I think that the real problem with "piracy" is that most people don't think of software (which is essentially intangible) as a "good" in the same way that they think of a pair of Levis.
My bet is that if you asked the average person if it's acceptable to shoplift a pair of jeans, the overwhelming response would be "No, it's not OK." If you asked if it's OK to download software/music without paying, the response is more likely to be "Sure"
Seriously, it seems like the majority of the basement dwellers here never met a tax-payer funded boondoggle they didn't support. It's hard to tell if that's related to age and income, or just a general inability to understand that every government project has negative unintended consequences all out of proportion to what it as to accomplish...
I'm sure we all want Internet access from an ISP with the efficiency of the DMV, the customer service of the IRS, and the privacy policies of the NSA.
Scientific journalism isn't a special case. In any writing endevour, but especially in journalism, you have to make assumptions about what your readers know, make choices about how much detail to provide, and generally be able to summarize complex stories. The choices writers make when determining how to address those issues affect what readers understand.
But it's in no way restricted to science. Political journalist, auto writers, even the folks writing for the 10:00 news--they all gloss over details. Sometimesin ways that are (intentionally or not) misleading. Ask anyone about news reports that cover their area of expertise and they'll tell you how often the writers get it wrong.
Besides conflating monitor issues with CPU speed, you've made one of the all-time classic blunders. The first is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well-known is "Never have developers use systems that have far greater specs than users."
My bet is that your developers with their shiny new boxes running the latest and greatest probably churn out the kind of crappy code that makes a page take 30 seconds to load at broadband speeds. The kinds of sites created by "fast-growing digital media agencies" that everyone hates because they're slower than molasses in the wintertime. Backed by slow, un-optimized code that "worked just fine" for your team running on dual cores off a local server local (let me guess, IIS?) using local storage. Probably (another guess) all your team's work is Flash "development"?
Give me well-written code that runs on slower machines any day over the kind of bloated crap turned out by "fast growing" "agencies" any day. The best, most usable sites are the ones that work well for the average user, running an average machine, with an average connection speed.
As a sibling said, I think your "digital media agency" is just the kind of place I wouldn't recommend having real development done.
They didn't prevent anyone from unlocking the phone. They're just not supporting you if you do so.
Why is this so hard for the/. crowd to understand? Apple specifically says that non-ATT use of the phone is unsupported. People who bought and hacked the phone knew that when they bought it. Apple didn't stop people from doing so, but they're not going to go out of their way to support them. Get over it.
This is like whining that Microsoft doesn't support people running Window-Blinds or some other hack.
This is the reason I won't rent music. I don't know much about their model, but the risk that my music "landlord" will got out of business, leaving me in the lurch, is why I won't rent music.
I see this dichotomy in what my wife and I got out of college:
I, unfortunately, was one of those "skate where you can" students--I aced the tests and did just the minimum amount of coursework to pass. I rarely cracked a (course-related) book, paid attention in lectures, or participated in discussions. I got a few things out of my college years--generally from required courses in subject areas I wouldn't normally have taken and actually had to learn about to pass the classes--but most of that was in spite of myself. I often regret the wasted opportunities to learn.
My wife, on the other hand, was diligent and attentive. She is one of those students who writes a 30 page paper when 20 pages are required, who always asked questions when she didn't understand something or needed clarification, and just generally worked to get all the possible benefit from her time in school. She took difficult classes as a choice, carried more than a full load of classes, and came out way more well-rounded and with a greater breadth of interests and knowledge than when she started. She put way more effort into her courses than I did, and obviously got a lot more out of them, too.
Your whole educational experience is a matter of getting out what you put in. I wish I'd invested more time and attention.
If even Google, a "very reactive" company faces these issues, what can be done? The answer: Nothing can be done.
There is no way (unless you're writing something with hundreds, rather than thousands of lines of code) that every code path is going to be audited carefully enough to catch every possible bug. Good coding practices aside, programmers are human and make errors. You do your best to catch as many as you can, and that's all you can do. When you're a "consumer" of code, you look for an organization that seems to be doing this and use their stuff. There's no complete, proactive solution to bugs.
