I don't care if we "provoked" them or not. You hit me, I hit you back. Doesn't matter how justified you felt in hitting me in the first place, not one bit. Well quite. The odd thing about the provocation argument is that they first attacked the USS Cole and the embassies back when Clinton was President.
He was actually quite pro Muslim. He saved the Bosnians from genocide and tried to get the Israelis to sign a peace treaty with Arafat. Arafat rejected it, admittedly. But I don't think the US was anti Muslim at all before 9/11, anymore than it was anti Japanese before Pearl Harbor.
I hope Osama & crew are happy with the devastation now wrought across the region. Either it was what they wanted in the first place, or they drastically underestimated what we would do. I strongly suspect the second. Al Qaeda want to re establish the Caliphate in the Middle East, Israel (after they get rid of all the Jews) and Spain. And Chechnya and Xinjang. To do that they think they just need to defeat the US. Since they think they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan, they obviously thought the US would be no problem.
This a completely crazy world view of course, opposed by the US, the Russians, the Chinese, most Arab states, Israel, Spain, France, Iran and Syria. Iran and Syria back Shiite fundamentalists like Hezbollah, not Sunni ones like Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda pissed them off by declaring Shiites apostates and killing some Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan. Even without the US, this is a powerful group able to thwart their ambitions.
And the Russians were actually defeated by the Northern Alliance, not Al Qaeda. Actually the Northern Alliance was backed by the same grand coalition which now opposes them and help to topple the Taliban.
But I think before they attacked the US, that was what they believed.
I meant that you can't avoid the infestation. One drive-by install of a trojan and it's over. If they root you, you'll never know.
This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe. But you can make it prompt you before installing ActiveX controls. And a non privileged browser process has so few rights it's very hard for malware to spread out of it. Almost all of the filesystem and registry are off limits for example. Even if it did Opera is not common enough for malware to bother targetting it. Actually you can see if a machine has malware because some non signed process is usually hogging the CPU or thrashing the disk. Or if I debug something I can see an unsigned DLL has been injected into every process.
At least I can see the difference in performance between my machine which is probably malware free and my parents' or brother's girlfriend machines which I'm sure or not. Most of the malwate I've seen is not at all subtle - it just wants to get off the machine into as many machines as possible as quickly as possible.
And come to think of it, if I can't see the malware, is it really that bad that I have it? It's reminds me of that puzzle about "if a tree falls but there is no one to hear it, does it still make a noise?";-) Or in biology the idea that introns, the bits of DNA that don't code for proteins are the remains of retroviruses that failed to wake up.
You know what? I've been hearing Windows users say this for a long time. It's rubbish I'm not sure what you think is rubbish. That most home machines are infested with spyware (true in my experience), or that people that know what they are doing can avoid it (I have a virus scanner and run Opera with minimum privileges and Spybot and AdAware never find anything. I don't install toolbars or anything unless I know it is clean. Actually the virus scanner only finds blatant malware attached to spam, so I probably don't need it)
Greek city states, on the other hand, were oligarchies, not democracies. Even in Athens, there was always a class of slaves that was not allowed to vote. In Sparta, only a small elite of "Warriors" had a say in politics. Platon famously argued that a country where "a carpenter thinks he can do the business of a politician" was doomed. Ok, I should have said "Direct democracies like Athens". Sparta was not a democracy and Plato was not a democrat. In fact he's one of the bad guys in Karl Popper's An Open Society and Its Enemies.
Nonvoting slaves in Athens and women in Switzerland is obviously not good. But you could make the same argument against most representative republics, since they only had universal suffrage recently. And if you started a new direct democracy you'd obviously make it as universal as is currently fashionable, or more so. Like allowing voting from 16 or something. Maybe you could allow children, AIs and so on to get voting rights by petitioning for them, based on the idea that if you know that you need to vote you should be allowed to.
I'm aware of the BNP and I think they are a mirror image of the Islamists. I.e. not good. It's like Europe in the 1930's. There are Nazis are Communists, both totalitarian and both feeding off fear of the other. Or El Salvador in the 1980s.
Now right now the Islamists seem to be more in need of being stomped just like in the Cold War the far left was a more serious threat than the far right because they had Soviet backing and were not complete idiots. But I don't have any illusions that the BNP aren't a potential threat to the democratic system. And a lot of rich and powerful people have too much stake in that system to allow a bunch of dumb skinheads to bring it down. They own the media, as you may have noticed.
