Actually, part of the reason for all the hassles that normal people face at the airport, on the road, etc. are the result of the paranoid anti-discrimination policies that the police follow. They can't just screen 'Arab-appearing' people because they'd be slapped down for discrimination (the definition of 'discrimination' has to do with discerning through observation, it's only a 'bad word' because it's been made so). So they have to hassle everybody evenly, thus using 100 times the resources on non-problems.
I think that the way the cops always go into a chickenshit screaming fit 'put your hands up! put your hands out where we can see them!' in their shrill panicky voice, escalates the situation. If there wasn't anything 'wrong' going on, there is by the time the dust settles.
It's chickenshit cop-panic-mentality at it's worst. It's surprising it gets on the air, but it always does.
You're thinking 1930's Communist Russia. That era when American Journalists would junket in Russia on the Soviet's tab and write glowing reviews and 'no problem seen here' columns in US Newspapers.
Meanwhile whole classes of people were exterminated systematically.
Then there could be a new dead fork created called 'Christopher' that didn't represent anything new. Just a body of code where some old stuff was shifted around. Supported by ghost writers, of course.
Blizzard spends a lot of time and money keeping people with illegetamate CD Keys off their network. Perhaps that's a secondary consideration to some, but preventing people with stolen/passed-around keys from having an alternative Network to play over prevents a certain amount of software piracy.
I know that when we wanted to do some two-player games here at home (My wife is a much bigger Diablo II fiend than I am) I went out and bought a second copy. I'm sure I could have dicked around on the 'net and found ways to do it without spending the twenty bucks, but it just wasn't worth it.
I've gotten to the point where I like the store-brand sodas better anyway. They're less sweet and also considerably less expensive. Big K cola (from Kroeger) rulez.
It could also be said that NeXT came along and took over Apple.
All the 'visionary' OS developers at Apple who pissed away all that money on Copeland, etc. failed dismally. Apple had to go outside to buy a modern Operating System, and some would interpret it as NeXT taking over Apple, not the reverse.
When they first put in Windows for Workgroups at the company I worked for at the time, they put one of the more annoying putzes in Engineering in charge of 'the mail server' which was a wobbly install of NT Advanced Server 3.1'.
I proceeded to mail my entire c:\dos directory as attachments to one of my buddies. It just seemed like the thing to do. Boy, that took down the mail server bad.
It really got the tech mad, but he was a third stringer doing make-work for the 'vanguard' engineer who thought it was such a good idea to roll out Windows For Workgroups (in direct conflict with the IT people who had other plans of afflicting us with Novell stuff,) and I was writing the embedded code that made the company's products run. It was overall a fun time.
The image being part of the message is supposed to be a good thing?
I never, ever, send mail in an HTML format. But I always send photographs and other stuff like that as urls (plaintext URLs, which most modern mail readers sense and interpret as web-links) to images I store on my webspace somewhere.
That's a vague assumption. That's like saying there were and are no big differences and cross-platform barriers in the many UNIX-based systems. Even systems which are all based on a common 'real' AT&T UNIX all have their differences, features, and warts, that keep source code, particularly complex graphical apps, from 'just recompiling' on them.
There are some pretty cool buildtime scripts that make some software very portable, but definitely not all of it, nor even the majority of packages.
I can't run a lot of the the stuff I want on my AIX and HP-UX machines, sad to say. Puts my beautiful legacy Unix hardware to shame in some ways, put up against a crappy Pentium 133 system.
Be careful about throwing stones. I remember using the Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' bootable CD back in 1993. It booted and ran rather nicely on a 486DX-33 with 16 megs of RAM.
The current Linux systems are bloatware pigs, just like Windows.
Microsoft was one of the many small companies selling binary software packages to the early 'personal computer' enthusiasts. Not that much of it was 'open source' unless you're talking about the BASIC programs people ran using Microsoft's interpreter that everybody typed in from magazine articles, etc.
CP/M certainly wasn't 'open source', nor were the commercial packages of the time, like WordStar, Electric Pencil, etc.
