"If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of
human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate
and would learn to think for themselves; and when they had done this,
they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no
function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run a hierarchical
society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
--"Emanuel Goldstein," 1984, by George Orwell
This could be just regular Fall season tweaking. Even though Comedy Central and other cable channels don't have a massive "Fall Season" promotion like the big three networks, they still want to dump the deadwood and get back to those things that have proven viewership. The big three "Fall Season" blitz can be rough on a cable network viewership. Remember, it's a big business.
Or, as you allude, is this a return to the 1950s and 1960s paranoia about the influence of the comic media on "young minds"? The Comics Code Authority (CCA) was the precursor to music lyric rating labels, video game rating labels, and other industry self-inflicted censorship to avoid the wrath of a Congress who doesn't care to understand freedom. (Of course, the Congress is just an extension of the general population, and the general population doesn't want to understand freedom either.) The CCA had one rating: if it wasn't CCA-approved pablum for toddlers, it wasn't put on the shelf.
The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link.
Remember the bionic man? Two bionic legs and a bionic arm?
If there's no bionic spine, the first time he would lift a truck, there'd be a sickening crunch in the middle. That's what we mean by the weakest link limiting the strength.
Mind you, a 767 full of transcontinental fuel is a mite bit heavier and more flammable than a 707. The support structures inside were rated for about three hours of regular fire heat, but jet fuel would start and sustain a hotter fire. An hour later, meltdown.
The second building, struck lower down than the first, crumbled faster, perhaps because there was more weight above the area being stressed. Or maybe the fire was more intense.
Patents are not about who is right, or who is first; patents are about
who will sue.
The US PTO is a money-making service for the government, and this
fact is why it operates as it does.
There is a misconception that it is the central duty of the PTO to
form a blockade against granting patents. The PTO can and will block
applications where there's heavy similarity with prior art or existing
patents, but that's really just a guideline to using the service, not
the core function.
The PTO's purpose is to grant patents for a fee, and it's wholly suited
to do so.
The application vetting process of the PTO is a cost center for the operation of the PTO. This is akin to saying that customer service
is a cost center for the operation of AT&T. It is required,
but they'll cut costs as much as they can get away with.
To fix the patent application vetting process, two things must happen:
Congress must stop using the PTO's filing fees as a revenue source
for other pet interests instead of the PTO's own budget, and
The PTO needs to allow third parties to aid the vetting process
by challenging potential patents before they're granted.
As of 15 March 2001, the USPTO has changed their policies to solve
that second problem. They can now publish patent applications before
the patent itself is awarded to the applicant. Previously, the patent was hidden while pending, and patent seekers were not required to disclose this unless they had already signed contracts, say, as part of a standards-body. Third parties may now
submit "helpful" arguments against controversial applications. The USPTO
can then weigh obviousness against challenges without incurring the
costs of doing all the searching themselves.
Breaking patents by finding simple prior art is not enough for most
cases. Patents already granted are almost never cracked, certainly not
by someone using an independent third party's prior art. In the famous
Heinlein/Waterbed case, the patent was denied before it was ever granted
by the Patent Office. Once a patent has been granted, the Patent Office
rarely will get involved in disputes; that is a matter for the courts. (And in this case, the FTC aids the investigation for a countersuit.)
1) Support whatever 90% of your users are using
Latest stats are showing IE5 to have... pretty much 90%... So Should we only support IE?
That's 90% of YOUR users, not 90% of the market you're trying to penetrate.
If you wrote WhizzyWord, and 90% of your users have migrated up to v1.2, you can dump any v1.1-only "features" and clean it up. This has nothing to do with Microsoft Word, KWord, AbiWord, WordPerfect or any other word processor app on the market.
Did anyone else see the bizarre juxtaposition from the writeup: embrace Linux as the one-and-only *nix OS.
If Linux should be the "only" one, why the wildcard asterisk? Sorta reminds you that there's diversity out there, while you're trying to homogenize the image, if not the marketplace.
HPUX, Linux, Unix, BSD, IRIX, Solaris,... they all have their reasons, their histories, their strengths, their weaknesses, their lack of support and their communities.
In Ira Levin's sci-fi novel, This Perfect Day, everyone was genetically homogenized, and was known by a nameber. They hailed a government run by Uni, a massive computer.
