Somone who uses an llegal copy of Windows is better than someone who uses a different OS. Microsoft still makes money because of the gamers, because they keep the installed base high - and as experienced Wndows uses they're more likely to help relatives maintain their Windows box than to tell them to buy a Mac. Also, many of those gamers are in school and will later enter the job market with nothing but Windows experience, thus helping to maintain Microsoft's stranglehold on IT.
Even if not a single gamer pays for Windows they're more than welcome to use it.
I highly doubt Monty Python had anything to do with it's popularity, and certainly neither did any internet abuse related use of the word.
Well, in Britain maybe. Over here in Germany I've only heard of it through Monty Python and the internet. Even now, I regard it to be a Corned Beef-workalike (the latter is actually being sold in Germany whereas I've never seen a can of SPAM here), even if Corned Beef might have been invented later.
It would help with old code that isn't maintained anymore but still works. There are projects that people still use but that don't see any active development (an example would be xmms-kde, a Kicker panel that controls XMMS).
Of course this would make KDE/Gnome themselves a bit harder to maintain because there is more code. One would have to see whether the advantages are worth that.
No, you mean IPv6, where every letter of the alphabet has its own IP address. Indeed IPv6 will be the successor to Unicode because we can just give every letter an address and then just concatenate the addresses to form text. "Hello world!" might look like this in hex:
This is text used to get around the "postercomment" compression filter, which for some reason thinks that my post contains too much whitespace and/or repetition. I can't imagine why. Spasmic organza etsa the buffalo snail while asparagus vanishes. Yestardey the world became onion soup. Help, I am being held captive an an abandoned factory.
PS: Of course you could have a block device for each letter of the alphabet. Then you could compose files like this: $ dd if=/dev/alphabet/H count=1 bs=1 > Hi.file
$ dd if=/dev/alphabet/i count=1 bs=1 >> Hi.file
How about rewriting the native interfaces to wrap the Portland ones? The real internal functions etc. are hidden from the application developers as the preferred way to access them is though Portland. That way older software would still run (getting (partial) Portland compatibility for free) and newer software would use Portland directly.
True. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry about the fact that sites with names like bestcracksserials.cc are becoming more trustworthy than companies like EMI or Sony.
I didn't get stuck with the SONY rootkit thing because I already stopped buying CD's due to the already defective by design CD's already out. Some have to get burned much harder before they break away from bad products.
No need to overreact. Even after un-CDs were introduced I bought a CD - the latest album from Machinae Supremacy who are known as OGG supporters and who put most of their songs (even some included in the albums) on their website for free download. Of course what I got was a real Red Book-compatible audio CD.
There's some website where you can look up whether a particular music medium is an audio CD or a crippled CD-workalike. Sadly I've forgotten the URL...
Exactly. Reiser hasn't yet faced trial, let alone been found guilty.
If you were German you'd know that as soon as the BILD (Europe's most-read tabloid) finds out he will be declared a murderer and an evil monster hell-bent on killing his family. It's amazing what tabloids get away with...
If people knew they had a good chance of getting away with it as they do in Iraq there would be.
Which raises the question whether the thing that deters people is capital punishment or punishment in general. Since murder rates are not significantly higher in the EU than they are in the US it's not entirely unlikely that the knowledge that you will likely be punished is an effective deterrant.
with the same rigor as newspapers publishing stories about alleged scandalous activities by our politicians and business people document their sources
Important: newspapers, not tabloids. If you follow the latter ones' practices you probably won't be able to explain to the court why you blocked microsoft.com for sending out hidden satanic messages.
Great. Then the contents of all those pipes spill all over the state and we get a second New Orleans. Really well thought out that little plan of yours.
ICANN isn't located in Illinois, is it? They don't list an Illinois office on their web site, anyway. Seems to me that it's almost as far out of the court's jurisdiction as Spamhaus is.
The ICANN servers are located around the world, but ICANN itself derives most of its power from a contract with the US Department of Commerce, giving the USA power over it. That's why an independent ICANN was such a good idea - no single country could decide that the (top level) domain XYZ had to be blocked etc.
