Microsoft, in spite if its using the word to death, is simply too large and complex to innovate. Real innovators are far too likely to feel stifled and leave the company.
They aren't capable of admitting, or possibly even acknowledging this any more.
They came to my uni in 2002, and the main speaker, their head of whatever they call their hiring department (he did introduce himself, but I was only there for the pizza) went on what I can only describe as a polite tirade against 'hackers', meaning the proper meaning, not the criminal one. They didn't want them, they wanted people who thought like microsoft did, and were able to do things the microsoft way. A way we were assured was nothing like open source, and far superior.
Their problems quite obviously run deep, and to be frank it was obvious from that one meeting, I was not alone in coming away with that impression (note, not one person at that meeting went to work for them). They want to distance themselves from their hacker origins, but those very same people are what's driving the real innovation in the industry.
In fact, as people have become more skilled at gaming Google, and Google is the only show of note in town, search has actually got worse.
Oh I don't know about that. They went through a stage search returns being buried in junk pages. That's gone now, or substantially so. Certainly I no longer have the problems I used to.
You're sort of making the assumption that the internet is static, so google aren't moving.
What's really happening is the internet is a constantly seething morass of junk, exploits, and bot created pages who's sole intent is to gain control of your machine. In the face of that I'm surprised google still manage to sift through the shart and produce useful results.
The pc gaming and console gaming crowds are quite often the same people, which a lot of these doomsayers miss.
I do get the impression from high street games shops that consoles are the new wave. Pc games are mostly relegated to a few shelves, or one small section.
This actually shows something entirely different from that which is apparent at first glance.
The old way of games purchasing is dying out at a rapid rate for pc gamers. We don't need to go into shops, we have steam, or play.com, or amazon, to name but a few online locations. Most polls that talk of reduced pc game sales aren't taking these online sources into account. It's been several years since I bought a game in a shop, a bargain bin copy of Rise of the Middle Kingdom.
Console gamers have online shopping systems, but those are very much first generation, and in my opinion, not that good. Give it a few years of work and we might start to see high street console game purchasing dropping. What will they say is the new thing then? Mobile phone games probably.
Besides, people tend to believe that more money is spent on space science then actually is, so it's a nice visible way to pretend to be cutting back on government spending.
Lets be clear about something. Most muslims, as in an overwhelming majority, don't want to have anything do do with violence. Unfortunately, it only takes one small group to do some pretty horrendous stuff.
Note also, that most muslim violence is directed against other muslims.
Yes there is a problem with poor levels of education, and also that religious leaders can spin any old line of bull and have it believed in its entirety by large numbers of muslims, but if we are to be honest, christians do the same thing quite often, especially some of the christianity 2.0 people. Ok we don't do the suicide bomber thing, but again, neither do the vast, vast majority of muslims, many of whom are just folk. Once again, most suicide bomber attacks are directed against muslims.
What's really going on, in my opinion, is a muslim civil war, orchestrated by powerful people who'd rather like it if only their flavour of beliefs were allowed, oh, and that they be rich and control the entire muslim world. We should butt out and let them solve their own problems.
Your data is both encrypted and unencrypted at the same time, only reverting to one state or the other when you observe it and collapse the waveform. There is also, if I read this correctly, some chance that it will turn into a cat.
The way you spelt that word suggests that you is Americaine?
Nope, but since the overwhelming majority of my exposure to the written word has been early american SF (can't help it, I worship at the alter of Gernsback) , I do find that my spelling is some sort of mutant hybrid between those of our two countries.
Add to that a fascination for pre eighteenth century European dictionaries, and you end up with a vocabulary which is positively weird. I gave up trying to conform to the language norms of my country a long time ago.
Well, it's a good thing most of us aren't hoping for the same things you are. Most sophisticated medical technology "distances" a doctor from his patient to some degree... like, for example, a stethoscope. Should a doctor be required to press his ears against a patient's chest to listen the heart and lungs?
Interesting that you should mention the stethoscope. I'm a few years out of my work as a nurse, but when I was working in that field there was considerable resistance to the use of electronically assisted stethoscopes. There was some feeling that something was lost in their use, even though a recording could be made for later analysis.