The important thing is that you want someone "very reactive." An organization that acknowledges these flaws up-front, publicly announces vulnerabilities with a work-around until they're patched, and then corrects problems in a timely manner. Some companies are more like this than others.
This "innocent girl" who wore something that looked like a bomb was out for just the effect she caused--a big scene, and her fifteen minutes on the nightly news. I'm expecting to see her on all the talks hows next week, and in court the week after suing the Airport Authority for violating her "civil right" to wear a fake bomb.
In exactly the same way that those Muslim clerics who made a big scene of praying in the airport and then asked for unneeded seatbelt extenders was hoping for a reaction.
Your post made a point I was thinking of: Vista's no Ferrari, in more ways than that.
It reminds me more of one of those fancy looking kit cars from the 70s & 80s, which looked at a distance like some exotic Lambo/Delorean crossbreed, but when they drove by you could tell that it was a fiberglass body on a VW bug chassis with the original air-cooled bug engine whining in protest at the weight of all that fiberglass and plastic. The rattles and squeaks were also amusing.
Vista may be the "Ultimate Extreme Super-Mega" version of Windows, but under the Areoglass body, it's still got that VW engine.
from rather than enhancing the reputation and usefulness of Linux.
Let me be blunt: Every time a raging Linux nutjob craps all over someone looking into Linux, that's a loss for Linux, not a "win" for leet haxors. I've said this numerous times, but it's not all or nothing. Linux can be both a good operating system AND have some deficiencies that need to be addressed before it's ready for non-technical folks to use. Out of the box, Windows can be both fairly easy to use and a security danger of massive proportions. Real life, unlike WoW or HALO, contains many shades of gray. Acting like a Democrat talking about President Bush (or a Republican villifying "defeatists") is not the way to make progress on issues.
Further, these attacks completely turn off reasonable people who would like to see Linux succeed. If someone less-than-100%-geeky asks me about Linux, I'm always hesitant to recommend it because I know that the first time they have troubles and hit up a "support" forum they're going to get flamed and/or jumped on. Yes, attacking folks looking for information about Linux as "stupid" is definitely a way to get people to switch from Windows or OSX. Everyone loves being belittled as "stupid" if they have a question about something outside their area of expertise. You know how people love the humiliation that geeks heap on them for asking the most innocuous questions.
Not that I expect Linux zealots on/. to RTFA, but it is funny how when someone reviews a distro and has a legitimate complaint, the first reaction is to call him "stupid"--Let me pose an alternate question: "Why anyone believe a guy who doesn't even understand that the option he's talking about isn't included on Dell's distro?"
As far as real differences on either end of the log.
My mom's a professor at a college where they wholeheartedly embraced computer technology in the classroom right from when it first became viable (for non-comp-sci professors) and from my observations both as a student and in visiting her on campus, it hasn't really made a big difference.
Those tenured old bores who droned on in endless lecture are now (mostly) reading PowerPoing presentations bullet-by-bullet. Engaging speakers who made connections with what students already know and what they will encounter after school are (mostly) just as effective. It's now possible to get the class syllabus on-line. Students who were meticulous about turning in assignments on time still are. The lazy ones who couldn't be bothered to look at a paper syllabus still don't. Those who took notes still do, albeit sometimes in a different way--the daydreamers are now playing Solitare.
Setting aside the hype, what makes a student (or professor) successful hasn't changed in the last few hundred years, at least. It's possible that old Zog was droning on about mammoth hunts while Grum was showing his actual spear moves for fighting sabertooth tigers.
I understand that there are those with poor organizational skills who feel there's been a great benefit to them, but I fail to see why they couldn't have had success using a paper planner.
Much like books, or other teaching "technology", computers can only empower those who are already prepared for learning and teaching.
This is totally a replacement for wired connectivity, because in a building with three or four hundred computer users, there won't be any radio interference between wireless cards. I'm sure that there won't be any issues in high-density deployments. I mean, the four PCs in my house never, ever have any reduction in speed when they're all connected simultaneously.
he was on that mission, but as far as I can tell from recent comments by RMS, his mission has become to promote Richard Stallman and the "Only my freedom is really free enough" point of view. Unlike Linus, RMS is all about putting himself out front. His interviews and talks remind me of a four-year-old's "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me" behavior. I don't know what he's like in person, but his public persona is a self-promoting bastard.
