Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
The trick is to stop (but not disable) the AutoUpdate Service, which is what pops up that god forsaken dialog every 5 minutes. When you finally get around to rebooting it'll start up again and all is well.
I don't believe for a moment that the above information isn't enough to uniquely track you. Between the PnP IDs of all of your hardware and version numbers of all of your software, you're a pretty unique datapoint.
Sure, except for the hundreds of other people with the exact same Dell/Compaq/HP/etc computer model, and thus the same PnP hardware IDs, for which the only version number being sent is "Windows" and "Office". You conveniently managed to leap from "version numbers of other software for which Microsoft provides updates" to "version numbers for all of your software."
Sometimes they are out to get you; usually, you really are just being paranoid.
The best-sounding April Fools story all day was from Ars Technica, about EMI announcing they will be ditching DRM. I thought that was rather well executed. Of course, it turned out to be true:x
I've got a kid. And if a little overreaction means the difference between drawing flowers with him and placing flowers on his grave, then I'm all for a little overreaction.
Homeland Security has been notified, and will be around to collect all of your child's Toys-R-Us-purchased destructive terrorist devices momentarily.
I'd recognize a mainframe if I saw it. It would look like those huge clunky old things we replaced with midranges and clusters of commodity microcomputers years ago.
My company has done some minor contract work with Walmart. Most of it involved receiving data from their systems for post-processing, particularly print jobs. Based on how their lpr behaves I would guess they are running some form of SVR4-based UNIX, probably HP-UX... of course, I don't work *for* them so I've never logged in to check:)
Interesting new sequence of events for articles these days though: 1) Find problem with a product or have issue with a company 2) Contact Company and wait for response 3) If no response in 24 hours or their response is not adequate, submit slashdot article.
What, exactly, is "new" about this? I assume you've never been in any sort of "high-level" retail position before. The first rule of customer service, which is drilled into every retail managers head from day one, is "For every customer that complains to you to get a problem fixed, there's 10 others that merely told everyone else they know to stop buying from you." Complaining about Apple's crappy customer service on Apple's apparently buggy hardware/software products to Apple's target audience is one of the most effective actions you can take.
Why bother? The American version of Wikipedia does a perfectly acceptable job of removing all useful information in preference for meaningless rhetoric and absurdly false information. Why would anyone beleive the Chinese Wikipedia would be any more accurate?
For the love of god, STOP ABUSING THIS TERM. I don't think I've once seen it used properly in my 4 years of reading/., and I doubt I missed much before that. Begging the question is a logical fallacy that invalidates the subsequent argument. This article raises a perfectly legitimate question that follows naturally from the preceding information.
Or, to put in in more/.-friendly terms: "Begs the question. You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means."
You've been watching way too much CSI if you think this evidence isn't enough to take a case to trial. Not every murder case ends with the forensic investigators finding a tiny shard of a unique knife mande only once in history by the accused's next door neighbor which is metallically linked to the handle of a knife found in a dumpster with the accused fingerprints on it nearby some ashes that have remnants of the victims DNS embedded in the one tooth that survived the burning process etcetcetcetc.
In many situations, the blood in his car *by itself* would be enough for a DA to decide to try the case. People often place way too much import on the idea of "circumstantial evidence"... it's still evidence. Given enough of it, a good prosecutor can employ a strategy of diminishing probabilities: one single piece of evidence may only narrow down the potential suspect list to a few thousand... but each additional piece of evidence narrows the field further and further until the number of people which fit *all* of the evidence is increasingly small, and the likelihood that someone other than the accused is guilty becomes very small.
As for not having a body, that is certainly a problem when attempting to prove murder (it's one more reasonable doubt the defense can introduce).. but again, the presence of blood, especially if there turns out to be a large quantity of it, has been used many times in the past to infer murder in the absence of a body.
The US hasn't won a single war where France wasn't fighting along their side.
I'm not one for unsubstantiated France bashing, but that statement is one hell of a non squitur.
Factually, it's MOSTLY correct. Arguably, we "won" the War if 1812, which France not only didn't fight with the US (Napoleon was kinda busy then), but partly caused the US to start in the first place. More to the point, one could just as easily make the same statement about Canada, Portugal, Belgium, and Australia; none of which have the same history of military loss as France. For whatever reason, France has found itself on the losing side of the majority of wars it gets itself involved in, and given the age of that country, there's been a lot. Their solution is quite freqently to concede, withdraw, or pay off their opponent to get the war over with. It's To an All American Patriot, that's surrender. To a French citizen, its probably considered "sane foreign policy that keeps our citizens alive and our cities in one piece in exchange for not fighting people we really don't give a crap about." It's all about perspective.