"Listen, Li RM35M26J449988WXYZ," Papa Jan said. "Listen. I'm going to tell you something fantastic, incredible. In my day--are you listening?--in my day there were
over twenty different names for boys alone! Would you believe it? Love of Family, it's the truth. There was 'Jan,' and 'John,' and 'Amu,' and 'Lev.' 'Higa,' and 'Mike'! 'Tonio'! And in my father's time there were even more, maybe forty or fifty! Isn't that ridiculous? All those different names when members themselves are exactly the same and interchangeable? Isn't that the silliest thing you ever heard of?"
And Chip nodded, confused, feeling that Papa Jan meant the opposite, that somehow it wasn't silly and ridiculous to have forty or fifty different names for boys alone.
"Look at them!" Papa Jan said, taking Chip's hand and walking on with him--through Unity Park to the Wei's Birthday parade. "Exactly the same! Isn't it marvelous? Hair the same; boys, girls, all the same. Like peas in a pod. Isn't it fine? Isn't it top speed?"
Thank you. No, Thank Uni. A pretty decent "hero rebels against the system" kind of story, worth the read. Written in 1969.
Asimov's Foundation Trilogy just narrowly beat Tolkien's Lord of the Ring Trilogy in the same year. (I liked both, but I'd say Tolkien was robbed.)
It's not just recently that fantasy and sci-fi have been blended and confused. And to make just two genres is also terribly limiting. Is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" a fantasy, or a sci-fi, book?
Let me get this straight. You "don't mind raising the noise floor for something like this," when it would be affecting GPS, public safety nets, air traffic, marine navigation and communications?
Sure, gotta surf your porn from the bathroom, but if some Cessna commits CFIG (controlled flight into ground) because its pilot thought it was somewhere else, eh, so what.
And after the fridge makes that shopping list, I should be able to point my Palm (or Visor) at it, download the list, take it to the grocery store and when I walk in the door, download a map of the store with all of the products that I need highlighted.
I agree that making devices work together is useful, but what's the fascination with automatic refrigerator/store interaction?
Who is automating what, in your scenario? The refrigerator is telling you what's its missing, the store is telling you where to go, the coupons are telling you what to buy. Am I the robot that serves the needs of the marketers, the store and the refrigerator?
The more you automate, the more complicated the rest of your life will be. Remove the easy tasks, and all you're left with are the hard ones. More stress, not less.
Some have said that people didn't care, or that the PDF format required was onerous. That may be true.
However, I imagine that the "only 30 comments" was more accurately described as "only 30 on-topic comments." Most slashdotter's response to the DMCA has to do with the copy control vs fari use aspects, and not the first-sale doctrine issues raised here.
If the Copyright Office has divided up the response according to different aspects, the torrent of feedback received may find new life, or they may just open up for more feedback later.
Not only is this a blow for Microsoft in terms of market share, but in PR as well.
Yes, it damages Microsoft's image, making them out to be a greedy Goliath. Yes, I think it's a great single instance of Linux getting some perception coup. However...
One, if you use proprietary/closed/commercial software, then you must pay for it and be licensed. If the schools are not in compliance, then they owe the software makers the money. When students see teachers cloning disks to work around "budget shortcomings," is there any wonder why kids think everything digital is free for the taking?
Two, if you choose libre/open/gratis software, that's a reasonable alternatve, but only if it serves the needs. It's not a hobby, but a job, so choose the right tools for the job and be prepared to pay for them if they're not free. Personally, I hope this just improves the free tools to where they fit the needs of the job.
Three, why are the schools strapped for cash? Because people don't want to pass school bond measures when they see it's going to affect their property taxes. Elderly people don't vote for schools, and homeowners don't vote for schools. Lotteries "give" proceeds to schools, but that just makes the legislature shortchange the schools even more.
Making Microsoft into the bully here misses the main arguments here. Microsoft chose a business model and is sticking to it. If you're going to do business with someone ethically, then you have to respect their business model. If we can't expect ethics from our schools, then we surely can't expect ethics from the next generation of graduates. Find alternatives that are functional, sustainable, and ethical, so you don't find yourself on the wrong end of the gun.
