I've mostly been struck at how irritating their website is to use. I went through most of the hassle of registering an account, but never finished, because it was just too irritating and long. Way to much reading and clicking.
Disabling my account when I moved countries was also a huge pain in the ass. In the end I figured it was easier to just never do business with them.
In the end I decided that I didn't trust their competency enough to give them my card info. I trust Amazon, and Yahoo! Store, but that's about it.
There's been a misunderstanding: "real programming" REQUIRES a theoretical understanding of compuatation.
Once you understand real programming, learning how to work around the bugs in the.NET development tools, how to get Source Safe to do what you want, etc. -- seems like a waste of a life.
So you'd better figure out a way to make a living off the stuff you love.
There's a "problem" with this: if you develop your mind, you likely won't want to work on the pedestrian stuff, and learn how to use the latest buzzword technologies.
Even if you overcome your personal feelings and learn that stuff, you won't want a normal job, or be happy at it.
So you'd better figure out how to make money doing some real programming.
But in terms that will affect os all, I'm seeing thousands of badly adminnned boxes just waiting for the next worm to come along and zombify them.
Thousdands of too-fast, over-price machines with too much bandwidth, on all the time, just waiting for instructions from some pimply-faced, 13-year-old darklord.
Standard practice at banks is two physically separated networks -- production & test.
I don't know why the exchange would be any different.
But things at banks and exchanges are very ninja-rigged. E.g. build an automated trading client that sumits multiple trades a second and the exchange is likely to ask you to do some rate-limiting -- their systems won't be able to handle it.
Just putting it on your network is enough. This looks like the typical Microsoft experience. Everyone has been warned.
I would love to be a blackhat, but I just can't stand running Windows. I'm quite torn: I want to do my part to cause Billy some pain for what he's done to me and others, yet I just can't bring myself to run his software in order to make that happen.
Is there any conflict between the government and the GPL? If so, that will be neat, becuase the government will use its sovereign powers to trump anything in the GPL.
That stands to reason, as the government is responsible for making the Copyright laws.
In the Blackberry/RIM case, the government can tell the court that it wants to keep on using the patented stuff, even though the court may say that the government hasn't bought the product from the guys that own the patent. The court will then order Blackberry to keep operating, but only for the government accounts. NTP can go jump in a lake.
That is a standard its-good-to-be-the-soverign legal doctrine.
Also, the government can compel licensing of patented things -- if it serves national interest. More its-good-to-be-the-sovereign legal doctrine. There is a guy who invented a neat device that got used to splice into an underground cable. The government complelled a license and slapped some heave duty national-security/secrecy mojo on it -- the inventor is screwed.
The GPL poses certain burdens for contractors (unlike, say, the BSD/MIT license) I wonder if the government will ever say -- don't follow the GPL. The sovereign says so. We don't want the bad guys to have access to it.
This would be interesting, because many Linux contributors are foreign, and not subject to the sovereignty of the US-of-A.
From looking at it, it seems that Pinyin is quite consistent!
I get the feeling Wade-Giles is better for gweilo, while Pinyin serves some Chinese needs.
I just hope they change the spellings of words are pronunciations drift.
Pinyin is so complicated -- there are likely to be lots of problems. the wikipedia has a great article on Pinyin.
Now I know why it reads so funny; it is just meant to use the Roman alphabet, but not in any particularly standard way. E.g. 'x' is like 'SH' -- just because. Hiyaaaaaaah!
I see a lot of people remarking that this is some sort of me-too, reactive stuff.
Well, I guess it is -- but you should get used to that. Microsoft's strength is that it is a great follower, not an innovator.
They let the innovator (e.g. Negroponte) risk stuff, then they follow on, crushing competition due to their size and resources. They've done this with DOS/Windows/Word/Excel/Access and so on. Every product was a follower.
They wait until they see someone else kicking ass with a product -- then they do their version, and slowly and gently, they push, push push their competitor out of the market. [Sort of the way the Han Chinese are moving into and dominating Xinjiang and Tibet - no massacres, just push, push push].
Every thirdworld guy wants a phone. Even before you have a reliable source of electricity, you need your cellphone, if only to find out about crop prices. Clearly the phone is THE growth platform of the future.
So if the get their stuff in the phone, they've got a few billion customers using windows -- and their company's future is secured.
Someone at Microsoft probably thought of this before, but it probably only got approval from Billy recently.
Will they just want to keep the current favorable sales tax treatment, unregulated selling (of tchochke) between individuals and keep network neutrality of internet connections?