Currently we have local DNS root organzationss (ICANN, ORSN...) with most people using the US root (which happens to be local only as far as legal responsibility goes). Thus if the USA want to manipulate their root then most people get the manipulated results. That's one of the main reasons why the people behind ORSN decided to establish a local European root - as a trustworthy root network in case the American root can't be trusted anymore for geopolitical or legal reasons.
The TV will do one thing, and one thing only. That's displaying an analog signal as moving images and sound. That's all. The day that's all Windows will ever have to do, that's the day you can demand a refund.
It also decrypts the signal from the receiver, carefully avoiding the dreaded analog hole. A modern TV uses more processing power to restrict my freedom than my PC did ten years ago to enhance it.
Come to think of it, that'd be an interesting prospect for a sci-fi story - a civilization where more computing power is used to enforce arbitrary "copyright protections" and to circumvent them than for everything else combined...
StepMania - Hey, DDR-clones are addictive, especially when they run on your iBook so you can play on the train while commuting to the university. My WASDPLÖÄ keyboard setup is feared (by everyone who tries to use it and isn't me). Final Fantasy Tactics - Not so much a comfort game as one where you sit down and spend three hours in one battle because you are a sick person and want to have a fully trained calculator before the end of the first chapter. Once you're in the zone you don't even mind spending hours just letting your soldiers beat the crap out of each other. You also stop caring aout everything else, including getting something to eat - after all those soldiers aren't going to indirectly gather 1200 monk JPs by themselves! Also, I love bitching about the sequel. Excessive Quake - A pure bloodbath of flying gibs and ridiculously overpowered weapons. Load this sucker, set the bots to "Hurt Me Plenty" and spend the next five minutes mowing down everything that moves. It's like a killing spree on steroids and equally stress-relieving.
Occasionally played: Perfect Cherry Blossom - I have no idea what the in-game text is saying, but gameplay-wise it's just as evil as Ikaruga. I mean, look at that screenshot!
There should be a nuke option for Windows in its entirety (at least the registry), along with applications having the ability to export their registry settings into.reg files (although I'd still prefer each having plain old INI files). If Windows gets slow you open all programs you know you need, let them dump their settingg in some folder, backup their files if neccessary, nuke Windows and load the settings from the dumps. That would make repairing a borked Windows installation much easier (at least one would avoid having the installer copy everything to the hard drive again).
Alternatively, just have every app capable of creating registry dumps and make the setup DVD smart enough to only write files that are changed. Also invent a hashing algorithm that works in constant time (with a small constant) so that checking whether a file is changed is faster than just copying it anyway.
Well, somewhere in the process the protected mode was permanently disbled (insert quip about 640 kilobytes of RAM here). Vista spyware authors might want to duplicate this - give the user one innocent program that disables the protected mode as an intended side effect and later hit him with the real spyware. Of course, Microsoft will also want to find out how it works.
We also have such posts getting modded up as 'interesting', more mod trolling.
Well, the idea is interesting. Not the "OMG MIXRO$OFT IS FUDING TEH INTARNEWS" ones but those thinking about how this might be fake news plantd by the government in order to make people all xenophoic. Maybe it's not realistic but interesting nonetheless, especially to those who tend to liken recent political decisions (not only within the USA) to a certain book by George Orwell.
Slashdot Mirror
Somone who uses an llegal copy of Windows is better than someone who uses a different OS. Microsoft still makes money because of the gamers, because they keep the installed base high - and as experienced Wndows uses they're more likely to help relatives maintain their Windows box than to tell them to buy a Mac. Also, many of those gamers are in school and will later enter the job market with nothing but Windows experience, thus helping to maintain Microsoft's stranglehold on IT.
Even if not a single gamer pays for Windows they're more than welcome to use it.
29.3 seconds is great compared to the fifteen minutes it took Jason Kottke...
I highly doubt Monty Python had anything to do with it's popularity, and certainly neither did any internet abuse related use of the word.