On a bad day of revision wars and trolling, probably fifty or sixty "real" articles exist on Wacky-pedia. The rest are collections of somewhat-related material cobbled together at random, mixed with extremely detailed minute-by-minute breakdowns of obscure SciFi series episodes and entries about imaginary languages.
it's communication with co-workers and the difficulties that come integrating remote teams.
My brother-in-law is a developer for a big fininacial services operation, and they attempted to outsource a project. Eventually management gave up and brought the work back to the home office, as the quality of code coming out of the outsourcing house was crap. Basically, a lot of the code they sent back was buggy or hard to integrate and had to be debugged and redone by the on-site developers.
But I'm not sure that that's an indication that the coders were poor (though that's a possibility). Basically, you're asking folks to communicate across both a language barrier and time difference that just makes it really difficult to do so with good results. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult. Considering the difficulties that folk speaking the same primary language and sitting in the same room have communicating, I think it's safe to say very difficult.
Moving your "onshore outsourcing" to Georgia or wherever might address language issues, but the problems that come with integrating a remote team aren't going to go away.
I think there's some sort of "editor TOS" that specificaly prohibits any "article-based" editing. Or correction of grammar/spelling/typos. Or checking of whether links point to some random profit-blog.
Heck, I think the editor TOS pretty much reads: post 'em if you got 'em
My Treo gave up the ghost earlier this year and I decided not to buy another.
This is the first time in almost eight years that I haven't had a Palm. I remember the IIIxe I got when I started my first job here in Silicon Valley. It was a great tool and the free software available was really an eye-opener. What could be cooler than MAME and the whole Project Gutenberg library of eBooks to take with you while your wife is shoe shopping?
Over the years I replaced my PDA about every twenty four months and I bought a Treo 650 when they came out. I was really pleased not to have to carry a separate phone and PDA. Unfortunately, Palm's technology is really showing its age. The Treo was relatively slow and missing a lot of capabilities (WiFi) and the free PalmOS software wasn't making up for the downsides any more. When the speaker started to fail, I gave up on it, sold it, and moved on to a small phone.
So far, what they've done is create "yet-another-MS-proprietary-format" to compete with the existing standard. Microsoft's new tool offers almost nothing technically innovative (at which I must say I'm shocked, shocked!) and exists merely to compete with Flash for the simple reason that Flash exists and Microsoft doesn't own it. There's no immediate financial benefit to MS from this, since they're giving it away (the sample is always free, right?)
I don't expect the Mac version of this to last past the point where this gets to 50% market penetration (Mac IE, anyone?).
This is another exercise in Microsoft suckage, straight up.
"Dr." Paul Moller has been promising to sell his skycar "in a few years" since the 70's. When I first saw something about his concept (in a late-70's Pop Sci, as I recall) it looked pretty interesting. At the time (almost 30 years ago) Moller was promising these "soon." But as time has gone by it's become clearer and clearer that the only thing that Moller is selling is old-fashioned snake-oil and the only folks he's selling to are the gullible.
If you look at what he's offering for sale "soon" you'll see that it's not the long-promised skycar, it's a flying saucer type craft that looks like something out of a Mario Party minigame. Seriously, it looks like four weed-whacker engines in a fiberglass shell molded from an old Texaco sign.
"A Svedeesh IT cunsooltunt hes coosed a stir in deeplumetic curcles effter poobleeshing a leest ooff secret lug-in deteeels belungeeng tu 100 imbesseees, poobleec oothureeties und puleeticel perties eruoond zee vurld. Dun Igersted seeed he-a vesn't tryeeng tu iern muney, geeen poobleecity oor get a neme-a fur heemselff in heckeeng curcles. Insteed he-a cleeemed thet poobleeshing zee leest ves ieseeer thun cuntecting zee oorguneezeshuns indeefidooelly -- und thet iff he-a hed hunded it tu zee Svedeesh oothureeties zeen thet vuoold hefe-a beee spyeeng."
Whatever little thing you can. Even small steps count.
