It all reminds me of the movie "Wag the Dog" - it was ok, but an interesting look at how easily people are manipulated by the media.
It reminds me of a story (probably told again and again) about people in Iran reading state-run newspapers about how the US was responsible for taking down the twin towers in an effort to eventually invade Iran. When questioned, a citizen of Iran said "it's in the newspaper, so it has to be true."
Personally, I go to/. for all my news. Totally unbiased.
The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch
This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:
Virtual PC runs on Windows
Wait - that's the only one. It already runs on an Intel platform. The codebase already exists. Starting from scratch is a load of crock that's an easy excuse for slowly closing down any support for OSX, considering that MS is loosing market share EVERYWHERE.
Yeah, they're still the big dogs - for now. But Apple, OSX, Google, Firefox - MS is losing ground everywhere, and closing down their OSX division is probably just one of the areas that they're going to try to shore up a sinking ship.
I find all of that possible now with the exception of recording HD - at least with our current cable monopoly here, Comcast makes it almost impossible to record HD with anything other than their own rent-a-DVR, which is relatively sucktastic.
Cable-card (or, at least v. 2) was supposed to solve all of this, choice-for-the-consumer wise, but its rollout has been far from happening. I had thought that it was at some point government mandated, but I suppose that was me dreaming instead. About a year ago, Toshiba showed off a HTPC with a cable-card slot in it, and I expected that to be the beginning of true living room integration (for us HD users anyway.)
HTPC and Tivo's rule for low def, but us HD (Cable/Sat HD, not OTA HD) users are SOL with regards to HTPCs now.
Or put another way, a guy from Microsoft, who has probably never configured or operated any of the systems he mentions, is telling a group of people, who also have probably never used those systems, that it's really scarey if you move away from Microsoft...
I don't think it's this bad - I think he has a point (that he puts his own MS positive light on) - but OSS is very often written to solve the problem a developer has, and is then supported and primarily used by developers. Setting up the software isn't something that the tech-savvy are concerned with because I think there is a very large "it works for me" chip on the shoulder of the OSS community.
That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today. I'm even dissapointed in Ubuntu in that light - they're the closest in my mind to a full desktop solution.
Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc. I think OSX has it pretty much right with software installation - drag this "file" into your Applications directory. Done.
Super Mario Bros is still lots of fun, I don't care what you say.
Bingo! Think of the business opportunity this presents! A new game sells, and its players often spend months playing said game. Nintendo WEEEE and PS3 and XBox 360 (dunno about Xbox for sure) will allow you to download old, nostalgic games for a small fee. For $5, $10, you download Mario 1. Then another $10 for 2, 3, Mario Kart, etc. You play these games (as is the point of the post) for a short period of time, and then download more. A $10 download can occur 2, 3 times a week, even a day - thus providing new revenue opportunities for old titles. But because the thrill of playing an older game will quickly wear off, prices can be lowered as volume will pick up.
This may be the "dark side" of gaming for gamers, but not at ALL for the game companies that have a new revenue stream based on nostalgia and boosted by your quickly disolving enthusiasm with said old game.
Quite impossible with regard to your "it's quite possible" comment.
While my physics may not be perfect, it is indeed the very point of the GP post and the article that the impossible, improbable, or unthought of consistently show up in the far reaches of the universe. What is though implausable is constantly discovered, and so my comment should not be considered impossible.
Further, the moons of many planets in this solar system (and perhaps even an outer planet or two) are thought to have been exactly that - space junk floating thorugh space that got caught in something else's gravitational pull.
You can bet that those objects were also moving a quite a significant velocity, but nonetheless ended up in orbit around another body.
And the moon orbits the earth, etc - it makes sense that a larger body orbits a smaller body, and as the difference in size approaches zero, the two bodies will orbit a virtual "center" of gravity between them (assuming their mass and density is close as well).
With the universe being stupidly big, it's quite possible that both planets were thrown off of their orbits around larger bodies, and wandered the universe until coming into proximity with eachother getting stuck in a shared gravitational pull.
Agreed - SP2 is definately what one should be running, but it's definately the best.
For Mac fanboys (that includes me) SP2 isn't that bad, considering that Tiger is on 10.4.7 - that's like XP being on SP7.
