I'm not so sure. While it's true that Norton/Symantec Anti-Virus is one of Symantec's big packages, it's not the only software they sell. Their recent acquisition of PowerQuest gave them all that software, including Partition Magic. They have a very active Ghost division, a division that while it might not be quite as profitable as AV, likely makes a fair bit. They've also got several other products like spam/virus filtering. The lists of their Home, Small Business, and Enterprise products are pretty large. If Symantec did completely close down it's AV division, while it might hurt the company for a while and cause a number of jobs to be cut, they have plenty of other products available to keep on going, at least long enough to re-group and put their focus someplace else.
On another topic, these issues are interesting. It's not so much that Microsoft is trying to bully Symantec out of business as it seems they are really trying to improve the view most people have on the security of Windows. XP SP2 gave users a "free" firewall which has drastically cut down the spread of worms and the like. It only seems logical that the next logical step in securing an OS is to control and protect the content already on the system, namely with an Anti-Virus agent.
You could look at this as saying that the reason that Symantec and others were able to sell AV and firewalls in the first place was because Microsoft was deficient in OS security. Now that they're catching up with it, any specialized companies that took advantage of this niche are going to hurt unless they can focus on something else. "Diversified interests" applies to large companies just as it does to personal portfolios.
Yes, it sucks for these companies, but it's not the same thing as if Microsoft started offering Office free with Windows.
Exactly. I can't see how this could be much of a surprise to anyone. However if Microsoft said they were going to build Office for Linux, then that would warrant some surprise and an article on/.
Why on Earth would Microsoft develop their main cash cow for an operating system they'd just assume quietly go away? Not only would they lose money one it, but they'd be showing support for Linux in a way that they're not ready to do (yet).
It's kind of too bad that they won't release Office for Linux because it would probably bolster the business and consumer desktop market shares. Honestly (aside from any closed-document arguments), MS Office is the best office suite available right now. It's incredibly powerful (think Excel if nothing else), and very intuitive. Open Office is nice, but still not in the same park as Office. Give it some time though; as Linux grows in popularity, Microsoft will be forced to start paying it this sort of attention.
Red vs Blue is a machinima series done by some fans of Halo. Been going on for several years, won some awards, and become the defacto standard to compare new machinima series to.
It's actually got some very funny parts, especially if you're familiar with Halo.
I agree with what you're saying, though I usually am less harsh in my time wasting. Often I'll come up with something that makes them feel foolish for calling me. It might not be very nice, but I have been known to berate them for calling and trying to sell home exercise equipment to "a paraplegic cripple". It's fun to see them try to explain their way out of that.
In addition it's fun to play the Hold game. When they ask for somebody or something, I'll ask them to wait for me to find them and then put them on hold (my phone even played music) and go back to whatever it was I'm doing. The record holder (pun intended) is 1 hour and 25 minutes. I guess he liked the classic 80's songs playing...
I try to waste as much of the company's money as possible by wasting their time and resources. At the same time I feel bad taking out my annoyance on the employees because it's very possible that they are at the only job available to them at the moment. Being a telemarketer doesn't require much in the way of skills, but it is better than other skill-less opportunities like fast food.
Those guys at mirrors.playboy.com have to be careful.
For anyone that missed the jest, check out mirrors.playboy.com (it is WS). One of my favorite places to suggest when somebody asks where they should grab one of a few Linux distros. It's also a handy way to explain to your boss why you were visiting the playboy.com domain.
That and hey! When you support Playboy, you're supporting Linux! Go Tux! (He just got more than most Slashdotters I'm afraid...:)
Well, what other P2P programs are there? This one is dead.
Take a look at Shareaza (and the just-released v2.2). Free, OSS, and supports Gnutella, Gnutella2, and eDonkey networks. Also supports the Bittorrent protocol.
It's actually quite a good product. I use it on those rare occasions where I get the sudden urge to do something evil.
