I don't care how hard you fight the damn cat, it's out of the bag, and it's not getting back in.
One part of the article I find funny is this:
But [Michael Ayers, chair of the AACS business group] accepted that DVDs that had had their copy protection removed were 'now in the clear' and could be copied.
Isn't that the point? I'm neither trying to justify nor rebuke file sharers, but think about it, man, and be practical for a change. Among those who download and share movies, who really cares about the nitty-gritty details of how keys are cracked, who all gets them, which ones get revoked, what players are and aren't affected, and so on? Most of them only care about one thing: Can I download the HD-DVD of [insert movie titles here]?
And as long as a key out there is cracked enough for the answer to that question to be "yes," the copy protection industry has lost. They can fight all they want to, but the thing is that unless they literally shut everyone down everywhere, they're doomed. As soon as one single solitary person is able to crack a key and unlock the encrypted data, all of their massive—and expensive—efforts will be in vain.
I also thought this was funny:
He said tracking down everyone who had published the keys was a 'resource intensive exercise'. A search on Google shows almost 700,000 pages have published the key. Mr. Ayers said that while he could not reveal the specific steps the group would be taking, it would be using both 'legal and technical' steps to prevent the circumvention of copy protection.
To Mr. Ayers, I would say this: Get real. For one thing, how many times has it been proven that your technical efforts are futile? How much more time and money are you going to waste developing something that consumers at best don't want and at worst outright resent? For another, what exactly do you plan to legally do to people who live in places where publishing the cracked keys is not illegal? As much as people like you would love to have the U.S.'s misguided laws apply to the whole world, it will never happen, and even if it did, people would still break such laws in civil disobedience.
If only they could figure out how to fight a winning battle for the hearts and minds of paying customers instead of this inevitable losing battle against people who are much, much smarter than they are, maybe everyone could be happier. This industry could sure learn a few things about the direction the music industry is headed, finally dropping DRM after realizing how useless it is.
No, you misunderstand. The person who gave up on W2K is the reporter, not the guy who created the drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers did it because he bought webcams for his daughters and they didn't have drivers.
As for you comment, it's not the camera that has the problem; it's the drivers, and that's what he fixed for Linux. In your analogy, it's more like buying a used car with a heavy discount because it has a dirty air filter. If you know that the car is perfectly fine with a new air filter, why not buy it? A famous man once said, "A dirty air filter does not a bad car make." (Okay, I admit it, it was me, just then, and I guess I'm not that famous.)
It was meant as an example. You know, as something you can relate to? Okay, let's say that you have a 100% uptime rate with Word. Can you say that about every application you run? Are you the one person who has never had a computer problem before in your life? Wow...
The point is that compared to average software, Google compares really well to being relatively glitchless, and when it is glitchful, unlike most other software it's restored to normal operation very quickly.
First of all, that was just an example. I'm not claiming that that one thing is going to totally blow Vista in the marketplace. It will be that, with about a hundred other things similar to it.
Second of all, what is high-end equipment today will be tomorrow's standard equipment. Remember when a CD drive on a computer was considered high-end? How about PCI slots? What about USB ports? What about LCD monitors? Or for that matter, LCD televisions? What about... Well, just about anything? It's not that hard for me to imagine a high-end audio interface becoming prevalent in the market.
Third of all, if Joe Blow wants access to Facebook, Hotmail, and whatever, he shouldn't be paying for an operating system to begin with. There are plenty of perfectly good free ones out there that are perfect for that kind of thing.
I find it hard to believe that many gamers actually want Vista instead of XP. Here are a few reasons why:
Hardly any game companies support running their games under Vista.
Gamers I know like to squeeze as much performance out of their machines as they can, and Vista's bells and whistles, the things that separate it from XP, are intensive resource hogs. If those fancy Aero graphics are consuming your GPU's cycles, guess what... Your game isn't.
Hardware support, as you pointed out, is sketchy at best. Spending $1,000 on video cards that don't work is, well, not fun.
Are they crying loudly for Vista drivers? Sure, because some of them have made the mistake of getting Vista, most likely by buying a new PC that didn't give them the opportunity for getting XP, and most of them would rather spend the $200 retail for a new copy of XP on some system component. But, like I said, most gamers I know aren't crying to manufacturers; they're simply avoiding Vista like the plague.
Say, though, since you bring it up, and now that I've told you why the gamers I know are avoiding Vista, exactly why do you think that "most of them want to get vista"? What is it about Vista that's better than Windows XP?
Which functionality is taken away? IIRC, the only DRM in Vista is there to enable playback of DRM-enabled media. (I.e. HD-DVD/BluRay) It's not as if it infects all your AVI files with some vicious DRM scheme.
No, but average consumers don't know that. The "Cost of Vista" article points out some fantastic ways in which functionality is effectively being taken away from consumers. Here's an excerpt close to the front of the article:
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Instead of hearing premium high-definition audio, you get treated to premium high-definition silence.