Getting off of the 9x kernel was the first great step, and 2000, XP, and 2003 are solid OSes. MS is right in one aspect - a whole boatload of the OS problems are caused by 3rd party drivers, hardware, and software.
As for viruses and rootkits, etc - all OSes are hackable. MS just happens to be the OS that turns a virus into a nuke instead of a pesky BB pellet, were it written for Linux or OSX.
Re:At least it won't work for a drive-by cloning
on
Hackers Clone E-Passport
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well that's fucking secure - chalk up another one for security through stupidity.
Ya know, there is not a thing that Homeland Security has done that has made us more secure. Even the one or two instances where they actually tracked down a terrorist cell instead of wasting government money on vacations and useless Katrina relief trailers could easily have been done by the individual agencies themselves.
It's almost difficult to fathom what anyone that requires this shit is thinking. There is no evaulation of technology, and a complete lack of understanding of security. Unfortunately, those that make the decisions often disregard for political reasons the constant cries of the actual technology folks in those agencies that actually point out these flaws. Unfortunately, their cries fall on deaf ears (although, a big thanks for not giving up the good fight). But politics outweighs information, and RFID gets put into passports, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are a very bad idea.
Almost all of this is politically motivated now, in one of two avenues - to "appear" to be taking some action to protect security, or in an effort to more easily collect information on anyone that steps foot one into this country - be ye citizen or visitor.
Checks and balances, being the glory of the past but just about dead now, make sure that these unilateral decisions can be made without any oversite. And with Bush just giving himself more power (a parody, but eerily poignant) there is no end in site to this stupidity.
Dood, you know it's only a matter of time before you download a 650 meg torrent of Real with Linux as an optional install.
Real bundles so much shit, it makes my head spin. Bundling Firefox is just another component. Although I wonder if Real Player does or now will start using the Mozilla engine for their built in browser instead of IE...
Whatever, Rambus are idiots. They should have just patented the technology and then sued everyone out of existance. Not proactively suing was their downfall.
Why risk being an illegal monopoly when the USPTO offers you a perfectly legal way to do so??
As a consumer I don't have a problem with the general idea of DRM on a rental - my fair use rights aren't being violated, because I don't have the right to backup, timeshift, or format shift rentals to begin with (unlike media I own, for which any DRM is intolerable).
I wonder - wouldn't fair-use rights of the media follow you for the duration of the rental? For instance, I have the right to skip from chapter to chapter, pause, rewind - basically time-shift any part of the movie. I have the right to play with any included interactive content on my PC during that time period (not that I would, mind you...) etc.
Sure, the rights we're talking about are ones that don't make much sense for a one week rental, but while in possession of content that I've rented, am I afforded the same rights that I would have if I owned the DVD/CD/whatever, during the rental period?
Also, if I rent a movie that installs DRM on my PC (ex: Sony rootkit) does the company's right to enforce such DRM end at the end of my rental period?
The post wasn't whining about being white male, it was whining about a PC world which tries so hard to scrub the present of the past. It's a very leftist agenda, and the only people that seem to escape the clutches of a scrubbed history in favor of receiving blame for the ills that begat the need for PC cleansing to begin with are white christians - and more specifically, white christian males.
It's not hard to see that there is no concern with pieces of art of Jesus smeared with feces is no cause for alarm, but cartoons of a bomb-turbin-wearing Mohammad are cause for inquiries and firings. It's not hard to see that white males are still blamed for the ills of all other races in the United States, including a high incarceration rate of young black males. Although black-on-black crime is at an all-time high and young black males enter prisions in incredibly high percentages, most blame goes back to a socio-economic background that is a result of slavery from hundreds of years ago - the blame lands on the white male.
So yeah, I'm whining that people won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves. I'm whining that the PC left is trying to push a revisionist history where no single group of people is responsible for any harm unless that group happens to be white or chrisitian.
Yeah, I'm whining, but I'm hardly clueless. I just don't appreciate being held to account for the sins of the ancestors of people of the same skin color as myself, despite glaring facts like blacks were sold into slavery by other blacks, or my ancestors were still in Ireland or Italy until well after slavery in the US was abolished.