I think the reason some Funny posts get modded Insightful, Informative, Whatever is because starting sometime ago Funny mods no longer improve your karma. Thus to counteract, if a post already has a few Funny mods, a moderator might mod it Informative to boost the poster's karma a bit.
Makes some sense to me. After all, Funny comments in/. stories are most of the reason I read comments. A real knee-slapper deservers a bit of karma methinks:)
The issue is always one of compute versus bandwidth.
It's not just bandwidth; Sun's president is dead wrong on so many levels.
Until mobile phones come with a screen capable of what modern LCDs and CRTs are capable of, people will not just blindly (pun intended) give up their PC monitor in favor of a tiny little screen.
Mobile phones don't have the ability to do anything but view a few web pages. They simply can't (and won't for quite some time) hold a candle to a PC's computing and memory resources.
The Internet isn't the end-all when it comes to computing. People want to be able to install and run any number of small programs and applications. They want complete control over their computing environment, and they don't want that environment to depend completely on external services which are completely out of their control. If the Internet connection into my apartament goes down (as is the case all too often unfortunately), I can still play TriPeaks. If Google's datacenter blows up, I can still type and print out a letter.
That brings up peripheals. There's a ton of small appliances that people use in conjunction with their PC. Printers, scanners, CD/DVD burners, sound cards, external storage, etc. These all need a place to connect to and enough processing power to work together and interact with whatever mainframe you might use over the Internet.
I could show some other examples, but it really boils down to this: The Internet and personal computing are NOT mutually exclusive. In order to use the Internet you need a portal to it via a connected device. Phones can do this, but they don't provide the means to work on with Internet apps easily or for extended periods of time. A PC provides ease and comfort while using the Internet in addition to a platform for performing other tasks where as Web solution isn't ideal. You won't find artists switching to GPhotoShop, a civil engineer switching to GAutoCAD, or a film producer switching to G3DStudioMax.
Personal computers are here to stay. Their form and HIDs may change to suit new technologies, but they won't disappear. Take my word for it.
Flamebait? No, no. Slashdot is the perfect place to post this. In fact, I'd be surprised if the folks at Boston didn't submit it themselves. After all:
3. Get 50 ad-ridden pages semi-related to scifi posted to a tech site with almost a million readers. 2. ??? 1. Profit!
You're saying exactly what I've thought since the first time I used the GMail interface. It's not a huge deal, but being forced to use the drop-down box every time I want to delete an email is a pain. I've actually sent the suggestion of creating a Delete button to Google a few times, but with no noticable results.
As to the fools that really think you suddenly need to keep everything that's ever been sent to you just because you have 2.5GB of space, think again. I get plenty of mail that's either pure garbage (spam or forwards from Grandma), or is just such that I *know* it's a waste to keep it. It's the same with drivespace on your desktop. Suddenly computers are shipping with 160GB hard drives so users never worry about freeing up some space, and some software developers are becoming lazy when it comes to the size of their applications.
Heck, under Windows XP, System Restore will use 12% of the total capacity of the drive by default. That's almost 20GB on the aforementioned 160GB drive. Internet Explorer uses (again by default) about 10% of the capacity of the drive for the browser cache. Not only is this insane from simply a real estate point of view, but it's technically flawed as well. I've read (and know from experience) that once IE hits more than about 200MB of cache it starts becoming slow and problematic.
Google is giving away over 2.5GB of free space for email because they know that 90% of their users will never go over 200MB and 99.9% will stay under 500MB. It's an advertising stunt, and I'd just love to see what would happen if suddenly a large number of their users filled their GMail accounts on purpose. I bet Western Digital's stock would go up...
That's alright. For those using a unsupported operating system, the **AA will send you a device to help you remove all pirated material on your computer and iPod.
If you want to be doubly sure though, you can send your computer away and they'll run it through their automagic de-pirater device.
Either way, you're sure to be safe from those evil pirated files!
