Are you kidding. A whole bunch of people come here for the OSS kiddie 'tude. Another interpretation of the post would be "Screw MS and its popular Xbox game!"
Yeah it would be better, but it would lose readers and I doubt the editors have it in them to be even-handed about anything. They are simply advocates and dont want to change their roles.
Like I wrote, there's an allure to going someplace where the editors have the same bias you do. Same with political blogs. Same with blogs about music. Same with what newspaper/media you chose to read.
To slashdot's credit at least they fess up to their bias now and again, unlike Fox News or somesuch.
>It was obviously the $40m tech demo called Half Life 2
Which is probably one the best games I've played. Excellent visuals and an excellent story. I don't usually replay games, but I've found myself re-doing the urban combat part of HL2 to fight those striders and take another tour of the citadel. Amazing stuff.
A couple thoughts:
Indie works great when a small group can accomplish what a large commercial group can, like in indie music or free software. The instruments/computers, recording studio/compilers, talent etc don't require mammoth amounts of money, but they sure do if you want to compete with the likes of HL2 or Halo 2. That's why most "indie" (best called shareware) games are simple puzzles hoping to become the next office craze, with some notable exceptions.
Slashdot bias of course dictates that Halo 2, a good FPS shooter, must be insulted in some way because of their connection to the Evil Empire! Scary!
Doom3 on the other hand, which was little more than a tech demo and had a poor "marine goes to hell" story ripped from the pages of worst sci-fi potboiler out there gets treated with kid gloves because there's a linux port.
Way, way, too many things at slashdot are political for the sake of linux and its often predictable and takes away from the site.
>That pretty much sums it up - blogging for a feeling of self importance
Many would argue that developing a sense of importance is part of the human condition. Its probably our main motivator except next to basic survival. The world would be a difference place if people weren't out there in every field trying to do something to make themselves feel important. Why better yourself? Why finish school? Why start some creative project? Why write that book? etc.
Of course want, need, altriusm and selfishness play roles, but don't underestimate things done for a sense of self-importance, status, standing out from the crowed, etc.
All the vendor has to do is change the scope of their product to include adware/spyware and say so long to the legal issues. Users who want spyware can toggle this feature off.
Ad Aware removes spyware all the time, but its not an illegal act. The question facing anti-virus vendors is if they want to be dinosaurs or catch up with the new threats. Legality should make no difference.
This is a serious ethical consideration. The site does a good job of playing the "we are the world" card, but is there any verification that we arent crunching numbers to crack codes for some government?
Their big success story was to find candidates for a smallpox treatment for the department of defense. *puts tin-foil hat on*
I remember when united devices hooked up with intel to run a similiar program. Is UD trustable? It doesnt seem as trustworthy as, say, stanfords folding@home project.
Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
When my adblocker was put on the slashdot front page I ran analog and saw something like 70% using windows. Possibly more. I wish I still had the logs. I also remember taco claiming that a huge number (60 or 80 percent) were Windows users.
Of course some were people at work using windows so give em 5 percent or so, but the problem here isnt the lack of a linux client its the lack of promotion on IBMs part. First I've heard of it.
Sorry, but this isnt the linux haven you think it is. Windows first, UNIX, and then Macs. Oh and I'm sure there are at least eight guys surfing from a commodore 64.
I'm on XP right now and shifting to OSX next year. All my UNIX work is done on the server side. The linux desktop revolution hasnt happened and may never happen. There needs to be a whole lot more commercialization of linux to even compete with MS and Apple's offerings.
And what was so great about suprnova? They are just an empty brand. Hell, they weren't even a tracker. What a scam they were running. People would find or start their own trackers, seed, and then give the suprnova people a link to the torrent while the suprnova people shoved 10 ads in your face.
I expect more people to be using eMule and bitorrent index sites to be hosted overseas while this exeed app dies the death of the empty branded hype with no substance that it is. Its just some company that saw the writing on the wall and paid off the suprnova kiddies to promote it. Big deal. Bittorrent if far from dead. The "russian" suprnova is up and works fine and at least the loki people are putting up some kind of fight so the technology isnt just considered illegal outright.
And excatly who is the competition here? Cobbled together and hard to use linux distributions that lack games and common apps users need? OSX's slightly pricey offerings which include the learning curve and rebuying/stealing all that software people are using on windows?