Still so long the BNP politicians don't break the laws against inciting violence they will be tolerated. Which they seem to be doing at the moment. But I don't consider them to be friends or even allies.
So you're saying that the rest of us are inferior and therefore need to live in representative republics rather than direct democracies?
That's oddly similar to mainland Chinese people who claim that China is 'not ready for democracy', or that democracy 'would cause chaos'. Which is clearly bullshit, since it works very well in Taiwan, and would probably work in Hong Kong and Shanghai given the chance.
In fact you could well argue that there is a spectrum of democracy, from one party states like China, to two party representative democracies like the US, to direct democracies like Switzerland. In many ways, GDP per capita and a disdain for the earning great power status by spending their citizens' blood they actually line up quite well with China at the bad end, the US in the middle and Switzerland at the high end. Switzerland has historically done better than the US at GDP per capita and has not been in a war for centuries. They're international isolated but they don't give a shit.
Maybe like the Chinese you've been socialised to think that the limits on yor freedom are for the good of society and are therefore necessary. But the problem with that would be that the world has essentially become dependent on the US behaving like a great and quasi imperial power. The one time, in the 1930s, that they didn't they ended up having to fight a major war to put things right. Certainly people in Taiwan are probably quite lucky that the US doesn't behave like Switzerland.
But dude! Now if you're an evil enemy of the US and the US sends its robots to attack you, they will swarm over the walls, Aliens style, not just the floor.It's like a sci fi movie, but we are the aliens with all sorts of cool weapons. Goddamn I'm excited just thinking about it.
I remember in the run up to the Afghanistan war there were loads of stories on Fark.com about cool technologies which would be used by America to kill the terrorists. Someone suggested that there should Fascism tag for them. On Plastic someone posted a funny Starship Troopers style dialog
Reporter: Some people say that the US has provoked this war by meddling in the Middle East. Soldier: I'm from New York and I say KILL 'EM ALL!
So, cool technology but I'm ambivalent. Mind you as an English guy it seems better that the US has all the cool killing machines than any conceivable competitor except maybe the UK.
If you are so freakin' concerned with this research, pull out your check book and pony up some cash!!! Put your money where your mouth is you geeky bafoons.
Too bad wars weren't funded this way. It'd be a much more peaceful planet. Not necessarily. You'd end up with the modern equivalent of the British East India corporation, which was allowed to recruit armies to do 'business' abroad. It's the reason that India was colonised really.
That's called a pure democracy, and it doesn't work. There's a reason we're a republic. Actually Switzerland is quite close to a direct democracy on Greek city state lines. And it's worked very well.
Have you heard the expression 'He who pays the piper calls the tune'?
In unrelated news, Evil Corp CEO Doctor Evil announced that no changes would be made to Fermilab's existing projects following Evil Corp's philanthropic donation. However a new project, Project Deathray was announced.
Just kidding. It doesn't really seem bad to me. There are probably enough billionaire nerds in silicon valley to fund a decent percentage of basic research. And actually good US universities are staggeringly rich by academic standards. It seems like the way to go is to try to migrate funding from the federal government to university foundations and private donors.
Maybe there should be some sort of intellectual property device that allows for pure research. Fermilab would get file for them and engineers would license them. It would be hard to do though, the physics that allowed for semiconductors was in the 1920's and 30's decades away from the engineering R&D that made them in the 50's and 60's. So it's hard to see how to use IP licenses to pay for the physics. Unless the physics is about time machines of course, then the engineers could pop back a few decades and pay the fee.
But for those of use on Windows 2K, XP was just extra bloat. XP felt much faster than Win2k on my machine, and that wasn't even that quick.
XP also suffered from major security holes, I can't remember how much spyware I remember taking off of people's computers before Service Pack 2 introduced the concept of basic security. Windows 2K also didn't suffer from WGA or other DRM nonsense. Most home Windows machines are infested with spyware. People that understand it can avoid it, on any version of Windows.
