Well if you want to buy major computer games, Windows is still the platform for that. Someone else responded with 'Excel'. Then there's the whole Outlook/Exchange situation.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that businesses have a huge investment in Microsoft. You get a business where all of their current servers are Windows, Exchange, MSSQL, etc. They have custom-built apps that only run on Windows. All of their IT personnel are trained on Windows. Next time they have a round of purchasing, they're going to buy Microsoft products again.
I think the whole concept of safeguards has been discredited because once you have sufficient money and resources you can erode, destroy and work around them with impunity.
I'm not sure what you'd suggest then. The whole concept of "safeguards" doesn't work? Precautions are just not going to help? I guess we should just go kill ourselves, then.
Or maybe you misunderstand and you think I'm saying that the NSA's program would be fine, but we only need a few additional safeguards? Not really. My point is more that the system of having secret courts with secret laws governing a secret surveillance program all enables abuse, and the public has no safeguards against what's done in secret.
So my point is, there's no such thing as secret courts with secret courts with secret laws governing a secret surveillance program that is "not being abused". Having that sort of system enables abuse with no accountability, which is equivalent to abuse even before the abuse takes place.
No one recognized the Year of Linux having come and possibly passed, because it was in the pocket, not the desktop.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting to think about how much of our personal computing now takes place on Unix or Linux. There are, of course, people who use Linux or BSD on the desktop and server, but setting that aside, there are now a lot of people using Macs, which are running a certified Unix. Then there are the iOS devices, which are also running unix, and Android devices which run Linux. I've also seen some people running around with Chromebooks, which is again Linux.
There are a couple of big moves to watch out for in the future. One of the big ones sitting in plain site is Valve's recent Linux support for Steam. If they can move their game catalog over to Linux, either through ports or by using something like WINE, it'll be a huge blow for Microsoft. There are some indications that Valve is looking to do just that, so that they can release a Linux-based game console. Even though it might not seem like a big deal, liberating the gaming market from Windows has the potential to have a big effect on home computing. Another thing to watch is the market share for products like Google Apps or LibreOffice. If Microsoft loses their dominance in office suites and email servers, they're going to be in a tough spot.
Why don't all these brilliant analysts go make billions if they are so smart?
Sorry, but this is a really stupid thing to say. Yes, I know you probably think it makes a lot of sense, because lots of people think about things that way, but it's just amazing that you assume that wealth and intelligence are necessarily linked.
First, there's the expectation that smart people are all focused on making making money, as though it's intelligent to waste your life scrambling to accure more money than you can use. Second, you assume that intelligent people can simply think themselves into being wealthy, as though it has nothing to do with having connections, being ruthless, or having dumb luck. Finally, you conclude from these assumptions that rich people (e.g. Microsoft) have they money that they have because of smart leaderships and decisions.
I know I'm going off on a tangent, because I'm not talking here about Microsoft per se. Even if we assume that Microsoft is filled with brilliant people who have made their billions of dollars through intellect alone, you're still saying something stupid.
Re:What's good for others apparently is no good fo
on
Break Microsoft Up
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yup. It seems to me that Microsoft still has the idea lodged in their collective heads that they're in a position to say, "Fuck you if you don't like our product. You have to buy it anyway." Unfortunately, they are still kind of in that position, but their position is increasingly tenuous.
Having the government build out the infrastructure will not significantly increase their ability to monitor your internet usage. The fact that it's currently controlled by private companies hasn't slowed them down.
In fact, I'd find it less unsettling if the government just had access to some of the information by virtue of the fact that I use their infrastructure, rather than knowing that they have access to the same information by strong-arming private companies who provide the illusion of privacy.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a 200 mbps connection that's lightly filtered rather than a 384 kbps connection that's completely unfiltered. Arguably providing slow speeds can be a stronger form of control and censorship than filtering.
This is something we should all understand: There's effectively no difference between "actual abuse" and "a system that enables abuse with no accountability". If you have a system that enables abuse without the proper safeguards against abuse, then it's only a matter of time before people start taking advantage of the situation.