The current non electronic designs are just adaptions of the same basic design that's been in use for most of the last 100 years. My personal one was very expensive, having been provided by a rep who mistakenly believed I was a doctor, instead of a student nurse on the hunt for free sandwiches. Anyway, mine felt great, but if I am to be honest, it worked no better then the ones my colleagues bought from a local toy store. Their ones were cheap, but came in lots of pretty colors.
Now that's a good, traditional British name. Wonder what his family crest looks like.
You've never heard the phrase 'a good Englishman is 99% foreign'?
My Family are English, and have lived in the UK for centuries, yet my Surname is Nordic. Extremely so in fact, It hasn't been englicised at all, in all this time, which I find quite odd. I've had no end of problems over the years with it being spelled wrong.
Apple have been doing this for a long time though. Did you not try to download quicktime when it included iTunes as a non optional install component?
You could uninstall it afterwards, but only if you were savvy enough to work this out.
I have an iPod, and I'll be getting another one soon (not the iPod Touch though, just Classic). In spite of this I have no interest in using iTunes, I use mediamonkey in windows and Amarok in Linux. Both of those are far superior.
Also, I'm not sure this Safari install as update stuff will assist Apple much. I've used Safari, it's simply not as good as either Firefox or Opera. I don't know how it compares to IE, as I haven't used that for a long time.
You couldn't pay me enough (literally - I've turned down jobs that wanted me to work with it... I should probably take it off my resume) to deal with that POS (by which I don't mean "Point Of Sale") on a regular basis.
Really? I guess vxWorks is an acquired taste then, because I'd be extremely happy to be given the opportunity to use vxWorks again.
I would have liked to have my own copy, but since a single licence for vxWorks costs more then I can reasonably afford (well, it used to, I can't find the price now), its out of the question.
Yes but your premise was that because you dont know anyone that backs up DVDs then obviously the only reason anyone would copy a DVD is for nefarious purposes.
Ok, perhaps I am generalizing a bit too much, I'm willing to admit that. However I went through university (twice, just finished my phd), and I met many, many people who pirated constantly, on campus it was mostly movies.
In fact it was my university experience that set me against such people. My research involved generating very large result sets, each of which I would transfer over the network to my room pc in order to perform further analysis. Doing this at certain times of day (evenings and weekends) the network was horribly slow, and sometimes impossible, because of freetards abusing the network with their file sharing. This made it impossible for me to do my work until very late at night most of the time (and no, I am not exaggerating). The network admins tried to put a stop to it, but we are talking hundreds of technologically savvy people breaking university rules here, and they were good at circumventing restrictions.
Note that I don't give a crap about the legality of what they were doing. My concern was that we all paid the same for campus net access, and they were raping the network sharing movies and such, which got in the way of the use it was meant for.
Wow, and obviously the people you know are a perfectly representative sample of the whole of humanity, so you are the only person in the world who can legitimately present anecdotes as proof! I do so envy you.
The way I see it, either I talk about my own experience, and my own viewpoint, or I needlessly repeat someone elses.
The people I speak of are real, and I either know, or have known them. You want I should only discuss people I don't know? Or perhaps just rip some stats from wikipedia?
Do try and think your statements through a bit more.
Do people also use these tools for piracy? Yes. Do I? Yes, and I'm not afraid to admit that online because I've actually BOUGHT MORE movies because I saw it pirated and felt it was actually worth my money. These are movies I would have never even bothered to rent, let alone watch, were it not for the fact that I could check it out in it's entirety for free, first.
That particular argument lost its validity for me a long time ago. Not that I don't agree with you on a certain level.
The problem is, there are people I know who used to get dvd rips years ago, and they continue to do so, all the while trotting out that same tired argument. I, as you own dvd's for films I first saw as rips. If you want to know what a film is like nowadays, there are loads of sites that publish reviews. I won't even consider a movie until I've found a few review sites. Then, if I like it, I want my first experience to be via the dvd I just purchased.
