No single raindrop is responsible for the flood and yet they all share responsibility.
We all share the blame/credit for what our country does. Most people in this country don't give a shit and won't even bother to vote but they are responsible nevertheless.
But he US was instrumental in creating the WTO. It has also used WTO when it suits their needs.
In all honesty though none of this really matters. We have bombs and are willing to use them against people we don't like. What's WTO going to do? Jack shit that's what.
You know I was also thinking that Maytag might be a good corporation for you to worship too. I noticed that there are web sites which discuss appliances and some people seem to critize them. They need somebody to defend them against the attacks.
Appliance boards probably don't get as heated (pun intended) as the automobile boards but still I think Maytag deserves your vigorous defence just as much as Microsoft does don't you think.
You are way offbase. I was around back then and visicalc was mainly used by accountants not engineers. I was also friends with people who made a living writing dbase applications. It was an entire cottage industry of people writing dbase applications and not one of them was a game.
It sounds like you also are not aware that dbase ran on CP/M based machines and apple II (and it's clones). Rbase was the big mainframe database back then. Again Dbase had no real practical use for an engineer it was mainly used for inventory and POS type applications and of course accounting applications.
I am flattered in a way. Of course it would be better if this kind of attention did not come from an insane person but really thanks.
I am also happy that you can admit you were wrong about the whole capitalism thing. I see you went on a nice tangent rant on it too. Very entertaining.
I still maintain that if you are the type of person who feels obligated to dedicate themselves to some organization you'd be better off choosing a cause rather then a corporations. You know help the poor, feed the hungry and all that. I don't think Bill gates will ever notice you valiantly defending him here on slashdot but if you helped out your local food bank they would notice.
If on the other hand you feel like you must dedicate your life to some corporation I'd still suggest a better one. I mentioned Honda, they make great products. They also make a wide variety of products. I think they are more deserving of your worship then MS don't you?
"Christ, I'd swear allegience to satan if I knew you were batting for the other team."
You have pledged your allegience to Microsoft so in effect you have already pledged your allegience to satan.
Apparently not only do you not have morals but you also can't read. I said nothing about capitalism or the evils thereof.
I am honestly curious though. Why did you pledge your allegience to MS? Why not Honda? They make nice stuff. Why not ghirardelli? They make tasty choclate. Why did you choose MS over all the other corporations in the world.
Gates does not give money to charity. He gives stock to his foundation which then sells the stock to convert it into money. He is giving up theoretical future money not actual real money.
It should be noted of course that Gates never paid for that stock in the first place.
It should also be noted that he never game money till after the trial began. To him it's a way to buy good publicity. By spending a miniscule percentage of his wealth he tries to shed his evil image.
Doing it by selling stock he got for free of course is his real genious.
I am so tired of this same old liteny here. But what the hell I don't have anything better to do.
"Slashdot has a tendency to continually bash MS."
SO FUCKING WHAT? Shut up already about this. If you don't like MS bashing go to someplace else. May I suggest you hang out at gotdotnet.com. There you will see people continually bash linux 24X7. Hell if you post a message defending open source or java too ardently they will even remove your posts for you. If you want to visit a site that bashes slashdot itself there are no shortages of that either.
This is the internet. There are forums to bash MS, Linux, Barney, Wesley Crusher or redheads. Go find one that suits your needs.
"I am not claiming that MS does no bad, but really there is not many large companies out there that have not done something bad at some stage. And there is not one company out there that would not defend themselves the same way that MS has, if they were under attack, be that a legitimate attack or not."
This is my favorite. I call the "my standards for myself are very low" defense. Rephrased it goes like this.
"Gee mommy I know I killed the neighbors dog but lot of people kill dogs and that makes it right"
And
"Gee mommy I know I killed the neigbors dog but johny over there would have also killed the dog if he just had the chance so that makes it right"
"So mod me down if you wish, but really, the MS bashing is starting to get boring."
You may be bored but I am disgusted. I am disgusted that an ordinary person would spend some time defending a multi billion dollar corporation and the worlds richest man from the unwashed masses of slashdot. I am disgusted that you feel that you need to add your voice to the din raised by marketing companies, PR firms, paid for politicians, bought out analysts. MS spend tens of millions of dollars a year telling the world how great they are and yet you feel that somehow if you just added your voice it would make all the difference.
