"Wouldn't a landmine that transmits a signal be relatively easy to detect? Just look for the signal and disable the mine."
A good metal detector is also a decent way to detect many landmines; but often that isn't the point. Landmines aren't as much a tool for blowing people up as they are a tool for deterring people from sneaking into an area. If you're slowly moving across a minefield, using a signal detector to find the mines, then digging them up and moving on, your chances of doing it unnoticed are generally nil.
"When it comes down to rechecking everything and delaying the mission for a little longer vs. the millions lost and the following PR hit, the answer pretty obvious."
The obvious answer here is that the president is really, really desperate for PR. There's no good reason for NASA to launch the shuttle over the July Fourth holiday weekend - but to a president who has sent over 2500 of his own troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths, risking the lives of a handful of astronauts is nothing if there's a chance it will make people feel patriotic and boost the presidential approval ratings a little bit more.
Anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration isn't pushing around NASA scientists for political gain needs only look at this launch to see what's really going on.
"...by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?"
By legal authority of they can hire an army of lawyers to bury you in legal costs and countersuits. That doesn't help much against a solid class-action, but as stack software learned, suing Microsoft is really, really dangerous.
"The details are still unknown, but these events raise scary questions about the actual security of FreeNode and other organizations like it."
I don't think that there have been any questions about the security of anything involving IRC for a long time. Everyone with half a brain knows that IRC is a cesspool of hackers, phreakers, crackers, and script-kiddies just looking to stir up shit.
"Wouldn't make even more sense, if money was your only concern and morality no issue, to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft, hold back the real vulnerabilities found, and then use that information to make money running bot networks (or selling the information to people who do?)"
Probably. But Black Hats have long been some of the best people at finding bugs and they're going to get prerelease copies of the OS through legal or illegal means regardless. So Microsoft really has nothing to lose aside from whatever is paid to the black hats - and to Microsoft, that kind of money is a trifling thing.
The success or failure of the Netscape brand no longer matters to AOL. They know they'll never see Netscape bring back the billions of dollars AOL spent on it - not that making money was ever the point of buying Netscape anyway. AOL now uses Netscape to play with differnt or new ideas without watering down the AOL brand. In a year Netscape.com will be something else, and the lessons learned from giving users control over content at Netscape.com will be applied to hundreds, if not thousands of other projects in the AOL/TW universe.
"Arent the white hat hackers typically the ones employed for legitimate jobs such as this? Now I'm confused:-s"
Typically, yes. But if you're Microsoft, trying to do everything you can to deal with a horrible reputation regarding the security of your software, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to go nuts and hire every crazy black-hat hacker willing to pen-test the OS for you. Remember, plenty of black-hats are just in it for the money, and for them, it probably makes a hell of a lot of sense to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft than it does to keep running bot networks selling v1@garr@.
The reason we don't have new superstars is that there just hasn't been time for them to become known. Wright, Carmack, Miyamoto, etc. did not become minor celebrities after releasing their first games, or even after releasing their first hit games. Given time and more titles, the new guys will get just as much attention as the old ones. A great example of this is Hideo Kojima, designer of the Metal Gear solid games. By the time MGS3 had come out (eight years ago), everyone who followed console gaming knew his name. If some of the other hot new devs out there stick with managing hot games, they'll make names for themselves, but it takes more than one or two hits for it to happen.
"Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission)...?"
Sure there are - just not in civilian government, the military, or in contracting firms that support government projects. There are a lot of big old bureaucratic corporations in the private sector, but they're generally easy to spot, and unlike the military, you can generally quit those jobs on a moments notice with few repercussions.
I want to work for CNET or some similar company as a hypothetical business analyst. I want to get paid to show up for work stoned, sit down, and write random stories about how big companies could hypothetically buy each other, or release new product lines, or exit entire markets, based on nothing more than my being to stoned to write something worthwhile. Then I'll want my boss to try and pass my garbage writing off as news, and later complain when the old media, politicians, and the general public refuse to take online journalism seriously.
I can't believe that they actually pay people to write that shit. What's worth, I can't believe how many bloggers and link aggregators keep linking to them.
"So, basically, it looks like Microsoft paid Go Daddy to switch to IIS for their domains, the vast majority of which were parked anyway, in a rather transparent attempt to massage the numbers. Quelle suprise."
Or maybe Godaddy just wants to experiment with IIS and is starting with non-critical systems. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than this all being a crazy conspiracy.
Sun has been going down the tubes for years, any idiot could have seen this coming - especially once it was announced that McNealy was stepping down as CEO. Sun employees have had plenty of time to find jobs at profitable, well-run firms, or to at least stash away money to live on. I see little reason to worry about their futures - anyone getting canned has had plenty of time to jump ship.
"PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage, enabling a non-technical user to run it as his primary desktop."
"This stands in contrast to older, beaurocratic methods that are closed and contract-based."
How do you think those contracts are often won? The government has often, and still does, set up contests like this, where big defense contractors compete for a bounty which comes in the form of a contract to produce the final product. In aerospace the bureaucracy is not so much a problem in the contracting system -- even without corruption and bureaucrats there are still only a tiny handful of people and corporations capable of handling any large aerospace project -- as it is in the implementation and maintenance of projects, where the ongoing costs and wasted productivity weigh down the entire system.
That said, I think that the bounty system is a gimmick that won't last too long. Smart executives seeing the success of bounties in the software world will be spurred to just start hiring F/OSS developers with some of the money F/OSS saves them in the first place, and the bounties will start fading away as their unnecessary - at least they will if Larry and Sergei at Google are setting an example.
I've spent my life consuming vast amounts of text, and I feel that above all else, reading anything that's well-written has a positive effect on my writing skills. All the teaching I've had over the years had a miniscule effect on my writing compared to decades of reading major newspapers, news magazines, and a very long list of books. If you want to teach engineers a lot about reading, get them subscriptions to The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, New York Monthly, US News and World Report, and other such well-written periodicals. They'll pick up a lot of good things from reading that stuff - far more than they will from reading technical publications.
You might also consider sending them to classes that involve a lot of reading, critical thinking about the reading, and writing about said readings and thoughts. Classes in subjects like ethics and art history can force one to think and write in very different ways from what one is used to.
"They can't expect to make money year after year releasing Madden, NHL games, and Movie spinoffs which don't really bring anything new to the gaming world."
EA could make money on those games if they did a good job making them - hell, EA was one of the companies that proved how well sequels can do, and good movie tie-in games have a historuy of success going back to the beginnings of the game industry. EAs problems stem from relying on hype from gaming publications to sell games - but consumers are quickly catching on that the gaming press will lavish accolades and awards on some truly shitty games to keep big advertisers happy, so it's time for EA to wake up and start hiring better designers.
"How is PS2's market penetration compared to DVD players in general?"
I don't have a clue what the market penetration numbers are for either format - digging up numbers will just turn up the number of units sold, but not number of households with units - but it's somewhat irrelevant. DVD had already been around for a few years when the PS2 launched, so DVD playback was just another feature to sell the system, but in the PS3's case the entire console is a loss-leader for the Blu-Ray format.
"Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more ammune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors."
And this is why the current browser war is irrelevant. XHTML/CSS is a mess to use, none of the browsers implement the standards completely or properly, and instead of the W3C and the browser developers sitting down, getting their shit together, and creating software that just works right and displays XHTML/CSS properly, it's a continuous fight to see who can top the other guy's software. Then the features need endless debugging or outright cutting. In the meanwhile, more and more web developers will be moving to Flash, users will get better and more consistent experiences with Flash, and the browsers just won't matter anymore.
I can see paying $300 for a 3D card - I've done it plenty of times - but $300 more to tweak out some physics effects? Not a chance for a gaming machine. They should get support for these things written into popular particle effects systems for video editors - $300 for real-time high-quality particles would sell like a charm in the visual effects world.
I'm guessing that Ageia is hoping on a buyout by Nvidia or ATI. Getting this technology built into GPUs would be a great selling point, and be a great way to almost guarantee that the developers chips would be the ones to end up in next-next-gen consoles.
How about we give the credit to the US government agencies like DARPA and NASA, who planned and funded most of the computing research projects from which modern computers and networks developed, and not to people who just ran the companies that built some of the machines and created some of the software? It the DOD, NASA, and the intelligence community hadn't been pushing for all those cool networks and powerful computers and bringing together thousands of companies and academics to do the work, companies like Sun probably wouldn't exist at all.
I don't think that it's entirely due to a lack of competition. There's plenty of competition in Europe, but even discounting VAT, Europeans pay more for goods than Americans. The big difference is that Europeans just accept the higher prices, whereas in America, we just stop buying overpriced goods.
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"Wouldn't a landmine that transmits a signal be relatively easy to detect? Just look for the signal and disable the mine."
A good metal detector is also a decent way to detect many landmines; but often that isn't the point. Landmines aren't as much a tool for blowing people up as they are a tool for deterring people from sneaking into an area. If you're slowly moving across a minefield, using a signal detector to find the mines, then digging them up and moving on, your chances of doing it unnoticed are generally nil.
"When it comes down to rechecking everything and delaying the mission for a little longer vs. the millions lost and the following PR hit, the answer pretty obvious."
