Every time there's a "YRO" story about some privacy issue in the US the europops come out of the woodwork drinking gin and smoking small cigarrettes to point out how fucked up we Americans are.
Well here's a big fat FUCK YOU BACK, if nothing else to prove that things are fucked up everywhere and you can all stick your "oh but vee are so much bettar than you amerikans" mantra bullshit.
Mod me down, I just had to vent after seeing a few of those flamewars in previous articles about US laws.
This is a nice gedanken experiment, but while WIPO or Disney or HP or Microsoft or some other entities that we think of as 'evil corporations' would have had the creativity and intelligence to come up with the WWW, ultimately the success rests on who is willing to implement it. People implemented Berners-Lee's shiny new protocol because it was simple, unencumbered, free and open. It carried no financial, legal, emotional or technical baggage. And it made sense. And it worked transparenly over an already popular infrastructure (HTTP/TCP). It was extensible. That would not happen with something that emerges from the bowels of a megamultinationalcorporation, I think.
Think of open source and free software - in a sense it spreads the same ways.
Good god, that is the most fallacy-ridden essay on microeconomics I've read in quite a long time.
First, the advertising 'tactics' you mention in relation to charities ('for the price of a cup of coffee a day...') are not to be 'felled for', they play to people's sense of cost vs. value. It is the same strategy used by retailers - research has consistently proven that people will buy something for $29.99 but will stay away from the same item priced at $30.00. And I wouldn't call them 'gimmicks' - these people are not selling kitchen knives or ab cruncher machines. Some of them do save lives with $1 a day, because that's what billions of people subsist on all over the world. Try visiting Guatemala or Kenya one of these days.
Second, Joe Medical does not reach the breaking point by dropping $600 on a brand new PC from Gateway, of which $43 is the 'Microsoft tax'. Further, your argument (if I was to actually take it seriously) in this sense is easily derailed by simply buying a 'bare bones' box without an operating system. The big bad evil Microsoft taking away poor Joe's last $43 dollars is, to say the least, not an operable starting point for examining where he ruined his future by being conned out of $43 dollars.
Third, this theoretical world you so non-chalantly massage to 'show' that 'some' people who have bought a Microsoft product would have rather used that money (or the profit component of the product thereof) to set a course in a critical 'juncture' of their lives is, well, ludicrous. What exactly do you base that off? The law of averages? Please.
Finally, I know people who would fight tooth and nail over a $23.05 overcharge on a $600,000 mortgage. Cost vs. value and all that.
He also didn't give a penny to anybody until after the anti-trust trial started. Take that for what it's worth.
He also hadn't turned Microsoft into a litigation powerhouse until Netscape, Sun et.al decided to cajole the Clinton DOJ to put up that circus witch hunt (not that I am denying the antitrust issue). Take that for what it's worth.
I don't think Bill Gates has the capacity for empathy.
Of course not, because your perceptions are shaped by your blind irrational hatred of a corporation. High IQ passtime, that.
Personally I usually have to actually meet people to percieve things like their 'capacity for empathy' - funny borg icons on Slashdot just don't do it for me as opinion shapers.
It never ceases to amaze me how disconnected the slashbots are from reality.
I can assure you that the millions of people who are afflicted by malaria and other 'third world' endemic diseases every year are not interested in whether or not Microsoft's fixing of the 'quirkiness' of Windows XP is going to trickle down to them in order to save their lives or spare them from a life of suffering.
All of the 'Microsoft tax'? The whole ~$43 dollars and change? Surely that hypothesis is going to be more popular here than, say, don't spend $200 on your next day out with the family at the baseball game and instead donate that to malaria research (because we all know that most of us americans constantly think about malaria), but it's no less ludicrous.
OK, I have a beef with this beign called a 'rootkit'; it's really a trojan that can hide itself very well. But anyway. SysInternals has a sort-of 'rootkit' detector called Autoruns that looks at everything that is loaded on to kernel and userspace at boot time. It's extremely useful because it provides an abridged view of what your PC is running when it starts. This is not a 'clik here' end user tool - you have to know what you're looking for. But I used it a few months ago to get rid of a nasty worm on a friend's machine. Might also want to get ProcessExplorer to actually get the cleanup done.
Or... just tell people not to download crap from 'teh interweb'.
Actually, Slashdot was one of the first user moderated and user filled blogs.
Yes, it was. It was also (along with Scoop of Kuro5in) one of the first free content management systems ever released.