... Feminin protection products... Birth control and/or pregnancy tests... vasectomy... Credit cards... I love my Linuxfund Penguin card... The Chase Toys 'R' Us card is great... Caravan... Toyota Tercel... The Legend of Beggar Vance... Constipation / Depends / Hemeroids / Atheletes foot... Bail bond... UPN... Voyager...
M*A*S*H... I hate... MS, SBC... Home/garden stuff... pokemon...
It seems that the advertising world has got you in its deadly embrace, my friend. You can rattle off trademark after trademark, they're ingrained into your brain. You misspelled the generic terms but spelled the trademarks with high accuracy. You form your opinions around brands jsut as much as around generic types of products. Not that I'm any different, but it just goes to show how powerful advertising is, in our lives.
(I jotted down this filk a couple weeks ago, waiting for the right "Microsoft and Browser Plugins" thread for it.)
Drag Me Drop Me
--to the tune of Savage Garden's "Break Me Shake Me"
I never thought I'd change my browser again,
To play movies in a format I've never known.
To play movies in a format I've never known.
But straight away you dominate the market again,
You abused me in a way that I've never known.
You abused me in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Just drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
So here's the file that deals with the games on the web,
But it's compressing in a way that I've never known,
It's compressing in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Won't you drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
"Support... I can help you, but what do you say?
Oh, it's not free baby, you'll have to pay."
You just keep me registering, watching upgrade costs recurring,
God, don't you make more than our national debt?
'Cause I used to copy in a way that you've never known,
So then you accuse to the feds that you've never known,
Watching profits grow in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Just drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Loading, baby, leave me, leave me alone...
Drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
Make me, shake me, charge me for a late fee,
Update me.
Many of the earlier graphics houses made a huge mistake: they bought whole render farms of SGI equipment, figuring, that's the best at graphics, so it's okay to pay double or triple for each box.
The distinction is, there's rendering, and then there's modeling. SGIs are (were) a great value for modeling, but a lousy value for the actual brute-force rendering work.
Yes, an SGI had a large advantage in the modeling department, because it could let an artist manipulate fairly complex meshes in real-time and get fast proof shots.
But SGI had *no* advantage, and sometimes a disadvantage, at the actual renderfarm work. The machines that did Jurassic Park I were just single-processor 150MHz MIPS R4400 boxes with a nice data bus. The software that did Jurassic Park were not taking *any* advantage of the 24 pipelined matrix multipliers, clippers, texturing rasterizers or other custom hardware. They were using the vanilla Unix works, just like any raytracer or renderman app. A few well-tuned Sparcs or an AS/400 could have done the same work.
SGI changed their logo and ther company name. It's no longer "Silicon Graphics, Inc.", it's just SGI. The logo isn't Scott Kim's famous paperclip cube anymore. Graphics isn't their prime corporate mission anymore. As others have pointed out, they now offer Linux-based machines, and they're still valuable to the artists.
So we have a machine that we can give a problem, and it will give us an answer, as long as we know what we want to hear.
"Hm, tricky." "But can you do it?"
"Yes, but the program will take a little while to run." "How long?"
"Seven and a half million years." "Seven and a half million years!?"
"I said it would take a while, didn't I? And it occurs to me that... so long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough, you can keep yourselvs on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?" "Now that's what I call thinking."
Or maybe this is less like Deep Thought, and more like the nutrimatic, which after analyzing the person's likes and dislikes, inevitably failed to produce anything but a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Your solutions should not affect the state of the infected machines. Even if you could "fix" their machine. Even telling them that their machine is infected is over the line, if you're using their machine to do it.
If you're being hampered by Code Red hits, make a script to firewall off every infected computer for a day. Allow those firewalls to expire, and if they're still infected, they'll get blocked again.
"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Yeah, that means you. You're giving up liberty-- not yours, but theirs. If you're messing with someone else's machine, you are part of the problem. No matter your intentions, or how nicely you word the "message" you deliver onto their desktop. Just don't touch it.
If you're going to call it a virus, think of the influenza virus. A medicine is widely available on the market. It is up to the infected party to take the medicine, and it would be unethical to sieze the unwitting victim and force the medicine into their bodies.
It's just a small problem, and in a month, people will just roll their eyes about the terrible outbreak. The best thing to do in a storm is to shelter yourself until it passes, not to rage against the howling winds around you.
I've suggested this before, but it would not be very hard to add this to slashcode, to make it easier on the editors. Yeah, (-1 Offtopic) but there ain't no Meta section.