Or do they want more stuff -- which might in the end be bad for consumers.
Normally you get your office in DC due to a threat. After you deal with the threat, you've got an "organ" set up that can try to get more stuff from DC -- so that's what you do.
Even the telecoms, in the beginning, had no lobbyists. They were small and scrappy -- high growth businesses. At some point they perceived entrenched powers as the threat to their services. Perhaps the post office, or messenger services.
Now the telecoms spend more on lobbying than any of us can imagine. A truly disgusting state of affairs -- for consumers. It is good for expensive DC restaurants though.
A guy asks why not decouple IE from the OS -- an obvious security problem, given that users typically run as Admin (aka root), so any buffer overflow becomes a flaw that threatens the entire box.
Mac OS, Linux and the BSDs manage to decouple the browser. I'm assuming with Mac OS, it is somehow possible to share the browser's code. Microsoft has a technolgy called (originally) OLE. The point is, one app can embed another app in it. The apps don't have to run with root rights: folks couple together Word and Excel when both run as user, and they do it all the time. Here's the answer the Microsoft guy gave:
"In terms of your question around Internet Explorer, there are two real aspects of this: 1) the platform implications of having IE in Windows, and 2) the user experiences that are possible with having IE in Windows.
From a platform point of view, decoupling IE would break a lot of things. There are many applications that depend on IE for rendering HTML and for accessing the Internet. Think about email applications, Internet-aware clients like the AOL Explorer or even Microsoft Money that use IE to render HTML in the application. Not only would this break a lot of applications, but it would also put a huge burden on developers who would now have to write their own HTML rendering capability."
That seems to imply that the OLE-like features require the stuff to be part of the OS, but that just isn't true (in my experience). Perhaps there are some extra features that come from having the browser in the OS, but in general, that just isn't necessary -- and given the security problems, just isn't worth it.
At that point, it is hard to believe the guy -- either he's trying to tell a lie, or he's not informed, or he is informed, but the story is very complicated and he doesn't manage to tell it.
Of course, others have said Microsoft put the browser into the OS in order to kill Netscape.
Here's an article on this. One guy, who supposedly should know his stuff, says that SIV and AIDS are different enough that proving something about SIDS isn't the same as proving something about AIDS.
* Dr. Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry:
"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document." (Sunday Times (London) 28 nov. 1993)
* Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sänger, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology, Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemy, München. Robert Koch Award 1978:
"Up to today there is actually no single scientifically really convincing evidence for the existence of HIV. Not even once such a retrovirus has been isolated and purified by the methods of classical virology." (Letter to Süddeutsche Zeitung 2000)
* Dr. Serge Lang, Professor of Mathematics, Yale University:
"I do not regard the causal relationship between HIV and any disease as settled. I have seen considerable evidence that highly improper statistics concerning HIV and AIDS have been passed off as science, and that top members of the scientific establishment have carelessly, if not irresponsible, joined the media in spreading misinformation about the nature of AIDS." (Yale Scientific, Fall 1994)
* Dr. Harry Rubin, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley:
"It is not proven that AIDS is caused by HIV infection, nor is it proven that it plays no role whatever in the syndrome." (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)
* Dr. Richard Strohman, Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley:
"In the old days it was required that a scientist address the possibilities of proving his hypothesis wrong as well as right. Now there's none of that in standard HIV-AIDS program with all its billions of dollars." (Penthouse April 1994)
* Dr. Harvey Bialy, Molecular Biologist, former editor of Bio/Technology and Nature Biotechnology:
"HIV is an ordinary retrovirus. There is nothing about this virus that is unique. Everything that is discovered about HIV has an analogue in other retroviruses that don't cause AIDS. HIV only contains a very small piece of genetic information. There's no way it can do all these elaborate things they say it does." (Spin June 1992)
* Dr. Roger Cunningham, Immunologist, Microbiologist and Director of the Centre for Immunology at the State University of New York at Buffalo:
"Unfortunately, an AIDS 'establishment' seems to have formed that intends to discourage challenges to the dogma on one side and often insists on following discredited ideas on the other." (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)
* Dr. Gordon Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, University of Glasgow:
"AIDS is a behavioural disease. It is multifactorial, brought on by several simultaneous strains on the immune system - drugs, pharmaceutical and recreational, sexually transmitted diseases, multiple viral infections." (Spin June 1992)
* Dr. Alfred Hässig, (1921-1999), former Professor of Immunology at the University of Bern, and former director Swiss Red Cross blood banks:
I remember hearing this fringy-sounding stuff that HIV hadn't been proven to cause AIDS, and that a Nobel prize winner -- the guy who invented PCR -- was in agreement.
