There _IS NO SUCH THING_ as Java 6. It is Java 1.6.0. Look at the software source code and package names, and try typing 'java -version" at the command line.
Sun has been confusing and manipulating software names for years, and I wish they'd stopped back with Solaris and SunOS.
Make my life as a lifelong technologist: provide technical competence in management, with knowledge to help you explain things to me and to tell when I'm seriously confused.
So it's still powerfully patent and copyright encumbered: if this blog turns out to be correct, Microsoft will have merely freed up one hand of the prisoner so they can scratch their nose, but not do anything really useful like unlock the other chains.
And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world, and the lines between religion, mind, and reality became increasingly blurred. I highly recommend it to people who only ever say "Blade Runner" and have no idea of the very different story that it was connected with.
Neuromancer was wonderful, and compelling, and intriguing. But it was nearly "Megabytes and sorcery" in the kind of magical spellcasting by mystical, incomprehensible beings who had to be channeled, rather than having to actually master definable rules about reality that is core to a lot of hard science fiction.
I'm afraid that we're seeing a lot of stories on Slashdot lately that are "look, I just got to my sophomore year and read this cool story! I bet it's completely new!" And a bunch of us older, more soldering iron burned geeks are laughing, and hopefully remembering when we were so excited. Let's be nice to the youngsters, and help them see where this stuff really came from.
It can be used against "you must give Microsoft all your master private keys" approaches, such as Palladium turned out to be. (It was later renamed Trusted Computing, and has turned out to have quite a few profound flaws.)
Sadly. You're correct in many cases: packaging over content is why a lot of truly frightening snack foods remain on store shelves. (What _are_ Combos, anyway? Did anyone ever actually want them?)
However, I suspect that you underestimate the quality of your actual content, especially compared to some of the recent business plans I've seen colleagues write. You seem coherent and actually make your point, and may raise the average Slashdot quality significantly.
Oh, I've no issue with _your_ use of a simple, available tool. Netscape also produced clean HTML, not the "let's HTML tag every character independently with its own font information so it looks like Microsoft Word" format that many tools produce when they output in HTML. (Microsoft Office is amazingly bad about this.)
And the rest of us used Emacs, just to get the indenting consistent and make sure we closed our parentheses correctly. But the amount of time people waste on page breaking where they want, font selection, "just so" footnote standards, etc. is a sign of people who don't have anything to actually say.
The exception is people who make visual illusion picture books. Other than that, let's get over our "web designer", IDE driven fascination with layout, and use a straightforward plain text format. Then get on with writing something worth reading, not something to be treasured for its footnote layout.
And that's why he's still playing innocent. If he coughs up the rest of the money, his wife, his family, and his lawyers suddenly have to scrounge for a living like honest people.
He needs his family to keep the money out of the hands of the cops, and his lawyers to keep he family clear of the cops as well. Both of those groups need Bernie to keep his mouth closed abou the remaining money. There is no surprise that they're all keeping quiet about the rest of the money.
Deadwood is a problem. I've been dealing with some other nation's IT personnel lately, and some are amazed at our lack of paperwork. Others are amazed at our complete inefficiency at it. Others don't understand why a little bit of modest bribery isn't in play, and remain shocked that I won't take their "gifts".
Might I ask what federal group you worked for? The EPA, the FDA, the ATF, the DEA, and the SEC are also clearly subject to massive political whims. And my goodness, the deadwood in the Department of Education is frightening indeed.
It doesn't cover brother-sister marriage because any farmer or competent biologist can tell you that leads to high risks of inbred genetic problems running rampant through a population, like conservatism blossomed into neo-conservativism in the Bush family.
It matches many of my observations in both the federal bureaucratic world and larger private industries. CEO's with "vision" distort the entire outlook of their companies, as do political leaders, in positive and negative ways. The "business friendliness" of many recent presidents is a problem in many fields.
Apparently so. And to counter another poster, I attended both public and private schools, depending on various family circumstances. The private schools could _kick out_ the worst students, and dump them on the public schools to deal with. There were occasions where the private schools could also take on horrible cases that the public schools could not hope to handle properly: clergy who are willing to box a child's ears instead of public school teachers afraid to defend themselves were something I learned to applaud for the worst behavioral cases.