In other words, a consumer who has high-end audio setup thinking that they're going to be able to listen to the latest and greatest in A/V home theater technology will be sadly disappointed. The discs aren't broken, the hardware isn't broken, and no AVI files have been infected, but the end result is the same: Functionality that the user has paid for and reasonably expects to work doesn't. It's been taken away.
If it ever gets to a state where it will run most of what Windows XP runs as well as XP will run it, I think that the ant and elephant roles will start changing. Personally, I hope that the developers of ReactOS meet with wild success, and I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this very interesting concept.
Is Vista in trouble? Why wouldn't it be? Even if Microsoft gave the thing away for free, it totally ignores the fact that there's an enormous cost to upgrading. Microsoft doesn't need a fire sale, it needs to be paying people to install this thing.
Let's run down the usual suspects of people who upgrade and see how they feel:
Business users hate it. The hardware required to run it cost a lot of money when multiplied by tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees. Add to that the training costs, the support costs, the deployment costs, and so on ad nauseum, and the business decision easily becomes a no-brainer. And for what? Beefed up "security" that causes your user base to go nuts answering "Allow or deny" dialog boxes?
Gamers hate it. It just plain doesn't run with the hardware that's out right now. I really think that Vista is trying to be the proverbial egg that comes before widespread manufacturer support (the proverbial chicken), but it's just not happening. Every gamer I know is avoiding Vista like the plague. As long as gamers aren't begging for Vista support in their high-end components, manufacturers are still going to continue to be reluctant.
Speaking of manufacturers, it's obvious that they hate it, too. When I tried Vista for a week a while back (not the beta, the so-called real version after launch), two things didn't work. My Creative SoundBlaster Live! card and my nVidia video card. To be fair, the latter technically worked, but some of its higher-end functionality didn't. We're not talking about little no-name manufacturers here or bizarre equipment, we're talking about common cards from major manufacturers. Have you even seen the hoops that hardware manufacturers have to jump through to comply with Vista's outrageous requirements?
The emerging home entertainment market hates it. Let's not mince words: One of Vista's primary design goals is Digital Rights "Management," keeping these people from doing what they want to do. Why would buy software that takes functionality away!!?
I could go on, but you get the point. Is Vista in trouble? You bet. Add to all of the above the competition that it faces from various Linux distributions that are easier than ever to install and use, products like Mac OS, clever new projects such as ReactOS, and even its own predecessor! and it becomes clear that Microsoft should be praying that people pirate it, because that's the only way it's going to make any kind of splash when all is said and done.
Don't get me wrong, it won't die completely, any more than Windows ME is dead. But in the annals of operating systems, my money is that it will be merely a blip on the screen. If Microsoft is smart, it should be working on adding features to its operating system, making it faster and more powerful and easier to use. It should be fighting with us against DRM, not against us by crippling their software with it.
Personally, I think that Microsoft is not very smart, but who knows, I guess we'll see. At any rate, after giving it a week to try to convince me that it's not as bad as everyone says it is, I was very disappointed in it and won't be running it anytime in the forseeable future.
Parse it any way you want, but he's still right. And you should read his post again; he's not talking about virtual possessions as assets, he's talking about virtual possessions as income. It's kind of like money, it can be considered as either an asset (e.g. the money you have in your wallet right now) or as income (e.g. the difference between what's in your wallet tomorrow and what's in it right now).
Except, unlike money, virtual assets don't exist. They have no intrinsic value. Plus, as pointed out, if the government is going to consider that +5 singing sword of orc death as income, that +5 singing sword of orc death has to be something you have possession of, even if only virtually. You don't. Blizzard does, and they make that clear in their terms of service. Any time that they want to, they could simply *poof!* make that sword disappear, transfer it to someone else, or give everyone a +5 singing sword of orc death. You have absolutely, positively no legal claim to that +5 singing sword of orc death whatsoever, neither as an asset nor as income. Thus, it cannot be taxed, period.
Now, if you put that virtual +5 singing sword of orc death on eBay and "sell" it to someone else, you can be taxed on that. Why? Because you've converted something without value into real property, and that is income. However, one major problem with that you never really owned the thing that you sold to begin with. Blizzard does, and if you search eBay for +5 singing swords of orc death, that's one of the reasons why you won't find any; you're trying to sell someone else's property.
It's kind of like subletting someone else's apartment out, which you have no legal right to do. Aside from the fact that you'd be in a heap of legal trouble from the owners and probably your "tenant," yes, you would still be taxed on the money that you got paid, since it was real income. But if a buddy is simply letting you use his apartment (like, you know, Blizzard is letting you use that +5 singing sword of orc death), you most emphatically do not have to pay tax on it as income.
So no, nothing in the land of Azeroth will be taxed, and people who are worried about it are worrying needlessly.
I don't buy that. Not good is the enemy of good. Great may not be the most efficient, but it is, by definition, better than not good.