One of the complaints was that nobody had bothered to isolate HIV, infect creatures, make sure they got AIDS, and so on -- the sort of things that scientists do to prove that something "causes" something.
Among other things, there was the complaint that some people have HIV, but don't get AIDS. And others have AIDS, but no HIV.
Does anyone know why they didn't bother to follow the normal procedures before deciding that HIV was the culprit? That just seems odd.
People who have worked at Google have pointed out that Google has gone into the Deja News usenet archive and snipped away stuff that they decided they didn't want there.
They've also made some sensitive searches return bogus results.
Don't think that the people at Google are a bunch of fucking angels. They are human.
Exactly. Restricting freedom after someone does their time is wrong -- they either do their punishment and rejoin society (perhaps losing some rights, like the right to vote) -- or they are still being punished.
Also, that why some "hard" cases tell the state they don't want parole. Because when they get out, they want the freedom to be bad to the fucking bone.
Mr. Ball Peen hammer killer was like that: he killed his math prof with a ball peen hammer in front of his class. He didn't want parole, with its irritating terms like sometimes calling in to say if you've been by the hardware store lately, because some hammer is calling for you to resuce it from a life of drudgery. The ball peen hammer killer wanted to be a free man.
I think got he got in trouble just after getting out though. Surprise surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
The cartoons were published in Egypt, and there was no problem:
y cott-egypt.html
http://egyptiansandmonkey.blogspot.com/2006/02/bo
Anyone heard about this? Looks like there is a double-standard.
The article mentions some ISPs called "Shaw" and "Rogers".
Is this in the USA? I'm used to things like Comacst, MSN, Time Warner, Qwest, Pacbell, SBC, etc.
What regions do Shaw and Rogers serve? Does this BitTorrent discrimination affect many people?
Thanks very much for this summary. How shitty.
I'm happy I'm not the only one to think their UI sucks! I was thinking maybe I was too harsh.
What is so evil about PayPal?
I've mostly been struck at how irritating their website is to use. I went through most of the hassle of registering an account, but never finished, because it was just too irritating and long. Way to much reading and clicking.
Disabling my account when I moved countries was also a huge pain in the ass. In the end I figured it was easier to just never do business with them.
In the end I decided that I didn't trust their competency enough to give them my card info. I trust Amazon, and Yahoo! Store, but that's about it.
Your comparison doesn't ring true with me.
Filling the tank of a car takes a few minutes a week.
You can waste hours a day trying to get Microsoft shitware to do what you need.
There's been a misunderstanding: "real programming" REQUIRES a theoretical understanding of compuatation.
.NET development tools, how to get Source Safe to do what you want, etc. -- seems like a waste of a life.
Once you understand real programming, learning how to work around the bugs in the
So you'd better figure out a way to make a living off the stuff you love.
There's a "problem" with this: if you develop your mind, you likely won't want to work on the pedestrian stuff, and learn how to use the latest buzzword technologies. Even if you overcome your personal feelings and learn that stuff, you won't want a normal job, or be happy at it. So you'd better figure out how to make money doing some real programming.
Yes.
But in terms that will affect os all, I'm seeing thousands of badly adminnned boxes just waiting for the next worm to come along and zombify them.
Thousdands of too-fast, over-price machines with too much bandwidth, on all the time, just waiting for instructions from some pimply-faced, 13-year-old darklord.
Standard practice at banks is two physically separated networks -- production & test.
I don't know why the exchange would be any different.
But things at banks and exchanges are very ninja-rigged. E.g. build an automated trading client that sumits multiple trades a second and the exchange is likely to ask you to do some rate-limiting -- their systems won't be able to handle it.
This one won't be super destructive, but a bit bad.
Hopefully people will learn from this, until something monstrously destructive comes along.
It looks like an entirely new form of memory. That's really something!
If these guys manage to make this work, they'll be increidbly well off and famous.
I love how the stuff is hundreds of times smaller than the state of the art!
Just putting it on your network is enough. This looks like the typical Microsoft experience. Everyone has been warned.
I would love to be a blackhat, but I just can't stand running Windows. I'm quite torn: I want to do my part to cause Billy some pain for what he's done to me and others, yet I just can't bring myself to run his software in order to make that happen.
I'm so happy to see there are groundbreaking new hacking opportunities in IE, and we know it in advance.
If people get victimized, you'll really be able to say that they were warned in advance.