Windows may be a natural monopoly on the desktop as people are reluctant to change, their office uses the same stuff, and the pricing is dirt cheap. Slashdotters complain about the 'MS tax' but Joe Sixpack sees 40 dollars extra for windows as a deal when it retails for over $150.
Even after the IE mess of spyware and viruses we're only seeing at best a 12% non-IE usage across the board, which includes a lot of people who didn't switch to FF but were using other browsers well before FF 1.0. Its not exactly a mandate, although FF is wildly popular.
Of course no company/product lasts forever, but MS isnt going away soon, nor is IE. SP2 probably saved a lot of people from changing browsers and at the end of the day people dont want change and they have product loyalty.
The idea that the US is against or will continue to do anything but slaps on the wrist against monopolizers is quaint and old fashioned. Toss in a lagging economy and the deficit and the Republican noise machine will churn out "Why do prosecutors want to hurt America" and every Joe Sixpack will tell me that "America hates success" like they did when MS was on trial before. I believe Bush ran in 2000 saying he would end the MS case in MS's favor.
So really, lets not be too naive here. The last entity that can help encourage a healthy IT market will be the government. Perhaps if OSX catches on like the iPod has there will be at least *some* competition on the desktop/bundled apps. This ain't the EU.
There's no way I'm carrying a card around to log into some phpBB board.
Password managers are a pretty ideal solution. People tend to have a super-secret password for their bank account and crap passwords for noisy boards. My browser does a good job at storing them.
This is a solution looking for a problem more than anything.
The Apple community is not known to do any sort of crazy speculation or pranks.
ThinkSecret is a widely respected website which we have all heard of.
Apple can magically lower the prices on its components to sell at $499. Using magic!
Every iPod owner tells me "I am listening to music and iTunes runs fine on my computer, but for some reason I want to write a 600 dollar check to Apple computers."
sheez, this is pathetic rumor mill stuff. This is so predicatable, before every keynote speech by Jobs another "credible" wish-fulfilment Apple rumor appears. Apple can't or just won't sell at Walmart prices. Get used to it or find a way around it (buy used).
Windows XP uses NX now as of SP2. Its part of its Data Execution Protection scheme. DEP can run without an AMD too. Its on by default for windows system files.
Buffer overflow exploits arent just for servers either, the RPC/DCOM exploit was one. So was the previous big worm, err blaster? I don't quite remember.
This is tech for the desktop, really. Modern computers run a slew of services.
>I, as a European, shake my head and wonder whether you Americans have any idea what is happening in your country
Of course we do, lets see:
Scott Peterson was a bad man who did a bad thing.
Saddam has WMD so we must kill lots of people.
America is #1 in everything.
Other countries dont really exist.
Abortion is bad.
That's what the media delivers and that's all people seem to know or believe. We've been on a dystopian footing for quite a while and its only getting worse. The few people here who can see the forest for the trees are largely ignored.
Penetration does not equal broadband. The article is about broadband connections, not access.
Not to mention in this study, internet access at the library counts even if you dont even own a home computer. Internet access at work counts even if you don't own a home computer. Etc.
The ITU subscribes to the definition of an internet user as someone aged 2 years old and above,
who went online in the past 30 days. The US Department of Commerce, in contrast, defines internet users as those 3 years or older who 'currently use' the internet. Other market researchers have there own definitions.
We believe that a basic definition must be as general and as simple as possible. For analyzing and comparing Internet users on a global scale, IWS adopts as its benchmark a broad definition and defines an Internet User as anyone currently in capacity to use the Internet.
If you read the article all the BBC is claiming is that there are 32 million NEW broadband connections in the US. Be it home or business.
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure for a variety of reasons:
Melissa.worm showed corporate america their security is terrible and now its rare for me to see a client running Exchange without Symatec or Trend Micro's realtime scanner.
The wireless/router fad puts everyone behind NAT, thus behind a firewall. The internet is chock full of articles on "how to open ports" because so many technophobes are behind firewalls but want to use P2P or some other app that requires port forwarding.
People are getting *less* ignorant. Its easy to sit upon your FreeBSD high horse and mock everyday users, its a lot harder to help them. And they have been helped. There's a technophile in every family. The number of articles in the media regarding spam, spyware, and viruses is non-trivial. The fact that I can say the word spyware to a stranger and not be asked what that is shows that the message is getting across.