And I didn't want to provide the gory details of the background of the situation, but the nutshell version is the before I got there, the previous system administrators had really done a job on the systems. They weren't deliberately incompetent, but they had never worked in an environment that had more than two or three servers, and they were just ignorant of how to run a lot more systems (we had around 30 or so servers).
One of my favorite stories is that I was sitting with one of the guys while going through the domain manager looking at all of the trusted domains (pre-Active Directory) and asking him, "What is this domain? What about that one?" For about half of the domains, he would stare blankly at it and say, "Um... I dunno." These were domains with active DCs in them with which we were replicating, and with users that had access to our stuff! Oh, and you should have seen the server room. There were CAT5 cables strung between the cabinets. You couldn't shut some of the server cabinets' doors because there were network cables literally run between the hinges on the back side of the door. The network cable to one of the main file servers had come out of its shielding, and the twisted pairs were hanging out. Switches were literally hanging out of the back of some of the cabinets, and the only thing holding them up were the cables themselves.
So anyway, one of the first things I did was go through and perform a somewhat detailed audit of our systems. I documented all of our servers, network segments, users, workstations, etc. Then I went through and cleaned all of the crud out of our domains and re-established order from the chaos. A couple of months later, my team completely cleaned out the server room, installed patch panels, actually mounted cable management arms, and so on. When we were done, the place was so unbelievably better.
As a result, server crashes that had been happening on a daily basis stopped. The users were amazed. This is kind of funny. The users had become so accustomed to stuff not working that they simply didn't bother reporting it any more. There were many times when I would only know something was broken when I saw something crashed while doing something else. I would ask the users, "Why didn't you tell me that you couldn't [do whatever it was that was broken]!!?" They would tell me, "Well, I just figured it would come back up in a few days..."
I remember thinking how sad it was when I sent out a company-wide e-mail one day basically saying, "Please report problems to us. I'm serious. I want to know when something isn't working correctly, and I will get it fixed in a timely manner!"
So anyway, we had the old crappy accounting software package called Fourth Shift. It was an old DOS program. So old, in fact, that the company that published it wouldn't support us and answer our questions any more. They would just tell us, "Um, that version came out in 1990. Upgrade." One night, a batch job scheduled to kick off at midnight failed, and the software didn't come back online until I got there the next morning. There was nothing that could have been done about it (barring hiring someone to monitor the software 24x7), but my boss somehow had gotten it stuck in his head that the reason it failed was because I had spent so much time documenting our assets and straightening out the mess that was our system setup. Thus, the meeting in which I was told that I should just do my job "good enough" and move on to other things.
I tried to explain to him that the people before me doing their job just "good enough" and moving on to other things is what had gotten us into the mess that we were in. I also tried to explain that even if I had done none of the cleanup and documentation that I had done, Fourth Shift would still have failed that night.
I've worked at two jobs where I've seen the reality of bosses to this extreme of badness.
A couple of examples: At the first one, my boss used to walk up and down behind our cubes every five minutes or so to make sure we were at our desks and working. If we weren't, she would start asking our neighbors where we were, when we would be back, etc. (And we were all hard-working professionals.) She even asked me to go to the men's room once to try to track down one of my coworkers. (I refused, and fortunately, he got back to his desk before it got ugly.)
I'll never forget once in a meeting, her boss suggested a change that we make to one of the reports we generated. He wasn't ugly about it, and he wasn't complaining; he was just trying to make it a little better than it was. Right there in front of him and all of us, she said, "I've told them that they're supposed to be doing that. I don't know why, but they just won't." (Of course, this being a new change, she was flat-out lying.)
At my last job, I honestly think my boss was crazy. As in, seriously, mental problems. He would yell and scream at people who were actually trying to help him with something. I'll never forget when he pulled me into a meeting and reamed me up and down because I was doing my job--are you sitting down?--too well. He told me, "This is really great quality work, but great is the worst enemy of good. I really need you to just do what you're working on, you know, good enough, and then move on to other things."
God, how I love leaving that company. He was on vacation when I turned in my notice, and I told the Human Resources lady (who, incidentally, I had talked to on two separate occasions about his behavior with absolutely nothing done about it), "Look, I know this is bad form, and if the circumstances weren't so extreme, I wouldn't do this. But the truth of the matter is that I do not want to ever see my boss again, so I will not be working out a two-week notice. Friday will be my last day."
Fortunately, I've had a couple of very good bosses to compensate for these horrible experiences. My current boss is a gem, and you all should be so lucky to have one like him. I guess we all have our professional ups and downs, and I've had some real doozies on both sides of that spectrum.
Do you people have any clue what the concept of "noon" is supposed to be? In case you've forgotten, it's supposed to be the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. It's supposed to be the time when there is as much daylight behind us as is in front of us.
For practical purposes, this isn't exact, but we've done a pretty good job with splitting the world up into 24 time zones so that it's somewhat close.