It's easy to bemoan the fact that there's this large corporation with a virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office tools. The wailing and gnashing of teeth across slashdot about this is almost ceaseless.
My suggestion (and something I'm doing myself) is to think of ways to encourage people to move away from Microsoft products. If you "support" family and friends, recommend Firefox if they ask you about security. Encourage someone to try out a live CD of Ubuntu. If you know someone who is thinking about buying a new computer who is considering a Mac, provide arguments in favor and offer support.
I've moved every computer I own (five) off Windows. My wife and I both have Mac laptops (good riddance to that Dell crap), our HTPC is a mini, our server and the PC in our garage are running Ubuntu. When my sister-in-law wanted a Mac, I encouraged her husband to get her one, and offered to her with support (he's a Windows guy). When my dad asked about internet security problems, I pointed him to Firefox and gently suggested that IE/Windows isn't the best choice.
I'm not suggesting (as some here do) that you should be ramming Open Source or a non-Windows OS down someone's throat. I wouldn't ever advocate being pushy about it, since you catch more flies with honey... but when it comes up (and for those of us who are "support" for family and friends, that's pretty often) it never hurts to gently, subtly point out alternatives to MS. If every geek who villifies MS on slashdot does their small bit, we can eventually make a difference.
I know that everyone on slashdot is shocked, shocked <\voice> to find Microsoft twisting the arms of their partners. I mean, it's not like they've ever done something like with with PC manufacturers who want to pre-install another OS, or anything.
It's mildy amusing to hear the feigned shock and dismay when Microsoft pulls their antics. At this point, behavior of this stripe should the expected outcome of any situation where Microsoft is involved. Whatever they may have done right in the past, for the last seven or eight years they've been heading down a path that makes it clear they'll do anything to crush competition (except actually produce a better product)
We all know what they're going to do before they even get their PR machine going. One hint: it won't be the right thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the real problem with "piracy" is that most people don't think of software (which is essentially intangible) as a "good" in the same way that they think of a pair of Levis.
My bet is that if you asked the average person if it's acceptable to shoplift a pair of jeans, the overwhelming response would be "No, it's not OK." If you asked if it's OK to download software/music without paying, the response is more likely to be "Sure"
Wi-fi subsidizes you!
Seriously, it seems like the majority of the basement dwellers here never met a tax-payer funded boondoggle they didn't support. It's hard to tell if that's related to age and income, or just a general inability to understand that every government project has negative unintended consequences all out of proportion to what it as to accomplish...
I'm sure we all want Internet access from an ISP with the efficiency of the DMV, the customer service of the IRS, and the privacy policies of the NSA.
No thanks, Karl
Scientific journalism isn't a special case. In any writing endevour, but especially in journalism, you have to make assumptions about what your readers know, make choices about how much detail to provide, and generally be able to summarize complex stories. The choices writers make when determining how to address those issues affect what readers understand.
But it's in no way restricted to science. Political journalist, auto writers, even the folks writing for the 10:00 news--they all gloss over details. Sometimesin ways that are (intentionally or not) misleading. Ask anyone about news reports that cover their area of expertise and they'll tell you how often the writers get it wrong.
Guess I'm saying you're not alone
Besides conflating monitor issues with CPU speed, you've made one of the all-time classic blunders. The first is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well-known is "Never have developers use systems that have far greater specs than users."
My bet is that your developers with their shiny new boxes running the latest and greatest probably churn out the kind of crappy code that makes a page take 30 seconds to load at broadband speeds. The kinds of sites created by "fast-growing digital media agencies" that everyone hates because they're slower than molasses in the wintertime. Backed by slow, un-optimized code that "worked just fine" for your team running on dual cores off a local server local (let me guess, IIS?) using local storage. Probably (another guess) all your team's work is Flash "development"?
Give me well-written code that runs on slower machines any day over the kind of bloated crap turned out by "fast growing" "agencies" any day. The best, most usable sites are the ones that work well for the average user, running an average machine, with an average connection speed.
As a sibling said, I think your "digital media agency" is just the kind of place I wouldn't recommend having real development done.
They didn't prevent anyone from unlocking the phone. They're just not supporting you if you do so.