Well, in Britain maybe. Over here in Germany I've only heard of it through Monty Python and the internet. Even now, I regard it to be a Corned Beef-workalike (the latter is actually being sold in Germany whereas I've never seen a can of SPAM here), even if Corned Beef might have been invented later.
It would help with old code that isn't maintained anymore but still works. There are projects that people still use but that don't see any active development (an example would be xmms-kde, a Kicker panel that controls XMMS).
Of course this would make KDE/Gnome themselves a bit harder to maintain because there is more code. One would have to see whether the advantages are worth that.
No, you mean IPv6, where every letter of the alphabet has its own IP address. Indeed IPv6 will be the successor to Unicode because we can just give every letter an address and then just concatenate the addresses to form text. "Hello world!" might look like this in hex:
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 48
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 65
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6c
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6c
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6f
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 20
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 77
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6f
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 73
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 6c
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 64
41 53 43 49 49 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 21
This is text used to get around the "postercomment" compression filter, which for some reason thinks that my post contains too much whitespace and/or repetition. I can't imagine why. Spasmic organza etsa the buffalo snail while asparagus vanishes. Yestardey the world became onion soup. Help, I am being held captive an an abandoned factory.
PS: Of course you could have a block device for each letter of the alphabet. Then you could compose files like this:
$ dd if=/dev/alphabet/H count=1 bs=1 > Hi.file
$ dd if=/dev/alphabet/i count=1 bs=1 >> Hi.file
How about rewriting the native interfaces to wrap the Portland ones? The real internal functions etc. are hidden from the application developers as the preferred way to access them is though Portland. That way older software would still run (getting (partial) Portland compatibility for free) and newer software would use Portland directly.
True. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry about the fact that sites with names like bestcracksserials.cc are becoming more trustworthy than companies like EMI or Sony.
I didn't get stuck with the SONY rootkit thing because I already stopped buying CD's due to the already defective by design CD's already out. Some have to get burned much harder before they break away from bad products.
No need to overreact. Even after un-CDs were introduced I bought a CD - the latest album from Machinae Supremacy who are known as OGG supporters and who put most of their songs (even some included in the albums) on their website for free download. Of course what I got was a real Red Book-compatible audio CD.
There's some website where you can look up whether a particular music medium is an audio CD or a crippled CD-workalike. Sadly I've forgotten the URL...
Following the established love/rocks/sucks method of calculating which language gets the most praise...
"love PHP" - 50 results
"PHP rocks" - 8 results
"PHP sucks" - 20 results
Let's compare:
50 + 6 - 20 = 36 net positive statements about Python
50 + 4 - 32900 = -32846 net positive statements about Perl
50 + 8 - 20 = 38 net positive statements about PHP
The result is obvious: Nobody on Slashdot gives a damn about Ruby.
Lots of 'em!
Try reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_topic
The think about which part of this mess is relevant to an IT- and Linux-oriented newsblog inhabited by techies.
From the way you're saying that it sounds like it's not common for American surveillance cameras to have a 10 gigapixel resolution...
I think we should first speculate on likely new names for Reiser4.
I propose "Reiser5".
Exactly. Reiser hasn't yet faced trial, let alone been found guilty.
If you were German you'd know that as soon as the BILD (Europe's most-read tabloid) finds out he will be declared a murderer and an evil monster hell-bent on killing his family. It's amazing what tabloids get away with...
If people knew they had a good chance of getting away with it as they do in Iraq there would be.
Which raises the question whether the thing that deters people is capital punishment or punishment in general. Since murder rates are not significantly higher in the EU than they are in the US it's not entirely unlikely that the knowledge that you will likely be punished is an effective deterrant.
with the same rigor as newspapers publishing stories about alleged scandalous activities by our politicians and business people document their sources
Important: newspapers, not tabloids. If you follow the latter ones' practices you probably won't be able to explain to the court why you blocked microsoft.com for sending out hidden satanic messages.
Great. Then the contents of all those pipes spill all over the state and we get a second New Orleans. Really well thought out that little plan of yours.