You've watched that bit of falsehood that Bruce Perens did in 'Revolution OS' more than you should.
Prior to Microsoft deciding that source code was so darned important and secret that it was going to make a big deal of letting people look at it and spin it up into a Linux countermeasure, source code was just stuff, and we very much doubt Mainsoft staff felt the need to don bunny suits and submit to strip-searches prior to working with it.
That's bullshit revisionist history. A baldfaced attempt to say Microsoft is the sole 'evil closed source' entity.
Many companies, for many years, have kept the source code to their products a trade secret. Remember, one of the big things Kevin Mitnick was prosecuted for was having a stolen copy of the Solaris source code.
Yellow journalism, but then, it's The Register after all...
Thank goodness the price on portable LCD DVD players has dropped. For the longest time the price was up there to the point where buying a laptop with a DVD drive in it actually made a lot more sense.
In a perfect world, you would get a player that does CDDA, FLAC, APE, MusePack, MP3, Ogg and nothing else.
No, in a perfect world we would have a player that you could throw any CD, even an AOL CD, or a handful of gravel off the ground into, and it would play any music requested.
My first 'online' experience was with a DecWriter I bought at a thrift store and a 300 baud acoustic coupler. I didn't have a computer at home then that had provision for a modem.
It was a true 'printing' terminal, meaning you had to eat up fanfold paper to go online with it.
I hated the BBSes with huge login messages that you couldn't abort out of.
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Actually, part of the reason for all the hassles that normal people face at the airport, on the road, etc. are the result of the paranoid anti-discrimination policies that the police follow. They can't just screen 'Arab-appearing' people because they'd be slapped down for discrimination (the definition of 'discrimination' has to do with discerning through observation, it's only a 'bad word' because it's been made so). So they have to hassle everybody evenly, thus using 100 times the resources on non-problems.
I think that the way the cops always go into a chickenshit screaming fit 'put your hands up! put your hands out where we can see them!' in their shrill panicky voice, escalates the situation. If there wasn't anything 'wrong' going on, there is by the time the dust settles.
It's chickenshit cop-panic-mentality at it's worst. It's surprising it gets on the air, but it always does.
You're thinking 1930's Communist Russia. That era when American Journalists would junket in Russia on the Soviet's tab and write glowing reviews and 'no problem seen here' columns in US Newspapers.
Meanwhile whole classes of people were exterminated systematically.
Then there could be a new dead fork created called 'Christopher' that didn't represent anything new. Just a body of code where some old stuff was shifted around. Supported by ghost writers, of course.
Blizzard spends a lot of time and money keeping people with illegetamate CD Keys off their network. Perhaps that's a secondary consideration to some, but preventing people with stolen/passed-around keys from having an alternative Network to play over prevents a certain amount of software piracy.
I know that when we wanted to do some two-player games here at home (My wife is a much bigger Diablo II fiend than I am) I went out and bought a second copy. I'm sure I could have dicked around on the 'net and found ways to do it without spending the twenty bucks, but it just wasn't worth it.
I've gotten to the point where I like the store-brand sodas better anyway. They're less sweet and also considerably less expensive. Big K cola (from Kroeger) rulez.
It could also be said that NeXT came along and took over Apple.
All the 'visionary' OS developers at Apple who pissed away all that money on Copeland, etc. failed dismally. Apple had to go outside to buy a modern Operating System, and some would interpret it as NeXT taking over Apple, not the reverse.
if it's from my mom or any girl for that matter, I turn HTML off.
Not a problem for you often, I take it.
News flash: you won't get cooties from reading email from a 'girl.'
When they first put in Windows for Workgroups at the company I worked for at the time, they put one of the more annoying putzes in Engineering in charge of 'the mail server' which was a wobbly install of NT Advanced Server 3.1'.
I proceeded to mail my entire c:\dos directory as attachments to one of my buddies. It just seemed like the thing to do. Boy, that took down the mail server bad.