The obvious answer here is that the president is really, really desperate for PR. There's no good reason for NASA to launch the shuttle over the July Fourth holiday weekend - but to a president who has sent over 2500 of his own troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths, risking the lives of a handful of astronauts is nothing if there's a chance it will make people feel patriotic and boost the presidential approval ratings a little bit more.
Anyone who doesn't think that the Bush administration isn't pushing around NASA scientists for political gain needs only look at this launch to see what's really going on.
"...by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?"
By legal authority of they can hire an army of lawyers to bury you in legal costs and countersuits. That doesn't help much against a solid class-action, but as stack software learned, suing Microsoft is really, really dangerous.
"The details are still unknown, but these events raise scary questions about the actual security of FreeNode and other organizations like it."
I don't think that there have been any questions about the security of anything involving IRC for a long time. Everyone with half a brain knows that IRC is a cesspool of hackers, phreakers, crackers, and script-kiddies just looking to stir up shit.
"Wouldn't make even more sense, if money was your only concern and morality no issue, to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft, hold back the real vulnerabilities found, and then use that information to make money running bot networks (or selling the information to people who do?)"
Probably. But Black Hats have long been some of the best people at finding bugs and they're going to get prerelease copies of the OS through legal or illegal means regardless. So Microsoft really has nothing to lose aside from whatever is paid to the black hats - and to Microsoft, that kind of money is a trifling thing.
The success or failure of the Netscape brand no longer matters to AOL. They know they'll never see Netscape bring back the billions of dollars AOL spent on it - not that making money was ever the point of buying Netscape anyway. AOL now uses Netscape to play with differnt or new ideas without watering down the AOL brand. In a year Netscape.com will be something else, and the lessons learned from giving users control over content at Netscape.com will be applied to hundreds, if not thousands of other projects in the AOL/TW universe.
"Arent the white hat hackers typically the ones employed for legitimate jobs such as this? Now I'm confused :-s"
Typically, yes. But if you're Microsoft, trying to do everything you can to deal with a horrible reputation regarding the security of your software, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to go nuts and hire every crazy black-hat hacker willing to pen-test the OS for you. Remember, plenty of black-hats are just in it for the money, and for them, it probably makes a hell of a lot of sense to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft than it does to keep running bot networks selling v1@garr@.
Well, this explains why Grampa isn't dead yet. We were wondering...
The reason we don't have new superstars is that there just hasn't been time for them to become known. Wright, Carmack, Miyamoto, etc. did not become minor celebrities after releasing their first games, or even after releasing their first hit games. Given time and more titles, the new guys will get just as much attention as the old ones. A great example of this is Hideo Kojima, designer of the Metal Gear solid games. By the time MGS3 had come out (eight years ago), everyone who followed console gaming knew his name. If some of the other hot new devs out there stick with managing hot games, they'll make names for themselves, but it takes more than one or two hits for it to happen.
"Are there any 'honest' places to work any more (where promotions/awards are based on work preformed and bureaucracy, and politics aren't encouraged to supplant the 'mission)...?"
Sure there are - just not in civilian government, the military, or in contracting firms that support government projects. There are a lot of big old bureaucratic corporations in the private sector, but they're generally easy to spot, and unlike the military, you can generally quit those jobs on a moments notice with few repercussions.
I want to work for CNET or some similar company as a hypothetical business analyst. I want to get paid to show up for work stoned, sit down, and write random stories about how big companies could hypothetically buy each other, or release new product lines, or exit entire markets, based on nothing more than my being to stoned to write something worthwhile. Then I'll want my boss to try and pass my garbage writing off as news, and later complain when the old media, politicians, and the general public refuse to take online journalism seriously.
I can't believe that they actually pay people to write that shit. What's worth, I can't believe how many bloggers and link aggregators keep linking to them.
"So, basically, it looks like Microsoft paid Go Daddy to switch to IIS for their domains, the vast majority of which were parked anyway, in a rather transparent attempt to massage the numbers. Quelle suprise."
Or maybe Godaddy just wants to experiment with IIS and is starting with non-critical systems. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than this all being a crazy conspiracy.
"What about the future of 5,000 human workers?"
Sun has been going down the tubes for years, any idiot could have seen this coming - especially once it was announced that McNealy was stepping down as CEO. Sun employees have had plenty of time to find jobs at profitable, well-run firms, or to at least stash away money to live on. I see little reason to worry about their futures - anyone getting canned has had plenty of time to jump ship.
"Lock said. "Other organizations will come along allowing VoIP. Who do you think is going to win?'"
I'm guessing it will be the one with the best marketing campaign.