Poor old helpless Microsoft. Getting attacked by those mean little slashdotters. I better to come to Bill gates aid right away lest he be crushed.
You are pathetic. More pathetic then any stereotype you may have about pimply faced slashdot kids living in their mom's basement.
why would you pledge your allegience to some company? Why do they need your help? What do you care if some company suffers? honestly do you go around ford when people say bad things about their cars? Do you go around defending Toshiba if somebody tells you their TV sucks?
Of all the millions of corporations in the world why did you choose MS to pledge your allegience to?
Man you are all over the place. Republicans sure are disjointed in their thinking. I especially love your proof that saddam was about to purchase a nuclear weapons!. That's rich. Duh you see he has some money, and I think that he wanted nuclear weapons, and if he has money then he could buy nuclear weapons, and if he could buy nuclear weapons then he must have been trying to buy them!. Wow just a brilliant putting together of half baked conjectures there buddy. Brilliant proof that Saddam was on the verge of buying nuclear weapons.
As for the muslims again your limited thinking processes lead you down weird passages. What were they going to attack us with spitballs? You think egypt or lebonan could take on the US army? You think they are stupid enough to launch tanks and airplanes to face the Bush war machine?
Listen these people are not stupid. They realize a couple of things that you don't. First of all there are a lot of things in common with bush and saddam. Both men are ruthless when it comes to punishing their enemies. Neither man recognized any bounds when it comes to crushing resistance. These countries know that you can't face these kinds of enemies head on. If they attacked us Bush would stop at nothing to destroy them. Powell said on the record that US would use nuclear weapons if we wanted to.
They will fight us in the only way that can have any hope of succeeding. By terrorism. They will fund and encourage terroists for generations to come. They will hit back but it won't be by firing missiles, they will instead detonate a nuclear bomb in a major city in the US. The hit won't come today, and maybe not even this year but it will come sooner or later. Arabs have long memories, if don't get anything else out of this conversation get that. One day you will open up the paper and see that millions of americans have died from a devestating attack in a large metorpolitan city. On that day say to yourself "They are attacking us becasue we invaded iraq".
As for Israel you continue to avoid the question at hand and make stupid statements about how Saddam attempted his pathetic scud launches during the first gulf war. As if nothing has had happened in the intervening years.
Sure he hated israel. Everybody does. Arabs do, europe does, russians do, even the chinese hate israel. We are the only friend Israel has in the world. And yet we can't go around invading every country that hates israel and has the capability to do them some harm. At some point they have to start fending for themselves for gods sake.
When is enough enough? Why isn't 12 billion a year enough? Why do we have to spend another 100 billion a year to keep them safe. Fuck man don't your schools need repairs? Are all your roads pothole free? They have nculear weapons for christs sake they don't need any more my money. If they want to kill arabs for fun let them launch their missles and have fun. Shit if you can launch missiles at a 70 year or quadraplegic why can't you launch nuclear weapons at iraq? It's not like the israelis have any morals or anything. They keep three million people as domesticated animals for gods sake.
You also put way too much faith in what the "inteligence community" says. These people have proved themselves to be extrememly incompetent during the last decade.
Finally. I am a veteran. I know you sissy hawks have this fantasy that every member of the military is a republican like you but it aint so. I have sacrificed to make this country stong what have you done? You are lucky that you are not in front of me denying my sacrifice and service. I guess it's easy to do that from your mothers basement. Say that to my face and I will break both of your arms.
I hate chicken shit wimps like you. Sit on your ass all day and thump your chest while other people kill and die for you. I know you get a hard on every time you read about some soldier killing somebody in your name. I know you it makes you feel great to know that "we're number one" as if you had anything to do with it, but get this straight you bedwetter: you are a spectator. That's all. You sit at the sidelines while real men do the work.
That's what the offer was numnuts. They would release teir JVM under the GPL if Java relaxed the rules of their trademark a little. Not enough to lose total control just enough so that people could distribute it.