/. crowd to understand? Apple specifically says that non-ATT use of the phone is unsupported. People who bought and hacked the phone knew that when they bought it. Apple didn't stop people from doing so, but they're not going to go out of their way to support them. Get over it.
Why is this so hard for the
This is like whining that Microsoft doesn't support people running Window-Blinds or some other hack.
This is the reason I won't rent music. I don't know much about their model, but the risk that my music "landlord" will got out of business, leaving me in the lurch, is why I won't rent music.
The parent is 100% correct.
I see this dichotomy in what my wife and I got out of college:
I, unfortunately, was one of those "skate where you can" students--I aced the tests and did just the minimum amount of coursework to pass. I rarely cracked a (course-related) book, paid attention in lectures, or participated in discussions. I got a few things out of my college years--generally from required courses in subject areas I wouldn't normally have taken and actually had to learn about to pass the classes--but most of that was in spite of myself. I often regret the wasted opportunities to learn.
My wife, on the other hand, was diligent and attentive. She is one of those students who writes a 30 page paper when 20 pages are required, who always asked questions when she didn't understand something or needed clarification, and just generally worked to get all the possible benefit from her time in school. She took difficult classes as a choice, carried more than a full load of classes, and came out way more well-rounded and with a greater breadth of interests and knowledge than when she started. She put way more effort into her courses than I did, and obviously got a lot more out of them, too.
Your whole educational experience is a matter of getting out what you put in. I wish I'd invested more time and attention.
you insensitive clod!
If even Google, a "very reactive" company faces these issues, what can be done? The answer: Nothing can be done.
There is no way (unless you're writing something with hundreds, rather than thousands of lines of code) that every code path is going to be audited carefully enough to catch every possible bug. Good coding practices aside, programmers are human and make errors. You do your best to catch as many as you can, and that's all you can do. When you're a "consumer" of code, you look for an organization that seems to be doing this and use their stuff. There's no complete, proactive solution to bugs.
The important thing is that you want someone "very reactive." An organization that acknowledges these flaws up-front, publicly announces vulnerabilities with a work-around until they're patched, and then corrects problems in a timely manner. Some companies are more like this than others.
I'm not buying what you're selling.
This "innocent girl" who wore something that looked like a bomb was out for just the effect she caused--a big scene, and her fifteen minutes on the nightly news. I'm expecting to see her on all the talks hows next week, and in court the week after suing the Airport Authority for violating her "civil right" to wear a fake bomb.
In exactly the same way that those Muslim clerics who made a big scene of praying in the airport and then asked for unneeded seatbelt extenders was hoping for a reaction.
Your post made a point I was thinking of: Vista's no Ferrari, in more ways than that.
It reminds me more of one of those fancy looking kit cars from the 70s & 80s, which looked at a distance like some exotic Lambo/Delorean crossbreed, but when they drove by you could tell that it was a fiberglass body on a VW bug chassis with the original air-cooled bug engine whining in protest at the weight of all that fiberglass and plastic. The rattles and squeaks were also amusing.
Vista may be the "Ultimate Extreme Super-Mega" version of Windows, but under the Areoglass body, it's still got that VW engine.
from rather than enhancing the reputation and usefulness of Linux.
/. to RTFA, but it is funny how when someone reviews a distro and has a legitimate complaint, the first reaction is to call him "stupid"--Let me pose an alternate question: "Why anyone believe a guy who doesn't even understand that the option he's talking about isn't included on Dell's distro?"
Let me be blunt: Every time a raging Linux nutjob craps all over someone looking into Linux, that's a loss for Linux, not a "win" for leet haxors. I've said this numerous times, but it's not all or nothing. Linux can be both a good operating system AND have some deficiencies that need to be addressed before it's ready for non-technical folks to use. Out of the box, Windows can be both fairly easy to use and a security danger of massive proportions. Real life, unlike WoW or HALO, contains many shades of gray. Acting like a Democrat talking about President Bush (or a Republican villifying "defeatists") is not the way to make progress on issues.