But not any more! No, now noon is just some arbitrary point during the day when we find it convenient to be. We want more time at the end of the day, so let's just move noon an hour ahead, right?
WRONG! I have a better idea. Instead of dinking around with clocks and redefining what something means that has been around since the beginning of recorded time, why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?
Imagine how nice this would be. We never change our clocks. Twice a year, government changes its hours. The Post Office, for example, doesn't open at 8:00am during the summer, it opens at 7:00am, and it closes an hour earlier, too. Businesses that choose to do so follow suit and make sure its employees know when to show up. I suspect that almost all of them would, and probably most companies would have a policy that says something like, "When the government shifts its hours, we're shifting ours also."
Everyone's happy. People get their extra hour at the end of the day. No one has to write stupid software patches to account for when DST is. Atlanta, Georgia is always GMT-5, never GMT-4 like it is now. People don't think Arizonans are weird because half the year they're on Mountain time and half the year they're on Pacific. If government wants to change its hours a few weeks earlier next year, there's no issue at all, they can just announce it a few months in advance, and when the time comes, do it.
I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots. If you want to change your schedule, change your schedule. But leave my freakin' clock alone.
It's what lawyers do, their sole function. (At least, professionally.) As such, it's in their vested financial interest to make sure that people sue each other as much as possible, even if that means for totally silly reasons.
As long as they continue to make lots and lots of money for doing so, and as long as our legislators continue to be disproportionately of that profession, it's not likely to change.
Not everyone who believes in God is an idiot, particularly not simply because of that belief.
I didn't say they are. But I'm sorry, Creationism is an idiotic belief.
What I don't like is when people have this "God trumps all" attitude; when people take the word of a 2000-year-old book (that, incidentally, has been heavily edited over the years for various agendas) over a body of persuasive scientific evidence in forming their opinions on scientific matters.
If you want to believe in religion to tell you how to live, answer philosophical questions, or give you comfort when you ponder the end of your natural earthly life, go for it. I have all the respect in the world for your beliefs, and will vehemently defend your right to have them and practice them. But when you want to propagate that religion by mucking with kids' science classes, tossing aside the science of it and teaching "theories" that aren't theories because they have absolutely no basis in tests or observation, we're going to have a bit of a problem. There's a huge difference between making your own kids stupid and using the power of government to make everyone's kids stupid.
If you use Firefox, snag Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater. If you're using Internet Destr-- Er, I mean Internet Explorer, woe is you, but at least snag the Google Toolbar, which I think blocks DoubleClick ads.
Sadly, this article will still undoubtedly be used my the uneducated to try to show that the Theory of Evolution is inferior to Intelligent Design because there are still things we don't know entirely or change our minds about based on new evidence. (Whereas, of course, they have it all figured out beyond question.)
Of course, when I see articles like this, I think it's a very good thing, not bad. It shows the beauty of science, that there is always room for refinement of our ideas of the way things are based on new evidence and new ideas. No, we don't have it all figured out yet, but unlike Intelligent Design advocates, at least we're trying, and we're open to new possibilities. (Yes, even Intelligent Design, if there were any credible proof of it.)
I always think it's kind of funny that Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents think that there's some kind of scientific conspiracy to advance the evolution "agenda." I believe in the Theory of Evolution, and believe me, if I could prove that it was false beyond any shadow of a doubt, I would in a heartbeat. For one thing, I'd be world-famous and likely very, very rich from book deals and talk shows. For another, I'm not interested in an agenda, I'm interested in the truth, as in things that can be observed and tested, not just taken on faith in spite of a large body of evidence to the contrary.
sigh... Oh well, I'm glad this showed up on Slashdot. At least now I know what my Creationist/ID friends are going to try to beat me over the head with next.
Actually, verbally kicking this guy in the nuts wasn't very funny at all.
This idiocy was a simple mutually beneficial exchange between the Fox News Channel and Michael Crook. They want rantings, he wants attention. So they get to put an idiot up on screen that they can verbally rake over the coals and look all smart while doing, and he gets some perverted pride in being notorious.
What's really disgusting is how Hannity and Colmes are trying to look all intelligent while raking the guy over the coals, and in spite of how blisteringly easy that should have been considering how stupid Michale Crook is, both come off as looking pretty dumb. Hannity keeps beating Crook into saying that servicemen die defending our freedoms, and Colmes hammers his one good question over and over.
All I can say is that it's a damn good thing for Hannity and Colmes that Michael Crook is such an idiot. In spite of how wrong Crook really, really is, if he had just three brain cells that weren't working on pumping his heart and inflating his lungs, he really could have turned the tables on Hannity and Colmes and torn both of them a verbal new one.
Of course, I guess at least the producers of the show are smart. They're the ones who don't allow intelligent people of either political persuasion get on the show. They don't want a devil's advocate that's got any intelligence, because the danger that it would make Pinky and The Brain look bad and embarrass the network is just far too great.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. What if I were to tell you, for example,...