I hope Microsoft-loving IT admins take down their whole company with this, and get their dumbasses fired.
Is there any conflict between the government and the GPL? If so, that will be neat, becuase the government will use its sovereign powers to trump anything in the GPL.
That stands to reason, as the government is responsible for making the Copyright laws.
In the Blackberry/RIM case, the government can tell the court that it wants to keep on using the patented stuff, even though the court may say that the government hasn't bought the product from the guys that own the patent. The court will then order Blackberry to keep operating, but only for the government accounts. NTP can go jump in a lake.
That is a standard its-good-to-be-the-soverign legal doctrine.
Also, the government can compel licensing of patented things -- if it serves national interest. More its-good-to-be-the-sovereign legal doctrine. There is a guy who invented a neat device that got used to splice into an underground cable. The government complelled a license and slapped some heave duty national-security/secrecy mojo on it -- the inventor is screwed.
The GPL poses certain burdens for contractors (unlike, say, the BSD/MIT license) I wonder if the government will ever say -- don't follow the GPL. The sovereign says so. We don't want the bad guys to have access to it.
This would be interesting, because many Linux contributors are foreign, and not subject to the sovereignty of the US-of-A.
From looking at it, it seems that Pinyin is quite consistent! I get the feeling Wade-Giles is better for gweilo, while Pinyin serves some Chinese needs. I just hope they change the spellings of words are pronunciations drift.
Pinyin is so complicated -- there are likely to be lots of problems. the wikipedia has a great article on Pinyin.
Now I know why it reads so funny; it is just meant to use the Roman alphabet, but not in any particularly standard way. E.g. 'x' is like 'SH' -- just because. Hiyaaaaaaah!
I see a lot of people remarking that this is some sort of me-too, reactive stuff.
Well, I guess it is -- but you should get used to that. Microsoft's strength is that it is a great follower, not an innovator.
They let the innovator (e.g. Negroponte) risk stuff, then they follow on, crushing competition due to their size and resources. They've done this with DOS/Windows/Word/Excel/Access and so on. Every product was a follower.
They wait until they see someone else kicking ass with a product -- then they do their version, and slowly and gently, they push, push push their competitor out of the market. [Sort of the way the Han Chinese are moving into and dominating Xinjiang and Tibet - no massacres, just push, push push].
Every thirdworld guy wants a phone. Even before you have a reliable source of electricity, you need your cellphone, if only to find out about crop prices. Clearly the phone is THE growth platform of the future.
So if the get their stuff in the phone, they've got a few billion customers using windows -- and their company's future is secured.
Someone at Microsoft probably thought of this before, but it probably only got approval from Billy recently.
They seem to have some new templates though.
I wish we'd see some of their major trolls, like the fake hijacked Apple OS.
How aggressive will Ebay, Amazon and Google be?
Will they just want to keep the current favorable sales tax treatment, unregulated selling (of tchochke) between individuals and keep network neutrality of internet connections?
Or do they want more stuff -- which might in the end be bad for consumers.
Normally you get your office in DC due to a threat. After you deal with the threat, you've got an "organ" set up that can try to get more stuff from DC -- so that's what you do.
Even the telecoms, in the beginning, had no lobbyists. They were small and scrappy -- high growth businesses. At some point they perceived entrenched powers as the threat to their services. Perhaps the post office, or messenger services.
Now the telecoms spend more on lobbying than any of us can imagine. A truly disgusting state of affairs -- for consumers. It is good for expensive DC restaurants though.
A guy asks why not decouple IE from the OS -- an obvious security problem, given that users typically run as Admin (aka root), so any buffer overflow becomes a flaw that threatens the entire box.
Mac OS, Linux and the BSDs manage to decouple the browser. I'm assuming with Mac OS, it is somehow possible to share the browser's code. Microsoft has a technolgy called (originally) OLE. The point is, one app can embed another app in it. The apps don't have to run with root rights: folks couple together Word and Excel when both run as user, and they do it all the time. Here's the answer the Microsoft guy gave:
"In terms of your question around Internet Explorer, there are two real aspects of this: 1) the platform implications of having IE in Windows, and 2) the user experiences that are possible with having IE in Windows.
From a platform point of view, decoupling IE would break a lot of things. There are many applications that depend on IE for rendering HTML and for accessing the Internet. Think about email applications, Internet-aware clients like the AOL Explorer or even Microsoft Money that use IE to render HTML in the application. Not only would this break a lot of applications, but it would also put a huge burden on developers who would now have to write their own HTML rendering capability."