I wish we had switched to Moodle or another OSS CMS, but that would have been far too easy.
BB, along with others, needs to abandon the idea of software patents. Frankly, patents are a nasty bit of work, and like copyrights they are now doing the opposite of what they were supposed to encourage.
Exactly - the REAL problem with patents is that companies have started using them as a way to shut down and exact revenge on competitors. There must be some industry software somewhere where you can automatically load lawsuits to file, which are triggered the minute a patent is granted.
These companies see patents as a retroactive license to regulate competition, and it's scary. Imagine finding yourself suddenly broadsided by a patent so obvious it kills you, and as a small company, unable to defend yourself in a court of "law".
Again I say to the teeming masses of Slashdot: lever machines are the answer!
Lever machines always steal my quarters, and rarely give me any back. Although at the end I feel raped, so I guess that lever machines DO support our kind of democracy!
No, my friend, I'm sorry. No one deserves any ridicule any more. Kids don't fail, they have deffered success. Scores aren't kept at soccer or baseball games. We live in a world scrubbed clean by the PC bleach that we have been force-fed over the past two decades.
So please, a little love for the Nigerians, who, just like everyone else, were at some point harmed due to something that I as a white christian male did, and are thusly kept down and deserve the same diversity respect that everyone else does. They are not responsible for their actions any more than parents that allow their children to play GTA, thank God for our lawmakers.
So please, understand that just about anything negative you say about anyone, if they are anything besides a white christian male, will be construed as *ist or *phobic, and rightly so.
The goal of bumping up your premium is not to compensate the insurance company. By having an accident, you have shown your insurance company that you are now in the class of people that have recently had an accident. Statistically speaking, you are more likely to have another accident than someone who has not recently had an accident. Your premium is adjusted to match their new information, not to compensate them for the amount they paid out.
You must work for an insurance company, because only someone who profited from such piracy would defend actions as logical. See, what is REALLY happening is insurance companies have gotten permission to charge more based on risk - ANY risk. Therefore, their risk calculations are done on millions (exageration) of different variables, almost all of which can add to the cost of your insurance.
For instance, got a convertable? Cost more. 6 cylinders? More. Double tail pipe? More. Car painted red? A lot more - as a matter of a fact, statistically, red cars get in the most accidents... so try to avoid red cars unless you want a sweet 10-20% bump in your premiums.
It's this reason that they are allowed to do things like charge me more when someone else hits my parked, empty car. Suddenly I become more of a risk because someone else runs into my parked car? That's not a law of averages, that's manipulation of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
It all reminds me of the movie "Wag the Dog" - it was ok, but an interesting look at how easily people are manipulated by the media.
/. for all my news. Totally unbiased.
It reminds me of a story (probably told again and again) about people in Iran reading state-run newspapers about how the US was responsible for taking down the twin towers in an effort to eventually invade Iran. When questioned, a citizen of Iran said "it's in the newspaper, so it has to be true."
Personally, I go to
Whatever, I don't care how it works. Are the WWDC installs of Leopard on Pirate Bay yet?
This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:
- Virtual PC runs on Windows
Wait - that's the only one. It already runs on an Intel platform. The codebase already exists. Starting from scratch is a load of crock that's an easy excuse for slowly closing down any support for OSX, considering that MS is loosing market share EVERYWHERE.Yeah, they're still the big dogs - for now. But Apple, OSX, Google, Firefox - MS is losing ground everywhere, and closing down their OSX division is probably just one of the areas that they're going to try to shore up a sinking ship.
I find all of that possible now with the exception of recording HD - at least with our current cable monopoly here, Comcast makes it almost impossible to record HD with anything other than their own rent-a-DVR, which is relatively sucktastic.
Cable-card (or, at least v. 2) was supposed to solve all of this, choice-for-the-consumer wise, but its rollout has been far from happening. I had thought that it was at some point government mandated, but I suppose that was me dreaming instead. About a year ago, Toshiba showed off a HTPC with a cable-card slot in it, and I expected that to be the beginning of true living room integration (for us HD users anyway.)
HTPC and Tivo's rule for low def, but us HD (Cable/Sat HD, not OTA HD) users are SOL with regards to HTPCs now.