Oh, wait, you don't believe in learning from things such as examples that aren't 100% true, so never mind.
Did it ever occur to you that the fiction part of science fiction may not be because the science is made up, but because the story in which it is used is not true? There are many examples of things that existed once in science fiction that are now science fact. There are also many examples of stuff that can be learned by reading a science fiction novel that tries to hold the science part of it true.
Have you ever read an historical fiction novel? You know, where some story is made up against a backdrop of real historical events? I guess that any knowledge gained about such real historical events is to be trivialized because the story part of it is fiction?
Pfff... "None" my ass...
And, of course, you're completely ignoring the fact that if you give a student a textbook and say, "Here, read this," most will strongly resist it. They'll study what they have to to pass the tests and get out of your class. But if you give a student an exciting story and say, "Here, read this, and if you're interested in the stuff that's in there, here's a textbook where you can learn more about it," you're a lot more likely to get them to actually learn something. And isn't that the idea?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care how hard you fight the damn cat, it's out of the bag, and it's not getting back in.
One part of the article I find funny is this:
Isn't that the point? I'm neither trying to justify nor rebuke file sharers, but think about it, man, and be practical for a change. Among those who download and share movies, who really cares about the nitty-gritty details of how keys are cracked, who all gets them, which ones get revoked, what players are and aren't affected, and so on? Most of them only care about one thing: Can I download the HD-DVD of [insert movie titles here]?
And as long as a key out there is cracked enough for the answer to that question to be "yes," the copy protection industry has lost. They can fight all they want to, but the thing is that unless they literally shut everyone down everywhere, they're doomed. As soon as one single solitary person is able to crack a key and unlock the encrypted data, all of their massive—and expensive—efforts will be in vain.
I also thought this was funny:
To Mr. Ayers, I would say this: Get real. For one thing, how many times has it been proven that your technical efforts are futile? How much more time and money are you going to waste developing something that consumers at best don't want and at worst outright resent? For another, what exactly do you plan to legally do to people who live in places where publishing the cracked keys is not illegal? As much as people like you would love to have the U.S.'s misguided laws apply to the whole world, it will never happen, and even if it did, people would still break such laws in civil disobedience.
If only they could figure out how to fight a winning battle for the hearts and minds of paying customers instead of this inevitable losing battle against people who are much, much smarter than they are, maybe everyone could be happier. This industry could sure learn a few things about the direction the music industry is headed, finally dropping DRM after realizing how useless it is.
No, you misunderstand. The person who gave up on W2K is the reporter, not the guy who created the drivers. The guy who wrote the drivers did it because he bought webcams for his daughters and they didn't have drivers.
As for you comment, it's not the camera that has the problem; it's the drivers, and that's what he fixed for Linux. In your analogy, it's more like buying a used car with a heavy discount because it has a dirty air filter. If you know that the car is perfectly fine with a new air filter, why not buy it? A famous man once said, "A dirty air filter does not a bad car make." (Okay, I admit it, it was me, just then, and I guess I'm not that famous.)
Neither have I. But then, I use OpenOffice...
It was meant as an example. You know, as something you can relate to? Okay, let's say that you have a 100% uptime rate with Word. Can you say that about every application you run? Are you the one person who has never had a computer problem before in your life? Wow...
The point is that compared to average software, Google compares really well to being relatively glitchless, and when it is glitchful, unlike most other software it's restored to normal operation very quickly.
Maybe because over the course of a few months or years, Google's uptime is a lot higher than my company's servers?
First of all, that was just an example. I'm not claiming that that one thing is going to totally blow Vista in the marketplace. It will be that, with about a hundred other things similar to it.
Second of all, what is high-end equipment today will be tomorrow's standard equipment. Remember when a CD drive on a computer was considered high-end? How about PCI slots? What about USB ports? What about LCD monitors? Or for that matter, LCD televisions? What about... Well, just about anything? It's not that hard for me to imagine a high-end audio interface becoming prevalent in the market.
Third of all, if Joe Blow wants access to Facebook, Hotmail, and whatever, he shouldn't be paying for an operating system to begin with. There are plenty of perfectly good free ones out there that are perfect for that kind of thing.
I find it hard to believe that many gamers actually want Vista instead of XP. Here are a few reasons why:
Are they crying loudly for Vista drivers? Sure, because some of them have made the mistake of getting Vista, most likely by buying a new PC that didn't give them the opportunity for getting XP, and most of them would rather spend the $200 retail for a new copy of XP on some system component. But, like I said, most gamers I know aren't crying to manufacturers; they're simply avoiding Vista like the plague.
Say, though, since you bring it up, and now that I've told you why the gamers I know are avoiding Vista, exactly why do you think that "most of them want to get vista"? What is it about Vista that's better than Windows XP?