Actually, I don't think that will be the case. I think that MS has learned the lesson that DRM-laden OSes will not sell and remove the DRM and bloat from Windows 7, if it goes according to their plans (which I honestly doubt it will....) it may be a decent OS. But if it is inferior to free products (such as Linux) of course those using it are going to complain. Look, you can release an OS with no WGA and people will pirate the hell out of it. Or you can release one with WGA and people will complain. But less people will pirate and more people will pay. Microsoft is a business, and they don't care if people complain or not so long as most people pay for the OS they are using.
So I'd guess WGA will stay. It's hardly draconian anyway. WGA on XP meant you can still use your pirate OS, and you will still get security updates. What you couldn't do was download IE7 or any other optional stuff from the Microsoft site. But if you paid for the OS you could. Being genuine is an advantage, as the acronym suggests. I know people that used pirated XP for ages. They had to wait for a crack before they could install each service pack, but they installed both of them in the end. Actually I think MSFT will tighten it up so you can't use a pirate OS in future. People will crack it of course and Microsoft will patch to defeat the cracks. So if you really, really want to use it and not pay you will be able to but it will take a lot of your time. But most people will opt to pay instead because it is more convenient.
I agree with Gates, Win95 was as good as Windows got. Except it was still based on 16 bit code, didn't even attempt to be secure and crashed all the time once you installed a bunch of badly written applications that hacked it with VxDs. Nope, Windows XP was the best.
No, I'm not Bill Gate's sockpupet. Their vision of a unified desktop and web browser has been better implemented by KDE since. XP's copy protection and Vista's digital restrictions were tremendous mistakes. I really don't get this. XP's copy protection was only an issue if you pirated it and didn't know what you were doing. People that paid for it or who knew what they were doing were fine.
And Vista's DRM is a non issue unless you want to play BlueRay or HDDVD's. I can listen to MP3 files on Vista, or play AVIs with no issues. I can even rip and encode CDs and DVDs. The people that licensed BlueRay and HDDVD were very scared of people ripping them, so they forced OS manufacturers to add a bunch of security features in return for being allowed to license the patents. Both Apple and Microsoft had to choose between implementing these features and not supporting the new formats. And both chose to implement them. But that only applies to the new formats.
The seeds of M$'s demise were expressed early on.
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software.
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
And it's not really surprising that Gates would say this. He's in the business of selling software, not giving it away.
And most people seem to be quite happy run the OEM copy of Windows they got with their machine rather than try to put together an alternative from free software. Hell I'd pay much more than the $50-$100 or so I pay for an OEM license for Windows because I've tried the alternatives and they really irritate me. $50 or $100 dollars or whatever the manufacturers pay Microsoft for a Windows license is not a high percentage of the machine cost, and it means I don't need to fart around trying to find clones of all the non free software I own. Every time I've done this, I end up spending weeks putting together a far inferior system. It's just not worth it to save $50-$100.
Now you can say it's Free as in Freedom. But that doesn't apply to me really. I want to be free to use the software I want to use. Most of the people that write it don't want to GPL it so the the Linux folks will regard them at best as leaches, even though I'm totally cool with people not giving their work away. Plus Linux has a tiny market share and they're not really too bothered about supporting it. So my Free as in Freedom machine will definitely not run the software I want to. Theoretically of course I could spend my time rewriting stuff to run on Linux, but why would I do that unless I could sell it to other people? And I can't do that if I give away the source code, since people will just take that and not pay me. But the whole Linux ecosystem is extremely hostile to people that don't GPL code. So the lack of the sort of software I want to use is not even a business opportunity.
So thanks, but no thanks. The OEM fee I pay for Windows when I buy a machine is fine by me.
It wasn't that bad. You got a disk with the modem with an inf file on it. You install the modem. The inf file was a text file that told Windows what AT commands to send. Since it was text, not a driver the dumb modem OEM couldn't screw it up too much.
Then you create a dialup connection. You needed to know your username and password. It helps if you installed Dial Up support when you install Windows of course, if you didn't I'd guess you need to dig out the CD that came with your machine.
They'll do their job and promote their latest mediocre products. But who cares, we'll end up with Vista anyway when we buy the latest Sony or Dell, and sure enough a couple hundred dollars flies from our pocket to theirs. Don't you think they know that? It's more like $50 for Dell.
