of all his "points" this is the dumbest one. He's blaming Windows for the work of app vendors. HA! I work in QA/App deployment so BELIEVE me I know how bad app vendors are, but that's not windows' problem.
I guess no one has mentioned the bug in Adobe's software under OS X that was causing it to take approximately 10 minutes to task between Illustrator and Photoshop.
"Hardware. There are hundreds of "WinTel-compatible" motherboards, each claiming to be better than the next. Whatever."
This is bad....why again? Here's a simple solution: buy ASUS.
"Memory. Not all RAM is equal. Some works well. Cheap stuff doesn't."
So don't buy the cheap stuff.
"Hard disks. Same problem: cheap or reliable. Your call. "
Never had a problem. Western Dig drives have been extremely reliable for me.
Listen, I'm no big fan of Windows, but these critisisms are just stupid and make no sense.
What's frustrating about this stuff is that 99% of these "no windows" rants that make it to slashdot are obviously due to incompetance on the part of the people maintaining the user's PC's. Yes, Windows certainly has it's gremlins, just like any OS, and you have to set your infrastructure up to deal with those gremlins. Is Windows the best OS for every application? Certainly not, but lobbing critisisms which are simply not that well thought out at it and then expecting OS X to wash your car and eliminate blackheads isn't going to help anyone.
It's not as if the Senator is reading it himself/herself. Their staff reads all that stuff and keeps track of how the constituents are feeling. Yea, MAYBE if you write a particularly wonderful letter it MIGHT make it to the hands of the senator, but who knows how often that happens. The letter is going to have the exact same impact on the Senator's staff as a fax will, and I would bet you that a mountain of faxes is going to have many times the impact of the few handwritten letters people can be bothered to write. Staffers can be young, and I'm sure the people reading the mail are...do you really know that many 25 year olds who are giving that much more creedence to paper mail than faxes and emails under these circumstances?
There are plenty of issues which I care a lot about, but don't have time to write a paper letter for. Have you not been paying much attention to politics lately? If I wrote a paper letter about every issue I was concerned about, I would literally do nothing but write letters all day. If I paired it down to the issues which really, really troubled me, maybe I could get the letters done before noon. Letter writing doesn't pay well.
Besides that, politics is not my job, it's my Senators job. The message is conveyed to the staff either way. If they ignore my concerns, it is at their peril as they will lose my vote. I'll take the time to write a cogent, grammatically correct response which covers the points I want to make. If they only take it seriously if I write a paper letter, that's their problem not mine. If there is one thing that is certain, it's that my views are not going to be represented either way. I do what I can...I write letters and make calls and give money and vote, but I am not interested in stopping my entire life just because America is a nation of misguided fools.
Well, the faxes are uniquely phrased and from different people, so we can discount that part of your reply right away. I find that it's usually a good idea to actually look at what you're talking about before debating it, but that's just something that helps me. YMMV.
Anyways...the point is that these web pentitions get a lot of people to take action that wouldn't otherwise. Let's be real...how many more people do you think are willing to shoot off an email or a fax through a website than are willing to send a hand written letter? If a Senator's fax machine is ringing off the hook spouting pages and pages and pages of opinions on an issue, I'm sure the staff takes notice. I have recieved replies to emails I have sent my representatives, which is something that a lot of people denounce as a method of communication which has no impact, so I am inclined to be skeptical of people critisizing one media or another as being something lawmakers don't pay attention to.
More than that, though, why are people so ready to accomodate the lawmakers? When did it become the case that we service the lawmakers in whatever manner THEY choose? I should not have to take extra time out of my day to cater to the needs of my senators when there is an isue I feel strongly enough about to write to them. Representatives SHOULD be e-aware and if they're not, and they ignore the feedback they get from their online constituents, then they should be out of office anyways. Let's be honest here, with the amount of legislation they are passing that affects the online community, they DAMN WELL BETTER be on the interenet and understanding that this is a valid method of communication which their constituents may choose to use.
Of course, it's all just symptomatic of the "either/or" state of American politics today. We don't see communication with our reps as something THEY should seek out and desire, we see it as them doing us a huge favor...that our SENATOR would actually pay attention to ME on an issue. Bullshit. They should be begging for every letter they get. The more feedback they get and the more responsive they are to that feedback, the more likely they are to be reelected. Of course, we all know that's not the way it works anymore. Everyone just votes down the party line regardless of what kind of nightmare they are putting in office, no one even knows about specific issues anymore, much less writes their reps about it.
I, for one, am tired of the political climate in this country and am especially tired of pandering to the people who are supposed to represent ME. I communicate with them, and I base my vote partially on how they respond to that communication. If others want to make their lives hard and continue to elect criminals and people who regulate things they have never even seen before, that's everyone else's problem because I've done everything I can to tell them it doesn't have to be this way.