As I said I predict that they will indeed open source their JVM. That will royally fuck Sun.
The PHB asks you how long it would take to create a program to ask the user one question and give them an answer based on a database lookup. You say "No more then a week". He then says OK and two days later you are told that you will build an e-commerce system and that you promised it could be done in a week.
This is an actual true story by the way.
In the real world we deal with idiot bosses who don't know jack shit about anything. Any attempt at trying to estimate a project automatically presumes that the projet scope is knowable or that the problem you are trying to solve is known. PHBs do not know the problem they are trying to solve.
I have never ever participated in any project that got done on time or that didn't change midstream. Never!. Mind you I have been programming since the early eighties and have worked for dozens of firms.
Anybody who thinks IT projects can be managed are just fooling themselves. When somebody asks me how long a program will take my stock answer is that it takes 15 years to write a decent program. Then I ask them exactly how good of a program they want. The usual answer is "I don't care how much it sucks as long as you can do it by next week. Oh don't bother testing it we can tackle that later, I promised the VP of such and such we'd get it done by next week and I have to show him something or we will both get fired".
You have got it all wrong. this is not about what we are missing out on. It's about trying to help java. Many people sincerely believe that open sourcing java will help java.
IBM certainly has invested a lot of money in java and now they are feeling uneasy about it. you would too if you spent billions of dollars on a technology completely controlled by one of your competitors. They want to help Sun open source java so they can continue to pour money into it.
If Sun does not open source it I predict IBM will shift it's focus away from java. They might just open source their own implementation and call it something else which would seriously hurt sun.
How much you want to bet that by the time parrot hits beta it's going to be faster and more cross platform then java and will already have larger library.
Well sun isn't doing that great lately. They can't really seem to find traction with any new product or idea they have come up with.
If he thinks that he will get anywhere doing the same old shit he has always done then more power to him. Personally I think he is just riding this train off the cliff.
I forgot that I was talking to a republican. Ok let's see if we can any of this into your little republican brain.
So you provide a link to the fact that saddam was selling oil to syria (SHOCKING!) and an abscure publication in which one inspector disagrees with the inspection team as proof that Saddam was actively searching for nuclear weapons. I guess to a republican this constitutes absolute 100% proof.
I guess armed with that kind of proof you can't go wrong invading a country and killing 10 or 20 thousand people.
Which naturally leads to your delusions about israel. Saddam did not attack israel. He did not say he was going to attack them. He did not have missiles capable of reaching israel. He did not amass an army at the israeli border. And yet to a republican like you this presented a clear and present danger to israel so great and ominous that it was worth spending a 100 billion of our tax dollars to alleviate. Israel is so helpless and weak despite the billions we give them and the hundreds of nuclear weapons they have that we needed a massive military operation to save precious israeli lives. Even if cost us the lives of American soldiers.
Silly me I thought the mission of the US military was to defend the US not Israel.
I really don't know what to make of your christian fundamentalist rant in the third paragraph. Being an atheist I always find it amusing when people lead their whole lives according to some silly 2000 year old writings and claim to speak to god. I do understand however how much christains hate muslims and how powerful the book of revelations is to you superstitious fucks. Apparently Iraq is to be a central palyer in bringing christ back and I realize that speeding the return of christ is a major reason why Bush invaded iraq.
Capturing saddam OTOH is nothing to crow about. As I said he was a declawed kittycat. I am shocked that it took almost a year.
Let's hope that when Jesus comes back and sees how many people GW killed to make him happy he won't be pissed.
My point is that people who think Mozilla can "win" or "compete" with IE are under a delusion. Mozilla is already 50 times better then IE and yet the only people who use it are geeks like us.
Slashdot Mirror
No single raindrop is responsible for the flood and yet they all share responsibility.
We all share the blame/credit for what our country does. Most people in this country don't give a shit and won't even bother to vote but they are responsible nevertheless.
But he US was instrumental in creating the WTO. It has also used WTO when it suits their needs.
In all honesty though none of this really matters. We have bombs and are willing to use them against people we don't like. What's WTO going to do? Jack shit that's what.
You know I was also thinking that Maytag might be a good corporation for you to worship too. I noticed that there are web sites which discuss appliances and some people seem to critize them. They need somebody to defend them against the attacks.