That seems to imply that the OLE-like features require the stuff to be part of the OS, but that just isn't true (in my experience). Perhaps there are some extra features that come from having the browser in the OS, but in general, that just isn't necessary -- and given the security problems, just isn't worth it.
At that point, it is hard to believe the guy -- either he's trying to tell a lie, or he's not informed, or he is informed, but the story is very complicated and he doesn't manage to tell it.
Of course, others have said Microsoft put the browser into the OS in order to kill Netscape.
Here's an article on this. One guy, who supposedly should know his stuff, says that SIV and AIDS are different enough that proving something about SIDS isn't the same as proving something about AIDS.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/761979.stm
Well what about this stuff (these guys are respectable, so WTF??): http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/controversy.htm
* Dr. Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry:
"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document." (Sunday Times (London) 28 nov. 1993)
* Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sänger, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology, Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemy, München. Robert Koch Award 1978:
"Up to today there is actually no single scientifically really convincing evidence for the existence of HIV. Not even once such a retrovirus has been isolated and purified by the methods of classical virology." (Letter to Süddeutsche Zeitung 2000)
* Dr. Serge Lang, Professor of Mathematics, Yale University:
"I do not regard the causal relationship between HIV and any disease as settled. I have seen considerable evidence that highly improper statistics concerning HIV and AIDS have been passed off as science, and that top members of the scientific establishment have carelessly, if not irresponsible, joined the media in spreading misinformation about the nature of AIDS." (Yale Scientific, Fall 1994)
* Dr. Harry Rubin, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley:
"It is not proven that AIDS is caused by HIV infection, nor is it proven that it plays no role whatever in the syndrome." (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)
* Dr. Richard Strohman, Emeritus Professor of Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley:
"In the old days it was required that a scientist address the possibilities of proving his hypothesis wrong as well as right. Now there's none of that in standard HIV-AIDS program with all its billions of dollars." (Penthouse April 1994)
* Dr. Harvey Bialy, Molecular Biologist, former editor of Bio/Technology and Nature Biotechnology:
"HIV is an ordinary retrovirus. There is nothing about this virus that is unique. Everything that is discovered about HIV has an analogue in other retroviruses that don't cause AIDS. HIV only contains a very small piece of genetic information. There's no way it can do all these elaborate things they say it does." (Spin June 1992)
* Dr. Roger Cunningham, Immunologist, Microbiologist and Director of the Centre for Immunology at the State University of New York at Buffalo:
"Unfortunately, an AIDS 'establishment' seems to have formed that intends to discourage challenges to the dogma on one side and often insists on following discredited ideas on the other." (Sunday Times (London) 3 April 1994)
* Dr. Gordon Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, University of Glasgow:
"AIDS is a behavioural disease. It is multifactorial, brought on by several simultaneous strains on the immune system - drugs, pharmaceutical and recreational, sexually transmitted diseases, multiple viral infections." (Spin June 1992)
* Dr. Alfred Hässig, (1921-1999), former Professor of Immunology at the University of Bern, and former director Swiss Red Cross blood banks:
I remember hearing this fringy-sounding stuff that HIV hadn't been proven to cause AIDS, and that a Nobel prize winner -- the guy who invented PCR -- was in agreement.
One of the complaints was that nobody had bothered to isolate HIV, infect creatures, make sure they got AIDS, and so on -- the sort of things that scientists do to prove that something "causes" something.
Among other things, there was the complaint that some people have HIV, but don't get AIDS. And others have AIDS, but no HIV.
Does anyone know why they didn't bother to follow the normal procedures before deciding that HIV was the culprit? That just seems odd.
People who have worked at Google have pointed out that Google has gone into the Deja News usenet archive and snipped away stuff that they decided they didn't want there.
They've also made some sensitive searches return bogus results.
Don't think that the people at Google are a bunch of fucking angels. They are human.
Exactly. Restricting freedom after someone does their time is wrong -- they either do their punishment and rejoin society (perhaps losing some rights, like the right to vote) -- or they are still being punished.
Also, that why some "hard" cases tell the state they don't want parole. Because when they get out, they want the freedom to be bad to the fucking bone.
Mr. Ball Peen hammer killer was like that: he killed his math prof with a ball peen hammer in front of his class. He didn't want parole, with its irritating terms like sometimes calling in to say if you've been by the hardware store lately, because some hammer is calling for you to resuce it from a life of drudgery. The ball peen hammer killer wanted to be a free man.
I think got he got in trouble just after getting out though. Surprise surprise.