Simple, easy, effective, it's standard in the industry by default, works a good percentage of the time as long as management is in one of those rock and hard place situations. If they are at ease and stupid, they will simply cut you and let someone else struggle to fix it later. Oops. Also standard in the industry by default.
They were bought by Cisco. That one word alone sums up everything since the buyout and will sum up everything about Scientific Atlanta equipment when that finishes. Cisco is headed for irrellevance sooner or later. They know it. Their product line is overpriced and underperforming and overly headachy. They know it. They aren't the darlings of the Internet leading every trend in the physical sector. They *don't* know it.
I still remember every single telecom magazine breathlessly reporting every supposed advance being made by Cisco and how it would be deployed to bring me interactive gaming and video on demand over ethernet over dsl and I'd have it at speeds of omigawdthatstoofast per second any day now.
And then I watched the carriers and so on not go with their stuff.
That last part is important about Cisco not knowing "it". They don't get the industry or the Internet or a lot of other things and they aren't the world-conquering studs the industry rags still like to make them seem like. So when I saw the Cisco buyout, all I thought was, so much for the firmware ever being fixed. Now it will be CYA and obfuscate over there and the product will be forty-six firmware iterations along from now before anyone even looks at repairing one bug from right now which will still be there then, in the future.
Given my daily calls at work, I don't seem to be too far off on that.
I have Sprint, four lines, and about 1100 minutes a month, with web, etc. The whole shebang. Covers the family very very well. Ringtones, games, and so forth? Next to impossible to get decent content outside of the official site of Sprint and their partners. From them, expensive and much of it ongoing in cost. Very limited collection. I really don't need to listen to Brittney or Fifty or whoever and their latest glittertrash noise.
However, through places like 3gupload.com and so on, as well as some devious techie kiddies and their apps, it is possible to get a ringtone like the old original Hamsterdance on my phone without paying an arm, a leg, and the rest. I already pay that monthly for my service, I don't get nearly enough service to justify that price I pay, and they really should cut me a better deal than that, but if they won't, oh well.
Better solution would be a Windows based PDA phone where I could put on just about any file I liked and hack it sixteen ways from Sunday (thank you MS for putting the SDKs and IDEs out so easy to get) and never think of the proprietary nonsense that the carriers gladly adopt with every phone model. Did people think that Sprint grudingly accepted Sanyo's idiocy of their platform design? They want it that way to charge you for proprietary limited availibility crap like this.
Like I said, there are ways around it, and Sprint needs to grasp that but just when they were making progress towards coolness, they seem to have been infected with the Nextel "we can be as closed, inaccessible, non-standard, and insane as we want" virus.
Sewer maintenance versus nude centerfold makeup artist for instance. This still doesn't beat the latter and given my lack of interest in playing games anymore doesn't even beat my day job of doing telecom support. Your milage may of course vary. It's just sad that there's going to be ten thousand boobs out there who point at this and say, "see? I'm not wasting my time!" Yes, you and that kid who couldn't sink a shot if he were dunked holding the ball are both wasting your time. Banking on the longshot and oddball is not where success is at. Nevertheless, I have no ill will towards this oddball so I hope for his sake and happiness that his success continues.
I used a newspaper and phone based system to meet women, found the one for me after two dates, been married seven years. There's a lot more than the so-called "compatibility points" that people have in their theories. There's hard work, selflessness, willingness to compromise, see the possibilties in the other person, etc. They don't come pre-packaged. Looking for that online or offline is idiotic and the cause of most failed pairings.
In addition, it pushes well beyond the data center to touch consumers where they live.
Quite frankly I don't need Cisco touching me and would appreciate it if they didn't touch my wife either.
I'm also kind of concerned that I might need a CCNA, you know, a Can't Configure Network Access certification, just to install a frigging cable box. CCNA holders have a high incidence of primma donnas amongst them and I can't see them deigning to be cable monkeys or accepting the sh*tty pay that the customer support techs do just to send commands to a box all day. I mean, not as though they want to do it now.
Disclaimer: I am not a CCNA holder and send commands to Cisco boxes all day but am willing to deal with almost sh*tty pay for many reasons among which would be that no one made me go out and get a CCNA first. At least it isn't cable work any more.
#ifconfig vid0 filterset allow porn vod
You know...
If the Antivirus companies start destroying Sony copy-protection technologies, they're almost certain to get in trouble. Surely they don't want to violate the DMCA.
This points up an interesting concept: can a virus be protected under the DMCA? Can delving into its bits be considered an IP violation? Hmmm...