Well of course, if it hasn't been done already, it's the next step. I believe pedophiles were the claimed reason for the British to attempt Internet filtering.
So first they say, "This isn't being used to spy on regular citizens. It's just for national security and going after terrorists. We're not interested in anything else, so if you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about." A lot of people will go along with that, since nobody wants terrorist to kill people.
So next they say, "Well we have all this data sitting around, and we could allow police access to it, and they could use it to catch pedophiles. You want to catch pedophiles, right?" And what, you're going to say no? You're going to defend pedophiles?
So eventually they'll say, "Well we have all this data sitting around, and police have access to it, so why not use it to catch all kinds of criminals? I mean, would you rather hamstring the police for no reason whatsoever?"
How long before all this surveillance infrastructure gets used against farmers standing up against Monstano, or generic drug makers, or individuals advocating for shorter copyright terms? How long before this gets used to stifle political dissent and free speech?
This is a very valid concern. Part of the problem is that the concept of 'a terrorist' is actually not very far from the concept of 'a political dissident' or 'a revolutionary'. The concept of 'terrorism' is not well defined with clear boundaries. In a general sense, anyone who uses tactics to elicit fear as a method of political opposition could be considered a terrorist, even if those tactics are not strictly violent. What's the difference, really, between a 'terrorists' and a 'freedom fighter'? If the United States' beloved founding fathers were around today, wouldn't the British call them 'terrorists'?
The idea of a "slippery slope" is not inherently a logical fallacy. There's such a thing as a fallacious use of a "slippery slope" argument, but it's only a fallacy because you're claiming that there's a slippery slope when the slope isn't actually all that slippery.
Yeah, really Microsoft was pretty early to the "devices and services" party. How many years have there been Windows-branded phones. They made the XBox, and I think they own WebTV. They've had an embedded version of Windows for over 15 years. They've owned Hotmail for... I don't remember how long. They've been trying to capture the search and advertising markets for quite a while.
To repeat, the problem isn't that Microsoft was 'late to the party'. They showed up right on time. They waltzed right in, acted like they owned the place, pissed in the punch bowl, and now a lot of people wish they'd leave.
Craigslist is private property and they reserve the right to ban anyone they darn please, for any or no reason.
Yes, but it's 'private property' in a very strange way, in that they're also a public website. It's not 'private property' like your house is private property. It's 'private property' like the newspaper classifieds section is. The newspaper press can ban you from buying their newspaper, but reading the newspaper doesn't suddenly become a felony.
The C&D letter proves that they were not welcome, and that they also knew it.
So what? If violating the C&D constitutes a crime, then that's a crime. Fine, so be it. Punish these guys for knowingly violating the C&D. That shouldn't make the act of bypassing a blacklist illegal.
To use an analogy: I could use email to plan a robbery, but a judge shouldn't then conclude that 'sending email' is an illegal act.
To use your analogy: Yes, you're allowed to ban me from your tavern. If I insist on coming in anyway, you may be able to have me charged with trespassing. If I'm wearing a disguise, it does not then make me more allowed to trespass on your property. However, the fact that someone was wearing a disguise while trespassing on your property should not make it a felony to wear any kind of disguise.
Imagine one person is banned from a shopping mall. If that person puts on a false beard and enters the shopping mall, they may not be recognised, but they are still trespassing. If _you_ put on a false beard, that doesn't make you a trespasser.
Right, but what this ruling seems to suggest is that changing/obscuring your IP to get bypass a blacklist is, in itself, a felony because it's considered 'hacking'.
Not everyone on a blacklist is guilty. If one person on your work network gets blacklisted from a site, it will hit everyone on that network. Sometimes sites will even blacklist whole IP ranges because too many IPs in the range have been engaged in something malicious, but that doesn't mean that every IP in the range is doing something wrong. And as the summary points out, IPs are allocated dynamically, and not intended to be used as authentication of a real-life identity. Your IP might be blacklisted for actions taken by someone who used that IP previously. And even if you are banned for good reason, it may be that you received an automated ban because your computer was infected with some malware. Once you clean off the malware, you might be fine.
Yet you're telling me that, if I try to bypass a blacklist for any reason, I'm committing fraud?
