Damn straight! Everyone who followed up to Nitack should get together and file a class action lawsuit against him for libel, emotional battery and tortious interference.
How do you know? I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in any Gods at all, but it seems to me going from believing in zero Gods to one is harder than from one to many.
Or more generally, if there's one entity with Godlike powers, who's actually warned humans repeatedly about others - look at the commments about Satan all through the bible, Quran etc, how do you know that some religions aren't worshipping the horned dude, thinking he's God?
In fact if you look at the mixed content in all religions, where God goes from advocating very moral behaviour (love thy neighbour) to very immoral behaviour (rape, genocide etc), isn't it possible that all religions were actually started by both Satan and God on some kind of party line?
Imagine there's a portal where they both live that lets them talk to some humans, and either of them can use it. Kind of like if you left a terminal in the library logged on to slashdot, and trolls would post under your account and everyone else would think it was you.
There's a site called prophetofdoom that makes this argument spookily well actually.
Well I was going to say that comparing the Nazis starting WWII was different for a bunch of reasons from the Congress voting to ban Myspace from schools and libraries, and how you totally Godwined yourself.
But actually it strikes me that this is Myspace we're talking about. If jackbooted Homeland Security goons started loading all the myspace users into cattle trucks for 'resettlement in the East', I'd volunteer to appear as a pundit on Fox News explaining how it was totally justified.
Which reminds me, isn't it funny how Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, so the 'cultural conservatives' at Fox News are now presumably under orders to say only good things about it.
If you do the math, you get some huge theoretical lifetimes for NAND flash hard drives even with relatively pessimistic assumptions, and the price differential should be negative in five years time.
So a 32GB NAND flash drive should have a longer life than a hard disk, and be cheaper too, if you can wait for five years.
Realistically, if you're up against the NSA or some equivalent state backed entity, their lawyers will probably persuade you that it's in your interest not to obstruct justice and just hand over the data, unless you want to spend a very long time in prison.
NT is not the same as Mach - it's an portable, pre-emptive OS, designed for SMP long before SMP was widely used.
Win32 API vs. Single Unix and X. Once again, older and better.
Better is a subjective term. Win32 is vast and original, that's my point. Whether your like it or not is not relevant to whether it's original. Nor really is whether X Windows came first, since X Windows is a very different thing to Win32.
ACPI ok. But the BIOS interface sucks, and hardware manufactures actually implement it, not Microsoft.
Well Microsoft have been heavily involved in all the innovations in PC hardware.
Back in the IBM days - PC's had 640K memory barriers, slow and primimitive graphics, ISA and a primitive interrupt DMA facilities. Now they're 64 bit, has no runtime Bios access (why ACPI was invented - they needed to move away from APM which required Bios access after boot), has ultra fast graphics, one interrupt per device, the whole works. It's 99% as a good as a clean design, binary compatibility has been preserved across the transition.
In fact, if you look at the 64 bit AMD stuff, there are loads of things that make it look as if the NT designers had a considerable input into the spec.
COM vs. Smalltalk, CLOS, Scheme, etc. One of these is not used today, and that's COM.
Umm, you what? COM is used in every Windows PC still. Big chunks of Windows are COM based - ActiveX, DirectX, the shell api, OLE and so on. It's also used the Xbox.
Oddly enough, a lot of cellphones use something called ECM, which is a subset of COM based too - not just Sony Ericsson as the link suggests, some of this code has been licensed to virtually everyone.
You can like this stuff of dislike it, and most of it is inelegant since it evolved while keeping binary compatibility, but saying that Microsoft have done no innovation is absurd.
And too their great credit, most of this stuff, like COM is well described and unpatented which is what allowed Sony Ericsson to borrow from COM. It also allowed them to make money licensing it to OEMs.
Careful. Cat owners are notoriously fanatical. Pointing out things like this could cause cat owners in the US and the UK to fight a bloody war over what each side sees as mistreatment of cats by the other.
I imagine the cats would secretly enjoy this immensely of course.
There's no evidence of that, and I don't think it's technically possible for them to do it. Third party players don't use the Microsoft codecs - they read data out of a file, decode it and output it with DirectX or GDI. There's no way for the OS to know that a media file is even being played.
And in terms of company culture, if you read the Old New Thing you can see that they go to great, indeed sometimes crazy, lengths to support third party applications. They believe in a ecosystem of third party applications resting on their platform. It would be a complete 180 degree turn to start deliberately preventing them from running.
And it's implausible in terms of marketing too, Microsoft are pushing Media Centre versions of Windows. These would get slaughtered if they cripple multimedia in any way.
The key technology that makes AJAX work is the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. The XMLHttpRequest was first implemented by Microsoft as an ActiveX object in IE 5.0 (March 1999). Then Mozilla added a compatible XMLHttpRequest object for Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 7 (May 2001). This was followed by Apple's support in Safari 1.2 (February 2004) and Opera's support in version 8.5 (September 2005).
You're missing the point of what DRM in Vista is for.
It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to play the new disks on any OS.
The DRM is there to let you play content, albeit with draconian restrictions, which you would not be able to play at all if the OS didn't support it.
