In a recent interview I can't find right now, Theo gave a perfectly good reason for this insane legacy support: OpenBSD is a volunteer project, and some of the most valuable contributors want this stuff to remain. Dumping the legacy systems would most likely mean losing those contributors. If they are important enough to the project, then the legacy support is the price it pays to keep them around.
Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.
Because they are highly respected in management circles. You get the tech view on them and I have to agree that I would never, ever, ever hire them unless you put a gun to my head or something equivalent. But management thinks differently. From what I've grasped, they deliver excellent work, as far as management is concerned - that means regular status updates in easy-to-digest powerpoint slides, solid contract work, and instantly available expertise (if you tell them you need an expert on your big-ass storage system, tomorrow, they'll fly someone in and send you a bill).
All of these and many similar things are like miracles to a beleaguered manager who needs to save his neck from the management layer above him who's asking for his head in order to save their own.
I don't see why these crybaby advertisers are so desperate to reach a market that would have low click-through rates.
Because they don't think like you and I.
All advertisers are spammers, to some degree. Not necessarily in what they do, but in how they think. They know that with large enough numbers, they will find someone who is dumb or interested enough.
So what if it costs more? It's not like the ad people would pay that.
Is it ethical to change how MY computer displays stuff to me? Of course it is. If you don't like it, nobody forces you to deliver content to my computer.
Adblockers are fair, good, justified and everything else, because spam. If we didn't block ads, if you had to watch every ad someone wanted you to watch, you would spend your entire day watching ads, and as soon as someone finds a way to inject content into dreams, your entire night, too.
It's not even about malware and tracking and all that other shit that comes on top of it. It is about MY attention being MINE to do with as I please, and the we-own-you attitude of advertisers who think that it's ok to force their crap on everyone, everywhere at every time.
Frankly, IMHO adblockers are a temporary solution. The real solution needs to be making advertisement illegal outside small, well-defined areas.
Here's the thing about steganography that is going to fuck most people who try to use it: If they ever find the original file that you used pre-stego, a simple binary comparison will reveal the alteration. In other words, if you use any publicly available image, document, etc., and then "stego" it... an adversary like the NSA can programically detect this.
If you are stupid, yes.
If you are not stupid, you copy the image, crop it a bit, apply some filter and re-encode it. There goes your programmatic detection.
While Theo is not the nicest guy around, it's perfectly possible to have a good conversation with him where he doesn't insult (etc.) you. I speak from personal experience there.
Theo faces the same problem that cryptographers, some physicists, climate scientists and similar people do: You get to have a lot of interaction with people who have no clue but an opinion. After the 100th e-mail claiming to "disprove Einstein", or "reveal the HOAX (always in capital letters!) of climate change!!!" or rant on OS security, you figure out that hostility is a great tool to cut that crap short and get back some of your time.
This brings up a question which everyone has been trying to skirt. Is the value in the object itself, or in the arrangement of the molecules which make up the object?
No, it doesn't. That question is still 50-100 years down the road when you're talking about unique items such as museum artifacts.
At this stage, these aren't replicators, they are basically DIY molds. Games Workshop is going to be pissed. Your average museum artifact is nowhere near being copyable to the point where it's more than a novelty or something for students. The value of these items is precisely in the fact that they are old and original, so making a copy from plastics isn't going to cut it. And actually replicating something on the molecular level is, as I said, way, way out there.
If the facsimile of a precious original artifact is indistinguishable from the real thing, does it really matter which is the original?
Depends. For your Warhammer tabletop hero, no. For your bronze-age spear tip, yes.
Re:it's the monetary system stupid..
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 1
yes, but...
The "but" here is called marketing. We already have the means to satisfy our basic demands in a fraction of the time it used to take our ancestors.
But if you want an iPhone, the latest hyped brand-name clothes and all other other shit... you're still a slave.
'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
And we have been for 50 years, which is why we have visionaries from the 60s talk about the change in work culture and a possible human future where robots do 99% of the work and humans - find something more interesting to do with their time.
But society refused to change. We still live in a work-is-mandatory culture.
Make a desktop interface which is optimized for the desktop and is substantially better than anything that exists now. Look at all the academic research, and take years to adopt and polish it. Demand excellence internally and never believe your own BS.
MS hasn't understood that ever. Why should they suddenly get it now?
Company with failed product tries to save itself by releasing more of the same
MS has missed the bandwagon, once again, but unlike the other big blunders (*cough* Internet *cough*), this time there are powerful and more importantly, wealthy, competitors around to take advantage of it.
Company with failed product tries to save itself by releasing more of the same
MS has missed the bandwagon, once again, but unlike the other big blunders (*cough* Internet *cough*), this time there are powerful and more importantly, wealthy, competitors around to take advantage of it.
Finally an entry on the extinct species list that we can actually be proud of.
Polio is one nasty disease and its (almost) eradication is one of the bravest examples of human accomplishment and proof of what things our grandparents thought impossible we can achieve if we work together for a change.