They violated a cease and desist letter, so if that can carry any penalty, hit them with it. But there should not be any criminality applied to changing or obscuring your IP address.
And that, right there, is what I was finding bizarre. "Don't get me wrong, I think that education is great and important and all that. I think it should be a really high priority, right up there with visiting the Bahamas and going to see 'Kick-Ass 2'. I mean I love that kind of entertaining shit, or enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it."
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month
First, education is not a widget. Second, you have no way of knowing the return on investment that education will have on your life. And don't respond with some nonsense about, "You *can* calculate the ROI! People who complete a BA are paid an an average of $X over the course of their lifetime more than people who only completed high school." You don't know much much additional money you'll make if you go to college.
I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
What makes you think that an 18 year-old can predict the amount of money they'll make in their future career? What, is your solution here to have all 18 year-olds saying, "Well, I don't have a proven track record of making massive amounts of money. I may as well give up on myself and quit trying to learn things."
I'm not saying that 18 year-olds should be going $100k in debt. I'm saying you can't blame them for pursuing an education, especially when they have been given every reason to believe it's the smart thing to do. If you want to blame someone, start looking into why college costs $100k.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
Re:Students have to take some of the responsibilit
on
The College-Loan Scandal
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think your suggestions are good, but I think it's wrong-headed to blame the students for 'not taking responsibility.
This is a systemic problem. We have a bunch of 18 year-olds with relatively little life experience, and we keep telling them that going to a good college will make them rich someday. We give them the impression that taking out massive amounts of student loan is a wise move. This message comes from parents and teachers and politicians and the media, and you can't blame a bunch of kids for believing it.
We need to take a good hard look at how we're treating education. Is college a place where kids can receive a good general education, or are they vocational schools? Are we promoting education for the good of our society, or do we think it's a privilege for rich people that should be denied to the poor because they haven't earned it? Is the purpose of college to educate our young adults, or to entertain them with frat parties and amateur minor-league sports teams?
Yeah, I kind of hate the response the proposal has gotten, and not because I'm such a huge fan of it that I feel like we *need to* create the hyperloop, but because it shows an underlying shitty attitude that our society had acquired.
When someone proposes a radically different method of solving a problem that may increase efficiency dramatically, we dismiss it out of hand. We don't even bother trying to consider the idea, we just say, "Meh, it's probably dumb and it probably won't work, because if it was going to work, we would have thought of it by now." I think this is an unfortunate overreaction to the utopian expectations from the last century. We're too cynical. In spite of living in a fricken sci-fi future world, with powerful computers in our pockets and global video communications, we still think cool things can't happen, and we make fun of anyone who wants to do anything cool.
Honestly, that's all fine when you're a kid and have nothing better to do with your time. Many of us, however, are looking for a way that we get to watch the content that we want to watch, in a convenient manner, while offering some reasonable monetary support to the creators of that content.
The problem seems to be that you have all these other companies getting in between the content creators and my money. These other companies don't want me to be able to watch the content that I want, and they don't want it to be convenient or at a reasonable price. They want to bundle up a big package deal, where I have to buy a lot of content I don't want to get the content I want. And then they want me to watch it in some time slot they've selected, and then they want to interrupt the experience every 5 minutes with commercials.
If the content creators could manage to get those companies out of the way, then I don't think most adults would bother pirating. We have better things to do with our time.
Who needs the majority? It seems like Apple is doing well enough as it is.
And this is part of my point. Jobs didn't go around following the standard businessman path of chasing dumb conventional wisdom. He didn't seek to dominate all markets, trying to make his products all things to all people. You look at the results of that decision and you think it's dumb, because he didn't sell Macs to the vast majority of people. Many people would point out, though, that they're the most valuable company in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you want to buy major computer games, Windows is still the platform for that. Someone else responded with 'Excel'. Then there's the whole Outlook/Exchange situation.
Aside from that, there's just the fact that businesses have a huge investment in Microsoft. You get a business where all of their current servers are Windows, Exchange, MSSQL, etc. They have custom-built apps that only run on Windows. All of their IT personnel are trained on Windows. Next time they have a round of purchasing, they're going to buy Microsoft products again.