Taco figured why waste money on a development server or two when you can just develop it right on the live servers. "What they hell," he said. "It'll give those losers something to whine about. We'll get it right in a few days, and until then, screw them."
Though I think I like the mix of Arial and Times New Roman text. It takes me back to 1995.
A) If you're a mac user, or you have access to a mac, or you purchased the dual disc, you should have no problems... simply import the songs the same way as you always do.
Not trying to Mac-bash, but having only about 3% of the consumer market share does have it's advantages.
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms. Why spend an equal amount of money for copy protection that's only going to affect 3% of your consumers vs 95%?
That said, the whole DMCA side of this is plain stupid. Microsoft designed Windows (this really *is* a feature:) so that you could bypass pesky autorun software by holding the SHIFT key (or just turning off on a per-drive basis). It's not a secret. Maybe Sony should sue Microsoft for not giving them a good way to prohibit users from exercising their fair use rights. That's a Slashdot article I want too see; Microsoft getting sued (yay!) but by Sony because they want strict media access control (boo!).
Whats the point of putting such protection on your music CDs when all you're going to do is turn around and post a link on your site about how to bypass it.
RTFA.
The band had no voice in the matter. Sony is their label and chose to put the protection on the disc, whether the band wanted it on or not. Switchfoot posted the info on bypassing it because it was pissing off a lot of their fans and that's not something most (read: not Metallica) bands want. In addition, they probably wanted to piss off Sony a little bit for abusing the power that labels have come to know and love.
Bah. Most of these places just have an automated process that pulls from "authoritive" RSS feeds and adds it to their own website. There's not some guy at all these news sites that reads each thing and posts it.
The Internet and RSS: Spreading "news" at the speed of BS.
I still don't understand this mentality. I used to run Win2000 as well and was fairly skeptical when XP came out. It was six months before I installed it on another system I had ("No way I'm going to screw my good Win2000 install with that XPee stuff!").
I use XP now, and have Vista Beta 1 installed on my laptop. It's not that I've started to love the "M$ upgrade cycle", rather I've discovered that as long as Microsoft stays with the NT kernel and doesn't go changing a lot of core system stuff for the worse, odds are the OS will be better.
Why do you stay with 2000? If it was simply price, then that's your choice, but if it's not is there something in XP that you found so offensive you didn't want to switch? Here's what I found when I switched to XP: A Win2000 system with improved multimedia ability, an expanded native driver database, and better support for legacy software and games.
If the eye candy that was added to XP annoys you, you can turn it off. If some newer features like System Restore annoy you, you can turn it off. If other added features like Auto Update annoy you, you can turn it off. Essentially you can make XP just like 2000 except for the added support for the things I listed above. Windows 2000 is technically "Windows NT 5.0". Windows XP is technically "Windows NT 5.1". This (accurately) implies that XP is a minor update to Windows 2000, and also explains the short time between the release of 2000 (1999) and XP (2001). Vista is "Windows NT 6.0" showing a major update.
I won't switch to Vista right away, but I will install and try it out on a system other than my primary desktop. By the time an MS OS reaches it's first Service Pack, it's a very good bet that the big bugs in the RTM version have been ironed out. Simply upgrading to a newer OS doesn't mean you're somehow stuck in some cycle from then on.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I did forget about Veritas and VMWare. Those are massive products.
Good point.
...it may very well be game over for Symantec.
I'm not so sure. While it's true that Norton/Symantec Anti-Virus is one of Symantec's big packages, it's not the only software they sell. Their recent acquisition of PowerQuest gave them all that software, including Partition Magic. They have a very active Ghost division, a division that while it might not be quite as profitable as AV, likely makes a fair bit. They've also got several other products like spam/virus filtering. The lists of their Home, Small Business, and Enterprise products are pretty large. If Symantec did completely close down it's AV division, while it might hurt the company for a while and cause a number of jobs to be cut, they have plenty of other products available to keep on going, at least long enough to re-group and put their focus someplace else.