No, but average consumers don't know that. The "Cost of Vista" article points out some fantastic ways in which functionality is effectively being taken away from consumers. Here's an excerpt close to the front of the article:
In other words, a consumer who has high-end audio setup thinking that they're going to be able to listen to the latest and greatest in A/V home theater technology will be sadly disappointed. The discs aren't broken, the hardware isn't broken, and no AVI files have been infected, but the end result is the same: Functionality that the user has paid for and reasonably expects to work doesn't. It's been taken away.
That's what makes it a clever new project. ;-)
If it ever gets to a state where it will run most of what Windows XP runs as well as XP will run it, I think that the ant and elephant roles will start changing. Personally, I hope that the developers of ReactOS meet with wild success, and I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this very interesting concept.
Is Vista in trouble? Why wouldn't it be? Even if Microsoft gave the thing away for free, it totally ignores the fact that there's an enormous cost to upgrading. Microsoft doesn't need a fire sale, it needs to be paying people to install this thing.
Let's run down the usual suspects of people who upgrade and see how they feel:
I could go on, but you get the point. Is Vista in trouble? You bet. Add to all of the above the competition that it faces from various Linux distributions that are easier than ever to install and use, products like Mac OS, clever new projects such as ReactOS, and even its own predecessor! and it becomes clear that Microsoft should be praying that people pirate it, because that's the only way it's going to make any kind of splash when all is said and done.
Don't get me wrong, it won't die completely, any more than Windows ME is dead. But in the annals of operating systems, my money is that it will be merely a blip on the screen. If Microsoft is smart, it should be working on adding features to its operating system, making it faster and more powerful and easier to use. It should be fighting with us against DRM, not against us by crippling their software with it.
Personally, I think that Microsoft is not very smart, but who knows, I guess we'll see. At any rate, after giving it a week to try to convince me that it's not as bad as everyone says it is, I was very disappointed in it and won't be running it anytime in the forseeable future.
Parse it any way you want, but he's still right. And you should read his post again; he's not talking about virtual possessions as assets, he's talking about virtual possessions as income. It's kind of like money, it can be considered as either an asset (e.g. the money you have in your wallet right now) or as income (e.g. the difference between what's in your wallet tomorrow and what's in it right now).
Except, unlike money, virtual assets don't exist. They have no intrinsic value. Plus, as pointed out, if the government is going to consider that +5 singing sword of orc death as income, that +5 singing sword of orc death has to be something you have possession of, even if only virtually. You don't. Blizzard does, and they make that clear in their terms of service. Any time that they want to, they could simply *poof!* make that sword disappear, transfer it to someone else, or give everyone a +5 singing sword of orc death. You have absolutely, positively no legal claim to that +5 singing sword of orc death whatsoever, neither as an asset nor as income. Thus, it cannot be taxed, period.
Now, if you put that virtual +5 singing sword of orc death on eBay and "sell" it to someone else, you can be taxed on that. Why? Because you've converted something without value into real property, and that is income. However, one major problem with that you never really owned the thing that you sold to begin with. Blizzard does, and if you search eBay for +5 singing swords of orc death, that's one of the reasons why you won't find any; you're trying to sell someone else's property.
It's kind of like subletting someone else's apartment out, which you have no legal right to do. Aside from the fact that you'd be in a heap of legal trouble from the owners and probably your "tenant," yes, you would still be taxed on the money that you got paid, since it was real income. But if a buddy is simply letting you use his apartment (like, you know, Blizzard is letting you use that +5 singing sword of orc death), you most emphatically do not have to pay tax on it as income.
So no, nothing in the land of Azeroth will be taxed, and people who are worried about it are worrying needlessly.
I don't buy that. Not good is the enemy of good. Great may not be the most efficient, but it is, by definition, better than not good.
And I didn't want to provide the gory details of the background of the situation, but the nutshell version is the before I got there, the previous system administrators had really done a job on the systems. They weren't deliberately incompetent, but they had never worked in an environment that had more than two or three servers, and they were just ignorant of how to run a lot more systems (we had around 30 or so servers).
One of my favorite stories is that I was sitting with one of the guys while going through the domain manager looking at all of the trusted domains (pre-Active Directory) and asking him, "What is this domain? What about that one?" For about half of the domains, he would stare blankly at it and say, "Um... I dunno." These were domains with active DCs in them with which we were replicating, and with users that had access to our stuff! Oh, and you should have seen the server room. There were CAT5 cables strung between the cabinets. You couldn't shut some of the server cabinets' doors because there were network cables literally run between the hinges on the back side of the door. The network cable to one of the main file servers had come out of its shielding, and the twisted pairs were hanging out. Switches were literally hanging out of the back of some of the cabinets, and the only thing holding them up were the cables themselves.
So anyway, one of the first things I did was go through and perform a somewhat detailed audit of our systems. I documented all of our servers, network segments, users, workstations, etc. Then I went through and cleaned all of the crud out of our domains and re-established order from the chaos. A couple of months later, my team completely cleaned out the server room, installed patch panels, actually mounted cable management arms, and so on. When we were done, the place was so unbelievably better.