I think the whole concept of safeguards has been discredited because once you have sufficient money and resources you can erode, destroy and work around them with impunity.
I'm not sure what you'd suggest then. The whole concept of "safeguards" doesn't work? Precautions are just not going to help? I guess we should just go kill ourselves, then.
Or maybe you misunderstand and you think I'm saying that the NSA's program would be fine, but we only need a few additional safeguards? Not really. My point is more that the system of having secret courts with secret laws governing a secret surveillance program all enables abuse, and the public has no safeguards against what's done in secret.
So my point is, there's no such thing as secret courts with secret courts with secret laws governing a secret surveillance program that is "not being abused". Having that sort of system enables abuse with no accountability, which is equivalent to abuse even before the abuse takes place.
No one recognized the Year of Linux having come and possibly passed, because it was in the pocket, not the desktop.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting to think about how much of our personal computing now takes place on Unix or Linux. There are, of course, people who use Linux or BSD on the desktop and server, but setting that aside, there are now a lot of people using Macs, which are running a certified Unix. Then there are the iOS devices, which are also running unix, and Android devices which run Linux. I've also seen some people running around with Chromebooks, which is again Linux.
There are a couple of big moves to watch out for in the future. One of the big ones sitting in plain site is Valve's recent Linux support for Steam. If they can move their game catalog over to Linux, either through ports or by using something like WINE, it'll be a huge blow for Microsoft. There are some indications that Valve is looking to do just that, so that they can release a Linux-based game console. Even though it might not seem like a big deal, liberating the gaming market from Windows has the potential to have a big effect on home computing. Another thing to watch is the market share for products like Google Apps or LibreOffice. If Microsoft loses their dominance in office suites and email servers, they're going to be in a tough spot.
Why don't all these brilliant analysts go make billions if they are so smart?
Sorry, but this is a really stupid thing to say. Yes, I know you probably think it makes a lot of sense, because lots of people think about things that way, but it's just amazing that you assume that wealth and intelligence are necessarily linked.
First, there's the expectation that smart people are all focused on making making money, as though it's intelligent to waste your life scrambling to accure more money than you can use. Second, you assume that intelligent people can simply think themselves into being wealthy, as though it has nothing to do with having connections, being ruthless, or having dumb luck. Finally, you conclude from these assumptions that rich people (e.g. Microsoft) have they money that they have because of smart leaderships and decisions.
I know I'm going off on a tangent, because I'm not talking here about Microsoft per se. Even if we assume that Microsoft is filled with brilliant people who have made their billions of dollars through intellect alone, you're still saying something stupid.
Yup. It seems to me that Microsoft still has the idea lodged in their collective heads that they're in a position to say, "Fuck you if you don't like our product. You have to buy it anyway." Unfortunately, they are still kind of in that position, but their position is increasingly tenuous.
Having the government build out the infrastructure will not significantly increase their ability to monitor your internet usage. The fact that it's currently controlled by private companies hasn't slowed them down.
In fact, I'd find it less unsettling if the government just had access to some of the information by virtue of the fact that I use their infrastructure, rather than knowing that they have access to the same information by strong-arming private companies who provide the illusion of privacy.
On the other hand, I'd rather have a 200 mbps connection that's lightly filtered rather than a 384 kbps connection that's completely unfiltered. Arguably providing slow speeds can be a stronger form of control and censorship than filtering.
This is something we should all understand: There's effectively no difference between "actual abuse" and "a system that enables abuse with no accountability". If you have a system that enables abuse without the proper safeguards against abuse, then it's only a matter of time before people start taking advantage of the situation.
Well of course, if it hasn't been done already, it's the next step. I believe pedophiles were the claimed reason for the British to attempt Internet filtering.
So first they say, "This isn't being used to spy on regular citizens. It's just for national security and going after terrorists. We're not interested in anything else, so if you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about." A lot of people will go along with that, since nobody wants terrorist to kill people.