Are all the urls in a story submission identical to those in another story in the queue? (Is THIS a match or subset of OTHER, linkwise?) If so, insta-reject with an explanation that someone else has already covered the subject at least as thoroughly.
Is this submission a superset of another that is earlier in the queue? Mark the earlier but lesser submission internally, so the editors can see and compare the two for the better submission.
Find the most uncommon words in the submitted headline and story. Are all those words also in another submission or posted top-level story? If so, mark the submission internally, so the editor can see and compare the earlier story for relevance.
Give more info to the rejected submitter. If there's internal auto-notes like the above points suggest, this can help the submitter know why their version was rejected. Oh, already submitted. Oh, too similar to old story. Oh, referenced URL isn't even valid. Oh, Taco hates me. Okay, I can live with that.
If the editors don't like combing through a submission queue, then they need to make the queue smarter to do the most tedious tasks. Then they can focus on other things, like learning the word 'than' or getting support engineers to quit their jobs.
Clients are good for lock-in, Servers bad.
on
MS getting rid of SAMBA?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Microsoft must be overjoyed that Mac OS X.1 and Linux and Unix all have popular SMB clients. Woo hoo! Desktops of all kinds are locking in the value of having a nice Microsoft-controlled backoffice.
It's the servers of SMB which are the thorn in Microsoft's side. A decent Samba server runs on Linux just fine, which robs Microsoft of all that wonderful lock-in. A Microsoft backoffice solution can be replaced with a drop-in equivalent, and not one desktop user even notices the difference (except there's fewer i.t. emails out to the organization about downtime).
Every time a fully functional drop-in replacement is possible, Microsoft will attempt to change the game to break that possibility. Desktops are hard to replace fully, because every single user has to make a very personal commitment (either by paycheck or choice) to learn all the little differences. Servers are easy to replace without much hardship, and Microsoft knows this. Hence,.net and kerberos tweaks and other closed or extended standards.
Slashdot Mirror
"If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."
--"Emanuel Goldstein," 1984, by George Orwell
This could be just regular Fall season tweaking. Even though Comedy Central and other cable channels don't have a massive "Fall Season" promotion like the big three networks, they still want to dump the deadwood and get back to those things that have proven viewership. The big three "Fall Season" blitz can be rough on a cable network viewership. Remember, it's a big business.
Or, as you allude, is this a return to the 1950s and 1960s paranoia about the influence of the comic media on "young minds"? The Comics Code Authority (CCA) was the precursor to music lyric rating labels, video game rating labels, and other industry self-inflicted censorship to avoid the wrath of a Congress who doesn't care to understand freedom. (Of course, the Congress is just an extension of the general population, and the general population doesn't want to understand freedom either.) The CCA had one rating: if it wasn't CCA-approved pablum for toddlers, it wasn't put on the shelf.
The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link.
Remember the bionic man? Two bionic legs and a bionic arm?
If there's no bionic spine, the first time he would lift a truck, there'd be a sickening crunch in the middle. That's what we mean by the weakest link limiting the strength.
"I designed it for a 707 to smash into it." --Les Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, as recently as last week
Mind you, a 767 full of transcontinental fuel is a mite bit heavier and more flammable than a 707. The support structures inside were rated for about three hours of regular fire heat, but jet fuel would start and sustain a hotter fire. An hour later, meltdown.
The second building, struck lower down than the first, crumbled faster, perhaps because there was more weight above the area being stressed. Or maybe the fire was more intense.
[stock rant on the subject]
Patents are not about who is right, or who is first; patents are about who will sue.
The US PTO is a money-making service for the government, and this fact is why it operates as it does.
There is a misconception that it is the central duty of the PTO to form a blockade against granting patents. The PTO can and will block applications where there's heavy similarity with prior art or existing patents, but that's really just a guideline to using the service, not the core function.
The PTO's purpose is to grant patents for a fee, and it's wholly suited to do so.
The application vetting process of the PTO is a cost center for the operation of the PTO. This is akin to saying that customer service is a cost center for the operation of AT&T. It is required, but they'll cut costs as much as they can get away with.