As a result, server crashes that had been happening on a daily basis stopped. The users were amazed. This is kind of funny. The users had become so accustomed to stuff not working that they simply didn't bother reporting it any more. There were many times when I would only know something was broken when I saw something crashed while doing something else. I would ask the users, "Why didn't you tell me that you couldn't [do whatever it was that was broken]!!?" They would tell me, "Well, I just figured it would come back up in a few days..."
I remember thinking how sad it was when I sent out a company-wide e-mail one day basically saying, "Please report problems to us. I'm serious. I want to know when something isn't working correctly, and I will get it fixed in a timely manner!"
So anyway, we had the old crappy accounting software package called Fourth Shift. It was an old DOS program. So old, in fact, that the company that published it wouldn't support us and answer our questions any more. They would just tell us, "Um, that version came out in 1990. Upgrade." One night, a batch job scheduled to kick off at midnight failed, and the software didn't come back online until I got there the next morning. There was nothing that could have been done about it (barring hiring someone to monitor the software 24x7), but my boss somehow had gotten it stuck in his head that the reason it failed was because I had spent so much time documenting our assets and straightening out the mess that was our system setup. Thus, the meeting in which I was told that I should just do my job "good enough" and move on to other things.
I tried to explain to him that the people before me doing their job just "good enough" and moving on to other things is what had gotten us into the mess that we were in. I also tried to explain that even if I had done none of the cleanup and documentation that I had done, Fourth Shift would still have failed that night.
Seriously! This is one of the funniest posts I've read all day!
Whooboy, "It's heresy!" That's a good one!
Well, he can't edit his post, so it's a mute point now.
;-)
I've worked at two jobs where I've seen the reality of bosses to this extreme of badness.
A couple of examples: At the first one, my boss used to walk up and down behind our cubes every five minutes or so to make sure we were at our desks and working. If we weren't, she would start asking our neighbors where we were, when we would be back, etc. (And we were all hard-working professionals.) She even asked me to go to the men's room once to try to track down one of my coworkers. (I refused, and fortunately, he got back to his desk before it got ugly.)
I'll never forget once in a meeting, her boss suggested a change that we make to one of the reports we generated. He wasn't ugly about it, and he wasn't complaining; he was just trying to make it a little better than it was. Right there in front of him and all of us, she said, "I've told them that they're supposed to be doing that. I don't know why, but they just won't." (Of course, this being a new change, she was flat-out lying.)
At my last job, I honestly think my boss was crazy. As in, seriously, mental problems. He would yell and scream at people who were actually trying to help him with something. I'll never forget when he pulled me into a meeting and reamed me up and down because I was doing my job--are you sitting down?--too well. He told me, "This is really great quality work, but great is the worst enemy of good. I really need you to just do what you're working on, you know, good enough, and then move on to other things."
God, how I love leaving that company. He was on vacation when I turned in my notice, and I told the Human Resources lady (who, incidentally, I had talked to on two separate occasions about his behavior with absolutely nothing done about it), "Look, I know this is bad form, and if the circumstances weren't so extreme, I wouldn't do this. But the truth of the matter is that I do not want to ever see my boss again, so I will not be working out a two-week notice. Friday will be my last day."
Fortunately, I've had a couple of very good bosses to compensate for these horrible experiences. My current boss is a gem, and you all should be so lucky to have one like him. I guess we all have our professional ups and downs, and I've had some real doozies on both sides of that spectrum.
It's not the fonts that are in question, it's the method by which they're rendered on a screen.
Do you people have any clue what the concept of "noon" is supposed to be? In case you've forgotten, it's supposed to be the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. It's supposed to be the time when there is as much daylight behind us as is in front of us.
For practical purposes, this isn't exact, but we've done a pretty good job with splitting the world up into 24 time zones so that it's somewhat close.
But not any more! No, now noon is just some arbitrary point during the day when we find it convenient to be. We want more time at the end of the day, so let's just move noon an hour ahead, right?
WRONG! I have a better idea. Instead of dinking around with clocks and redefining what something means that has been around since the beginning of recorded time, why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?
Imagine how nice this would be. We never change our clocks. Twice a year, government changes its hours. The Post Office, for example, doesn't open at 8:00am during the summer, it opens at 7:00am, and it closes an hour earlier, too. Businesses that choose to do so follow suit and make sure its employees know when to show up. I suspect that almost all of them would, and probably most companies would have a policy that says something like, "When the government shifts its hours, we're shifting ours also."
Everyone's happy. People get their extra hour at the end of the day. No one has to write stupid software patches to account for when DST is. Atlanta, Georgia is always GMT-5, never GMT-4 like it is now. People don't think Arizonans are weird because half the year they're on Mountain time and half the year they're on Pacific. If government wants to change its hours a few weeks earlier next year, there's no issue at all, they can just announce it a few months in advance, and when the time comes, do it.