No, the best teachers really weren't the worst students. That's a silly idea.
The "worst behaved" students of my experience, and ossibly yours, are dead, massively crippled by their own foolishness, in jail, dying of AIDS or lung cancer, homeless, etc. Being homicidal, fundamentally stupid, a slut of any gender or orientation, constantly stoned, or spoiled does not help one as a teacher.
There are kinds of behaviors that are frowned on by authorities, for lots of understandable reasons, but help people be leaders or teachers. Curiousity, interest in others, love of particular types of knowledge, etc. can all hinder someone in school but pay off for teachers, true.
The technical definition of a solid is a bit more fascinating. Liquids are fluid: they deform, under pressure, and do not retain the deformed state when the pressure is removed or altered. It's also possible to model the solid as having stable molecular layouts: molecules do not significantly exchange positions within the medium, they remain linked by various forces to the molecules around them.
The differences between irregular solids and crystals is another subject. It's fascinating stuff to study.
In the IT world, if you're good with Linux, you do have jobs waiting in the EU. I'm still getting recruiters calling from there because I put my names in a few jobhunting sites, for political and personal reasons. (George Bush and Iraq scared me a lot. So did medical insurance, as I get older, with a family history of some serious chronic medical problems.) If you have cross-platform skills, or familiarity with cross-platform work and obscure skills, it's even better.
I took the recruiters from Sweden pretty seriously: the money was good, the government seemed reasonable, but my workplace had too much of my own work finally coming into play and too many people I didn't want to leave behind, and it was to support a technology that I would have been urging them to migrate away from. And if you do go to Europe as a contractor, be prepared to line up your paperwork to become incorporated: it makes a big difference at tax time if you're a sole person or working for a very small company.
Takek that, you pastamancer! Back at you, you stealer of my accordion!
Check out http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/ it's free to play, fiscal contributions get you some fun ingame widgets, it's popular among smart children with a sense of humor, it's plain web based without fancy Java or flash reuirements, and it keeps my friends able to play on their modest systems so they don't beg me for my hardcore system while I'm playing the latest shooters.
You need a 'CAT5 of Nine Tails'. Google it: I've seen them made with usable sets of labeled connectors and adapters. on the ends to serve as an amusing collection of adapters, actually packed in a toolbox, and amusing as heck to whip out when a client had lost the appropriate adapter to go from their funky 3Com serial jack to normal laptop serial port, or needed a crossover cable to tie two machines directly together without a switch back in the pre-GigE days when network ports became hermaphroditic.
Whether it's bundled with the OS or a separate download is completely irrelevant to who paid for it. Microsoft did: they fund the websites for download, they take the support calls, they paid the programmers who wrote the OS. Where did the money come from for that? Windows sales and Microsft Office sales, that fund the company's R&D.
I don't object to Microsoft doing it themselves and putting most of the anti-virus people out of business: it's one of the things Microsoft's funds should have been used for, from day one in development and through every release and service pack. And because of Microsoft's design decisions, anti-virus tools have to be incredibly invasive to detect and disable known vulnerabilities, and that kind of work is expensive.
Just don't mistake it as "free" or "unpaid for". Microsoft has repeatedly been convicted of abusing its monopoly position to force users to have tools they would prefer other versions of, and forced vendors not to pre-install those other tools, and deliberately used their funding from their core business to replace competitive products with de facto (and often inferior) built-in products as a deliberate anti-competitive move. (Remember, Microsoft _lost_ cases about interfering with Netscape this way.)
Oh, DC milli-Amps at 12 Volts at the right places will kill you quite, quite dead. (Directly through your brain or your heart, for example.)