They had to hack 16bit optimizations into a new chip and to make it interesting, added new DSP-like registers(SSE) so they could sell it as a new CPU. Otherwise it was just the old stuff dumbed down to run 16bit code better. 16 bit code does a lot of segement register loads. Loading a segment register with a descriptor in protected mode is slow because the CPU must do protection checks. In the Pentium they added a cache. If you tried to load from a descriptor that was in the cache, the Pentium would skip the checks.
http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)
When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.
Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.
many (maybe most) people would be disciplined for doing ANY blogging on company time. why should government workers be held to a lower standard? I think the whole thing is bullshit. If you have free time at work, it's free. It's not like any job keeps workers busy 100% of the time. It's probably a bad idea to do that anyway, they'll just burn out.
People that get disciplined for blogging or surfing probably have a company that is so totally incompetent they have nothing to do for weeks at a time and a manager who wants to intimidate them. The point is to make everyone else keep their heads down and act busy.
I'd bet money if you filmed the people that made up the kangaroo court that suspended him, they're not exactly overworked either.
Twelve years ago, Deutsche Telekom handed my account over to a collection agency after they were unable to produce records of calls they asserted I made, nor were they capable of tracking payments for which I sent copies of the transfer statements.
The collection agent who called me barely even tried to get the money. Her attitude was more along the lines of "I know, they really do suck."
So now we expect them to be able to track their own phone usage? I doubt it. When I was leaving Germany I was in during the day, packing my stuff up.
The doorbell rang, and there was a delivery guy with a box for the apartment upstairs. He rung several times - he needed a signature. Being a good neighbour I signed for it and put a note in the letterbox for the upstairs apartment - "I have a parcel for you, please come down and pick it up".
A harried looking young German woman arrived in the evening and said (and I quote) "It was good of you to pick it up but you really shouldn't have DT sent it to me I didn't order it I saw they had charged me and so I called them they told me that they couldn't cancel the order I didn't make but they could schedule delivery for a time that I wasn't there and make it registered so that no one would be there to sign and then would get sent back to them and they agreed to pay the postage and the computer would void the contract based on German Law but now that you picked it up I will need to pay the return postage and contract cancelation fees [Deep intact of breath] But it was nice of you to sign for it. Thanks."
It was like fixing an obvious bug in some horrible hacked system and then seeing it collapse spectacularly because one of the side effects of the bug was the only thing keeping it up.
Compared to DT, British Telecom were actually quite customer friendly. And that is saying something.
Maybe they put the MKULTRA CH92B pattern in the free MP3s. That would be harmless if you played it a few times but would give you a cerebral hemorrhage after a few hundred times.
You've obviously not checked out jukeboxes lately. Most of the ones I see cost a dollar per play. I'm not kidding... I think jukeboxes have always been expensive by design. If you're in a bar talking to some woman and you play song on the jukebox it would be counterproductive to whine about it costing too much.
Essentially all species mating rituals have an element of stotting
Spend a buck on a song, or better playing it on your overpriced by coolly branded music player with an attractive shiny finish, shows that you have excess resources and thus are a 'fit' mate. Essentially it's a modern equivalent of picking up your date in a limousine. Geeks don't get laid partially because they refuse to play the stotting game I suspect.
Problem with selling stuff on the Internet is that there's no reason for anonymous people to stot since there is no one to impress.
PS isn't it ironic once you know what Stotting is to see a picture of Ken Stott.
It's Windows only because Microsoft wrote it to promote their Silverlight initiative. Siverlight doesn't work on Macs or Linux, so there's no point porting the exploit there.
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He was actually quite pro Muslim. He saved the Bosnians from genocide and tried to get the Israelis to sign a peace treaty with Arafat. Arafat rejected it, admittedly. But I don't think the US was anti Muslim at all before 9/11, anymore than it was anti Japanese before Pearl Harbor. I hope Osama & crew are happy with the devastation now wrought across the region. Either it was what they wanted in the first place, or they drastically underestimated what we would do. I strongly suspect the second. Al Qaeda want to re establish the Caliphate in the Middle East, Israel (after they get rid of all the Jews) and Spain. And Chechnya and Xinjang. To do that they think they just need to defeat the US. Since they think they defeated the Russians in Afghanistan, they obviously thought the US would be no problem.
This a completely crazy world view of course, opposed by the US, the Russians, the Chinese, most Arab states, Israel, Spain, France, Iran and Syria. Iran and Syria back Shiite fundamentalists like Hezbollah, not Sunni ones like Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda pissed them off by declaring Shiites apostates and killing some Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan. Even without the US, this is a powerful group able to thwart their ambitions.