In closing, to counter one non sequitur with another, for as long as there has been a US, France hasn't won a single war that the US didn't do most of their fighting, to wit: American Revolution, WWI, WWII, Desert Storm. There's a reason that the most famous French military unit is the French Foreign Legion.:)
I think his point would be more accurately expressed as this:
"Why is 2 + 3 = 5?"
Because the arbitrary definitions which we assigned to the symbols 2, 3, 5, +, and = happen to represent real-world concepts that exhibit the behavior that 2 + 3 = 5, and not because there is any abstract universal rule that "2 + 3 = 5" and we simply need to find real-world behavior to prove it. That is, the real-world behavior has always existed, but the mathematical language used to express it was invented by us and assigned to those behaviors specifically to make the mathematics true.
But the problem, as stated very clearly by the article, was *not* the result of any bug in the voting machines. The problem was a very basic human error:
Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said.
Somebody forgot to bring the required materials with them to the voting booth. Exactly the same problem can, and probably has, occurred if a polling station has no paper ballots; or no pencils; or no curtains; or no people; or whatever.
This is absolutely the wrong incident for anti-machine-voting people to be harping on, because it's so easily dismissed by the manufacturers. "Well, when the biggest problem you can find with our machine is that someone forgot to bring it's paper stock"... doesn't make the argument against voting machines sound terribly strong. Continue to focus on the problems with past machines, demand proof of validity of the votes, etc. But it's counter productive to invent a probelem where one doesn't exist.
They must have spend millions on market research to have determined that we 'nerds' prefer B movies about giant insects and episodes of RAW
I agree Sci-Fi has made some seemingly stupid moves in its lineup (WWF RAW is heavy on the fiction but kinda light on the science...) But the B-movies you so roundly criticise are one of the reasons the network is still on the air.
When Sci-Fi first started they had very limited options for what to air. They could purchase rights to old sci-fi shows in syndications, which they did, becoming the place to go for Star Trek, Dr Who, Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, and just about every other 70's and 80's sci-fi show in the world. But that only gets you so far. They could also produce their own shows, and they did that too. Stargate being the clear example. But that costs a LOT of money.
A third option was to go find old, campy, and cheap sci-fi movies to put on the air. When they started airing some of these old movies, they noticed viewers actually watching them. So, someone at the network got the bright idea of filling all the gaps in their airtime with their OWN cheap movies. It probably costs less to make a year's worth of b-movies than a season of Firefly, with comparable viewership numbers. They saved a lot of money in production costs, made lots of money in advertising ("lots" being relative, since they are a niche cable network), and stayed on the air.
I need to get one of those rocks off you. Ever since they opened the goth store at the mall down the road, our neighborhood has been CRAWLING with the bastards.
There's absolutely nothing that would justify any legal intervention or any other meddling with the market in this case. Nobody is forcing DRM on you.
Nobody except the government; and the music industry; and the movie industry; and the software industry; and the hardware vendors; and the distributors; and...
The entire problem, and the reason the FSF is taking such a hardline stance against DRM, is because it is being forced on us. It's being secretly added to my private property without my permission. It's being integrated directly into all of the hardware I buy, with a rapidly diminishing list of alternatives. It's being mandated by content in order to make use of what I've already bought.
In a way, you're entirely correct. There's no justification for any legal meddling with the market. Unfortunately, all the meddling is already being done and it's being done by the pro-DRM industries. The FSF and similar groups are merely providing a counterbalance to those big businesses that represents the interests of us measly consumers.
It's all so obvious. Low sales in the US are caused by generic Canadian versions of songs coming across the border. The US needs tighter regulatory controls on music to prevent this kind of thing
If it gets rid of Celene Dion and Bryan Adams, I'm all for it.
I find it a bit ironic that the US is concerned about a lack of security from Isreal. Frankly, I think their track record is far better in that department than ours is. Wether you neccessarily agree with their politics, you gotta admit, those guys know their security.
Yes it does. Potentially a lot, as a matter of fact. The nominal rate, as you can clearly read right on their web site, is "$0.10 for messages received and $0.10 for messages sent.". If you are "IN" then I beleive all other "IN" messages are free, and for about $5.00/mo you get something like 500 messages. (All prices are applicable to my area, central Florida, but I doubt they vary much). Those bundles also typically reduce your per-message fee for overages, I think mine is $.05/message. But if you do go over (I have -- my company decided to stick my SMS number into log4net's SMTP logger on a horribly broken system over Xmas break) then the bills can get rather pricy.
--Kutulu
Apple has nothing to worry about...
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
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· Score: 3, Interesting
We tried to install this version of 3 different PCs, plus a VMWare and a VPC virtual machine. Both virtual machines blew up due to invalid or unimplemented operations, and the 3 real PCs all contained some piece of hardware (video card and CD-ROM drivers, specifically) that the installer claims were non-existant. If this is what they consider "just download a DVD and run it" then I'm changing careers before the tech support calls start coming in.