So next they say, "Well we have all this data sitting around, and we could allow police access to it, and they could use it to catch pedophiles. You want to catch pedophiles, right?" And what, you're going to say no? You're going to defend pedophiles?
So eventually they'll say, "Well we have all this data sitting around, and police have access to it, so why not use it to catch all kinds of criminals? I mean, would you rather hamstring the police for no reason whatsoever?"
That's how the slippery slope works.
How long before all this surveillance infrastructure gets used against farmers standing up against Monstano, or generic drug makers, or individuals advocating for shorter copyright terms? How long before this gets used to stifle political dissent and free speech?
This is a very valid concern. Part of the problem is that the concept of 'a terrorist' is actually not very far from the concept of 'a political dissident' or 'a revolutionary'. The concept of 'terrorism' is not well defined with clear boundaries. In a general sense, anyone who uses tactics to elicit fear as a method of political opposition could be considered a terrorist, even if those tactics are not strictly violent. What's the difference, really, between a 'terrorists' and a 'freedom fighter'? If the United States' beloved founding fathers were around today, wouldn't the British call them 'terrorists'?
The idea of a "slippery slope" is not inherently a logical fallacy. There's such a thing as a fallacious use of a "slippery slope" argument, but it's only a fallacy because you're claiming that there's a slippery slope when the slope isn't actually all that slippery.
Yeah, really Microsoft was pretty early to the "devices and services" party. How many years have there been Windows-branded phones. They made the XBox, and I think they own WebTV. They've had an embedded version of Windows for over 15 years. They've owned Hotmail for... I don't remember how long. They've been trying to capture the search and advertising markets for quite a while.
To repeat, the problem isn't that Microsoft was 'late to the party'. They showed up right on time. They waltzed right in, acted like they owned the place, pissed in the punch bowl, and now a lot of people wish they'd leave.
Craigslist is private property and they reserve the right to ban anyone they darn please, for any or no reason.
Yes, but it's 'private property' in a very strange way, in that they're also a public website. It's not 'private property' like your house is private property. It's 'private property' like the newspaper classifieds section is. The newspaper press can ban you from buying their newspaper, but reading the newspaper doesn't suddenly become a felony.
The C&D letter proves that they were not welcome, and that they also knew it.
So what? If violating the C&D constitutes a crime, then that's a crime. Fine, so be it. Punish these guys for knowingly violating the C&D. That shouldn't make the act of bypassing a blacklist illegal.
To use an analogy: I could use email to plan a robbery, but a judge shouldn't then conclude that 'sending email' is an illegal act.
To use your analogy: Yes, you're allowed to ban me from your tavern. If I insist on coming in anyway, you may be able to have me charged with trespassing. If I'm wearing a disguise, it does not then make me more allowed to trespass on your property. However, the fact that someone was wearing a disguise while trespassing on your property should not make it a felony to wear any kind of disguise.
Imagine one person is banned from a shopping mall. If that person puts on a false beard and enters the shopping mall, they may not be recognised, but they are still trespassing. If _you_ put on a false beard, that doesn't make you a trespasser.
Right, but what this ruling seems to suggest is that changing/obscuring your IP to get bypass a blacklist is, in itself, a felony because it's considered 'hacking'.
Not everyone on a blacklist is guilty. If one person on your work network gets blacklisted from a site, it will hit everyone on that network. Sometimes sites will even blacklist whole IP ranges because too many IPs in the range have been engaged in something malicious, but that doesn't mean that every IP in the range is doing something wrong. And as the summary points out, IPs are allocated dynamically, and not intended to be used as authentication of a real-life identity. Your IP might be blacklisted for actions taken by someone who used that IP previously. And even if you are banned for good reason, it may be that you received an automated ban because your computer was infected with some malware. Once you clean off the malware, you might be fine.
Yet you're telling me that, if I try to bypass a blacklist for any reason, I'm committing fraud?
They violated a cease and desist letter, so if that can carry any penalty, hit them with it. But there should not be any criminality applied to changing or obscuring your IP address.
If you've read my posts and don't understand what I'm disagreeing with, then it's a symptom of the same problem I'm raising.