Microsoft is seriously getting into the act. SP2 is godsend for the technophobes out there. Firewall on by default, better IE control, etc. Hell, they even recommend Ad Aware on their own site. Their aquisition of Giant can only mean good things in the long run.
That being said, the worst offenders in my experience are computer savvy teens who don't give a shit, not new users. They're savvy enough to get warez and also savvy enough to do that eventual re-install long after they;re so infected its hurting their download rates.
I've been doing some support for college students (for those who live in the dorm) and they're a lot more careful because they have data on there they need and have to put up with University policies regarding proper use. These skills translate over to the workplace pretty easily.
So yeah, its not perfect, but in my experience its getting better, not worse. Sorry, but the internet has yet to collapse because of new users. In fact, more users means more eventual power users and an eventual critical mass where everyone has someone to lean on when they need help with their PC.
>Middle-eastern religions document the flood as well
Oh please, a worldwide flood in the past few thousand years? There's no evidence for that. Credulous religious "scholars" taking a local flood and blowing it out of proportion and apply the word god/allah to it is proof of human vanity and self-centeredness.
> Cortez got away with what he did is because they thought he was the second coming of their saviour.
Cortez was confused with a local god, the second coming is very much a Christian concept but it was pretty clear later on what the score was. Not to mention cortez got away with what he did because of smallpox.
>So? Do advertisers care that the content of a page is factual?
Exactly. Many religious sites have ads. Religion is hardly factual. Toss in political sites and all the opinion dress up as news and you would be hard press to find any facts on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
>Wouldn't Slashdot be so much better like that?
Are you kidding. A whole bunch of people come here for the OSS kiddie 'tude. Another interpretation of the post would be "Screw MS and its popular Xbox game!"
Yeah it would be better, but it would lose readers and I doubt the editors have it in them to be even-handed about anything. They are simply advocates and dont want to change their roles.
Like I wrote, there's an allure to going someplace where the editors have the same bias you do. Same with political blogs. Same with blogs about music. Same with what newspaper/media you chose to read.
To slashdot's credit at least they fess up to their bias now and again, unlike Fox News or somesuch.
>It was obviously the $40m tech demo called Half Life 2
Which is probably one the best games I've played. Excellent visuals and an excellent story. I don't usually replay games, but I've found myself re-doing the urban combat part of HL2 to fight those striders and take another tour of the citadel. Amazing stuff.
A couple thoughts:
Indie works great when a small group can accomplish what a large commercial group can, like in indie music or free software. The instruments/computers, recording studio/compilers, talent etc don't require mammoth amounts of money, but they sure do if you want to compete with the likes of HL2 or Halo 2. That's why most "indie" (best called shareware) games are simple puzzles hoping to become the next office craze, with some notable exceptions.
Slashdot bias of course dictates that Halo 2, a good FPS shooter, must be insulted in some way because of their connection to the Evil Empire! Scary!
Doom3 on the other hand, which was little more than a tech demo and had a poor "marine goes to hell" story ripped from the pages of worst sci-fi potboiler out there gets treated with kid gloves because there's a linux port.
Way, way, too many things at slashdot are political for the sake of linux and its often predictable and takes away from the site.
MS owns bungie and the Xbox. Get over it. Thanks.
>That pretty much sums it up - blogging for a feeling of self importance
Many would argue that developing a sense of importance is part of the human condition. Its probably our main motivator except next to basic survival. The world would be a difference place if people weren't out there in every field trying to do something to make themselves feel important. Why better yourself? Why finish school? Why start some creative project? Why write that book? etc.
Of course want, need, altriusm and selfishness play roles, but don't underestimate things done for a sense of self-importance, status, standing out from the crowed, etc.
All the vendor has to do is change the scope of their product to include adware/spyware and say so long to the legal issues. Users who want spyware can toggle this feature off.
Ad Aware removes spyware all the time, but its not an illegal act. The question facing anti-virus vendors is if they want to be dinosaurs or catch up with the new threats. Legality should make no difference.
Used it to send out their 800+ meg installer for their free 12 month trial. I remember some game demo sites using it too.