It really got the tech mad, but he was a third stringer doing make-work for the 'vanguard' engineer who thought it was such a good idea to roll out Windows For Workgroups (in direct conflict with the IT people who had other plans of afflicting us with Novell stuff,) and I was writing the embedded code that made the company's products run. It was overall a fun time.
The image being part of the message is supposed to be a good thing?
I never, ever, send mail in an HTML format. But I always send photographs and other stuff like that as urls (plaintext URLs, which most modern mail readers sense and interpret as web-links) to images I store on my webspace somewhere.
Why shuttle around bloated email attachments?
Yes, portability is possible, indeed it's a good design objective. However, the grandparent seemed to be implying portability is inherent to Unix.
That's a vague assumption. That's like saying there were and are no big differences and cross-platform barriers in the many UNIX-based systems. Even systems which are all based on a common 'real' AT&T UNIX all have their differences, features, and warts, that keep source code, particularly complex graphical apps, from 'just recompiling' on them.
There are some pretty cool buildtime scripts that make some software very portable, but definitely not all of it, nor even the majority of packages.
I can't run a lot of the the stuff I want on my AIX and HP-UX machines, sad to say. Puts my beautiful legacy Unix hardware to shame in some ways, put up against a crappy Pentium 133 system.
Be careful about throwing stones. I remember using the Yggdrasil 'Plug and Play Linux' bootable CD back in 1993. It booted and ran rather nicely on a 486DX-33 with 16 megs of RAM.
The current Linux systems are bloatware pigs, just like Windows.
Microsoft was one of the many small companies selling binary software packages to the early 'personal computer' enthusiasts. Not that much of it was 'open source' unless you're talking about the BASIC programs people ran using Microsoft's interpreter that everybody typed in from magazine articles, etc.
CP/M certainly wasn't 'open source', nor were the commercial packages of the time, like WordStar, Electric Pencil, etc.
You've watched that bit of falsehood that Bruce Perens did in 'Revolution OS' more than you should.
Why is it so hard for you to understand that your 'pick and choose' ambivalent attitude is frightening?
Java is also unfortunately permanently tarred with the 'slow' brush. That's just not true any more,
But isn't that mostly because people have faster hardware to bog down with Java now, rather than Java itself really improving it's performance?
It's fine to call something 'acceptable to use on expensive new hardware' but a resource pig is still a resource pig.
I can't get my sound card to work. I run Linux.
(ducks)
Prior to Microsoft deciding that source code was so darned important and secret that it was going to make a big deal of letting people look at it and spin it up into a Linux countermeasure, source code was just stuff, and we very much doubt Mainsoft staff felt the need to don bunny suits and submit to strip-searches prior to working with it.
That's bullshit revisionist history. A baldfaced attempt to say Microsoft is the sole 'evil closed source' entity.
Many companies, for many years, have kept the source code to their products a trade secret. Remember, one of the big things Kevin Mitnick was prosecuted for was having a stolen copy of the Solaris source code.
Yellow journalism, but then, it's The Register after all...
Well, I can say:
Thank goodness the price on portable LCD DVD players has dropped. For the longest time the price was up there to the point where buying a laptop with a DVD drive in it actually made a lot more sense.
In a perfect world, you would get a player that does CDDA, FLAC, APE, MusePack, MP3, Ogg and nothing else.
No, in a perfect world we would have a player that you could throw any CD, even an AOL CD, or a handful of gravel off the ground into, and it would play any music requested.
The FSF sells printed, bound copies of the GNU Emacs Manual. They have for years. My copy is over 15 years old now.
Yikes. Well, I guess if you live in Antartica....
My first 'online' experience was with a DecWriter I bought at a thrift store and a 300 baud acoustic coupler. I didn't have a computer at home then that had provision for a modem.
It was a true 'printing' terminal, meaning you had to eat up fanfold paper to go online with it.
I hated the BBSes with huge login messages that you couldn't abort out of.
That was a long time ago, though.
There's a press release up on Microsoft's website about this here now.
If Microsoft is being consistent, it's probably still being built on one of Paul Allen's PDP-10 machines.