And that, right there, is what I was finding bizarre. "Don't get me wrong, I think that education is great and important and all that. I think it should be a really high priority, right up there with visiting the Bahamas and going to see 'Kick-Ass 2'. I mean I love that kind of entertaining shit, or enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it."
Capital investments are easy to justify, because they pay for themselves. If you make 100 widgets a month
First, education is not a widget. Second, you have no way of knowing the return on investment that education will have on your life. And don't respond with some nonsense about, "You *can* calculate the ROI! People who complete a BA are paid an an average of $X over the course of their lifetime more than people who only completed high school." You don't know much much additional money you'll make if you go to college.
I'm saying that if you don't have a good reason to expect to make lots of money in your future career, you should think twice about getting $100k in debt that you cannot ever discharge for any reason whatsoever.
What makes you think that an 18 year-old can predict the amount of money they'll make in their future career? What, is your solution here to have all 18 year-olds saying, "Well, I don't have a proven track record of making massive amounts of money. I may as well give up on myself and quit trying to learn things."
I'm not saying that 18 year-olds should be going $100k in debt. I'm saying you can't blame them for pursuing an education, especially when they have been given every reason to believe it's the smart thing to do. If you want to blame someone, start looking into why college costs $100k.
You're already taking for granted that education is either some form of personal entertainment on par with "watching movies", or else "a capital investment in your life". I understand that those are common ways of viewing it, but I find it bizarrely materialistic.
I was referring to the NSA domestic spying program.
I think that in light of recent events, you have to give the tinfoil-hat crowd the benefit of the doubt, no matter how insane they seem.
Right, because there's no point in learning anything that won't increase your earning potential.
I think your suggestions are good, but I think it's wrong-headed to blame the students for 'not taking responsibility.
This is a systemic problem. We have a bunch of 18 year-olds with relatively little life experience, and we keep telling them that going to a good college will make them rich someday. We give them the impression that taking out massive amounts of student loan is a wise move. This message comes from parents and teachers and politicians and the media, and you can't blame a bunch of kids for believing it.
We need to take a good hard look at how we're treating education. Is college a place where kids can receive a good general education, or are they vocational schools? Are we promoting education for the good of our society, or do we think it's a privilege for rich people that should be denied to the poor because they haven't earned it? Is the purpose of college to educate our young adults, or to entertain them with frat parties and amateur minor-league sports teams?
Yeah, I kind of hate the response the proposal has gotten, and not because I'm such a huge fan of it that I feel like we *need to* create the hyperloop, but because it shows an underlying shitty attitude that our society had acquired.
When someone proposes a radically different method of solving a problem that may increase efficiency dramatically, we dismiss it out of hand. We don't even bother trying to consider the idea, we just say, "Meh, it's probably dumb and it probably won't work, because if it was going to work, we would have thought of it by now." I think this is an unfortunate overreaction to the utopian expectations from the last century. We're too cynical. In spite of living in a fricken sci-fi future world, with powerful computers in our pockets and global video communications, we still think cool things can't happen, and we make fun of anyone who wants to do anything cool.
Honestly, that's all fine when you're a kid and have nothing better to do with your time. Many of us, however, are looking for a way that we get to watch the content that we want to watch, in a convenient manner, while offering some reasonable monetary support to the creators of that content.
The problem seems to be that you have all these other companies getting in between the content creators and my money. These other companies don't want me to be able to watch the content that I want, and they don't want it to be convenient or at a reasonable price. They want to bundle up a big package deal, where I have to buy a lot of content I don't want to get the content I want. And then they want me to watch it in some time slot they've selected, and then they want to interrupt the experience every 5 minutes with commercials.
If the content creators could manage to get those companies out of the way, then I don't think most adults would bother pirating. We have better things to do with our time.
Who needs the majority? It seems like Apple is doing well enough as it is.
And this is part of my point. Jobs didn't go around following the standard businessman path of chasing dumb conventional wisdom. He didn't seek to dominate all markets, trying to make his products all things to all people. You look at the results of that decision and you think it's dumb, because he didn't sell Macs to the vast majority of people. Many people would point out, though, that they're the most valuable company in the world.