To fix the patent application vetting process, two things must happen:
As of 15 March 2001, the USPTO has changed their policies to solve that second problem. They can now publish patent applications before the patent itself is awarded to the applicant. Previously, the patent was hidden while pending, and patent seekers were not required to disclose this unless they had already signed contracts, say, as part of a standards-body. Third parties may now submit "helpful" arguments against controversial applications. The USPTO can then weigh obviousness against challenges without incurring the costs of doing all the searching themselves.
Breaking patents by finding simple prior art is not enough for most cases. Patents already granted are almost never cracked, certainly not by someone using an independent third party's prior art. In the famous Heinlein/Waterbed case, the patent was denied before it was ever granted by the Patent Office. Once a patent has been granted, the Patent Office rarely will get involved in disputes; that is a matter for the courts. (And in this case, the FTC aids the investigation for a countersuit.)
[end of stock rant]
1) Support whatever 90% of your users are using ... pretty much 90% ... So Should we only support IE?
Latest stats are showing IE5 to have
That's 90% of YOUR users, not 90% of the market you're trying to penetrate.
If you wrote WhizzyWord, and 90% of your users have migrated up to v1.2, you can dump any v1.1-only "features" and clean it up. This has nothing to do with Microsoft Word, KWord, AbiWord, WordPerfect or any other word processor app on the market.
Did anyone else see the bizarre juxtaposition from the writeup: embrace Linux as the one-and-only *nix OS.
If Linux should be the "only" one, why the wildcard asterisk? Sorta reminds you that there's diversity out there, while you're trying to homogenize the image, if not the marketplace.
HPUX, Linux, Unix, BSD, IRIX, Solaris, ... they all have their reasons, their histories, their strengths, their weaknesses, their lack of support and their communities.
In Ira Levin's sci-fi novel, This Perfect Day, everyone was genetically homogenized, and was known by a nameber . They hailed a government run by Uni, a massive computer.
- "Listen, Li RM35M26J449988WXYZ," Papa Jan said. "Listen. I'm going to tell you something fantastic, incredible. In my day--are you listening?--in my day there were
- over twenty different names for boys alone! Would you believe it? Love of Family, it's the truth. There was 'Jan,' and 'John,' and 'Amu,' and 'Lev.' 'Higa,' and 'Mike'! 'Tonio'! And in my father's time there were even more, maybe forty or fifty! Isn't that ridiculous? All those different names when members themselves are exactly the same and interchangeable? Isn't that the silliest thing you ever heard of?"
Thank you. No, Thank Uni. A pretty decent "hero rebels against the system" kind of story, worth the read. Written in 1969.And Chip nodded, confused, feeling that Papa Jan meant the opposite, that somehow it wasn't silly and ridiculous to have forty or fifty different names for boys alone.
"Look at them!" Papa Jan said, taking Chip's hand and walking on with him--through Unity Park to the Wei's Birthday parade. "Exactly the same! Isn't it marvelous? Hair the same; boys, girls, all the same. Like peas in a pod. Isn't it fine? Isn't it top speed?"
Asimov's Foundation Trilogy just narrowly beat Tolkien's Lord of the Ring Trilogy in the same year. (I liked both, but I'd say Tolkien was robbed.)
It's not just recently that fantasy and sci-fi have been blended and confused. And to make just two genres is also terribly limiting. Is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" a fantasy, or a sci-fi, book?
Let me get this straight. You "don't mind raising the noise floor for something like this," when it would be affecting GPS, public safety nets, air traffic, marine navigation and communications?
Sure, gotta surf your porn from the bathroom, but if some Cessna commits CFIG (controlled flight into ground) because its pilot thought it was somewhere else, eh, so what.
This is exactly why there is an FCC.
And after the fridge makes that shopping list, I should be able to point my Palm (or Visor) at it, download the list, take it to the grocery store and when I walk in the door, download a map of the store with all of the products that I need highlighted.
I agree that making devices work together is useful, but what's the fascination with automatic refrigerator/store interaction?
Who is automating what, in your scenario? The refrigerator is telling you what's its missing, the store is telling you where to go, the coupons are telling you what to buy. Am I the robot that serves the needs of the marketers, the store and the refrigerator?
The more you automate, the more complicated the rest of your life will be. Remove the easy tasks, and all you're left with are the hard ones. More stress, not less.
Some have said that people didn't care, or that the PDF format required was onerous. That may be true.