RIGHT! Doing nothing is MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE! Everyone, the government is trying to pass legislation to put tracking devices in everyone's ass! Quick, let's all sit around and read about the new XBOX...that'll stop em!!!
He obviously doesn't understand the nuances of the FPS, and I doubt very much that he plays online. The rise of the team-based FPS has added a COMPLETELY new dimension to the FPS genre that I think has yet to be fully explored. Enemy Territory took the team-based FPS a level farther by creating specific objectives that have to be accomplished in a certain order as a team. This is, to my knowledge, the only game with this type of setup. Yes, Couter Strike is somewhat similar, but it's not nearly as involved in terms of the types of objectives you have to accomplish. The addition of classes of people is also pretty new and adds a completely new dimension to the game.
,etc) add a level of improvement in skills and strategy for individual players, but it's the team tactics which make it really interesting.
Playing online really is the future. If people are playing single player games and expecting something new, then obviously they're going to be disappointed. I really don't buy FPSes for the single player anymore, although the gravity gun in Half Life is pretty damn fun. Playing online means that every single game is different every single time. Sports like basketball or baseball have been around forever, why have they not died out? The reason is that they are played by different teams and combinations of skill sets which make for a different game every single time. This is true with online FPSes as well. Each team has a different dynamic and way of getting things done. The team based aspect adds a HUGE amount of strategy to what is a relatively simple formula. Things like "bugs" in the engines (circle jumping, strafe jumping, bunny hopping
What this means is that there will always be a market for FPSes. People love them...this has been proven. If the improvements to the games are incremental, people will still play them just as they continue to play basketball or baseball. Just because the parameters of the game don't change much doesn't mean that people are going to stop playing.
Both of the examples given on why this does nothing are shaky at best. In both examples it relies on the perpetrator to hack *at the time that the user is logged/logging in*. In both cases two factor auth has the advantage of not allowing subsequent logins after the one compromised one. Of course the damage can be done at the time the user logs in, but it ups the level of sophistication an attacker needs to be successful as well as the likelyhood the the user is going to notice.
In the case of remote servers and such, it really eliminates a substatial portion of the threat altogether. Yes, an attacker *might* be able to set up a fake server for a man in the middle attack, but that's pretty unlikely to succeed. Piggybacking and preventing the user from actually logging off could work, but how much is that really going to gain them if they are not able to log in again (gotta be careful who has access to add authetication methods of course).
Two factor also *GREATLY* decreases the threat that Kevin Mitnick claims is the biggest threat of all. Yes, an attacker can still get a user to give them the current pass code, but once again that's only good for one login. The likelyhood that the user is going to stay on the phone and keep reading passcodes is pretty low. Once again this relies on the idea that the two factor auth needs to be pretty secure in that it's not bypassable (i.e. log in with a passcode then issue himself a non changing password) but it adds a layer of security and eliminates a substantial threat.
I'm sure that there are other eventualities that I have not considered, but to claim that password issues are a security issue of 10 years ago is just stupid and out of touch. The author is obviously looking for a magic bullet that will solve all his security problems in one fell swoop. I have news for him: it doesn't exist. Two factor auth solves a few problems which anyone with an open port 22 the last few months knows for a fact still exists.
Hey listen, the RIAA are scumbags, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a legally sensible and valid case against these people. Would it please people more to have the RIAA take the suits seriously and *really* bust people's balls as bad as they could? If I wasn't as smart as I am I would probably have kept sharing files instead of stopping about a year before the suits started and I can tell you one thing: if I got busted for it I would thank my lucky stars every day that they turned me over to some pimple faced gopher in the customer service department rather than sending the types of lawyers that companies like the RIAA employ after me. That's not a case I would be likely to win.
>If you had a clue, you'd be using Gnus. :)
;)
Hahahaha, fair enough.
LMAO. What a pussy. He can't even post his homophobic response under his own name.
The only sad part about this story is that there may not be as many new users of USENET if ISP's aren't offering it for free. Other than that, it's just a bunch of crap.
There are new and old people on USENET constantly. Why, exactly, do you think that this ISP decied not to offer USENET access anymore...because there was no one posting there? Uhm...no. The reason that they stopped offering it is that it is a monster to maintain because of all the traffic. USENET is the most valuable and the most underrated resource on the internet. Yes, I said it, and yes, I mean it. For detailed technical information and answers to tough questions there is nowhere else to go. Product reviews, information on music you want to check out, whatever. It's all there.