RTF, Rich Text File, MS and Linux apps can easily save to this, 99.9% of users are on Windows anyways or on MacOSX which can access most MS app files easily given MS support for the platform, next problem. MA residents aren't be shortchanged in any way, shape, or form by using MS apps.
They're being short changed by idiotic attempts to go away from them towards a software world ruled by masochistic morons, anti-useability clowns, and the true anarchistic scuttlers of real meaningful standards. Standards which don't seem to exist in the world of Linux, BSD, or anywhere else on the open source side of the fence because every other person in it is a veritable Donald Trump of ego who know what is best for the world of computer users. Meanwhile the users ignore them and continue to willfully purchase Windows and Office.
The problem isn't Microsoft embracing open standards, it's that the open standards being proposed are like the idiocy of the UN running the Internet: done for imposing power by one group on another for purely inane reasons of ego. The open standards and open source people in general want to humble MS. MS Office has no useability issues. OS office software does.
For instance, GnuCash bites compared to Money and even Quicken no argument (I've used both, only Money worked as needed every time). MS Word is well integrated to the whole of Windows which is the majority desktop out there and not one OS app ported to Windows even seems to take a portion of the time that long-time Windows closed source shareware/freeware writers do to make the integration seamless and the experience good.
It's not about the users. If it was, the Linux and other OS os/app people would actually try to honestly grok why the end users consistantly choose Microsoft Windows over Linux and BSD and so forth. It's about sticking it to Microsoft, it's about FUD about Microsoft, and paranoia about Microsoft. I don't expect too many on/. to grasp any of this, but it's true. OPEN is not some magic word and those who wield it are frequently like the political correctness wonks on campus who whine about free speech but only as long as it is theirs: "the users" only matter as long as it is their hated enemy Microsoft that is getting the buys. When it comes to the users using open source code, then screw em cause you get what you pay for and it was free, so stop complaining and rewrite it yourself is the attitude.
Working for Santa Claus, living in trees making chocolate-covered cookies, riding wolves, and wising off to dwarves... now racing?! Is there anything they won't stop at?!
DRM protections are ALREADY on DBS and cable and have been for a long while. This new step was needed or else the content providers vowed they'd stonewall digital cable content delivery to PCs for eternity.
Sadly, the same content providers who didn't care if you watched a VHS tape of the nightly news at one point now see the future of DRM as being pay per view everything. A time when they can arbitrarily at any time revoke your ability to watch anything. The cable companies are NOT happy about being in the middle and THEY have been the ones stonewalling the advance of DRM on your television more than anything else.
Biggest one: lack of coherent standards and framework. It must be remembered that it was designed to ape Unix and all the garbage packed in pretty packages that went with it. That means the core of the behaviors, the text interface, the X system on top, the more advanced graphical things on top of X, the helter skelter nature of applications and resource allocations... If I run eMule, Yum, and Nautilus under Gnome at the same time, it immediately causes one or more of them to slow down, eat resources, and grind the drive in swap file overdrive for a good fifteen to twenty minutes. The hype is that Linux doesn't have these drawbacks of clashing code and resources. It does.
At least Windows is consistantly going to do this without any illusions. I'd like a similar consistancy applied to Linux so no one expects anything approaching the pseudo-perfection that is claimed of it constantly.
This title of course will turn people off who'd rather avoid things like judgement, guilt, responsibility, morality, and heck, reality itself. This points up why people avoid the classics: they were more morality tale than anything of today. Even the "morality tale lite" nature of the original Trek gave way to the pop politics posturing and beat you senseless with the not too subtle message style of the ST:tNG. People don't want to learn anything that might cause introspection about themselves, how they think, what they do. They might face confusion from comparison between those things and other ideas and ideals.
Being challenged intellectually is a deeply moving thing at times and people avoid it. It makes their heads hurt.
I keep a copy of The Inferno on my desk. It reminds me to try hard not to be too quick to jump and to persevere at being laid back and calm. Pride and a lot of other things go before great falls. I've learned other things from other old works too but I don't think that the trend will change.
As has been said many times, many ways, no not Merry Xmas, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean it isn't your nothing. You can hide nothing if you feel like it. No one's business if you do.
I think one of the next things to happen will be OSS software which by default requires encryption and hashes of all communication and has no facility for logging by design. Chained systems which scatter communications across tunnels from one point to another will become the norm, especially as more and more bidirectional broadband lines become the norm.