Take the H2G2 film. I was offered a rip of that a long time before the cinematic release. I wasn't interested, and unusually went to the cinema (first time in years, and haven't been since). Then I bought the dvd, which I enjoy greatly. Had I watched the rip I would have lost some of the experience I wanted.
When we go abroad on holiday, we often go with family and watch DVD's some nights. We'll take copies wherever possible because you don't know what people's machine will do, what the luggage has to go through etc.
Um, you take copies of dvd's through customs? Rather you than me chap....
I mean, nice idea, in a happy, fluffy world without crime, but since that world doesn't exist, you're just carrying illegal copies of discs through a place where the people are geared towards finding illegal stuff.
The vast majority of customers for blu-ray technology won't give a rats arse about this. I certainly don't
We've been able to crack dvd's for years, but every house I visit still has a pile of purchased dvd's, and I know of not one person who backs them up. The only people who use the cracking stuff that I know, do so either directly from borrowed dvd's, or indirectly through downloading movies. A know a few who never buy dvd's, because they prefer some dodgy rip. Beats me why, I know the average quality, and I don't think it's worth it, especially since they usually end up just taking up drive space.
The same will most likely occur with blu-ray. Most, if not all, purchased blu-ray discs will never be backed up. This cracking will be employed only by people who don't want to pay. They most likely wouldn't anyway.
So why don't we just drop this 'legal backup' crap and admit that this is only going to be of use to people who have no intention of buying the 'legal' dvd's in the first place.
Everyone knows that bad people are entirely willing to be completely honest, so obviously a system like this would mean we would know everything about them, and could stop all evil in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
NOT NOT == TRUE
doh...
== TRUE, so in first order logic, they do.
Microsoft, in spite if its using the word to death, is simply too large and complex to innovate. Real innovators are far too likely to feel stifled and leave the company.
They aren't capable of admitting, or possibly even acknowledging this any more.
They came to my uni in 2002, and the main speaker, their head of whatever they call their hiring department (he did introduce himself, but I was only there for the pizza) went on what I can only describe as a polite tirade against 'hackers', meaning the proper meaning, not the criminal one. They didn't want them, they wanted people who thought like microsoft did, and were able to do things the microsoft way. A way we were assured was nothing like open source, and far superior.
Their problems quite obviously run deep, and to be frank it was obvious from that one meeting, I was not alone in coming away with that impression (note, not one person at that meeting went to work for them). They want to distance themselves from their hacker origins, but those very same people are what's driving the real innovation in the industry.
In fact, as people have become more skilled at gaming Google, and Google is the only show of note in town, search has actually got worse.
Oh I don't know about that. They went through a stage search returns being buried in junk pages. That's gone now, or substantially so. Certainly I no longer have the problems I used to.
You're sort of making the assumption that the internet is static, so google aren't moving.
What's really happening is the internet is a constantly seething morass of junk, exploits, and bot created pages who's sole intent is to gain control of your machine. In the face of that I'm surprised google still manage to sift through the shart and produce useful results.
The pc gaming and console gaming crowds are quite often the same people, which a lot of these doomsayers miss.
I do get the impression from high street games shops that consoles are the new wave. Pc games are mostly relegated to a few shelves, or one small section.
This actually shows something entirely different from that which is apparent at first glance.
The old way of games purchasing is dying out at a rapid rate for pc gamers. We don't need to go into shops, we have steam, or play.com, or amazon, to name but a few online locations. Most polls that talk of reduced pc game sales aren't taking these online sources into account. It's been several years since I bought a game in a shop, a bargain bin copy of Rise of the Middle Kingdom.
Console gamers have online shopping systems, but those are very much first generation, and in my opinion, not that good. Give it a few years of work and we might start to see high street console game purchasing dropping. What will they say is the new thing then? Mobile phone games probably.
There's no oil on Mars.
Besides, people tend to believe that more money is spent on space science then actually is, so it's a nice visible way to pretend to be cutting back on government spending.
After all if I did, someone would only mark it as native .flame bait
Hint: Your engineering professor who wrote the book slept through is English Lit. class.
That's interesting, a girl I knew got through a second year english lit course by sleeping with her lecturer.