However, I imagine that the "only 30 comments" was more accurately described as "only 30 on-topic comments." Most slashdotter's response to the DMCA has to do with the copy control vs fari use aspects, and not the first-sale doctrine issues raised here.
If the Copyright Office has divided up the response according to different aspects, the torrent of feedback received may find new life, or they may just open up for more feedback later.
# units -v '5406mi/hr' 'km/hr'
5406mi/hr = 8700.1137 km/hr
5406mi/hr = (1 / 0.00011494103) km/hr
# units -v '5406mi/hr' 'furlong/fortnight'
5406mi/hr = 14531299 furlong/fortnight
5406mi/hr = (1 / 6.8816973e-08) furlong/fortnight
Sure seem to be a lot of people confusing GNU and GPL. They're different things.
If a Unix uses the GNU suite of tools, then how is GNU irrelevant?
If a Unix is released under the GPL license, then how does that have anything to do with the GNU suite of tools?
Not only is this a blow for Microsoft in terms of market share, but in PR as well.
Yes, it damages Microsoft's image, making them out to be a greedy Goliath. Yes, I think it's a great single instance of Linux getting some perception coup. However...
One, if you use proprietary/closed/commercial software, then you must pay for it and be licensed. If the schools are not in compliance, then they owe the software makers the money. When students see teachers cloning disks to work around "budget shortcomings," is there any wonder why kids think everything digital is free for the taking?
Two, if you choose libre/open/gratis software, that's a reasonable alternatve, but only if it serves the needs. It's not a hobby, but a job, so choose the right tools for the job and be prepared to pay for them if they're not free. Personally, I hope this just improves the free tools to where they fit the needs of the job.
Three, why are the schools strapped for cash? Because people don't want to pass school bond measures when they see it's going to affect their property taxes. Elderly people don't vote for schools, and homeowners don't vote for schools. Lotteries "give" proceeds to schools, but that just makes the legislature shortchange the schools even more.
Making Microsoft into the bully here misses the main arguments here. Microsoft chose a business model and is sticking to it. If you're going to do business with someone ethically, then you have to respect their business model. If we can't expect ethics from our schools, then we surely can't expect ethics from the next generation of graduates. Find alternatives that are functional, sustainable, and ethical, so you don't find yourself on the wrong end of the gun.
Quoting the parent:
... I don't ever want to see...
... Feminin protection products... Birth control and/or pregnancy tests... vasectomy... Credit cards... I love my Linuxfund Penguin card... The Chase Toys 'R' Us card is great... Caravan... Toyota Tercel... The Legend of Beggar Vance... Constipation / Depends / Hemeroids / Atheletes foot... Bail bond... UPN... Voyager... M*A*S*H... I hate... MS, SBC... Home/garden stuff... pokemon...
It seems that the advertising world has got you in its deadly embrace, my friend. You can rattle off trademark after trademark, they're ingrained into your brain. You misspelled the generic terms but spelled the trademarks with high accuracy. You form your opinions around brands jsut as much as around generic types of products. Not that I'm any different, but it just goes to show how powerful advertising is, in our lives.
(I jotted down this filk a couple weeks ago, waiting for the right "Microsoft and Browser Plugins" thread for it.)
Drag Me Drop Me
--to the tune of Savage Garden's "Break Me Shake Me"
I never thought I'd change my browser again,
To play movies in a format I've never known.
To play movies in a format I've never known.
But straight away you dominate the market again,
You abused me in a way that I've never known.
You abused me in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Just drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
So here's the file that deals with the games on the web,
But it's compressing in a way that I've never known,
It's compressing in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Won't you drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
"Support... I can help you, but what do you say?
Oh, it's not free baby, you'll have to pay."
You just keep me registering, watching upgrade costs recurring,
God, don't you make more than our national debt?
'Cause I used to copy in a way that you've never known,
So then you accuse to the feds that you've never known,
Watching profits grow in a way that I've never known.
So drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Just drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
With a mouse click here, you will start to load.
Loading, baby, leave me, leave me alone...
Drag me, drop me, treat me like an object,
Make me, shake me, charge me for a late fee,
Update me.
Many of the earlier graphics houses made a huge mistake: they bought whole render farms of SGI equipment, figuring, that's the best at graphics, so it's okay to pay double or triple for each box.