Further, these attacks completely turn off reasonable people who would like to see Linux succeed. If someone less-than-100%-geeky asks me about Linux, I'm always hesitant to recommend it because I know that the first time they have troubles and hit up a "support" forum they're going to get flamed and/or jumped on. Yes, attacking folks looking for information about Linux as "stupid" is definitely a way to get people to switch from Windows or OSX. Everyone loves being belittled as "stupid" if they have a question about something outside their area of expertise. You know how people love the humiliation that geeks heap on them for asking the most innocuous questions.
Not that I expect Linux zealots on
As far as real differences on either end of the log.
My mom's a professor at a college where they wholeheartedly embraced computer technology in the classroom right from when it first became viable (for non-comp-sci professors) and from my observations both as a student and in visiting her on campus, it hasn't really made a big difference.
Those tenured old bores who droned on in endless lecture are now (mostly) reading PowerPoing presentations bullet-by-bullet. Engaging speakers who made connections with what students already know and what they will encounter after school are (mostly) just as effective. It's now possible to get the class syllabus on-line. Students who were meticulous about turning in assignments on time still are. The lazy ones who couldn't be bothered to look at a paper syllabus still don't. Those who took notes still do, albeit sometimes in a different way--the daydreamers are now playing Solitare.
Setting aside the hype, what makes a student (or professor) successful hasn't changed in the last few hundred years, at least. It's possible that old Zog was droning on about mammoth hunts while Grum was showing his actual spear moves for fighting sabertooth tigers.
I understand that there are those with poor organizational skills who feel there's been a great benefit to them, but I fail to see why they couldn't have had success using a paper planner.
Much like books, or other teaching "technology", computers can only empower those who are already prepared for learning and teaching.
sure does ruin your day.
That any better?
This is totally a replacement for wired connectivity, because in a building with three or four hundred computer users, there won't be any radio interference between wireless cards. I'm sure that there won't be any issues in high-density deployments. I mean, the four PCs in my house never, ever have any reduction in speed when they're all connected simultaneously.
What do they teach them in schools these days?
he was on that mission, but as far as I can tell from recent comments by RMS, his mission has become to promote Richard Stallman and the "Only my freedom is really free enough" point of view. Unlike Linus, RMS is all about putting himself out front. His interviews and talks remind me of a four-year-old's "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me" behavior. I don't know what he's like in person, but his public persona is a self-promoting bastard.
On a bad day of revision wars and trolling, probably fifty or sixty "real" articles exist on Wacky-pedia. The rest are collections of somewhat-related material cobbled together at random, mixed with extremely detailed minute-by-minute breakdowns of obscure SciFi series episodes and entries about imaginary languages.
it's communication with co-workers and the difficulties that come integrating remote teams.
My brother-in-law is a developer for a big fininacial services operation, and they attempted to outsource a project. Eventually management gave up and brought the work back to the home office, as the quality of code coming out of the outsourcing house was crap. Basically, a lot of the code they sent back was buggy or hard to integrate and had to be debugged and redone by the on-site developers.
But I'm not sure that that's an indication that the coders were poor (though that's a possibility). Basically, you're asking folks to communicate across both a language barrier and time difference that just makes it really difficult to do so with good results. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult. Considering the difficulties that folk speaking the same primary language and sitting in the same room have communicating, I think it's safe to say very difficult.
Moving your "onshore outsourcing" to Georgia or wherever might address language issues, but the problems that come with integrating a remote team aren't going to go away.
I think there's some sort of "editor TOS" that specificaly prohibits any "article-based" editing. Or correction of grammar/spelling/typos. Or checking of whether links point to some random profit-blog.
Heck, I think the editor TOS pretty much reads: post 'em if you got 'em
My Treo gave up the ghost earlier this year and I decided not to buy another.
This is the first time in almost eight years that I haven't had a Palm. I remember the IIIxe I got when I started my first job here in Silicon Valley. It was a great tool and the free software available was really an eye-opener. What could be cooler than MAME and the whole Project Gutenberg library of eBooks to take with you while your wife is shoe shopping?