I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots. If you want to change your schedule, change your schedule. But leave my freakin' clock alone.
It's what lawyers do, their sole function. (At least, professionally.) As such, it's in their vested financial interest to make sure that people sue each other as much as possible, even if that means for totally silly reasons.
As long as they continue to make lots and lots of money for doing so, and as long as our legislators continue to be disproportionately of that profession, it's not likely to change.
:-(
This one, but it's not done yet.
Sounds good, I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the tip!
I didn't say they are. But I'm sorry, Creationism is an idiotic belief.
What I don't like is when people have this "God trumps all" attitude; when people take the word of a 2000-year-old book (that, incidentally, has been heavily edited over the years for various agendas) over a body of persuasive scientific evidence in forming their opinions on scientific matters.
If you want to believe in religion to tell you how to live, answer philosophical questions, or give you comfort when you ponder the end of your natural earthly life, go for it. I have all the respect in the world for your beliefs, and will vehemently defend your right to have them and practice them. But when you want to propagate that religion by mucking with kids' science classes, tossing aside the science of it and teaching "theories" that aren't theories because they have absolutely no basis in tests or observation, we're going to have a bit of a problem. There's a huge difference between making your own kids stupid and using the power of government to make everyone's kids stupid.
If you use Firefox, snag Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater. If you're using Internet Destr-- Er, I mean Internet Explorer, woe is you, but at least snag the Google Toolbar, which I think blocks DoubleClick ads.
Sadly, this article will still undoubtedly be used my the uneducated to try to show that the Theory of Evolution is inferior to Intelligent Design because there are still things we don't know entirely or change our minds about based on new evidence. (Whereas, of course, they have it all figured out beyond question.)
Of course, when I see articles like this, I think it's a very good thing, not bad. It shows the beauty of science, that there is always room for refinement of our ideas of the way things are based on new evidence and new ideas. No, we don't have it all figured out yet, but unlike Intelligent Design advocates, at least we're trying, and we're open to new possibilities. (Yes, even Intelligent Design, if there were any credible proof of it.)
I always think it's kind of funny that Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents think that there's some kind of scientific conspiracy to advance the evolution "agenda." I believe in the Theory of Evolution, and believe me, if I could prove that it was false beyond any shadow of a doubt, I would in a heartbeat. For one thing, I'd be world-famous and likely very, very rich from book deals and talk shows. For another, I'm not interested in an agenda, I'm interested in the truth, as in things that can be observed and tested, not just taken on faith in spite of a large body of evidence to the contrary.
sigh... Oh well, I'm glad this showed up on Slashdot. At least now I know what my Creationist/ID friends are going to try to beat me over the head with next.
Didn't you see the story the other day?
We are.
Actually, verbally kicking this guy in the nuts wasn't very funny at all.
This idiocy was a simple mutually beneficial exchange between the Fox News Channel and Michael Crook. They want rantings, he wants attention. So they get to put an idiot up on screen that they can verbally rake over the coals and look all smart while doing, and he gets some perverted pride in being notorious.
What's really disgusting is how Hannity and Colmes are trying to look all intelligent while raking the guy over the coals, and in spite of how blisteringly easy that should have been considering how stupid Michale Crook is, both come off as looking pretty dumb. Hannity keeps beating Crook into saying that servicemen die defending our freedoms, and Colmes hammers his one good question over and over.
All I can say is that it's a damn good thing for Hannity and Colmes that Michael Crook is such an idiot. In spite of how wrong Crook really, really is, if he had just three brain cells that weren't working on pumping his heart and inflating his lungs, he really could have turned the tables on Hannity and Colmes and torn both of them a verbal new one.
Of course, I guess at least the producers of the show are smart. They're the ones who don't allow intelligent people of either political persuasion get on the show. They don't want a devil's advocate that's got any intelligence, because the danger that it would make Pinky and The Brain look bad and embarrass the network is just far too great.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. What if I were to tell you, for example,...
Oh, wait, you don't believe in learning from things such as examples that aren't 100% true, so never mind.
Did it ever occur to you that the fiction part of science fiction may not be because the science is made up, but because the story in which it is used is not true? There are many examples of things that existed once in science fiction that are now science fact. There are also many examples of stuff that can be learned by reading a science fiction novel that tries to hold the science part of it true.
Have you ever read an historical fiction novel? You know, where some story is made up against a backdrop of real historical events? I guess that any knowledge gained about such real historical events is to be trivialized because the story part of it is fiction?
Pfff... "None" my ass...
And, of course, you're completely ignoring the fact that if you give a student a textbook and say, "Here, read this," most will strongly resist it. They'll study what they have to to pass the tests and get out of your class. But if you give a student an exciting story and say, "Here, read this, and if you're interested in the stuff that's in there, here's a textbook where you can learn more about it," you're a lot more likely to get them to actually learn something. And isn't that the idea?