Appliance boards probably don't get as heated (pun intended) as the automobile boards but still I think Maytag deserves your vigorous defence just as much as Microsoft does don't you think.
You are way offbase. I was around back then and visicalc was mainly used by accountants not engineers. I was also friends with people who made a living writing dbase applications. It was an entire cottage industry of people writing dbase applications and not one of them was a game.
It sounds like you also are not aware that dbase ran on CP/M based machines and apple II (and it's clones). Rbase was the big mainframe database back then. Again Dbase had no real practical use for an engineer it was mainly used for inventory and POS type applications and of course accounting applications.
I am flattered in a way. Of course it would be better if this kind of attention did not come from an insane person but really thanks.
I am also happy that you can admit you were wrong about the whole capitalism thing. I see you went on a nice tangent rant on it too. Very entertaining.
I still maintain that if you are the type of person who feels obligated to dedicate themselves to some organization you'd be better off choosing a cause rather then a corporations. You know help the poor, feed the hungry and all that. I don't think Bill gates will ever notice you valiantly defending him here on slashdot but if you helped out your local food bank they would notice.
If on the other hand you feel like you must dedicate your life to some corporation I'd still suggest a better one. I mentioned Honda, they make great products. They also make a wide variety of products. I think they are more deserving of your worship then MS don't you?
"Christ, I'd swear allegience to satan if I knew you were batting for the other team."
You have pledged your allegience to Microsoft so in effect you have already pledged your allegience to satan.
Apparently not only do you not have morals but you also can't read. I said nothing about capitalism or the evils thereof.
I am honestly curious though. Why did you pledge your allegience to MS? Why not Honda? They make nice stuff. Why not ghirardelli? They make tasty choclate. Why did you choose MS over all the other corporations in the world.
I really want to know.
MS just doesn't work that way. They are closer to a cult then a company.
Yea. It's not like he ever lied before.
Gates does not give money to charity. He gives stock to his foundation which then sells the stock to convert it into money. He is giving up theoretical future money not actual real money.
It should be noted of course that Gates never paid for that stock in the first place.
It should also be noted that he never game money till after the trial began. To him it's a way to buy good publicity. By spending a miniscule percentage of his wealth he tries to shed his evil image.
Doing it by selling stock he got for free of course is his real genious.
You've never used a Mac have you?
I am so tired of this same old liteny here. But what the hell I don't have anything better to do.
"Slashdot has a tendency to continually bash MS."
SO FUCKING WHAT? Shut up already about this. If you don't like MS bashing go to someplace else. May I suggest you hang out at gotdotnet.com. There you will see people continually bash linux 24X7. Hell if you post a message defending open source or java too ardently they will even remove your posts for you. If you want to visit a site that bashes slashdot itself there are no shortages of that either.
This is the internet. There are forums to bash MS, Linux, Barney, Wesley Crusher or redheads. Go find one that suits your needs.
"I am not claiming that MS does no bad, but really there is not many large companies out there that have not done something bad at some stage. And there is not one company out there that would not defend themselves the same way that MS has, if they were under attack, be that a legitimate attack or not."
This is my favorite. I call the "my standards for myself are very low" defense. Rephrased it goes like this.
"Gee mommy I know I killed the neighbors dog but lot of people kill dogs and that makes it right"
And
"Gee mommy I know I killed the neigbors dog but johny over there would have also killed the dog if he just had the chance so that makes it right"
"So mod me down if you wish, but really, the MS bashing is starting to get boring."
You may be bored but I am disgusted. I am disgusted that an ordinary person would spend some time defending a multi billion dollar corporation and the worlds richest man from the unwashed masses of slashdot. I am disgusted that you feel that you need to add your voice to the din raised by marketing companies, PR firms, paid for politicians, bought out analysts. MS spend tens of millions of dollars a year telling the world how great they are and yet you feel that somehow if you just added your voice it would make all the difference.
Poor old helpless Microsoft. Getting attacked by those mean little slashdotters. I better to come to Bill gates aid right away lest he be crushed.