And the Russians were actually defeated by the Northern Alliance, not Al Qaeda. Actually the Northern Alliance was backed by the same grand coalition which now opposes them and help to topple the Taliban.
But I think before they attacked the US, that was what they believed.
This is true on all OSes, not just Windows. "I'm safe because I know my business" is just BS. No one is safe. But you can make it prompt you before installing ActiveX controls. And a non privileged browser process has so few rights it's very hard for malware to spread out of it. Almost all of the filesystem and registry are off limits for example. Even if it did Opera is not common enough for malware to bother targetting it. Actually you can see if a machine has malware because some non signed process is usually hogging the CPU or thrashing the disk. Or if I debug something I can see an unsigned DLL has been injected into every process.
At least I can see the difference in performance between my machine which is probably malware free and my parents' or brother's girlfriend machines which I'm sure or not. Most of the malwate I've seen is not at all subtle - it just wants to get off the machine into as many machines as possible as quickly as possible.
And come to think of it, if I can't see the malware, is it really that bad that I have it? It's reminds me of that puzzle about "if a tree falls but there is no one to hear it, does it still make a noise?"
Nonvoting slaves in Athens and women in Switzerland is obviously not good. But you could make the same argument against most representative republics, since they only had universal suffrage recently. And if you started a new direct democracy you'd obviously make it as universal as is currently fashionable, or more so. Like allowing voting from 16 or something. Maybe you could allow children, AIs and so on to get voting rights by petitioning for them, based on the idea that if you know that you need to vote you should be allowed to.
I'm aware of the BNP and I think they are a mirror image of the Islamists. I.e. not good. It's like Europe in the 1930's. There are Nazis are Communists, both totalitarian and both feeding off fear of the other. Or El Salvador in the 1980s.
Now right now the Islamists seem to be more in need of being stomped just like in the Cold War the far left was a more serious threat than the far right because they had Soviet backing and were not complete idiots. But I don't have any illusions that the BNP aren't a potential threat to the democratic system. And a lot of rich and powerful people have too much stake in that system to allow a bunch of dumb skinheads to bring it down. They own the media, as you may have noticed.
Still so long the BNP politicians don't break the laws against inciting violence they will be tolerated. Which they seem to be doing at the moment. But I don't consider them to be friends or even allies.
So you're saying that the rest of us are inferior and therefore need to live in representative republics rather than direct democracies?
That's oddly similar to mainland Chinese people who claim that China is 'not ready for democracy', or that democracy 'would cause chaos'. Which is clearly bullshit, since it works very well in Taiwan, and would probably work in Hong Kong and Shanghai given the chance.
In fact you could well argue that there is a spectrum of democracy, from one party states like China, to two party representative democracies like the US, to direct democracies like Switzerland. In many ways, GDP per capita and a disdain for the earning great power status by spending their citizens' blood they actually line up quite well with China at the bad end, the US in the middle and Switzerland at the high end. Switzerland has historically done better than the US at GDP per capita and has not been in a war for centuries. They're international isolated but they don't give a shit.
Maybe like the Chinese you've been socialised to think that the limits on yor freedom are for the good of society and are therefore necessary. But the problem with that would be that the world has essentially become dependent on the US behaving like a great and quasi imperial power. The one time, in the 1930s, that they didn't they ended up having to fight a major war to put things right. Certainly people in Taiwan are probably quite lucky that the US doesn't behave like Switzerland.
But dude! Now if you're an evil enemy of the US and the US sends its robots to attack you, they will swarm over the walls, Aliens style, not just the floor.It's like a sci fi movie, but we are the aliens with all sorts of cool weapons. Goddamn I'm excited just thinking about it.
I remember in the run up to the Afghanistan war there were loads of stories on Fark.com about cool technologies which would be used by America to kill the terrorists. Someone suggested that there should Fascism tag for them. On Plastic someone posted a funny Starship Troopers style dialog
Reporter: Some people say that the US has provoked this war by meddling in the Middle East.
Soldier: I'm from New York and I say KILL 'EM ALL!
So, cool technology but I'm ambivalent. Mind you as an English guy it seems better that the US has all the cool killing machines than any conceivable competitor except maybe the UK.