Time out there dude.
Lets be clear about something. Most muslims, as in an overwhelming majority, don't want to have anything do do with violence. Unfortunately, it only takes one small group to do some pretty horrendous stuff.
Note also, that most muslim violence is directed against other muslims.
Yes there is a problem with poor levels of education, and also that religious leaders can spin any old line of bull and have it believed in its entirety by large numbers of muslims, but if we are to be honest, christians do the same thing quite often, especially some of the christianity 2.0 people. Ok we don't do the suicide bomber thing, but again, neither do the vast, vast majority of muslims, many of whom are just folk. Once again, most suicide bomber attacks are directed against muslims.
What's really going on, in my opinion, is a muslim civil war, orchestrated by powerful people who'd rather like it if only their flavour of beliefs were allowed, oh, and that they be rich and control the entire muslim world. We should butt out and let them solve their own problems.
Your data is both encrypted and unencrypted at the same time, only reverting to one state or the other when you observe it and collapse the waveform. There is also, if I read this correctly, some chance that it will turn into a cat.
Hope that clears it up for you...
So at what point does the silliness of excuses stop and we start calling "destruction of evidence"?
When the next administration need something to distract the public from their own nefarious deeds.
The way you spelt that word suggests that you is Americaine?
Nope, but since the overwhelming majority of my exposure to the written word has been early american SF (can't help it, I worship at the alter of Gernsback) , I do find that my spelling is some sort of mutant hybrid between those of our two countries.
Add to that a fascination for pre eighteenth century European dictionaries, and you end up with a vocabulary which is positively weird. I gave up trying to conform to the language norms of my country a long time ago.
Well, it's a good thing most of us aren't hoping for the same things you are. Most sophisticated medical technology "distances" a doctor from his patient to some degree ... like, for example, a stethoscope. Should a doctor be required to press his ears against a patient's chest to listen the heart and lungs?
Interesting that you should mention the stethoscope. I'm a few years out of my work as a nurse, but when I was working in that field there was considerable resistance to the use of electronically assisted stethoscopes. There was some feeling that something was lost in their use, even though a recording could be made for later analysis.
The current non electronic designs are just adaptions of the same basic design that's been in use for most of the last 100 years. My personal one was very expensive, having been provided by a rep who mistakenly believed I was a doctor, instead of a student nurse on the hunt for free sandwiches. Anyway, mine felt great, but if I am to be honest, it worked no better then the ones my colleagues bought from a local toy store. Their ones were cheap, but came in lots of pretty colors.
Now that's a good, traditional British name. Wonder what his family crest looks like.
You've never heard the phrase 'a good Englishman is 99% foreign'?
My Family are English, and have lived in the UK for centuries, yet my Surname is Nordic. Extremely so in fact, It hasn't been englicised at all, in all this time, which I find quite odd. I've had no end of problems over the years with it being spelled wrong.
Apple have been doing this for a long time though. Did you not try to download quicktime when it included iTunes as a non optional install component?
You could uninstall it afterwards, but only if you were savvy enough to work this out.
I have an iPod, and I'll be getting another one soon (not the iPod Touch though, just Classic). In spite of this I have no interest in using iTunes, I use mediamonkey in windows and Amarok in Linux. Both of those are far superior.
Also, I'm not sure this Safari install as update stuff will assist Apple much. I've used Safari, it's simply not as good as either Firefox or Opera. I don't know how it compares to IE, as I haven't used that for a long time.
You couldn't pay me enough (literally - I've turned down jobs that wanted me to work with it... I should probably take it off my resume) to deal with that POS (by which I don't mean "Point Of Sale") on a regular basis.
Really? I guess vxWorks is an acquired taste then, because I'd be extremely happy to be given the opportunity to use vxWorks again.
I would have liked to have my own copy, but since a single licence for vxWorks costs more then I can reasonably afford (well, it used to, I can't find the price now), its out of the question.
Shit, anyone who commissions a huge model penis for the initial launch of his product can't be all bad.
Seriously, check your history, am I right or am I right?