The opinion you ridicule here is the considered opinion of your customer's.
It would be, if the Slashdot editors weren't known for editing submissions to make them sound more sensationalistic.
The first and most important is that Forbes claims to be an impartial newpaper.
Forbes has never claimed anything like that. It's not a requirement for running a media outlet, you know?
Another important distinction is that Forbes is paid by Microsoft to publish.
Cite, please.
Most importantly to me, Forbes stories usually violate common sense and personal observations.
And which 'common sense' is that? Yours? Heh. That's a great argument.
Slashdot, on the other hand, usually mirrors content from other sites filled with reproducible research and sensible opinion.
OK, that's ridiculous... but even if it were true, it's still subject to what you consider 'common sense'. Slashdot used to be good. It's turned into nothing but a 24/7 flame fest of epic proportions with dupes and bullshit articles like the 'Microsoft flu' or the 'amazing creatures being dredged up by the tsunami', among thousands of others.
... your customers.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I agree, that sounds like nonsense.
I don't know if you're being facetious - I can look it up for you, if you want.
And how exactly, pray tell, is this any different than Slashdot? A 'blog' (for lack of a better term) owned by OSTG, which makes a living selling products and services that directly compete with Microsoft, yet dedicates terabytes of bandwidth to bullshit-laden half-retarded FUD-infested 'stories' about Microsoft? The Office XML 'scoop' fiasco? The 'Vista virus' or the 'Monad virus' bits? The 'OMG Microsoft employees have the flu' one? And all the hundreds of others throughout the years? And how is it different from Newsforge (again, owned by OSTG), with its pontificating 'editorials' that freely bash Microsoft and other software companies like Sun, filled with vague claims and outright bad journalism? How is Lyons different than CmdrTaco or michael sims or timothy or any of the Slashdot 'editors'? How is the Slashdot collective (which you seem to enjoy being a part of) any different than a virtual 'lynch mob' again?
Everyone has an agenda. You just happen to dislike Forbes'. And of course, it does pay to bash Microsoft sometimes.
BTW, I remember you, you posted something once claiming that anyone who disagreed with you had an 'enslaving mouth' or some such nonsense. What a hoot. I guess we'll take your comments on this matter with a grain of salt, eh?
The vast majority of people who use Windows have no use for a compiler. Windows is a binary-only 'distribution' so it does not require a compiler to install software. Some people think that's better than having to open a console to write 'make & make install', some don't. But if you're wondering about the reason, that's it. Normal people (a demographic which I assume does not include you) don't buy computers so they can 'program them'.
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months now and because I have Synaptic, I could actually care less if it shipped with a compiler or not. See how that works?
If you want to tinker or write software in Windows, there are enough free (beer and whatnot) compilers, interpreters and IDEs out there to shake a stick at.
Extremely slow in North America - I thought it was the pipe coming in here but someone just IM'ed me from somewhere else in the US and they're having the same problem.
Oh well, I can always wait for the DVDs to arrive at the office =)
Actually since I do a lot of development with their C++ compiler and (gasp) vim, for the moment I only want to look at the framework. I don't use VS.NET that much and can't think of a way to use SQL Server at all, but I do want to look at them eventually.
If you're downloading the 2.0 framework & SDK (many people write.NET apps without Visual Studio), you can get them directly from the MSDN.NET developer center.
I'm guessing MSDN is going to be less swamped than FileForum, though the subscriber downloads are extremely slow at the moment as expected.
Well, one of the things that's going to come out (maybe) of this big business push with Linux is the licensing of more hardware specs to companies like Novell and IBM.
If you're Hardware Maker X and some dude in Wisconsin send you an email telling you that you 'suxxorz' because you won't release your specs or at least a driver you'll likely just chuckle and hit 'Del'. When someone from IBM does that on the other hand...
Or maybe just the incentive of having a corp pay for driver development (through bounties or whatnot) might be enough to get the reverse engineering juices flowing.
Oh, I'm not going to contest that at all - PGSQL is a far better database than MySQL. My point however is that MySQL "the toy database" as it were represents a choice that should not go away. Simplistic and crappy as it can be sometimes (we'll silently truncate your char data, no problem!) it also scales very well and it's extremely fast. IOW, if you are aware of the shortcomings you can do some cool things with it. As much as I hate to say it, Slashdot is an example of that to a certain extent.
There's also the size of the community around the product. MySQL's is several magnitudes larger than PGSQL's.