Too bad wars weren't funded this way. It'd be a much more peaceful planet. Not necessarily. You'd end up with the modern equivalent of the British East India corporation, which was allowed to recruit armies to do 'business' abroad. It's the reason that India was colonised really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_East_India_Company#Military_expansion
Have you heard the expression 'He who pays the piper calls the tune'?
In unrelated news, Evil Corp CEO Doctor Evil announced that no changes would be made to Fermilab's existing projects following Evil Corp's philanthropic donation. However a new project, Project Deathray was announced.
Just kidding. It doesn't really seem bad to me. There are probably enough billionaire nerds in silicon valley to fund a decent percentage of basic research. And actually good US universities are staggeringly rich by academic standards. It seems like the way to go is to try to migrate funding from the federal government to university foundations and private donors.
Maybe there should be some sort of intellectual property device that allows for pure research. Fermilab would get file for them and engineers would license them. It would be hard to do though, the physics that allowed for semiconductors was in the 1920's and 30's decades away from the engineering R&D that made them in the 50's and 60's. So it's hard to see how to use IP licenses to pay for the physics. Unless the physics is about time machines of course, then the engineers could pop back a few decades and pay the fee.
So I'd guess WGA will stay. It's hardly draconian anyway. WGA on XP meant you can still use your pirate OS, and you will still get security updates. What you couldn't do was download IE7 or any other optional stuff from the Microsoft site. But if you paid for the OS you could. Being genuine is an advantage, as the acronym suggests. I know people that used pirated XP for ages. They had to wait for a crack before they could install each service pack, but they installed both of them in the end. Actually I think MSFT will tighten it up so you can't use a pirate OS in future. People will crack it of course and Microsoft will patch to defeat the cracks. So if you really, really want to use it and not pay you will be able to but it will take a lot of your time. But most people will opt to pay instead because it is more convenient.
And Vista's DRM is a non issue unless you want to play BlueRay or HDDVD's. I can listen to MP3 files on Vista, or play AVIs with no issues. I can even rip and encode CDs and DVDs. The people that licensed BlueRay and HDDVD were very scared of people ripping them, so they forced OS manufacturers to add a bunch of security features in return for being allowed to license the patents. Both Apple and Microsoft had to choose between implementing these features and not supporting the new formats. And both chose to implement them. But that only applies to the new formats. The seeds of M$'s demise were expressed early on.
Free software has done all of these things better than non free software.
And it's not really surprising that Gates would say this. He's in the business of selling software, not giving it away.And most people seem to be quite happy run the OEM copy of Windows they got with their machine rather than try to put together an alternative from free software. Hell I'd pay much more than the $50-$100 or so I pay for an OEM license for Windows because I've tried the alternatives and they really irritate me. $50 or $100 dollars or whatever the manufacturers pay Microsoft for a Windows license is not a high percentage of the machine cost, and it means I don't need to fart around trying to find clones of all the non free software I own. Every time I've done this, I end up spending weeks putting together a far inferior system. It's just not worth it to save $50-$100.
Now you can say it's Free as in Freedom. But that doesn't apply to me really. I want to be free to use the software I want to use. Most of the people that write it don't want to GPL it so the the Linux folks will regard them at best as leaches, even though I'm totally cool with people not giving their work away. Plus Linux has a tiny market share and they're not really too bothered about supporting it. So my Free as in Freedom machine will definitely not run the software I want to. Theoretically of course I could spend my time rewriting stuff to run on Linux, but why would I do that unless I could sell it to other people? And I can't do that if I give away the source code, since people will just take that and not pay me. But the whole Linux ecosystem is extremely hostile to people that don't GPL code. So the lack of the sort of software I want to use is not even a business opportunity.
So thanks, but no thanks. The OEM fee I pay for Windows when I buy a machine is fine by me.
It wasn't that bad. You got a disk with the modem with an inf file on it. You install the modem. The inf file was a text file that told Windows what AT commands to send. Since it was text, not a driver the dumb modem OEM couldn't screw it up too much.
Then you create a dialup connection. You needed to know your username and password. It helps if you installed Dial Up support when you install Windows of course, if you didn't I'd guess you need to dig out the CD that came with your machine.