You are missing one key element here, in that what the US government is demanding from Google to do is not something they (yet) have any legal authority to demand. What the Chinese government demanded fell squarely in line with Chinese law. It's one thing for a collective of individuals to fight against unjust laws by simply ignoring them; corporations don't usually last too long when they try the same thing.
You're calling the power to take away other people's freedom, a "freedom" in itself.
This kind of rhetoric is why I wish someone besides RMS would take over as spokesperson for Free Software. Because that statement is pure crap. You cannot take away a freedom THAT DOES NOT EXIST TO BEGIN WITH.
If I sit down at my desk and I write some nifty program to sort my porn collection by number of second until the first midget appears, no one else has ANY FREEDOM to do anything with that program. I must choose to GIVE those people freedom: to use, to look at, to change, to resell, to derive, etc. As the author, I have the freedom to pick which of those I want to give out, and which I don't. As a user, you have the freedom to accept my choice or not use my software. (Or possibly face civil/criminal charges, if that's how you roll.)
The idea of Free Software should not be that people implicity have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with my stuff. It should be about me CHOOSING to give those freedoms away because it is mutually beneficial to me and to everyone else. When you start telling artists/authors/etc. that they have no control over their own works, they stop wanting to create works. When you tell those same people "your work is so useful that you should allow everyone to make full use of it; it will even make the world a better place!", they get teary-eyed and slap a GPL on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The trick is to stop (but not disable) the AutoUpdate Service, which is what pops up that god forsaken dialog every 5 minutes. When you finally get around to rebooting it'll start up again and all is well.
The best-sounding April Fools story all day was from Ars Technica, about EMI announcing they will be ditching DRM. I thought that was rather well executed. Of course, it turned out to be true :x
Homeland Security has been notified, and will be around to collect all of your child's Toys-R-Us-purchased destructive terrorist devices momentarily.
I'd recognize a mainframe if I saw it. It would look like those huge clunky old things we replaced with midranges and clusters of commodity microcomputers years ago.
--K
My company has done some minor contract work with Walmart. Most of it involved receiving data from their systems for post-processing, particularly print jobs. Based on how their lpr behaves I would guess they are running some form of SVR4-based UNIX, probably HP-UX... of course, I don't work *for* them so I've never logged in to check :)
--K
What, exactly, is "new" about this? I assume you've never been in any sort of "high-level" retail position before. The first rule of customer service, which is drilled into every retail managers head from day one, is "For every customer that complains to you to get a problem fixed, there's 10 others that merely told everyone else they know to stop buying from you." Complaining about Apple's crappy customer service on Apple's apparently buggy hardware/software products to Apple's target audience is one of the most effective actions you can take.
You mean, like every MUSH in the world?
Why bother? The American version of Wikipedia does a perfectly acceptable job of removing all useful information in preference for meaningless rhetoric and absurdly false information. Why would anyone beleive the Chinese Wikipedia would be any more accurate?
For the love of god, STOP ABUSING THIS TERM. I don't think I've once seen it used properly in my 4 years of reading /., and I doubt I missed much before that. Begging the question is a logical fallacy that invalidates the subsequent argument. This article raises a perfectly legitimate question that follows naturally from the preceding information.
/.-friendly terms: "Begs the question. You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Or, to put in in more
You've been watching way too much CSI if you think this evidence isn't enough to take a case to trial. Not every murder case ends with the forensic investigators finding a tiny shard of a unique knife mande only once in history by the accused's next door neighbor which is metallically linked to the handle of a knife found in a dumpster with the accused fingerprints on it nearby some ashes that have remnants of the victims DNS embedded in the one tooth that survived the burning process etcetcetcetc.
In many situations, the blood in his car *by itself* would be enough for a DA to decide to try the case. People often place way too much import on the idea of "circumstantial evidence"... it's still evidence. Given enough of it, a good prosecutor can employ a strategy of diminishing probabilities: one single piece of evidence may only narrow down the potential suspect list to a few thousand... but each additional piece of evidence narrows the field further and further until the number of people which fit *all* of the evidence is increasingly small, and the likelihood that someone other than the accused is guilty becomes very small.
As for not having a body, that is certainly a problem when attempting to prove murder (it's one more reasonable doubt the defense can introduce).. but again, the presence of blood, especially if there turns out to be a large quantity of it, has been used many times in the past to infer murder in the absence of a body.
--K
I think his point would be more accurately expressed as this:
"Why is 2 + 3 = 5?"