ICANN isn't located in Illinois, is it? They don't list an Illinois office on their web site, anyway. Seems to me that it's almost as far out of the court's jurisdiction as Spamhaus is.
The ICANN servers are located around the world, but ICANN itself derives most of its power from a contract with the US Department of Commerce, giving the USA power over it. That's why an independent ICANN was such a good idea - no single country could decide that the (top level) domain XYZ had to be blocked etc.
Currently we have local DNS root organzationss (ICANN, ORSN...) with most people using the US root (which happens to be local only as far as legal responsibility goes). Thus if the USA want to manipulate their root then most people get the manipulated results. That's one of the main reasons why the people behind ORSN decided to establish a local European root - as a trustworthy root network in case the American root can't be trusted anymore for geopolitical or legal reasons.
The TV will do one thing, and one thing only. That's displaying an analog signal as moving images and sound. That's all. The day that's all Windows will ever have to do, that's the day you can demand a refund.
It also decrypts the signal from the receiver, carefully avoiding the dreaded analog hole. A modern TV uses more processing power to restrict my freedom than my PC did ten years ago to enhance it.
Come to think of it, that'd be an interesting prospect for a sci-fi story - a civilization where more computing power is used to enforce arbitrary "copyright protections" and to circumvent them than for everything else combined...
Ah yes, I once had a mainboard like that too...
Wait a minute, that mainboard is still in my_MQ\ZY61?'DK7N.DP#+U^4:.$NO CARRIER
StepMania - Hey, DDR-clones are addictive, especially when they run on your iBook so you can play on the train while commuting to the university. My WASDPLÖÄ keyboard setup is feared (by everyone who tries to use it and isn't me).
Final Fantasy Tactics - Not so much a comfort game as one where you sit down and spend three hours in one battle because you are a sick person and want to have a fully trained calculator before the end of the first chapter. Once you're in the zone you don't even mind spending hours just letting your soldiers beat the crap out of each other. You also stop caring aout everything else, including getting something to eat - after all those soldiers aren't going to indirectly gather 1200 monk JPs by themselves! Also, I love bitching about the sequel.
Excessive Quake - A pure bloodbath of flying gibs and ridiculously overpowered weapons. Load this sucker, set the bots to "Hurt Me Plenty" and spend the next five minutes mowing down everything that moves. It's like a killing spree on steroids and equally stress-relieving.
Occasionally played:
Perfect Cherry Blossom - I have no idea what the in-game text is saying, but gameplay-wise it's just as evil as Ikaruga. I mean, look at that screenshot!
There should be a nuke option for Windows in its entirety (at least the registry), along with applications having the ability to export their registry settings into .reg files (although I'd still prefer each having plain old INI files). If Windows gets slow you open all programs you know you need, let them dump their settingg in some folder, backup their files if neccessary, nuke Windows and load the settings from the dumps. That would make repairing a borked Windows installation much easier (at least one would avoid having the installer copy everything to the hard drive again).
Alternatively, just have every app capable of creating registry dumps and make the setup DVD smart enough to only write files that are changed. Also invent a hashing algorithm that works in constant time (with a small constant) so that checking whether a file is changed is faster than just copying it anyway.
Well, somewhere in the process the protected mode was permanently disbled (insert quip about 640 kilobytes of RAM here). Vista spyware authors might want to duplicate this - give the user one innocent program that disables the protected mode as an intended side effect and later hit him with the real spyware. Of course, Microsoft will also want to find out how it works.
We also have such posts getting modded up as 'interesting', more mod trolling.
Well, the idea is interesting. Not the "OMG MIXRO$OFT IS FUDING TEH INTARNEWS" ones but those thinking about how this might be fake news plantd by the government in order to make people all xenophoic. Maybe it's not realistic but interesting nonetheless, especially to those who tend to liken recent political decisions (not only within the USA) to a certain book by George Orwell.
XenoPHOBIC. You know how "hydrophobic" means that something can't mix with water? How good would a Xena party that can't even mix with Xena be?
Sheesh, some people really can't see the obvious.