What happens when we touch live electricity depends massively on the voltage at the other side of our body, such as our soaking wet feet or our dry, hands touch the other wire. The impedance or resistance we present to the load, and where that minimum impedance path runs on or thrugh our bodies, makes a huge difference (from my experience with server electrical safety). It's why we have "ground fault interrupters" in outlets, to detect if someone is acting as a connection to the ground and letting current go through where it shouldn't, and why system cases are supposed to be thoroughly, thoroughly grounded so if you touch the box, it's safe even if you touch another grounded object.
It's not merely the code. It's the historical approach to security as an after-the-fact addition to features like auto-run of inserted CD's or media, auto-open of downloads, auto-conceal of filename extensions, auto-interpret of strange URL's into something more sensible looking but more dangerous to the user, more auto-display of web content of strange new proprietary and poorly tested formats, etc.
Anti-virus cannot hope to fix this anymore than buckets can hope to fix a leaky roof.
Excuse me, but that's the one in _NT_. NT is, in many ways, VMS rewritten by David Cutler and his software pirates from DEC, so I'm not surprised it has a not-merely-FreeBSD TCP stack. There was also another company back then selling TCP stacks which I used at the time, FTP software, which collapsed in various ways when Microsoft included a free TCP stack for Windows 3.11b and then Win98. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software)
Looking at the Wikipedia for that company, I see Roxanne van Bokkolen, nee Ritchie. Why is that name familiar? Ohhh, my: (http://tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_097/TECH_V097_S0241_P012.pdf). I had a chat with a colleague about this, during the dotcom era. It apparently explained a lot about the divorce among the founders, and was used as during a presentation as an example of what dotcom companies should avoid.
Yes. They are. The cost is folded into that of Windows itself.
Please review the findings _against_ Microsoft in the US Department of Justice cases for their monopoly based anti-competitive behavior against Netscape, by folding the cost of browsers into the included version of Internet Explorer, proprietizing it, and using their monopoly power to prevent the installation or use of other browsers.
And please don't assume that because the ocst is included in the basic OS cost, that they are not charging for it. They're merely, once again, charging _all_ customers for software that they might otherwise buy from competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
There _IS NO SUCH THING_ as Java 6. It is Java 1.6.0. Look at the software source code and package names, and try typing 'java -version" at the command line.
Sun has been confusing and manipulating software names for years, and I wish they'd stopped back with Solaris and SunOS.
Make my life as a lifelong technologist: provide technical competence in management, with knowledge to help you explain things to me and to tell when I'm seriously confused.
So it's still powerfully patent and copyright encumbered: if this blog turns out to be correct, Microsoft will have merely freed up one hand of the prisoner so they can scratch their nose, but not do anything really useful like unlock the other chains.
Such pirates have a serious tendency to get shot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/africa/13pirates.html
And don't forget Philp K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", where people communed with animal spirits in a virtual world, and the lines between religion, mind, and reality became increasingly blurred. I highly recommend it to people who only ever say "Blade Runner" and have no idea of the very different story that it was connected with. Neuromancer was wonderful, and compelling, and intriguing. But it was nearly "Megabytes and sorcery" in the kind of magical spellcasting by mystical, incomprehensible beings who had to be channeled, rather than having to actually master definable rules about reality that is core to a lot of hard science fiction. I'm afraid that we're seeing a lot of stories on Slashdot lately that are "look, I just got to my sophomore year and read this cool story! I bet it's completely new!" And a bunch of us older, more soldering iron burned geeks are laughing, and hopefully remembering when we were so excited. Let's be nice to the youngsters, and help them see where this stuff really came from.
It can be used against "you must give Microsoft all your master private keys" approaches, such as Palladium turned out to be. (It was later renamed Trusted Computing, and has turned out to have quite a few profound flaws.)
Sadly. You're correct in many cases: packaging over content is why a lot of truly frightening snack foods remain on store shelves. (What _are_ Combos, anyway? Did anyone ever actually want them?)
However, I suspect that you underestimate the quality of your actual content, especially compared to some of the recent business plans I've seen colleagues write. You seem coherent and actually make your point, and may raise the average Slashdot quality significantly.
Oh, I've no issue with _your_ use of a simple, available tool. Netscape also produced clean HTML, not the "let's HTML tag every character independently with its own font information so it looks like Microsoft Word" format that many tools produce when they output in HTML. (Microsoft Office is amazingly bad about this.)