Let's keep it real here, okay? Most internet users (including IT "professionals") are too dumb to figure out how to use a newsreader, and FAR too dumb to understand how to evaluate the quality of information you get from google groups. People whine about, "Ohhh, the quality of information on message boards SUCKS, you can't learn ANYTHING from them". What a load of shit. If you have a brain in your head and understand the idea of crossreferencing information before you commit changes on a server that a few thousand people are connecting to, then you can really get a LOT of information from USENET and solve a lot of tough problems quickly. I find good, solid solutions to technical problems CONSTANTLY through google groups. I don't think a week goes by that I don't search it at least 10 times for various things.
Oh, but we have web forums! God forbid people should allow their words to convey their meaning rather than having pretty pictures and fancy emoticons to cover up for the fact that they are just stupid assholes who no one wants to hear from anyway. It's such a joke when you hear people complaining about how "rough" certain web forums are. They don't even know the definition of a "troll" and they think they invented flaming. (Can I get a rolleyes smiley here?).
This is just crap, and everyone cosiging it in this post is an idiot. I'm sorry, but it's true. USENET is a one-stop-shop for all kinds of amazingly valuable information and if you don't see that, then you're missing out. Go download agent and get a clue.
Funny how USENET is the first place I go for answers to technical questions and I get an answer every time. If it hasn't been asked already, you can count on an answer within a couple hours. Add to that the high traffic music groups I read, the always entertaining alt.slack...
Just because *YOU* are not saavy enough to derive any value from it, doesn't mean there is no value there. Do you know how many times a week I tell people at my office to "just search google groups" when they are stuck on a technical question? They constantly bother me for stuff that I just end up searching google groups for anyway. Many parts of my job would take twice or three times as long without the ability to find quick answers on there.
F-you and your condemnation of something which you clearly know nothing about.
Gee, you THINK??? And this is coming from the owner of a minidisc player (and an iPod). Sony's garbage ass software and ridiculously long wait to convert to ATRAC is what has relegated my minidisc player to excersize duty rather than daily music player. The minidisc players are great in terms of hardware and features, but not supporting MP3 natively was assinine.
Spyware and SPAM are technical problems. Yes, it would be nice to have it be illegal, but legislators are way too busy considering legislation to help big companies prop up failing business models to help the taxpayers. You can't blame them for that, I mean who is going to pay the bills if they can't recieve their bribes?
Anyway, these problems need to be solved with technical solutions. The government, these days, thinks technical problems can be solved by making things "more illegal" and that ain't the case. The internet community needs to get off it's ass, stop bickering, and adopt a solution.
Personally, though, I'd just as soon see a few hundred million noobs stop using the internet. It was a better system when the "if you use it try to give back to it" ethos was in effect...now everyone is just out to make a buck. Remember the time before banner ads? If not, unplug your computer and go to hell.
Some of the stuff in the article (the guy who lost the reciepts for example) are just dumb. He could have lost those reciepts just as easily to a HDD crash. People want all the benefits of technology, but none of the responsibility (backing up, patching your systems, etc.) and that's what you get when you don't take responsibility for your machines. This attitude is what keeps crappy developers employed while good, careful ones who are into things like standards and correctess are assed out. It's not an inexcusable offense...I've lost stuff I should have backed up, but then I'm not quitting the internet because I lost that data am I?
Whatever. everyone can go to hell. I'm tired of society being flabberghasted by problems which it creates for itself and then refuses to address in any really meaningful or lasting way. Fuck'em.
Give me a break. Men can't even be men in the fantasy world anymore. The feminization of our culture is now supposed to extend to male sexuality now? Fuck that.
Listen, I'm not saying that there aren't problems with gender representation in video games (no one mentioned the male stereotypes which are propogated by the gaming industry, but I don't really care enough to go down that road). Certainly there is a need for more female characters and especially female characters that aren't over sexualized. However, there is nothing wrong with the return of leisure suit larry or the plaboy game. Here's a newsflash ladies: men think about fucking you. A lot. And dating doesn't come into the fantasy. You know that guy at Starbucks that serves you coffee every morning? He would probably fuck you on the floor behind the counter if he got the chance...and if he wouldn't (which is certainly possible) then I guarantee you he's at least thought about it. It's biological programming...it's how we're wired.
Now we can either act on that or not. Some people might put forth the idea that getting to act on these impulses in video games might help us to not need to act them out as much in real life. What a concept. Denying the nature of male sexuality isn't going to make it go away. We sure have a lot of talk about how this or that repressed group feels, but what about the traditionally dominant group? Just because we need to work towards a climate of accepting all people's ways of being doesn't mean we should do it at the expense of the previously dominant groups way of being. They, in this case men, have a right to be as they are too.