Over the years I replaced my PDA about every twenty four months and I bought a Treo 650 when they came out. I was really pleased not to have to carry a separate phone and PDA. Unfortunately, Palm's technology is really showing its age. The Treo was relatively slow and missing a lot of capabilities (WiFi) and the free PalmOS software wasn't making up for the downsides any more. When the speaker started to fail, I gave up on it, sold it, and moved on to a small phone.
Palm seems to have lost their way.
So far, what they've done is create "yet-another-MS-proprietary-format" to compete with the existing standard. Microsoft's new tool offers almost nothing technically innovative (at which I must say I'm shocked, shocked!) and exists merely to compete with Flash for the simple reason that Flash exists and Microsoft doesn't own it. There's no immediate financial benefit to MS from this, since they're giving it away (the sample is always free, right?)
I don't expect the Mac version of this to last past the point where this gets to 50% market penetration (Mac IE, anyone?).
This is another exercise in Microsoft suckage, straight up.
I swear this guy puts P.T. Barnum to shame.
"Dr." Paul Moller has been promising to sell his skycar "in a few years" since the 70's. When I first saw something about his concept (in a late-70's Pop Sci, as I recall) it looked pretty interesting. At the time (almost 30 years ago) Moller was promising these "soon." But as time has gone by it's become clearer and clearer that the only thing that Moller is selling is old-fashioned snake-oil and the only folks he's selling to are the gullible.
If you look at what he's offering for sale "soon" you'll see that it's not the long-promised skycar, it's a flying saucer type craft that looks like something out of a Mario Party minigame. Seriously, it looks like four weed-whacker engines in a fiberglass shell molded from an old Texaco sign.
"A Svedeesh IT cunsooltunt hes coosed a stir in deeplumetic curcles effter poobleeshing a leest ooff secret lug-in deteeels belungeeng tu 100 imbesseees, poobleec oothureeties und puleeticel perties eruoond zee vurld. Dun Igersted seeed he-a vesn't tryeeng tu iern muney, geeen poobleecity oor get a neme-a fur heemselff in heckeeng curcles. Insteed he-a cleeemed thet poobleeshing zee leest ves ieseeer thun cuntecting zee oorguneezeshuns indeefidooelly -- und thet iff he-a hed hunded it tu zee Svedeesh oothureeties zeen thet vuoold hefe-a beee spyeeng."
Whatever little thing you can. Even small steps count.
It's easy to bemoan the fact that there's this large corporation with a virtual monopoly on desktop operating systems and office tools. The wailing and gnashing of teeth across slashdot about this is almost ceaseless.
My suggestion (and something I'm doing myself) is to think of ways to encourage people to move away from Microsoft products. If you "support" family and friends, recommend Firefox if they ask you about security. Encourage someone to try out a live CD of Ubuntu. If you know someone who is thinking about buying a new computer who is considering a Mac, provide arguments in favor and offer support.
I've moved every computer I own (five) off Windows. My wife and I both have Mac laptops (good riddance to that Dell crap), our HTPC is a mini, our server and the PC in our garage are running Ubuntu. When my sister-in-law wanted a Mac, I encouraged her husband to get her one, and offered to her with support (he's a Windows guy). When my dad asked about internet security problems, I pointed him to Firefox and gently suggested that IE/Windows isn't the best choice.
I'm not suggesting (as some here do) that you should be ramming Open Source or a non-Windows OS down someone's throat. I wouldn't ever advocate being pushy about it, since you catch more flies with honey... but when it comes up (and for those of us who are "support" for family and friends, that's pretty often) it never hurts to gently, subtly point out alternatives to MS. If every geek who villifies MS on slashdot does their small bit, we can eventually make a difference.
Just my $.02
I know that everyone on slashdot is shocked, shocked <\voice> to find Microsoft twisting the arms of their partners. I mean, it's not like they've ever done something like with with PC manufacturers who want to pre-install another OS, or anything.
It's mildy amusing to hear the feigned shock and dismay when Microsoft pulls their antics. At this point, behavior of this stripe should the expected outcome of any situation where Microsoft is involved. Whatever they may have done right in the past, for the last seven or eight years they've been heading down a path that makes it clear they'll do anything to crush competition (except actually produce a better product)
We all know what they're going to do before they even get their PR machine going. One hint: it won't be the right thing.