On another topic, these issues are interesting. It's not so much that Microsoft is trying to bully Symantec out of business as it seems they are really trying to improve the view most people have on the security of Windows. XP SP2 gave users a "free" firewall which has drastically cut down the spread of worms and the like. It only seems logical that the next logical step in securing an OS is to control and protect the content already on the system, namely with an Anti-Virus agent.
You could look at this as saying that the reason that Symantec and others were able to sell AV and firewalls in the first place was because Microsoft was deficient in OS security. Now that they're catching up with it, any specialized companies that took advantage of this niche are going to hurt unless they can focus on something else. "Diversified interests" applies to large companies just as it does to personal portfolios.
Yes, it sucks for these companies, but it's not the same thing as if Microsoft started offering Office free with Windows.
In other news...The sky is still blue.
/.
Exactly. I can't see how this could be much of a surprise to anyone. However if Microsoft said they were going to build Office for Linux, then that would warrant some surprise and an article on
Why on Earth would Microsoft develop their main cash cow for an operating system they'd just assume quietly go away? Not only would they lose money one it, but they'd be showing support for Linux in a way that they're not ready to do (yet).
It's kind of too bad that they won't release Office for Linux because it would probably bolster the business and consumer desktop market shares. Honestly (aside from any closed-document arguments), MS Office is the best office suite available right now. It's incredibly powerful (think Excel if nothing else), and very intuitive. Open Office is nice, but still not in the same park as Office. Give it some time though; as Linux grows in popularity, Microsoft will be forced to start paying it this sort of attention.
No, no. That's the article.
When you're the IT guy for a company and you visit the page and see...
Service Unavailable
...and about 50,000 references to 'slashdot.org' in your log files.
That's when you quit. Let some other schmuck take care of that mess of melted aluminum and plastic on the floor.
Love your .sig
main(){while(new int);}
I just had to see if it would really compile. Then I just had to run it.
Now it's eating up 100MB / second. Neat.
It does seem to be capped at about 550MB though (1GB RAM, XP Pro SP2). Anyone know why this would be?
Uh, I think you missed the point.
Red vs Blue is a machinima series done by some fans of Halo. Been going on for several years, won some awards, and become the defacto standard to compare new machinima series to.
It's actually got some very funny parts, especially if you're familiar with Halo.
He actually lost me at his praise for I-Robot
I agree. I saw that in the theater and had mixed feelings because I was torn between what the was and what it should have been.
Maddox sums it up pretty nicely.
Kerry would have stopped those hurricanes!
Of course he would have! What, are you assuming that he couldn't?
Proof!
(a few more just for fun)
You might need to refresh the page after the image and sound load to sync them up.
Khan Spoils HP (very funny)
MM
Memories
Dancin'
He's that bald guy
Ummmm, Anime? (MNBSFW)
RSTLNE, Vanna?
OOOOOOOOOOOOOON!
Early Google Maps
New Orleans Simulation
That's most of what's on my "funny" list. Anyone have any others that are good?
How about...
Even though Episode I, Episode II, and Episode III sucked it managed to earn $380 million at the box office
To be a little more concise, how about...
Even though George Lucas has irreperably raped Star Wars, Episode III still managed to earn $350 million more at the box office than it deserved.
I agree with what you're saying, though I usually am less harsh in my time wasting. Often I'll come up with something that makes them feel foolish for calling me. It might not be very nice, but I have been known to berate them for calling and trying to sell home exercise equipment to "a paraplegic cripple". It's fun to see them try to explain their way out of that.
In addition it's fun to play the Hold game. When they ask for somebody or something, I'll ask them to wait for me to find them and then put them on hold (my phone even played music) and go back to whatever it was I'm doing. The record holder (pun intended) is 1 hour and 25 minutes. I guess he liked the classic 80's songs playing...