Probably because they looked at MySQL 5.0. It's no Postgres, but it's a big step in the right direction.
On the other hand... MySQL is popular because it 'fits' the development approach many open source projects have embraced for a long time - power, flexibility and simplicity, even with its limitations.
I hope MySQL can still be used the same way so everyone can have the best of both worlds. Sometimes you just need a storage engine for your blog or whatever, you know?
File->Send To->Mail Recipient on Windows XP with the Mail/News application default set to Thunderbird fires up... you guessed it, Thunderbird, instead of Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express (both of which are installed on this machine).
Stupid zealot. "contact your attorney blah blah blah" indeed.
Tell us about it, PyroGx1133. Did the Microsoft Special Forces raid your village and kill your family back when you lived among the hill people of the north?
Or you could just source mswin.vim (typically found under $VIMRUNTIME) and essentially have a MS-style keymap emulation. Put it in your ~/.vimrc, and make sure you include the 'behave mswin' line before you source it.
Looks like the Slashdork crew needs to enroll in the 12-step Googleholics Program for Frustrated Webmasters. Not only are there three Google stories in the front page, this one also happens to be a dupe. Or maybe a trupe.
Now that they've migrated to CSS after seven years maybe they should rename the site as well. Maybe Gooshdot.org is not taken.
Maybe the next version will ship with a sane list of enabled sources in/etc/apt/sources.list so I won't have to fiddle with Synaptic just to get vim-gtk and whatnot installed. Oh, and maybe I'll get a warning from the update manager about critical patches available when I first enable it, not three days later. To this moment I don't know what I did to see the updates - running apt-get manually did nothing. I ran Firefox 1.02 for like two days before I saw the icon on the GNOME tray.
Having said that, I like Ubuntu because like Knoppix it rocks at detecting and setting up hardware. I've never installed a distro that got everything right, but 5.04 did. I just had to fiddle a bit with the Xorg config file to get my LCD up to 1600x1200.
Slashdot Mirror
Well here's a big fat FUCK YOU BACK, if nothing else to prove that things are fucked up everywhere and you can all stick your "oh but vee are so much bettar than you amerikans" mantra bullshit.
Mod me down, I just had to vent after seeing a few of those flamewars in previous articles about US laws.
Think of open source and free software - in a sense it spreads the same ways.
Lactation can't be far behind.
First, the advertising 'tactics' you mention in relation to charities ('for the price of a cup of coffee a day...') are not to be 'felled for', they play to people's sense of cost vs. value. It is the same strategy used by retailers - research has consistently proven that people will buy something for $29.99 but will stay away from the same item priced at $30.00. And I wouldn't call them 'gimmicks' - these people are not selling kitchen knives or ab cruncher machines. Some of them do save lives with $1 a day, because that's what billions of people subsist on all over the world. Try visiting Guatemala or Kenya one of these days.
Second, Joe Medical does not reach the breaking point by dropping $600 on a brand new PC from Gateway, of which $43 is the 'Microsoft tax'. Further, your argument (if I was to actually take it seriously) in this sense is easily derailed by simply buying a 'bare bones' box without an operating system. The big bad evil Microsoft taking away poor Joe's last $43 dollars is, to say the least, not an operable starting point for examining where he ruined his future by being conned out of $43 dollars.
Third, this theoretical world you so non-chalantly massage to 'show' that 'some' people who have bought a Microsoft product would have rather used that money (or the profit component of the product thereof) to set a course in a critical 'juncture' of their lives is, well, ludicrous. What exactly do you base that off? The law of averages? Please.
Finally, I know people who would fight tooth and nail over a $23.05 overcharge on a $600,000 mortgage. Cost vs. value and all that.
He also hadn't turned Microsoft into a litigation powerhouse until Netscape, Sun et.al decided to cajole the Clinton DOJ to put up that circus witch hunt (not that I am denying the antitrust issue). Take that for what it's worth.
I don't think Bill Gates has the capacity for empathy.
Of course not, because your perceptions are shaped by your blind irrational hatred of a corporation. High IQ passtime, that.
Personally I usually have to actually meet people to percieve things like their 'capacity for empathy' - funny borg icons on Slashdot just don't do it for me as opinion shapers.
I can assure you that the millions of people who are afflicted by malaria and other 'third world' endemic diseases every year are not interested in whether or not Microsoft's fixing of the 'quirkiness' of Windows XP is going to trickle down to them in order to save their lives or spare them from a life of suffering.