This is a serious ethical consideration. The site does a good job of playing the "we are the world" card, but is there any verification that we arent crunching numbers to crack codes for some government?
Their big success story was to find candidates for a smallpox treatment for the department of defense. *puts tin-foil hat on*
I remember when united devices hooked up with intel to run a similiar program. Is UD trustable? It doesnt seem as trustworthy as, say, stanfords folding@home project.
Blows my mind people are still wasting cycles over "find ET on my desktop."
When my adblocker was put on the slashdot front page I ran analog and saw something like 70% using windows. Possibly more. I wish I still had the logs. I also remember taco claiming that a huge number (60 or 80 percent) were Windows users.
Of course some were people at work using windows so give em 5 percent or so, but the problem here isnt the lack of a linux client its the lack of promotion on IBMs part. First I've heard of it.
Sorry, but this isnt the linux haven you think it is. Windows first, UNIX, and then Macs. Oh and I'm sure there are at least eight guys surfing from a commodore 64.
I'm on XP right now and shifting to OSX next year. All my UNIX work is done on the server side. The linux desktop revolution hasnt happened and may never happen. There needs to be a whole lot more commercialization of linux to even compete with MS and Apple's offerings.
And what was so great about suprnova? They are just an empty brand. Hell, they weren't even a tracker. What a scam they were running. People would find or start their own trackers, seed, and then give the suprnova people a link to the torrent while the suprnova people shoved 10 ads in your face.
I expect more people to be using eMule and bitorrent index sites to be hosted overseas while this exeed app dies the death of the empty branded hype with no substance that it is. Its just some company that saw the writing on the wall and paid off the suprnova kiddies to promote it. Big deal. Bittorrent if far from dead. The "russian" suprnova is up and works fine and at least the loki people are putting up some kind of fight so the technology isnt just considered illegal outright.
And excatly who is the competition here? Cobbled together and hard to use linux distributions that lack games and common apps users need? OSX's slightly pricey offerings which include the learning curve and rebuying/stealing all that software people are using on windows?
Windows may be a natural monopoly on the desktop as people are reluctant to change, their office uses the same stuff, and the pricing is dirt cheap. Slashdotters complain about the 'MS tax' but Joe Sixpack sees 40 dollars extra for windows as a deal when it retails for over $150.
Even after the IE mess of spyware and viruses we're only seeing at best a 12% non-IE usage across the board, which includes a lot of people who didn't switch to FF but were using other browsers well before FF 1.0. Its not exactly a mandate, although FF is wildly popular.
Of course no company/product lasts forever, but MS isnt going away soon, nor is IE. SP2 probably saved a lot of people from changing browsers and at the end of the day people dont want change and they have product loyalty.
The idea that the US is against or will continue to do anything but slaps on the wrist against monopolizers is quaint and old fashioned. Toss in a lagging economy and the deficit and the Republican noise machine will churn out "Why do prosecutors want to hurt America" and every Joe Sixpack will tell me that "America hates success" like they did when MS was on trial before. I believe Bush ran in 2000 saying he would end the MS case in MS's favor.
So really, lets not be too naive here. The last entity that can help encourage a healthy IT market will be the government. Perhaps if OSX catches on like the iPod has there will be at least *some* competition on the desktop/bundled apps. This ain't the EU.
>Now, we seem to be becomming just bland "American" consumers.
Now?
Err, television hit critical mass in the 50's. The radio well before then. The newspaper before then too.
Its not the medium, its how its managed. Its not the ideas, its the people without the skepticism to handle them.
There's no way I'm carrying a card around to log into some phpBB board.
Password managers are a pretty ideal solution. People tend to have a super-secret password for their bank account and crap passwords for noisy boards. My browser does a good job at storing them.
This is a solution looking for a problem more than anything.
>1) not be true or
How could it not be true?
They list "sources" as their sources!
The Apple community is not known to do any sort of crazy speculation or pranks.
ThinkSecret is a widely respected website which we have all heard of.
Apple can magically lower the prices on its components to sell at $499. Using magic!
Every iPod owner tells me "I am listening to music and iTunes runs fine on my computer, but for some reason I want to write a 600 dollar check to Apple computers."
sheez, this is pathetic rumor mill stuff. This is so predicatable, before every keynote speech by Jobs another "credible" wish-fulfilment Apple rumor appears. Apple can't or just won't sell at Walmart prices. Get used to it or find a way around it (buy used).