The distinction is, there's rendering, and then there's modeling. SGIs are (were) a great value for modeling, but a lousy value for the actual brute-force rendering work.
Yes, an SGI had a large advantage in the modeling department, because it could let an artist manipulate fairly complex meshes in real-time and get fast proof shots.
But SGI had *no* advantage, and sometimes a disadvantage, at the actual renderfarm work. The machines that did Jurassic Park I were just single-processor 150MHz MIPS R4400 boxes with a nice data bus. The software that did Jurassic Park were not taking *any* advantage of the 24 pipelined matrix multipliers, clippers, texturing rasterizers or other custom hardware. They were using the vanilla Unix works, just like any raytracer or renderman app. A few well-tuned Sparcs or an AS/400 could have done the same work.
SGI changed their logo and ther company name. It's no longer "Silicon Graphics, Inc.", it's just SGI. The logo isn't Scott Kim's famous paperclip cube anymore. Graphics isn't their prime corporate mission anymore. As others have pointed out, they now offer Linux-based machines, and they're still valuable to the artists.
So we have a machine that we can give a problem, and it will give us an answer, as long as we know what we want to hear.
"Hm, tricky." ... so long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough, you can keep yourselvs on the gravy train for life. How does that sound?"
"But can you do it?"
"Yes, but the program will take a little while to run."
"How long?"
"Seven and a half million years."
"Seven and a half million years!?"
"I said it would take a while, didn't I? And it occurs to me that
"Now that's what I call thinking."
Or maybe this is less like Deep Thought, and more like the nutrimatic, which after analyzing the person's likes and dislikes, inevitably failed to produce anything but a liquid which was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
sequels better than the original:
Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan
American Heritage Dictionary, dictionary.com. [clipped without a copyright attribution, oh no!]
ethics:
2. Being in accordance with the accepted principles of right and wrong that govern the conduct of a profession.
moral:
1. Of or concerned with the judgement of the goodness or badness of human action and character.
You want an ethical lawyer, but not one who applies morality. You want an ethical doctor, but not one who judges your morality.
Ethics is reflective, driving ones own behavior with respect for others. Morality is applied to others, and rarely implies respect for others.
Why do schools neglect an ethics curriculum?
Your solutions should not affect the state of the infected machines. Even if you could "fix" their machine. Even telling them that their machine is infected is over the line, if you're using their machine to do it.
If you're being hampered by Code Red hits, make a script to firewall off every infected computer for a day. Allow those firewalls to expire, and if they're still infected, they'll get blocked again.
- "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Yeah, that means you. You're giving up liberty-- not yours, but theirs. If you're messing with someone else's machine, you are part of the problem. No matter your intentions, or how nicely you word the "message" you deliver onto their desktop. Just don't touch it.If you're going to call it a virus, think of the influenza virus. A medicine is widely available on the market. It is up to the infected party to take the medicine, and it would be unethical to sieze the unwitting victim and force the medicine into their bodies.
It's just a small problem, and in a month, people will just roll their eyes about the terrible outbreak. The best thing to do in a storm is to shelter yourself until it passes, not to rage against the howling winds around you.
I've suggested this before, but it would not be very hard to add this to slashcode, to make it easier on the editors. Yeah, (-1 Offtopic) but there ain't no Meta section.
If the editors don't like combing through a submission queue, then they need to make the queue smarter to do the most tedious tasks. Then they can focus on other things, like learning the word 'than' or getting support engineers to quit their jobs.
Microsoft must be overjoyed that Mac OS X.1 and Linux and Unix all have popular SMB clients. Woo hoo! Desktops of all kinds are locking in the value of having a nice Microsoft-controlled backoffice.
It's the servers of SMB which are the thorn in Microsoft's side. A decent Samba server runs on Linux just fine, which robs Microsoft of all that wonderful lock-in. A Microsoft backoffice solution can be replaced with a drop-in equivalent, and not one desktop user even notices the difference (except there's fewer i.t. emails out to the organization about downtime).
Every time a fully functional drop-in replacement is possible, Microsoft will attempt to change the game to break that possibility. Desktops are hard to replace fully, because every single user has to make a very personal commitment (either by paycheck or choice) to learn all the little differences. Servers are easy to replace without much hardship, and Microsoft knows this. Hence, .net and kerberos tweaks and other closed or extended standards.