And the rest of us used Emacs, just to get the indenting consistent and make sure we closed our parentheses correctly. But the amount of time people waste on page breaking where they want, font selection, "just so" footnote standards, etc. is a sign of people who don't have anything to actually say.
The exception is people who make visual illusion picture books. Other than that, let's get over our "web designer", IDE driven fascination with layout, and use a straightforward plain text format. Then get on with writing something worth reading, not something to be treasured for its footnote layout.
And that's why he's still playing innocent. If he coughs up the rest of the money, his wife, his family, and his lawyers suddenly have to scrounge for a living like honest people.
He needs his family to keep the money out of the hands of the cops, and his lawyers to keep he family clear of the cops as well. Both of those groups need Bernie to keep his mouth closed abou the remaining money. There is no surprise that they're all keeping quiet about the rest of the money.
Deadwood is a problem. I've been dealing with some other nation's IT personnel lately, and some are amazed at our lack of paperwork. Others are amazed at our complete inefficiency at it. Others don't understand why a little bit of modest bribery isn't in play, and remain shocked that I won't take their "gifts".
Might I ask what federal group you worked for? The EPA, the FDA, the ATF, the DEA, and the SEC are also clearly subject to massive political whims. And my goodness, the deadwood in the Department of Education is frightening indeed.
It doesn't cover brother-sister marriage because any farmer or competent biologist can tell you that leads to high risks of inbred genetic problems running rampant through a population, like conservatism blossomed into neo-conservativism in the Bush family.
It matches many of my observations in both the federal bureaucratic world and larger private industries. CEO's with "vision" distort the entire outlook of their companies, as do political leaders, in positive and negative ways. The "business friendliness" of many recent presidents is a problem in many fields.
Apparently so. And to counter another poster, I attended both public and private schools, depending on various family circumstances. The private schools could _kick out_ the worst students, and dump them on the public schools to deal with. There were occasions where the private schools could also take on horrible cases that the public schools could not hope to handle properly: clergy who are willing to box a child's ears instead of public school teachers afraid to defend themselves were something I learned to applaud for the worst behavioral cases.
No, the best teachers really weren't the worst students. That's a silly idea.
The "worst behaved" students of my experience, and ossibly yours, are dead, massively crippled by their own foolishness, in jail, dying of AIDS or lung cancer, homeless, etc. Being homicidal, fundamentally stupid, a slut of any gender or orientation, constantly stoned, or spoiled does not help one as a teacher.
There are kinds of behaviors that are frowned on by authorities, for lots of understandable reasons, but help people be leaders or teachers. Curiousity, interest in others, love of particular types of knowledge, etc. can all hinder someone in school but pay off for teachers, true.
The technical definition of a solid is a bit more fascinating. Liquids are fluid: they deform, under pressure, and do not retain the deformed state when the pressure is removed or altered. It's also possible to model the solid as having stable molecular layouts: molecules do not significantly exchange positions within the medium, they remain linked by various forces to the molecules around them.
The differences between irregular solids and crystals is another subject. It's fascinating stuff to study.
In the IT world, if you're good with Linux, you do have jobs waiting in the EU. I'm still getting recruiters calling from there because I put my names in a few jobhunting sites, for political and personal reasons. (George Bush and Iraq scared me a lot. So did medical insurance, as I get older, with a family history of some serious chronic medical problems.) If you have cross-platform skills, or familiarity with cross-platform work and obscure skills, it's even better.
I took the recruiters from Sweden pretty seriously: the money was good, the government seemed reasonable, but my workplace had too much of my own work finally coming into play and too many people I didn't want to leave behind, and it was to support a technology that I would have been urging them to migrate away from. And if you do go to Europe as a contractor, be prepared to line up your paperwork to become incorporated: it makes a big difference at tax time if you're a sole person or working for a very small company.
Takek that, you pastamancer! Back at you, you stealer of my accordion!