Windows XP uses NX now as of SP2. Its part of its Data Execution Protection scheme. DEP can run without an AMD too. Its on by default for windows system files.
Buffer overflow exploits arent just for servers either, the RPC/DCOM exploit was one. So was the previous big worm, err blaster? I don't quite remember.
This is tech for the desktop, really. Modern computers run a slew of services.
Here's the photo. Look to the wheel on your left hand side. I wonder if they were anticipating this happening.
Actually slashdot linked to the coral cache of his page:
n de x.htm
http://64.252.62.40.nyud.net:8090/lasershoppe/i
See the nyud.net:8090 in there? Smart move. Hopefully submitters will be doing this more often.
>I, as a European, shake my head and wonder whether you Americans have any idea what is happening in your country
Of course we do, lets see:
Scott Peterson was a bad man who did a bad thing.
Saddam has WMD so we must kill lots of people.
America is #1 in everything.
Other countries dont really exist.
Abortion is bad.
That's what the media delivers and that's all people seem to know or believe. We've been on a dystopian footing for quite a while and its only getting worse. The few people here who can see the forest for the trees are largely ignored.
> OPEC knows that if oil really got up into the $80-$100 barrel range people would start making lifestyle changes
I fail to see the lack of SUVs in my area just yet. Something tells me fad beats economics every time.
That should be 9 million new connections this year, 32 million total.
Not to mention in this study, internet access at the library counts even if you dont even own a home computer. Internet access at work counts even if you don't own a home computer. Etc.If you read the article all the BBC is claiming is that there are 32 million NEW broadband connections in the US. Be it home or business.
Wow, everyone is quite the Cassandra today.
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure for a variety of reasons:
Melissa.worm showed corporate america their security is terrible and now its rare for me to see a client running Exchange without Symatec or Trend Micro's realtime scanner.
The wireless/router fad puts everyone behind NAT, thus behind a firewall. The internet is chock full of articles on "how to open ports" because so many technophobes are behind firewalls but want to use P2P or some other app that requires port forwarding.
People are getting *less* ignorant. Its easy to sit upon your FreeBSD high horse and mock everyday users, its a lot harder to help them. And they have been helped. There's a technophile in every family. The number of articles in the media regarding spam, spyware, and viruses is non-trivial. The fact that I can say the word spyware to a stranger and not be asked what that is shows that the message is getting across.
Microsoft is seriously getting into the act. SP2 is godsend for the technophobes out there. Firewall on by default, better IE control, etc. Hell, they even recommend Ad Aware on their own site. Their aquisition of Giant can only mean good things in the long run.
That being said, the worst offenders in my experience are computer savvy teens who don't give a shit, not new users. They're savvy enough to get warez and also savvy enough to do that eventual re-install long after they;re so infected its hurting their download rates.
I've been doing some support for college students (for those who live in the dorm) and they're a lot more careful because they have data on there they need and have to put up with University policies regarding proper use. These skills translate over to the workplace pretty easily.
So yeah, its not perfect, but in my experience its getting better, not worse. Sorry, but the internet has yet to collapse because of new users. In fact, more users means more eventual power users and an eventual critical mass where everyone has someone to lean on when they need help with their PC.
>Middle-eastern religions document the flood as well
Oh please, a worldwide flood in the past few thousand years? There's no evidence for that. Credulous religious "scholars" taking a local flood and blowing it out of proportion and apply the word god/allah to it is proof of human vanity and self-centeredness.
> Cortez got away with what he did is because they thought he was the second coming of their saviour.
Cortez was confused with a local god, the second coming is very much a Christian concept but it was pretty clear later on what the score was. Not to mention cortez got away with what he did because of smallpox.
>So? Do advertisers care that the content of a page is factual?
Exactly. Many religious sites have ads. Religion is hardly factual. Toss in political sites and all the opinion dress up as news and you would be hard press to find any facts on the web.
>So at Microsoft, either something works and isn't secure, or is secure and doesn't work.
There's always the fix all patch.
> just buy everything made in USA
But, but that's so expensive! And 'morals' in American mean one thing and one thing only - abortion.
*applies easy to remove 'Support our troops' magnetic sticker to his SUV*