I don't think it's this bad - I think he has a point (that he puts his own MS positive light on) - but OSS is very often written to solve the problem a developer has, and is then supported and primarily used by developers. Setting up the software isn't something that the tech-savvy are concerned with because I think there is a very large "it works for me" chip on the shoulder of the OSS community.
That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today. I'm even dissapointed in Ubuntu in that light - they're the closest in my mind to a full desktop solution.
Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc. I think OSX has it pretty much right with software installation - drag this "file" into your Applications directory. Done.
Isn't that better than MSI or make/make install?
Agreed - people like "try before you buy" and allowing a person to try out OSX first would be a good thing, methinks.
You mean like the same odds as... life? ;)
Bingo! Think of the business opportunity this presents! A new game sells, and its players often spend months playing said game. Nintendo WEEEE and PS3 and XBox 360 (dunno about Xbox for sure) will allow you to download old, nostalgic games for a small fee. For $5, $10, you download Mario 1. Then another $10 for 2, 3, Mario Kart, etc. You play these games (as is the point of the post) for a short period of time, and then download more. A $10 download can occur 2, 3 times a week, even a day - thus providing new revenue opportunities for old titles. But because the thrill of playing an older game will quickly wear off, prices can be lowered as volume will pick up.
This may be the "dark side" of gaming for gamers, but not at ALL for the game companies that have a new revenue stream based on nostalgia and boosted by your quickly disolving enthusiasm with said old game.
While my physics may not be perfect, it is indeed the very point of the GP post and the article that the impossible, improbable, or unthought of consistently show up in the far reaches of the universe. What is though implausable is constantly discovered, and so my comment should not be considered impossible.
Further, the moons of many planets in this solar system (and perhaps even an outer planet or two) are thought to have been exactly that - space junk floating thorugh space that got caught in something else's gravitational pull.
You can bet that those objects were also moving a quite a significant velocity, but nonetheless ended up in orbit around another body.
And the moon orbits the earth, etc - it makes sense that a larger body orbits a smaller body, and as the difference in size approaches zero, the two bodies will orbit a virtual "center" of gravity between them (assuming their mass and density is close as well).
With the universe being stupidly big, it's quite possible that both planets were thrown off of their orbits around larger bodies, and wandered the universe until coming into proximity with eachother getting stuck in a shared gravitational pull.
And those pesky "check engine" and "low fuel" lights too :)
Just a note - SP2 will install those 15 updates that you had to do prior to SP2.
Agreed - SP2 is definately what one should be running, but it's definately the best.
For Mac fanboys (that includes me) SP2 isn't that bad, considering that Tiger is on 10.4.7 - that's like XP being on SP7.
Getting off of the 9x kernel was the first great step, and 2000, XP, and 2003 are solid OSes. MS is right in one aspect - a whole boatload of the OS problems are caused by 3rd party drivers, hardware, and software.
As for viruses and rootkits, etc - all OSes are hackable. MS just happens to be the OS that turns a virus into a nuke instead of a pesky BB pellet, were it written for Linux or OSX.
Ya know, there is not a thing that Homeland Security has done that has made us more secure. Even the one or two instances where they actually tracked down a terrorist cell instead of wasting government money on vacations and useless Katrina relief trailers could easily have been done by the individual agencies themselves.
It's almost difficult to fathom what anyone that requires this shit is thinking. There is no evaulation of technology, and a complete lack of understanding of security. Unfortunately, those that make the decisions often disregard for political reasons the constant cries of the actual technology folks in those agencies that actually point out these flaws. Unfortunately, their cries fall on deaf ears (although, a big thanks for not giving up the good fight). But politics outweighs information, and RFID gets put into passports, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are a very bad idea.
Almost all of this is politically motivated now, in one of two avenues - to "appear" to be taking some action to protect security, or in an effort to more easily collect information on anyone that steps foot one into this country - be ye citizen or visitor.
Checks and balances, being the glory of the past but just about dead now, make sure that these unilateral decisions can be made without any oversite. And with Bush just giving himself more power (a parody, but eerily poignant) there is no end in site to this stupidity.