OS/2 run on commodity hardware and had passable compatibility with Windows and Dos applications, in addition to reasonable support from major software vendors (including Microsoft) for native applications. Plus it had major OEMs signed on to buy licenses for ATMs, and would be bundled with IBM hardware, back when IBM had the majority of the PC market.
The US and the UK are different in that draconian UK laws are targetted towards specific groups rather than having any pretense of being impartial.
E.g. a law designed to be used against al Qaeda suspects will most likely be used only against them. If it goes wrong and becomes more general it will be revoked. E.g. Operation Kratos ended when de Menezes got shot. Remarkably it consisted of this "A senior officer is on standby 24 hours a day to authorise the deployment of special armed squads, who will track and if needs be, shoot dead suspected suicide bombers."
Now shooting suicide bombers is something which the establishment, and probably the majority of the population would support at that time. Shooting illegal immigrants, or more to the point random members of the public is something they would not.
Not that Kratos was a law come to think of it, more like something which the police, the army and the government dreamed up.
So unlike the US you don't have much in the way of absolute rights. Traditionally, a UK Prime Minister has extreme, dictatorial powers. It's much more like the Roman Republic, with elected Dictators, than the American one where everyone has limited powers and fundamental rights. The difference is that the dictator has to answer to a free press, and can be removed by a revolt inside his or her own party if any of his policies become outrageously unpopular.
I think it's quite an effective system - when the shit hits the fan, you can do extreme stuff like Kratos or Defense Regulation 18b. Once things calm down, the Prime Minister responsible is usually removed, and any laws passed can be revoked.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn straight! Everyone who followed up to Nitack should get together and file a class action lawsuit against him for libel, emotional battery and tortious interference.
But they're suing Nintendo as well. You know, a good megacorporation like Apple.
I dunno, maybe he's hetrosexual?
Neither of those were Gods, they were very powerful beings posing as Gods.
Remember the quote "What use does God have for a starship?"
How do you know? I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in any Gods at all, but it seems to me going from believing in zero Gods to one is harder than from one to many.
Or more generally, if there's one entity with Godlike powers, who's actually warned humans repeatedly about others - look at the commments about Satan all through the bible, Quran etc, how do you know that some religions aren't worshipping the horned dude, thinking he's God?
In fact if you look at the mixed content in all religions, where God goes from advocating very moral behaviour (love thy neighbour) to very immoral behaviour (rape, genocide etc), isn't it possible that all religions were actually started by both Satan and God on some kind of party line?
Imagine there's a portal where they both live that lets them talk to some humans, and either of them can use it. Kind of like if you left a terminal in the library logged on to slashdot, and trolls would post under your account and everyone else would think it was you.
There's a site called prophetofdoom that makes this argument spookily well actually.
Well I was going to say that comparing the Nazis starting WWII was different for a bunch of reasons from the Congress voting to ban Myspace from schools and libraries, and how you totally Godwined yourself.
But actually it strikes me that this is Myspace we're talking about. If jackbooted Homeland Security goons started loading all the myspace users into cattle trucks for 'resettlement in the East', I'd volunteer to appear as a pundit on Fox News explaining how it was totally justified.
Which reminds me, isn't it funny how Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, so the 'cultural conservatives' at Fox News are now presumably under orders to say only good things about it.
I dunno, I've seen some very pioneering typography on MySpace.
I can see why the War on Drugs bothers you so much.
The sad thing about this argument is that it's clear in the original Aramaic that they meant Imploding.
God spoke the Queen's English, not some obscure semitic language.
If you do the math, you get some huge theoretical lifetimes for NAND flash hard drives even with relatively pessimistic assumptions, and the price differential should be negative in five years time.
So a 32GB NAND flash drive should have a longer life than a hard disk, and be cheaper too, if you can wait for five years.
Thermite isn't guanteed to vaporise stuff. If you're serious, a fission-fusion-fission nuke is the only way to be sure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiyUSv2Z07A
Playing Wagner and dressing up in Soviet uniforms is not absolutely essential, but certainly adds something to occasion.
Realistically, if you're up against the NSA or some equivalent state backed entity, their lawyers will probably persuade you that it's in your interest not to obstruct justice and just hand over the data, unless you want to spend a very long time in prison.
NT vs. Mach. Mach is older and better.
s /docs/35_Rep.Lundberg.pdf
NT is not the same as Mach - it's an portable, pre-emptive OS, designed for SMP long before SMP was widely used.
Win32 API vs. Single Unix and X. Once again, older and better.
Better is a subjective term. Win32 is vast and original, that's my point. Whether your like it or not is not relevant to whether it's original. Nor really is whether X Windows came first, since X Windows is a very different thing to Win32.
ACPI ok. But the BIOS interface sucks, and hardware manufactures actually implement it, not Microsoft.
Well Microsoft have been heavily involved in all the innovations in PC hardware.