Check out http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/ it's free to play, fiscal contributions get you some fun ingame widgets, it's popular among smart children with a sense of humor, it's plain web based without fancy Java or flash reuirements, and it keeps my friends able to play on their modest systems so they don't beg me for my hardcore system while I'm playing the latest shooters.
It's what web-based gaming _should_ be.
You need a 'CAT5 of Nine Tails'. Google it: I've seen them made with usable sets of labeled connectors and adapters. on the ends to serve as an amusing collection of adapters, actually packed in a toolbox, and amusing as heck to whip out when a client had lost the appropriate adapter to go from their funky 3Com serial jack to normal laptop serial port, or needed a crossover cable to tie two machines directly together without a switch back in the pre-GigE days when network ports became hermaphroditic.
Whether it's bundled with the OS or a separate download is completely irrelevant to who paid for it. Microsoft did: they fund the websites for download, they take the support calls, they paid the programmers who wrote the OS. Where did the money come from for that? Windows sales and Microsft Office sales, that fund the company's R&D.
I don't object to Microsoft doing it themselves and putting most of the anti-virus people out of business: it's one of the things Microsoft's funds should have been used for, from day one in development and through every release and service pack. And because of Microsoft's design decisions, anti-virus tools have to be incredibly invasive to detect and disable known vulnerabilities, and that kind of work is expensive.
Just don't mistake it as "free" or "unpaid for". Microsoft has repeatedly been convicted of abusing its monopoly position to force users to have tools they would prefer other versions of, and forced vendors not to pre-install those other tools, and deliberately used their funding from their core business to replace competitive products with de facto (and often inferior) built-in products as a deliberate anti-competitive move. (Remember, Microsoft _lost_ cases about interfering with Netscape this way.)
Oh, DC milli-Amps at 12 Volts at the right places will kill you quite, quite dead. (Directly through your brain or your heart, for example.) What happens when we touch live electricity depends massively on the voltage at the other side of our body, such as our soaking wet feet or our dry, hands touch the other wire. The impedance or resistance we present to the load, and where that minimum impedance path runs on or thrugh our bodies, makes a huge difference (from my experience with server electrical safety). It's why we have "ground fault interrupters" in outlets, to detect if someone is acting as a connection to the ground and letting current go through where it shouldn't, and why system cases are supposed to be thoroughly, thoroughly grounded so if you touch the box, it's safe even if you touch another grounded object.
Then you're not doing it right. Nothing like a nice clean wife's laptop for making a day start nicely.
It's not merely the code. It's the historical approach to security as an after-the-fact addition to features like auto-run of inserted CD's or media, auto-open of downloads, auto-conceal of filename extensions, auto-interpret of strange URL's into something more sensible looking but more dangerous to the user, more auto-display of web content of strange new proprietary and poorly tested formats, etc.
Anti-virus cannot hope to fix this anymore than buckets can hope to fix a leaky roof.
Excuse me, but that's the one in _NT_. NT is, in many ways, VMS rewritten by David Cutler and his software pirates from DEC, so I'm not surprised it has a not-merely-FreeBSD TCP stack. There was also another company back then selling TCP stacks which I used at the time, FTP software, which collapsed in various ways when Microsoft included a free TCP stack for Windows 3.11b and then Win98. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTP_Software)
Looking at the Wikipedia for that company, I see Roxanne van Bokkolen, nee Ritchie. Why is that name familiar? Ohhh, my: (http://tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_097/TECH_V097_S0241_P012.pdf). I had a chat with a colleague about this, during the dotcom era. It apparently explained a lot about the divorce among the founders, and was used as during a presentation as an example of what dotcom companies should avoid.
Yes. They are. The cost is folded into that of Windows itself.
Please review the findings _against_ Microsoft in the US Department of Justice cases for their monopoly based anti-competitive behavior against Netscape, by folding the cost of browsers into the included version of Internet Explorer, proprietizing it, and using their monopoly power to prevent the installation or use of other browsers.
And please don't assume that because the ocst is included in the basic OS cost, that they are not charging for it. They're merely, once again, charging _all_ customers for software that they might otherwise buy from competitors.