Dood, you know it's only a matter of time before you download a 650 meg torrent of Real with Linux as an optional install.
Real bundles so much shit, it makes my head spin. Bundling Firefox is just another component. Although I wonder if Real Player does or now will start using the Mozilla engine for their built in browser instead of IE...
Whatever, Rambus are idiots. They should have just patented the technology and then sued everyone out of existance. Not proactively suing was their downfall.
Why risk being an illegal monopoly when the USPTO offers you a perfectly legal way to do so??
I wonder - wouldn't fair-use rights of the media follow you for the duration of the rental? For instance, I have the right to skip from chapter to chapter, pause, rewind - basically time-shift any part of the movie. I have the right to play with any included interactive content on my PC during that time period (not that I would, mind you...) etc.
Sure, the rights we're talking about are ones that don't make much sense for a one week rental, but while in possession of content that I've rented, am I afforded the same rights that I would have if I owned the DVD/CD/whatever, during the rental period?
Also, if I rent a movie that installs DRM on my PC (ex: Sony rootkit) does the company's right to enforce such DRM end at the end of my rental period?
The post wasn't whining about being white male, it was whining about a PC world which tries so hard to scrub the present of the past. It's a very leftist agenda, and the only people that seem to escape the clutches of a scrubbed history in favor of receiving blame for the ills that begat the need for PC cleansing to begin with are white christians - and more specifically, white christian males.
It's not hard to see that there is no concern with pieces of art of Jesus smeared with feces is no cause for alarm, but cartoons of a bomb-turbin-wearing Mohammad are cause for inquiries and firings. It's not hard to see that white males are still blamed for the ills of all other races in the United States, including a high incarceration rate of young black males. Although black-on-black crime is at an all-time high and young black males enter prisions in incredibly high percentages, most blame goes back to a socio-economic background that is a result of slavery from hundreds of years ago - the blame lands on the white male.
So yeah, I'm whining that people won't stand up and take responsibility for themselves. I'm whining that the PC left is trying to push a revisionist history where no single group of people is responsible for any harm unless that group happens to be white or chrisitian.
Yeah, I'm whining, but I'm hardly clueless. I just don't appreciate being held to account for the sins of the ancestors of people of the same skin color as myself, despite glaring facts like blacks were sold into slavery by other blacks, or my ancestors were still in Ireland or Italy until well after slavery in the US was abolished.
But still, it must be my fault...
Most insightful post of the day. Hey weird BackSlash editors with too much time on your hands - don't miss the parent post.
Lever machines always steal my quarters, and rarely give me any back. Although at the end I feel raped, so I guess that lever machines DO support our kind of democracy!
Check the sig, sweety.
I'm waiting for Firefox 2.0 before I start spell-checking all my /. posts.
No, my friend, I'm sorry. No one deserves any ridicule any more. Kids don't fail, they have deffered success. Scores aren't kept at soccer or baseball games. We live in a world scrubbed clean by the PC bleach that we have been force-fed over the past two decades.
So please, a little love for the Nigerians, who, just like everyone else, were at some point harmed due to something that I as a white christian male did, and are thusly kept down and deserve the same diversity respect that everyone else does. They are not responsible for their actions any more than parents that allow their children to play GTA, thank God for our lawmakers.
So please, understand that just about anything negative you say about anyone, if they are anything besides a white christian male, will be construed as *ist or *phobic, and rightly so.
Just don't paint too quickly, or your brush might suddenly become a hammer.
You must work for an insurance company, because only someone who profited from such piracy would defend actions as logical. See, what is REALLY happening is insurance companies have gotten permission to charge more based on risk - ANY risk. Therefore, their risk calculations are done on millions (exageration) of different variables, almost all of which can add to the cost of your insurance.
For instance, got a convertable? Cost more. 6 cylinders? More. Double tail pipe? More. Car painted red? A lot more - as a matter of a fact, statistically, red cars get in the most accidents... so try to avoid red cars unless you want a sweet 10-20% bump in your premiums.
It's this reason that they are allowed to do things like charge me more when someone else hits my parked, empty car. Suddenly I become more of a risk because someone else runs into my parked car? That's not a law of averages, that's manipulation of the system.