You are pathetic. More pathetic then any stereotype you may have about pimply faced slashdot kids living in their mom's basement.
why would you pledge your allegience to some company? Why do they need your help? What do you care if some company suffers? honestly do you go around ford when people say bad things about their cars? Do you go around defending Toshiba if somebody tells you their TV sucks?
Of all the millions of corporations in the world why did you choose MS to pledge your allegience to?
I think you are playing revisionist history here.
You are forgetting the revolution in business brought about by dbase and visicalc.
By the time MS came on to the scene business had already embraced computers.
Man you are all over the place. Republicans sure are disjointed in their thinking. I especially love your proof that saddam was about to purchase a nuclear weapons!. That's rich. Duh you see he has some money, and I think that he wanted nuclear weapons, and if he has money then he could buy nuclear weapons, and if he could buy nuclear weapons then he must have been trying to buy them!. Wow just a brilliant putting together of half baked conjectures there buddy. Brilliant proof that Saddam was on the verge of buying nuclear weapons.
As for the muslims again your limited thinking processes lead you down weird passages. What were they going to attack us with spitballs? You think egypt or lebonan could take on the US army? You think they are stupid enough to launch tanks and airplanes to face the Bush war machine?
Listen these people are not stupid. They realize a couple of things that you don't. First of all there are a lot of things in common with bush and saddam. Both men are ruthless when it comes to punishing their enemies. Neither man recognized any bounds when it comes to crushing resistance. These countries know that you can't face these kinds of enemies head on. If they attacked us Bush would stop at nothing to destroy them. Powell said on the record that US would use nuclear weapons if we wanted to.
They will fight us in the only way that can have any hope of succeeding. By terrorism. They will fund and encourage terroists for generations to come. They will hit back but it won't be by firing missiles, they will instead detonate a nuclear bomb in a major city in the US. The hit won't come today, and maybe not even this year but it will come sooner or later. Arabs have long memories, if don't get anything else out of this conversation get that. One day you will open up the paper and see that millions of americans have died from a devestating attack in a large metorpolitan city. On that day say to yourself "They are attacking us becasue we invaded iraq".
As for Israel you continue to avoid the question at hand and make stupid statements about how Saddam attempted his pathetic scud launches during the first gulf war. As if nothing has had happened in the intervening years.
Sure he hated israel. Everybody does. Arabs do, europe does, russians do, even the chinese hate israel. We are the only friend Israel has in the world. And yet we can't go around invading every country that hates israel and has the capability to do them some harm. At some point they have to start fending for themselves for gods sake.
When is enough enough? Why isn't 12 billion a year enough? Why do we have to spend another 100 billion a year to keep them safe. Fuck man don't your schools need repairs? Are all your roads pothole free? They have nculear weapons for christs sake they don't need any more my money. If they want to kill arabs for fun let them launch their missles and have fun. Shit if you can launch missiles at a 70 year or quadraplegic why can't you launch nuclear weapons at iraq? It's not like the israelis have any morals or anything. They keep three million people as domesticated animals for gods sake.
You also put way too much faith in what the "inteligence community" says. These people have proved themselves to be extrememly incompetent during the last decade.
Finally. I am a veteran. I know you sissy hawks have this fantasy that every member of the military is a republican like you but it aint so. I have sacrificed to make this country stong what have you done? You are lucky that you are not in front of me denying my sacrifice and service. I guess it's easy to do that from your mothers basement. Say that to my face and I will break both of your arms.
I hate chicken shit wimps like you. Sit on your ass all day and thump your chest while other people kill and die for you. I know you get a hard on every time you read about some soldier killing somebody in your name. I know you it makes you feel great to know that "we're number one" as if you had anything to do with it, but get this straight you bedwetter: you are a spectator. That's all. You sit at the sidelines while real men do the work.
I hear rekall is trying to fill that role. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.
Anybody who thinks that this punishment is real or will discourage MS needs to lay down the crack pipe and check out their stock price.
Since the announcement of the punishment the stock has gone UP!. The investors think this is a good thing for MS.
OTOH Bush has collected more bribes er I mean donations then anybody else in history.