All of the 'Microsoft tax'? The whole ~$43 dollars and change? Surely that hypothesis is going to be more popular here than, say, don't spend $200 on your next day out with the family at the baseball game and instead donate that to malaria research (because we all know that most of us americans constantly think about malaria), but it's no less ludicrous.
Are you talking about the previous version? This new one is far more comprehensible - it even covers TCP providers. I think it's quite complete.
Or... just tell people not to download crap from 'teh interweb'.
Well, since you (obviously) didn't reply, and given that you stupidly decided to call my bluff, here you go.
Of course I remembered it because I replied and recommended you seek professional help. My advice stands.
Yes, it was. It was also (along with Scoop of Kuro5in) one of the first free content management systems ever released.
The opinion you ridicule here is the considered opinion of your customer's.
It would be, if the Slashdot editors weren't known for editing submissions to make them sound more sensationalistic.
The first and most important is that Forbes claims to be an impartial newpaper.
Forbes has never claimed anything like that. It's not a requirement for running a media outlet, you know?
Another important distinction is that Forbes is paid by Microsoft to publish.
Cite, please.
Most importantly to me, Forbes stories usually violate common sense and personal observations.
And which 'common sense' is that? Yours? Heh. That's a great argument.
Slashdot, on the other hand, usually mirrors content from other sites filled with reproducible research and sensible opinion.
OK, that's ridiculous... but even if it were true, it's still subject to what you consider 'common sense'. Slashdot used to be good. It's turned into nothing but a 24/7 flame fest of epic proportions with dupes and bullshit articles like the 'Microsoft flu' or the 'amazing creatures being dredged up by the tsunami', among thousands of others.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I agree, that sounds like nonsense.
I don't know if you're being facetious - I can look it up for you, if you want.
Everyone has an agenda. You just happen to dislike Forbes'. And of course, it does pay to bash Microsoft sometimes.
BTW, I remember you, you posted something once claiming that anyone who disagreed with you had an 'enslaving mouth' or some such nonsense. What a hoot. I guess we'll take your comments on this matter with a grain of salt, eh?
Yay, that's not bad at all. It must be my pipe then. Sigh.
I've been using Ubuntu for a few months now and because I have Synaptic, I could actually care less if it shipped with a compiler or not. See how that works?
If you want to tinker or write software in Windows, there are enough free (beer and whatnot) compilers, interpreters and IDEs out there to shake a stick at.
Oh well, I can always wait for the DVDs to arrive at the office =)
Actually since I do a lot of development with their C++ compiler and (gasp) vim, for the moment I only want to look at the framework. I don't use VS.NET that much and can't think of a way to use SQL Server at all, but I do want to look at them eventually.
I'm guessing MSDN is going to be less swamped than FileForum, though the subscriber downloads are extremely slow at the moment as expected.
If you're Hardware Maker X and some dude in Wisconsin send you an email telling you that you 'suxxorz' because you won't release your specs or at least a driver you'll likely just chuckle and hit 'Del'. When someone from IBM does that on the other hand...
Or maybe just the incentive of having a corp pay for driver development (through bounties or whatnot) might be enough to get the reverse engineering juices flowing.
There's also the size of the community around the product. MySQL's is several magnitudes larger than PGSQL's.
On the other hand... MySQL is popular because it 'fits' the development approach many open source projects have embraced for a long time - power, flexibility and simplicity, even with its limitations.
I hope MySQL can still be used the same way so everyone can have the best of both worlds. Sometimes you just need a storage engine for your blog or whatever, you know?
Stupid zealot. "contact your attorney blah blah blah" indeed.
Looks like there's a landerjacking in progress up there!
Tell us about it, PyroGx1133. Did the Microsoft Special Forces raid your village and kill your family back when you lived among the hill people of the north?
Or you could just source mswin.vim (typically found under $VIMRUNTIME) and essentially have a MS-style keymap emulation. Put it in your ~/.vimrc, and make sure you include the 'behave mswin' line before you source it.
Now that they've migrated to CSS after seven years maybe they should rename the site as well. Maybe Gooshdot.org is not taken.
Having said that, I like Ubuntu because like Knoppix it rocks at detecting and setting up hardware. I've never installed a distro that got everything right, but 5.04 did. I just had to fiddle a bit with the Xorg config file to get my LCD up to 1600x1200.