Back in the IBM days - PC's had 640K memory barriers, slow and primimitive graphics, ISA and a primitive interrupt DMA facilities. Now they're 64 bit, has no runtime Bios access (why ACPI was invented - they needed to move away from APM which required Bios access after boot), has ultra fast graphics, one interrupt per device, the whole works. It's 99% as a good as a clean design, binary compatibility has been preserved across the transition.
In fact, if you look at the 64 bit AMD stuff, there are loads of things that make it look as if the NT designers had a considerable input into the spec.
COM vs. Smalltalk, CLOS, Scheme, etc. One of these is not used today, and that's COM.
Umm, you what? COM is used in every Windows PC still. Big chunks of Windows are COM based - ActiveX, DirectX, the shell api, OLE and so on. It's also used the Xbox.
Oddly enough, a lot of cellphones use something called ECM, which is a subset of COM based too - not just Sony Ericsson as the link suggests, some of this code has been licensed to virtually everyone.
http://serg.telecom.lth.se/education/master_these
You can like this stuff of dislike it, and most of it is inelegant since it evolved while keeping binary compatibility, but saying that Microsoft have done no innovation is absurd.
And too their great credit, most of this stuff, like COM is well described and unpatented which is what allowed Sony Ericsson to borrow from COM. It also allowed them to make money licensing it to OEMs.
People don't have a choice about their race, they do about the software they use.
Or since this is the Internet, look at this page and see why the analogy is silly -
Video and WMV - OTP. pwnt
I like the "The REAL cause of the civil war icon".
You could write an ActiveX control that installs the plugin, that would take care of the Windows IE users. And a plugin for Firefox and Opera.
Real and Macromedia managed to do this, why can't the Ogg guys?
Careful. Cat owners are notoriously fanatical. Pointing out things like this could cause cat owners in the US and the UK to fight a bloody war over what each side sees as mistreatment of cats by the other.
I imagine the cats would secretly enjoy this immensely of course.
Cats probably transmit another parasite on their fur in an infectious form that makes you post stuff like this in online forums.
There's no evidence of that, and I don't think it's technically possible for them to do it. Third party players don't use the Microsoft codecs - they read data out of a file, decode it and output it with DirectX or GDI. There's no way for the OS to know that a media file is even being played.
And in terms of company culture, if you read the Old New Thing you can see that they go to great, indeed sometimes crazy, lengths to support third party applications. They believe in a ecosystem of third party applications resting on their platform. It would be a complete 180 degree turn to start deliberately preventing them from running.
And it's implausible in terms of marketing too, Microsoft are pushing Media Centre versions of Windows. These would get slaughtered if they cripple multimedia in any way.
http://www.modelworks.com/ajax.html
Or the NT kernel? Or the Win32 API? Or ACPI? COM?
You're missing the point of what DRM in Vista is for.
It will always be possible to watch Lord.Of.The.Rings.DVDRIP.xvid.avi on a Windows machine, Vista or XP since there are open source applications that let you watch it which Windows can't refuse to run.
The difference between XP and Vista is that BlueRay and HDDVD disks will (initially) only play on Vista, since XP is not regarded as secure enough to have software players run on it. But sooner or later, one of the open source media players will learn to play the new disks on any OS.
The DRM is there to let you play content, albeit with draconian restrictions, which you would not be able to play at all if the OS didn't support it.
Is this make up your own, new unheard of acronym day?
YM MUYONUOAD, HTH
Nixon was a Great Man.
Like Jesus, or Ghengis Khan, or Hitler.
On a side note - how is Ford's death "News for Nerds?
Have you seen that video of him falling down the airplane steps?
Hey, I object to that comparison.
OS/2 run on commodity hardware and had passable compatibility with Windows and Dos applications, in addition to reasonable support from major software vendors (including Microsoft) for native applications. Plus it had major OEMs signed on to buy licenses for ATMs, and would be bundled with IBM hardware, back when IBM had the majority of the PC market.
The US and the UK are different in that draconian UK laws are targetted towards specific groups rather than having any pretense of being impartial.
E.g. a law designed to be used against al Qaeda suspects will most likely be used only against them. If it goes wrong and becomes more general it will be revoked. E.g. Operation Kratos ended when de Menezes got shot. Remarkably it consisted of this
"A senior officer is on standby 24 hours a day to authorise the deployment of special armed squads, who will track and if needs be, shoot dead suspected suicide bombers."
Now shooting suicide bombers is something which the establishment, and probably the majority of the population would support at that time. Shooting illegal immigrants, or more to the point random members of the public is something they would not.
Not that Kratos was a law come to think of it, more like something which the police, the army and the government dreamed up.
So unlike the US you don't have much in the way of absolute rights. Traditionally, a UK Prime Minister has extreme, dictatorial powers. It's much more like the Roman Republic, with elected Dictators, than the American one where everyone has limited powers and fundamental rights. The difference is that the dictator has to answer to a free press, and can be removed by a revolt inside his or her own party if any of his policies become outrageously unpopular.
I think it's quite an effective system - when the shit hits the fan, you can do extreme stuff like Kratos or Defense Regulation 18b. Once things calm down, the Prime Minister responsible is usually removed, and any laws passed can be revoked.