Unfortunately, once again, religion is the final obstacle in mankinds road to a better world. If they create an eradication of religion program next, sign me up.
For MS and Apple, you are the customer. So they care about you. Most importantly (and that's what the BBB rates): They actually handle your issues.
For Google, you are the product that they sell to their customers (advertisers). So they care just enough that you don't leave. They also mostly handle customer issues because they understand that they are often technical problems that are in their own interest to solve.
Valve... well, as I said. Basically, they don't give a fuck.
and still you'll end up with a full fledged PC with a serious OS (Linux) that can run lots and lots of 'serious apps'
*cough*
Sorry, but Linux is not a serious desktop OS. And I say that as someone who had hoped for almost a decade that it would become one.
Using it basically as a black-box OS where the end-user is only ever exposed to your custom app and never to the OS itself is precisely the right move, because that's what Linux is really good for (other than, say, windows which regularily graces bulletin boards or kiosks the world over with blue screen, "new software updates are available" windows and other "why the fuck can't the OS stay in the fucking background instead of jumping into your face?" bullshit.
Oh, yeah, I forgot the most important thing: Our wholly-owned politicians and the stupid media which for some reason believes people whose job it is to lie, swindle and bullshit, are making the renewable energies - whose unexpected success is causing these wholesale price drops - responsible for the rising consumer prices.
On a daily basis, December was a month of extremes for Germany, with day-ahead base prices closing on December 10 and 11 at less than â60/MWh â" the highest over-the-counter levels seen all year â" only to fall to its lowest level December 24 to â0.50/MWh.
What you really must know there is that these low costs are not passed on to the customer. On the contrary, energy prices for private users have been constantly rising for years.
Why? Because our corrupt bullshit non-government has passed laws that exempt the - wait for it - biggest industrial users of energy from taxes. Which, of course, means that the rest of us have to pay their share.
Slashdot Mirror
In a recent interview I can't find right now, Theo gave a perfectly good reason for this insane legacy support: OpenBSD is a volunteer project, and some of the most valuable contributors want this stuff to remain. Dumping the legacy systems would most likely mean losing those contributors. If they are important enough to the project, then the legacy support is the price it pays to keep them around.
...these malware companies buy out AdBlock. :-/
They already did, years ago.
If you haven't switched to AdBlock Edge, yet, you're behind.
Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.
Because they are highly respected in management circles. You get the tech view on them and I have to agree that I would never, ever, ever hire them unless you put a gun to my head or something equivalent. But management thinks differently. From what I've grasped, they deliver excellent work, as far as management is concerned - that means regular status updates in easy-to-digest powerpoint slides, solid contract work, and instantly available expertise (if you tell them you need an expert on your big-ass storage system, tomorrow, they'll fly someone in and send you a bill).
All of these and many similar things are like miracles to a beleaguered manager who needs to save his neck from the management layer above him who's asking for his head in order to save their own.
Thank you!
Yes, it's just another cheap MS stunt and /. should know better.
The fact that some people hate gravity and try to have it outlawed doesn't mean that gravity doesn't exist, you know?
but the reality is that these sites have to pay the bills somehow.
"somehow" being the keyword here.
We live in a free world, and one of its beauties is that you do not have a right to have your business model succeed.
Advertisement sucks, everyone agrees on that. People avoid it wherever they can.
I don't see why these crybaby advertisers are so desperate to reach a market that would have low click-through rates.
Because they don't think like you and I.
All advertisers are spammers, to some degree. Not necessarily in what they do, but in how they think. They know that with large enough numbers, they will find someone who is dumb or interested enough.
So what if it costs more? It's not like the ad people would pay that.
What a bullshit question.
Is it ethical to change how MY computer displays stuff to me? Of course it is. If you don't like it, nobody forces you to deliver content to my computer.
Adblockers are fair, good, justified and everything else, because spam. If we didn't block ads, if you had to watch every ad someone wanted you to watch, you would spend your entire day watching ads, and as soon as someone finds a way to inject content into dreams, your entire night, too.
It's not even about malware and tracking and all that other shit that comes on top of it. It is about MY attention being MINE to do with as I please, and the we-own-you attitude of advertisers who think that it's ok to force their crap on everyone, everywhere at every time.
Frankly, IMHO adblockers are a temporary solution. The real solution needs to be making advertisement illegal outside small, well-defined areas.
But normal people do not need this
You are not thinking creatively enough. I can see a dozen uses for this, some playful, some serious, some a bit geeky, some artistic.
Here's the thing about steganography that is going to fuck most people who try to use it: If they ever find the original file that you used pre-stego, a simple binary comparison will reveal the alteration. In other words, if you use any publicly available image, document, etc., and then "stego" it... an adversary like the NSA can programically detect this.
If you are stupid, yes.
If you are not stupid, you copy the image, crop it a bit, apply some filter and re-encode it. There goes your programmatic detection.