The articles credibility is somewhat suspect. They say, "LCDs are great as desktop PC monitors because they don't have to refresh pictures rapidly" uhhh...yes they do. You're talking about gaming where you're trying to get at least 85FPS on an 85HZ monitor versus a TV which is displaying 30FPS at max. So pretty much the opposite of what the article says is true there...
Thanks for the response. I do know the difference between aperature and F-stop...I did use the manual mode on my Elan ONCE in a while...and my K1000 was about as manual as it gets =]. I have to read the link you posted again because I'm only partially coming to the conclusions you stated in your second paragraph. I'll figure it out though...thanks for the pointer.
Thanks for the response...that's exactly what I thought was going on. I knew that had to be misleading!
Okay, so I used to do a lot of photo back in the day. I've been wanting to do a darkroom setup so I can print since i lost my darkroom access. It doesn't look like it's going to happen...
So I go out and purchase a Canon A80 becuase it seemed to have many of the options I had come to expect on my Elan IIE. Obviously it was a point and shoot but I figured it would be a good entry into the digital world...see if I like digital enough to abandon my dreams of building a dark room. It's a good camera, but one of the things I noticed is the piss poor depth of field. I take pretty much all my pictures in aperature priority just so I can max it out as much as possible.
I figured this was a result of the smallest aperature on my A80 still being pretty large, and that if I ever bought a digital SLR (I would buy Canon so I can keep using my lenses) that I would be able to get better depth of field because there would be smaller aperatures available...
Is there something I'm missing here? Seems to me that if the A80 is a decent example of a good P and S digital camera, the maximum amount of depth of field would be much much better on an SLR. I don't need the noob lecture (well at least the photography noob lecture, the digital noob lecture maybe), I understand that SLR = control = complexity for those who don't know how to use it, but the article went to such a level explaining how apparently you can never ever get the same depth of field with an SLR that you would get from a P and S that now I'm confused. That doesn't make sense to me. Even if they said oh you have to have tons of sunlight to use the smaller aperatures because the effective ISO speed of the sensors were too slow that would make sense...but that doesn't seem to be what they're saying.
This is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen. Are you reading this Google? What the fuck it wrong with you? Why the fuck would you remove features such as date search and the dotted lines that helped you navigate threads more easily????
This is the kind of assinine bullshit that Google HAS NOT engaged in in the past and has made it successfull. What the fuck are you thinking with this crap?
I use google groups on a daily basis to help find information. USENET is one of the most valuable resources on the interenet and I was very scared when google took over. I did not like the interface at first, but I got used to it BECAUSE IT INCORPORATED THE IMPORTANT FEATURES OF THE DEJA INTERFACE. Now you are removing features which are absolutely critical to making your USENET archive functional and useful to people. Get your fucking heads out of your asses and put it back the way it was.
The thing is, the government is not supposed to be in the business of providing broadband internet access for a number of reasons, not the least of which are the reasons Verizon is citing...i.e. that the government has unfair advantages over private businesses. The question, in the long term, becomes whether you want companies to have viable business motives for bringing competitively priced broadband to an area or whether you would rather pay twice as much for a bloated government system which, in the end, provides substandard service and extremely questionable privacy anyway. It doesn't seem like this is a law that needed to be made, and certainly the process of buying the law is sketchy, but the ends do justify the means. There is a lot of debate over the role of government, but I am 100% certain that that role does not include providing free internet access to everyone. These kinds of socialistic policies have been proven over and over again not to work, regardless of whatever short sighted reasoning provides a jusification for doing it.
People here are excited about Verizon's move to FTTP, but do you honestly think that Verizon is going to have the money to build out the infratructure in areas where the government is already providing free internet access? Be honest, how many novice users are going to pay for internet access when the government provides it for free (and why should they)? Once again, this is an issue where private industry will drive innovation and cost reduction whereas the government will promote stagnation and bloat.
There is more to this issue than whether or not Verizon bought the law, or whether or not companies should be able to buy legislation. I heard a Verizon executive talking about how they're ready to jump into the pool of having to provide internet access to (traditionally unprofitable) rural areas, but that they just want to make sure there is some water in the pool first...and he is absolutely correct.
WTF is dude talking about. The unsuitability of LCD's for gaming is well known, and even if it wasn't you can look at the refresh rates and the blur on the screen and tell. Is this really the level of comment that goes up on the slashdot front page? Users who don't do there homework before buying hardware get featured? This is pathetic.
So because of your problems with wealth distribution, that means we should give up on addressing the *exact* problems ou mention on a governmental level? If you look at the party platform you'll see that a big thing with the LP is returning governmental power to the people rather than to politicians. The situation you describe in terms of wealth is already coming to pass by way of corporate welfare and favoritism...so would you rather be free and poor or enslaved and poor?