That's what the offer was numnuts. They would release teir JVM under the GPL if Java relaxed the rules of their trademark a little. Not enough to lose total control just enough so that people could distribute it.
As I said I predict that they will indeed open source their JVM. That will royally fuck Sun.
Where I work it goes like this.
The PHB asks you how long it would take to create a program to ask the user one question and give them an answer based on a database lookup. You say "No more then a week". He then says OK and two days later you are told that you will build an e-commerce system and that you promised it could be done in a week.
This is an actual true story by the way.
In the real world we deal with idiot bosses who don't know jack shit about anything. Any attempt at trying to estimate a project automatically presumes that the projet scope is knowable or that the problem you are trying to solve is known. PHBs do not know the problem they are trying to solve.
I have never ever participated in any project that got done on time or that didn't change midstream. Never!. Mind you I have been programming since the early eighties and have worked for dozens of firms.
Anybody who thinks IT projects can be managed are just fooling themselves. When somebody asks me how long a program will take my stock answer is that it takes 15 years to write a decent program. Then I ask them exactly how good of a program they want. The usual answer is "I don't care how much it sucks as long as you can do it by next week. Oh don't bother testing it we can tackle that later, I promised the VP of such and such we'd get it done by next week and I have to show him something or we will both get fired".
This industry sucks.
You have got it all wrong. this is not about what we are missing out on. It's about trying to help java. Many people sincerely believe that open sourcing java will help java.
IBM certainly has invested a lot of money in java and now they are feeling uneasy about it. you would too if you spent billions of dollars on a technology completely controlled by one of your competitors. They want to help Sun open source java so they can continue to pour money into it.
If Sun does not open source it I predict IBM will shift it's focus away from java. They might just open source their own implementation and call it something else which would seriously hurt sun.
How much you want to bet that by the time parrot hits beta it's going to be faster and more cross platform then java and will already have larger library.
Java is dead. It just doesn't know it yet.
Well sun isn't doing that great lately. They can't really seem to find traction with any new product or idea they have come up with.
If he thinks that he will get anywhere doing the same old shit he has always done then more power to him. Personally I think he is just riding this train off the cliff.
Microsoft did fork java and made a windows only version. It's called C# and .NET.
.NET is a greater threat to java then open sourcing it. In fact open sourcing it would probably help it right now.
You know what though?
I forgot that I was talking to a republican. Ok let's see if we can any of this into your little republican brain.
So you provide a link to the fact that saddam was selling oil to syria (SHOCKING!) and an abscure publication in which one inspector disagrees with the inspection team as proof that Saddam was actively searching for nuclear weapons. I guess to a republican this constitutes absolute 100% proof.
I guess armed with that kind of proof you can't go wrong invading a country and killing 10 or 20 thousand people.
Which naturally leads to your delusions about israel. Saddam did not attack israel. He did not say he was going to attack them. He did not have missiles capable of reaching israel. He did not amass an army at the israeli border. And yet to a republican like you this presented a clear and present danger to israel so great and ominous that it was worth spending a 100 billion of our tax dollars to alleviate. Israel is so helpless and weak despite the billions we give them and the hundreds of nuclear weapons they have that we needed a massive military operation to save precious israeli lives. Even if cost us the lives of American soldiers.
Silly me I thought the mission of the US military was to defend the US not Israel.
I really don't know what to make of your christian fundamentalist rant in the third paragraph. Being an atheist I always find it amusing when people lead their whole lives according to some silly 2000 year old writings and claim to speak to god. I do understand however how much christains hate muslims and how powerful the book of revelations is to you superstitious fucks. Apparently Iraq is to be a central palyer in bringing christ back and I realize that speeding the return of christ is a major reason why Bush invaded iraq.
Capturing saddam OTOH is nothing to crow about. As I said he was a declawed kittycat. I am shocked that it took almost a year.
Let's hope that when Jesus comes back and sees how many people GW killed to make him happy he won't be pissed.
My point is that people who think Mozilla can "win" or "compete" with IE are under a delusion. Mozilla is already 50 times better then IE and yet the only people who use it are geeks like us.
"To keep Mozilla competitive"
Keep it competitive with what? IE?
If browsers won on features IE would be dead now.