I try to waste as much of the company's money as possible by wasting their time and resources. At the same time I feel bad taking out my annoyance on the employees because it's very possible that they are at the only job available to them at the moment. Being a telemarketer doesn't require much in the way of skills, but it is better than other skill-less opportunities like fast food.
Those guys at mirrors.playboy.com have to be careful.
:)
For anyone that missed the jest, check out mirrors.playboy.com (it is WS). One of my favorite places to suggest when somebody asks where they should grab one of a few Linux distros. It's also a handy way to explain to your boss why you were visiting the playboy.com domain.
That and hey! When you support Playboy, you're supporting Linux! Go Tux! (He just got more than most Slashdotters I'm afraid...
I liked the cover on the old version. You know, the one with the half-naked people
Can't go wrong with naked. Well, you could I guess, but I wasn't on the cover.
Well, what other P2P programs are there? This one is dead.
Take a look at Shareaza (and the just-released v2.2). Free, OSS, and supports Gnutella, Gnutella2, and eDonkey networks. Also supports the Bittorrent protocol.
It's actually quite a good product. I use it on those rare occasions where I get the sudden urge to do something evil.
I believe what I said here still applies:
Makes some sense to me.
And me too
The issue is always one of compute versus bandwidth.
It's not just bandwidth; Sun's president is dead wrong on so many levels.
Until mobile phones come with a screen capable of what modern LCDs and CRTs are capable of, people will not just blindly (pun intended) give up their PC monitor in favor of a tiny little screen.
Mobile phones don't have the ability to do anything but view a few web pages. They simply can't (and won't for quite some time) hold a candle to a PC's computing and memory resources.
The Internet isn't the end-all when it comes to computing. People want to be able to install and run any number of small programs and applications. They want complete control over their computing environment, and they don't want that environment to depend completely on external services which are completely out of their control. If the Internet connection into my apartament goes down (as is the case all too often unfortunately), I can still play TriPeaks. If Google's datacenter blows up, I can still type and print out a letter.
That brings up peripheals. There's a ton of small appliances that people use in conjunction with their PC. Printers, scanners, CD/DVD burners, sound cards, external storage, etc. These all need a place to connect to and enough processing power to work together and interact with whatever mainframe you might use over the Internet.
I could show some other examples, but it really boils down to this: The Internet and personal computing are NOT mutually exclusive. In order to use the Internet you need a portal to it via a connected device. Phones can do this, but they don't provide the means to work on with Internet apps easily or for extended periods of time. A PC provides ease and comfort while using the Internet in addition to a platform for performing other tasks where as Web solution isn't ideal. You won't find artists switching to GPhotoShop, a civil engineer switching to GAutoCAD, or a film producer switching to G3DStudioMax.
Personal computers are here to stay. Their form and HIDs may change to suit new technologies, but they won't disappear. Take my word for it.
Flamebait? No, no. Slashdot is the perfect place to post this. In fact, I'd be surprised if the folks at Boston didn't submit it themselves. After all:
3. Get 50 ad-ridden pages semi-related to scifi posted to a tech site with almost a million readers.
2. ???
1. Profit!
You are a complete and utter fool. It's a pity that Slashdot harbors so many blind fanboys.
You're saying exactly what I've thought since the first time I used the GMail interface. It's not a huge deal, but being forced to use the drop-down box every time I want to delete an email is a pain. I've actually sent the suggestion of creating a Delete button to Google a few times, but with no noticable results.
As to the fools that really think you suddenly need to keep everything that's ever been sent to you just because you have 2.5GB of space, think again. I get plenty of mail that's either pure garbage (spam or forwards from Grandma), or is just such that I *know* it's a waste to keep it. It's the same with drivespace on your desktop. Suddenly computers are shipping with 160GB hard drives so users never worry about freeing up some space, and some software developers are becoming lazy when it comes to the size of their applications.