Yes but your premise was that because you dont know anyone that backs up DVDs then obviously the only reason anyone would copy a DVD is for nefarious purposes.
Ok, perhaps I am generalizing a bit too much, I'm willing to admit that. However I went through university (twice, just finished my phd), and I met many, many people who pirated constantly, on campus it was mostly movies.
In fact it was my university experience that set me against such people. My research involved generating very large result sets, each of which I would transfer over the network to my room pc in order to perform further analysis. Doing this at certain times of day (evenings and weekends) the network was horribly slow, and sometimes impossible, because of freetards abusing the network with their file sharing. This made it impossible for me to do my work until very late at night most of the time (and no, I am not exaggerating). The network admins tried to put a stop to it, but we are talking hundreds of technologically savvy people breaking university rules here, and they were good at circumventing restrictions.
Note that I don't give a crap about the legality of what they were doing. My concern was that we all paid the same for campus net access, and they were raping the network sharing movies and such, which got in the way of the use it was meant for.
Wow, and obviously the people you know are a perfectly representative sample of the whole of humanity, so you are the only person in the world who can legitimately present anecdotes as proof! I do so envy you.
The way I see it, either I talk about my own experience, and my own viewpoint, or I needlessly repeat someone elses.
The people I speak of are real, and I either know, or have known them. You want I should only discuss people I don't know? Or perhaps just rip some stats from wikipedia?
Do try and think your statements through a bit more.
wrong, you can watch dvd's in linux without decss, using powerdvd
http://www.bluesquad.com/usa/prod.php?pid=1989
Do people also use these tools for piracy? Yes. Do I? Yes, and I'm not afraid to admit that online because I've actually BOUGHT MORE movies because I saw it pirated and felt it was actually worth my money. These are movies I would have never even bothered to rent, let alone watch, were it not for the fact that I could check it out in it's entirety for free, first.
That particular argument lost its validity for me a long time ago. Not that I don't agree with you on a certain level.
The problem is, there are people I know who used to get dvd rips years ago, and they continue to do so, all the while trotting out that same tired argument. I, as you own dvd's for films I first saw as rips. If you want to know what a film is like nowadays, there are loads of sites that publish reviews. I won't even consider a movie until I've found a few review sites. Then, if I like it, I want my first experience to be via the dvd I just purchased.
Take the H2G2 film. I was offered a rip of that a long time before the cinematic release. I wasn't interested, and unusually went to the cinema (first time in years, and haven't been since). Then I bought the dvd, which I enjoy greatly. Had I watched the rip I would have lost some of the experience I wanted.
When we go abroad on holiday, we often go with family and watch DVD's some nights. We'll take copies wherever possible because you don't know what people's machine will do, what the luggage has to go through etc.
Um, you take copies of dvd's through customs? Rather you than me chap....
I mean, nice idea, in a happy, fluffy world without crime, but since that world doesn't exist, you're just carrying illegal copies of discs through a place where the people are geared towards finding illegal stuff.
The vast majority of customers for blu-ray technology won't give a rats arse about this. I certainly don't
We've been able to crack dvd's for years, but every house I visit still has a pile of purchased dvd's, and I know of not one person who backs them up. The only people who use the cracking stuff that I know, do so either directly from borrowed dvd's, or indirectly through downloading movies. A know a few who never buy dvd's, because they prefer some dodgy rip. Beats me why, I know the average quality, and I don't think it's worth it, especially since they usually end up just taking up drive space.
The same will most likely occur with blu-ray. Most, if not all, purchased blu-ray discs will never be backed up. This cracking will be employed only by people who don't want to pay. They most likely wouldn't anyway.
So why don't we just drop this 'legal backup' crap and admit that this is only going to be of use to people who have no intention of buying the 'legal' dvd's in the first place.
So you would rather remain in a system where no one can safely determine who you are? Its like preferring ignorance.
First, what?
Second, I refer you to my first reply.
You make no sense. Care to elaborate?
Yes of course it would work!
Everyone knows that bad people are entirely willing to be completely honest, so obviously a system like this would mean we would know everything about them, and could stop all evil in the world.