Pop tarts. Head On. Bonzi Buddy. Cubic Time theory. Most conspiracy theories. The Hurd OS. A desert topping which is also a floor cleaner.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070525-windows-tax-is-50-according-to-dell-linux-pc-pricing.html
http://www.x86.org/ddj/aug98/aug98.htm
With the Pentium, Intel introduced a 94-entry, two-way set associative cache of segment-descriptor cache entries. Therefore, the phrase "segment-descriptor cache" is now ambiguous, with two possible meanings. Making matters worse, the new segment-descriptor cache was removed from the Pentium Pro design, but reintroduced in the Pentium II. (The lack of the new segment-descriptor cache in the Pentium Pro largely accounted for its poor 16-bit performance.)
When designing the PPro Intel thought that Windows NT would take over from 16 bit Windows. Windows NT doesn't do many segment loads. Threads use FS for thread local data so that is presumably loaded every time the scheduler switch threads, every 10 to 100ms. But that is a very small percentage of instructions. All code and data use the same values for CS and DS - base address 0 and limit 4GB. So Intel removed the segment descriptor cache. But since 16 bit OSs were still popular and those OSs load the CS and DS segment registers much more frequently. In fact they have to, since they were designed to work on the 286 back when 64K was the maximum possible limit. Since datasets and code sizes were way bigger than 64K, the segment registers are loaded very frequently. So in the Pentium 2 Intel reintroduced the cache. It's not a hack, just bad crystal ball gazing.
Actually most of Intel's mistakes are like that. They predict the future badly because of a strange mix of wishful thinking, a desire to get rid of legacy stuff and outright hubris.
Sharks with lasers are patrolling to keep slashdot cliche free.
People that get disciplined for blogging or surfing probably have a company that is so totally incompetent they have nothing to do for weeks at a time and a manager who wants to intimidate them. The point is to make everyone else keep their heads down and act busy.
I'd bet money if you filmed the people that made up the kangaroo court that suspended him, they're not exactly overworked either.
The collection agent who called me barely even tried to get the money. Her attitude was more along the lines of "I know, they really do suck."
So now we expect them to be able to track their own phone usage? I doubt it. When I was leaving Germany I was in during the day, packing my stuff up.
The doorbell rang, and there was a delivery guy with a box for the apartment upstairs. He rung several times - he needed a signature. Being a good neighbour I signed for it and put a note in the letterbox for the upstairs apartment - "I have a parcel for you, please come down and pick it up".
A harried looking young German woman arrived in the evening and said (and I quote) "It was good of you to pick it up but you really shouldn't have DT sent it to me I didn't order it I saw they had charged me and so I called them they told me that they couldn't cancel the order I didn't make but they could schedule delivery for a time that I wasn't there and make it registered so that no one would be there to sign and then would get sent back to them and they agreed to pay the postage and the computer would void the contract based on German Law but now that you picked it up I will need to pay the return postage and contract cancelation fees [Deep intact of breath] But it was nice of you to sign for it. Thanks."
It was like fixing an obvious bug in some horrible hacked system and then seeing it collapse spectacularly because one of the side effects of the bug was the only thing keeping it up.
Compared to DT, British Telecom were actually quite customer friendly. And that is saying something.
Do you reckon we'll have much less wars when the Generation Xers run things, or much more.
Maybe they put the MKULTRA CH92B pattern in the free MP3s. That would be harmless if you played it a few times but would give you a cerebral hemorrhage after a few hundred times.
brb, door.
Essentially all species mating rituals have an element of stotting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting
Spend a buck on a song, or better playing it on your overpriced by coolly branded music player with an attractive shiny finish, shows that you have excess resources and thus are a 'fit' mate. Essentially it's a modern equivalent of picking up your date in a limousine. Geeks don't get laid partially because they refuse to play the stotting game I suspect.
Problem with selling stuff on the Internet is that there's no reason for anonymous people to stot since there is no one to impress.
PS isn't it ironic once you know what Stotting is to see a picture of Ken Stott.
http://us.imdb.com/media/rm4137064704/nm0832792
He should be some James Bond type with expensive tastes.
It's Windows only because Microsoft wrote it to promote their Silverlight initiative. Siverlight doesn't work on Macs or Linux, so there's no point porting the exploit there.
My fascist ISP won't let me send packets on their network unless I put a MAC address in them and and IP address.