Heck, under Windows XP, System Restore will use 12% of the total capacity of the drive by default. That's almost 20GB on the aforementioned 160GB drive. Internet Explorer uses (again by default) about 10% of the capacity of the drive for the browser cache. Not only is this insane from simply a real estate point of view, but it's technically flawed as well. I've read (and know from experience) that once IE hits more than about 200MB of cache it starts becoming slow and problematic.
Google is giving away over 2.5GB of free space for email because they know that 90% of their users will never go over 200MB and 99.9% will stay under 500MB. It's an advertising stunt, and I'd just love to see what would happen if suddenly a large number of their users filled their GMail accounts on purpose. I bet Western Digital's stock would go up...
I tried, but it wont run on Linux.
That's alright. For those using a unsupported operating system, the **AA will send you a device to help you remove all pirated material on your computer and iPod.
If you want to be doubly sure though, you can send your computer away and they'll run it through their automagic de-pirater device.
Either way, you're sure to be safe from those evil pirated files!
No, no.
Taco figured why waste money on a development server or two when you can just develop it right on the live servers. "What they hell," he said. "It'll give those losers something to whine about. We'll get it right in a few days, and until then, screw them."
Though I think I like the mix of Arial and Times New Roman text. It takes me back to 1995.
Not trying to Mac-bash, but having only about 3% of the consumer market share does have it's advantages.
If the Apple and Windows userbases suddenly became equal, you'd see copy protection for both platforms. Why spend an equal amount of money for copy protection that's only going to affect 3% of your consumers vs 95%?
That said, the whole DMCA side of this is plain stupid. Microsoft designed Windows (this really *is* a feature
Whats the point of putting such protection on your music CDs when all you're going to do is turn around and post a link on your site about how to bypass it.
RTFA.
The band had no voice in the matter. Sony is their label and chose to put the protection on the disc, whether the band wanted it on or not. Switchfoot posted the info on bypassing it because it was pissing off a lot of their fans and that's not something most (read: not Metallica) bands want. In addition, they probably wanted to piss off Sony a little bit for abusing the power that labels have come to know and love.
So... whatever that means
If it's a hoax, it's fooled a lot of people.
Bah. Most of these places just have an automated process that pulls from "authoritive" RSS feeds and adds it to their own website. There's not some guy at all these news sites that reads each thing and posts it.
The Internet and RSS: Spreading "news" at the speed of BS.
I'm still running win2k as my prefered OS.
I still don't understand this mentality. I used to run Win2000 as well and was fairly skeptical when XP came out. It was six months before I installed it on another system I had ("No way I'm going to screw my good Win2000 install with that XPee stuff!").
I use XP now, and have Vista Beta 1 installed on my laptop. It's not that I've started to love the "M$ upgrade cycle", rather I've discovered that as long as Microsoft stays with the NT kernel and doesn't go changing a lot of core system stuff for the worse, odds are the OS will be better.
Why do you stay with 2000? If it was simply price, then that's your choice, but if it's not is there something in XP that you found so offensive you didn't want to switch? Here's what I found when I switched to XP: A Win2000 system with improved multimedia ability, an expanded native driver database, and better support for legacy software and games.
If the eye candy that was added to XP annoys you, you can turn it off. If some newer features like System Restore annoy you, you can turn it off. If other added features like Auto Update annoy you, you can turn it off. Essentially you can make XP just like 2000 except for the added support for the things I listed above. Windows 2000 is technically "Windows NT 5.0". Windows XP is technically "Windows NT 5.1". This (accurately) implies that XP is a minor update to Windows 2000, and also explains the short time between the release of 2000 (1999) and XP (2001). Vista is "Windows NT 6.0" showing a major update.
I won't switch to Vista right away, but I will install and try it out on a system other than my primary desktop. By the time an MS OS reaches it's first Service Pack, it's a very good bet that the big bugs in the RTM version have been ironed out. Simply upgrading to a newer OS doesn't mean you're somehow stuck in some cycle from then on.