Now that Dell owns Alienware, you might be able to upgrade to a whole new gaming PC for $600 by the time the PS3 comes out.
"PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage, enabling a non-technical user to run it as his primary desktop."
Yeah... um... I think this is distro is a little bit redundant.
"This stands in contrast to older, beaurocratic methods that are closed and contract-based."
How do you think those contracts are often won? The government has often, and still does, set up contests like this, where big defense contractors compete for a bounty which comes in the form of a contract to produce the final product. In aerospace the bureaucracy is not so much a problem in the contracting system -- even without corruption and bureaucrats there are still only a tiny handful of people and corporations capable of handling any large aerospace project -- as it is in the implementation and maintenance of projects, where the ongoing costs and wasted productivity weigh down the entire system.
That said, I think that the bounty system is a gimmick that won't last too long. Smart executives seeing the success of bounties in the software world will be spurred to just start hiring F/OSS developers with some of the money F/OSS saves them in the first place, and the bounties will start fading away as their unnecessary - at least they will if Larry and Sergei at Google are setting an example.
I've spent my life consuming vast amounts of text, and I feel that above all else, reading anything that's well-written has a positive effect on my writing skills. All the teaching I've had over the years had a miniscule effect on my writing compared to decades of reading major newspapers, news magazines, and a very long list of books. If you want to teach engineers a lot about reading, get them subscriptions to The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, New York Monthly, US News and World Report, and other such well-written periodicals. They'll pick up a lot of good things from reading that stuff - far more than they will from reading technical publications.
You might also consider sending them to classes that involve a lot of reading, critical thinking about the reading, and writing about said readings and thoughts. Classes in subjects like ethics and art history can force one to think and write in very different ways from what one is used to.
"They can't expect to make money year after year releasing Madden, NHL games, and Movie spinoffs which don't really bring anything new to the gaming world."
EA could make money on those games if they did a good job making them - hell, EA was one of the companies that proved how well sequels can do, and good movie tie-in games have a historuy of success going back to the beginnings of the game industry. EAs problems stem from relying on hype from gaming publications to sell games - but consumers are quickly catching on that the gaming press will lavish accolades and awards on some truly shitty games to keep big advertisers happy, so it's time for EA to wake up and start hiring better designers.
"How is PS2's market penetration compared to DVD players in general?"
I don't have a clue what the market penetration numbers are for either format - digging up numbers will just turn up the number of units sold, but not number of households with units - but it's somewhat irrelevant. DVD had already been around for a few years when the PS2 launched, so DVD playback was just another feature to sell the system, but in the PS3's case the entire console is a loss-leader for the Blu-Ray format.
"...including a unique sharing reward system where the user can share bandwidth and get rewards, such as credit in the iTunes store."
If Apple is really this desperate for bandwidth, could this be a sign that we'll finally see higher-bitrate content on iTunes?
"Firefox is no longer about doing the right thing. It's now all about one-upping Microsoft at their own stupid game, and the users are suffering for it. Open Source developers, apparently, are no more ammune to this competition attitude than the proprietary vendors."
And this is why the current browser war is irrelevant. XHTML/CSS is a mess to use, none of the browsers implement the standards completely or properly, and instead of the W3C and the browser developers sitting down, getting their shit together, and creating software that just works right and displays XHTML/CSS properly, it's a continuous fight to see who can top the other guy's software. Then the features need endless debugging or outright cutting. In the meanwhile, more and more web developers will be moving to Flash, users will get better and more consistent experiences with Flash, and the browsers just won't matter anymore.
I can see paying $300 for a 3D card - I've done it plenty of times - but $300 more to tweak out some physics effects? Not a chance for a gaming machine. They should get support for these things written into popular particle effects systems for video editors - $300 for real-time high-quality particles would sell like a charm in the visual effects world.
I'm guessing that Ageia is hoping on a buyout by Nvidia or ATI. Getting this technology built into GPUs would be a great selling point, and be a great way to almost guarantee that the developers chips would be the ones to end up in next-next-gen consoles.
How about we give the credit to the US government agencies like DARPA and NASA, who planned and funded most of the computing research projects from which modern computers and networks developed, and not to people who just ran the companies that built some of the machines and created some of the software? It the DOD, NASA, and the intelligence community hadn't been pushing for all those cool networks and powerful computers and bringing together thousands of companies and academics to do the work, companies like Sun probably wouldn't exist at all.
I don't think that it's entirely due to a lack of competition. There's plenty of competition in Europe, but even discounting VAT, Europeans pay more for goods than Americans. The big difference is that Europeans just accept the higher prices, whereas in America, we just stop buying overpriced goods.