Because the arbitrary definitions which we assigned to the symbols 2, 3, 5, +, and = happen to represent real-world concepts that exhibit the behavior that 2 + 3 = 5, and not because there is any abstract universal rule that "2 + 3 = 5" and we simply need to find real-world behavior to prove it. That is, the real-world behavior has always existed, but the mathematical language used to express it was invented by us and assigned to those behaviors specifically to make the mathematics true.
(Or something, it's early.)
--K
I agree Sci-Fi has made some seemingly stupid moves in its lineup (WWF RAW is heavy on the fiction but kinda light on the science...) But the B-movies you so roundly criticise are one of the reasons the network is still on the air.
When Sci-Fi first started they had very limited options for what to air. They could purchase rights to old sci-fi shows in syndications, which they did, becoming the place to go for Star Trek, Dr Who, Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, and just about every other 70's and 80's sci-fi show in the world. But that only gets you so far. They could also produce their own shows, and they did that too. Stargate being the clear example. But that costs a LOT of money.
A third option was to go find old, campy, and cheap sci-fi movies to put on the air. When they started airing some of these old movies, they noticed viewers actually watching them. So, someone at the network got the bright idea of filling all the gaps in their airtime with their OWN cheap movies. It probably costs less to make a year's worth of b-movies than a season of Firefly, with comparable viewership numbers. They saved a lot of money in production costs, made lots of money in advertising ("lots" being relative, since they are a niche cable network), and stayed on the air.
--Kutulu
I'm sorry, you seem to have missed the memo. Developers don't get freedoms, only users do.
I need to get one of those rocks off you. Ever since they opened the goth store at the mall down the road, our neighborhood has been CRAWLING with the bastards.
Nobody except the government; and the music industry; and the movie industry; and the software industry; and the hardware vendors; and the distributors; and...
The entire problem, and the reason the FSF is taking such a hardline stance against DRM, is because it is being forced on us. It's being secretly added to my private property without my permission. It's being integrated directly into all of the hardware I buy, with a rapidly diminishing list of alternatives. It's being mandated by content in order to make use of what I've already bought.
In a way, you're entirely correct. There's no justification for any legal meddling with the market. Unfortunately, all the meddling is already being done and it's being done by the pro-DRM industries. The FSF and similar groups are merely providing a counterbalance to those big businesses that represents the interests of us measly consumers.
--K
If it gets rid of Celene Dion and Bryan Adams, I'm all for it.
--K
I find it a bit ironic that the US is concerned about a lack of security from Isreal. Frankly, I think their track record is far better in that department than ours is. Wether you neccessarily agree with their politics, you gotta admit, those guys know their security.
Yes it does. Potentially a lot, as a matter of fact. The nominal rate, as you can clearly read right on their web site, is "$0.10 for messages received and $0.10 for messages sent.".
If you are "IN" then I beleive all other "IN" messages are free, and for about $5.00/mo you get something like 500 messages. (All prices are applicable to my area, central Florida, but I doubt they vary much). Those bundles also typically reduce your per-message fee for overages, I think mine is $.05/message. But if you do go over (I have -- my company decided to stick my SMS number into log4net's SMTP logger on a horribly broken system over Xmas break) then the bills can get rather pricy.
--Kutulu
We tried to install this version of 3 different PCs, plus a VMWare and a VPC virtual machine. Both virtual machines blew up due to invalid or unimplemented operations, and the 3 real PCs all contained some piece of hardware (video card and CD-ROM drivers, specifically) that the installer claims were non-existant. If this is what they consider "just download a DVD and run it" then I'm changing careers before the tech support calls start coming in.
--K
You are missing one key element here, in that what the US government is demanding from Google to do is not something they (yet) have any legal authority to demand. What the Chinese government demanded fell squarely in line with Chinese law. It's one thing for a collective of individuals to fight against unjust laws by simply ignoring them; corporations don't usually last too long when they try the same thing.
This kind of rhetoric is why I wish someone besides RMS would take over as spokesperson for Free Software. Because that statement is pure crap. You cannot take away a freedom THAT DOES NOT EXIST TO BEGIN WITH.
If I sit down at my desk and I write some nifty program to sort my porn collection by number of second until the first midget appears, no one else has ANY FREEDOM to do anything with that program. I must choose to GIVE those people freedom: to use, to look at, to change, to resell, to derive, etc. As the author, I have the freedom to pick which of those I want to give out, and which I don't. As a user, you have the freedom to accept my choice or not use my software. (Or possibly face civil/criminal charges, if that's how you roll.)
The idea of Free Software should not be that people implicity have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with my stuff. It should be about me CHOOSING to give those freedoms away because it is mutually beneficial to me and to everyone else. When you start telling artists/authors/etc. that they have no control over their own works, they stop wanting to create works. When you tell those same people "your work is so useful that you should allow everyone to make full use of it; it will even make the world a better place!", they get teary-eyed and slap a GPL on it.
--Kutulu