While Theo is not the nicest guy around, it's perfectly possible to have a good conversation with him where he doesn't insult (etc.) you. I speak from personal experience there.
Theo faces the same problem that cryptographers, some physicists, climate scientists and similar people do: You get to have a lot of interaction with people who have no clue but an opinion. After the 100th e-mail claiming to "disprove Einstein", or "reveal the HOAX (always in capital letters!) of climate change!!!" or rant on OS security, you figure out that hostility is a great tool to cut that crap short and get back some of your time.
This brings up a question which everyone has been trying to skirt. Is the value in the object itself, or in the arrangement of the molecules which make up the object?
No, it doesn't. That question is still 50-100 years down the road when you're talking about unique items such as museum artifacts.
At this stage, these aren't replicators, they are basically DIY molds. Games Workshop is going to be pissed. Your average museum artifact is nowhere near being copyable to the point where it's more than a novelty or something for students. The value of these items is precisely in the fact that they are old and original, so making a copy from plastics isn't going to cut it. And actually replicating something on the molecular level is, as I said, way, way out there.
If the facsimile of a precious original artifact is indistinguishable from the real thing, does it really matter which is the original?
Depends. For your Warhammer tabletop hero, no. For your bronze-age spear tip, yes.
yes, but...
The "but" here is called marketing. We already have the means to satisfy our basic demands in a fraction of the time it used to take our ancestors.
But if you want an iPhone, the latest hyped brand-name clothes and all other other shit... you're still a slave.
'because we're not only in a recession-induced employment slump. We're in technological hurricane reshaping the workplace.'"
And we have been for 50 years, which is why we have visionaries from the 60s talk about the change in work culture and a possible human future where robots do 99% of the work and humans - find something more interesting to do with their time.
But society refused to change. We still live in a work-is-mandatory culture.
Make a desktop interface which is optimized for the desktop and is substantially better than anything that exists now. Look at all the academic research, and take years to adopt and polish it. Demand excellence internally and never believe your own BS.
MS hasn't understood that ever. Why should they suddenly get it now?
Company with failed product tries to save itself by releasing more of the same
MS has missed the bandwagon, once again, but unlike the other big blunders (*cough* Internet *cough*), this time there are powerful and more importantly, wealthy, competitors around to take advantage of it.
lol, wrong article. I don't think that's ever happened to me in... uh... almost 20 years of /. ?
Company with failed product tries to save itself by releasing more of the same
MS has missed the bandwagon, once again, but unlike the other big blunders (*cough* Internet *cough*), this time there are powerful and more importantly, wealthy, competitors around to take advantage of it.
Finally an entry on the extinct species list that we can actually be proud of.
Polio is one nasty disease and its (almost) eradication is one of the bravest examples of human accomplishment and proof of what things our grandparents thought impossible we can achieve if we work together for a change.
Unfortunately, once again, religion is the final obstacle in mankinds road to a better world. If they create an eradication of religion program next, sign me up.
Not surprising if you think about it.
For MS and Apple, you are the customer. So they care about you. Most importantly (and that's what the BBB rates): They actually handle your issues.
For Google, you are the product that they sell to their customers (advertisers). So they care just enough that you don't leave. They also mostly handle customer issues because they understand that they are often technical problems that are in their own interest to solve.
Valve... well, as I said. Basically, they don't give a fuck.
Valve has gone from simply evangelizing the PC platform [...] to actively protecting it
What a load of paid-for bullshill. Valve has famously horrible customer-service and that flies right in the face of that claim.
Want to help the PC platform? Make fewer people sorry they spent money on your shit,
They were invented by engineers.
For engineers. The fact that you're posting on this site means you're not representative of the general population.
and still you'll end up with a full fledged PC with a serious OS (Linux) that can run lots and lots of 'serious apps'
*cough*
Sorry, but Linux is not a serious desktop OS. And I say that as someone who had hoped for almost a decade that it would become one.
Using it basically as a black-box OS where the end-user is only ever exposed to your custom app and never to the OS itself is precisely the right move, because that's what Linux is really good for (other than, say, windows which regularily graces bulletin boards or kiosks the world over with blue screen, "new software updates are available" windows and other "why the fuck can't the OS stay in the fucking background instead of jumping into your face?" bullshit.
Oh, yeah, I forgot the most important thing: Our wholly-owned politicians and the stupid media which for some reason believes people whose job it is to lie, swindle and bullshit, are making the renewable energies - whose unexpected success is causing these wholesale price drops - responsible for the rising consumer prices.
On a daily basis, December was a month of extremes for Germany, with day-ahead base prices closing on December 10 and 11 at less than â60/MWh â" the highest over-the-counter levels seen all year â" only to fall to its lowest level December 24 to â0.50/MWh.
What you really must know there is that these low costs are not passed on to the customer. On the contrary, energy prices for private users have been constantly rising for years.
Why? Because our corrupt bullshit non-government has passed laws that exempt the - wait for it - biggest industrial users of energy from taxes. Which, of course, means that the rest of us have to pay their share.