Privacy services have a bright future ahead. And the bad guys will reap the benefits as a consequence of this, so easily they won't need to deal with techies on the side or try to get some who might align with their ideals and politics. They'll be able to spend five minutes with Google and point and click their way to encryption and security that will in the aggregate with so many layers interoperating and protecting each other be extremely non-trivial to break.
Control freakery always leads to a response from society. Fifties prudishness still didn't stop almost obscene double entendre from happening in music. So too will it continue now.
This all follows with the trend during the modern last several decades of "dumbing down", "going with the lowest common denominator", and "adjusting expectations downward". Now we criminalize more and more, make the situations damn near a fait accompli, and then profit off of it. If we can't find a way to come to honorable accomodations between each other as a society and between society and that damnable necessity, government, then we'll simply go for the easy way out.
This will continue, I have no doubt. Justice Griffin's words from Judge Dredd ring out, "we need to expand the death penalty to include lesser crimes!" I also hear Princess Leia's words to Darth Vader from Star Wars regarding systems slipping through fingers. All this will do is increase the tension and resistance in society to structure and law and make things worse. Sadly, those who seem to most get into government also seem to be the least likely to grasp this.
On we march towards control freakery and civil disobedience, tit for tat...
I'm not sure I want to watch Ted Kennedy sitting on the john. I mean, ogrish.com is one thing, but watching the private moments of some politicians is just way too far.
Although, eMule/etc. uses a custom routine based on MD4 so how long till that is poisoned regularly?
On behalf of every malware writer out there...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
THANK YOU SONY!
You knew it was coming.
I am banning my family from using their Windows PCs to play CDs thanks to this. Was on the fence, but not anymore. I don't need this aggravation and have enough crapware to remove thanks to their frenetic ADD click every frigging thing tendencies.
I wonder how long until I see such things infecting my customers with traffic generating trojans and viruses that they can't figure out how to remove.
to embracing text in general and getting away from graphics. Text messaging people was great for a long while but the modern WWW graphics glut is influencing people to think they need all that glitz on their cell phones now. So the essence of the messaging, the transmission of information, is being lost to the "gee whiz" aspect and we know how well that works on the web.
I would love to see a resurgence of interest in Lynx. Especially with it coming with most distos of Linux and the shell being where true Linux geeks live. $lynx (url) and you're off. Easy, simple, transmission of information.
I vote we put a smackdown on new blogs which at the current rate of creation will outnumber the species which creates and reads them. I have one. Just one. I swear. I hardly use it. But come on... I know people with three or four. Saying nothing of value four times over... So mostly like the congressional record... Never mind...
MS and others are busy trying to make the *AA and company's wet dreams of perfect DRM come true and this happens. It's not possible that the malware crowd won't notice and put 2 and 2 together. Anyone want to place wagers on other DRM systems being targeted to be used in the furtherance of malware? It's like leaving an armory wide open with a sign reading, come on in bad guys, we got your tools right here...
Slashdot Mirror
Simple, easy, effective, it's standard in the industry by default, works a good percentage of the time as long as management is in one of those rock and hard place situations. If they are at ease and stupid, they will simply cut you and let someone else struggle to fix it later. Oops. Also standard in the industry by default.
They were bought by Cisco. That one word alone sums up everything since the buyout and will sum up everything about Scientific Atlanta equipment when that finishes. Cisco is headed for irrellevance sooner or later. They know it. Their product line is overpriced and underperforming and overly headachy. They know it. They aren't the darlings of the Internet leading every trend in the physical sector. They *don't* know it.
I still remember every single telecom magazine breathlessly reporting every supposed advance being made by Cisco and how it would be deployed to bring me interactive gaming and video on demand over ethernet over dsl and I'd have it at speeds of omigawdthatstoofast per second any day now.
And then I watched the carriers and so on not go with their stuff.
That last part is important about Cisco not knowing "it". They don't get the industry or the Internet or a lot of other things and they aren't the world-conquering studs the industry rags still like to make them seem like. So when I saw the Cisco buyout, all I thought was, so much for the firmware ever being fixed. Now it will be CYA and obfuscate over there and the product will be forty-six firmware iterations along from now before anyone even looks at repairing one bug from right now which will still be there then, in the future.
Given my daily calls at work, I don't seem to be too far off on that.
I have Sprint, four lines, and about 1100 minutes a month, with web, etc. The whole shebang. Covers the family very very well. Ringtones, games, and so forth? Next to impossible to get decent content outside of the official site of Sprint and their partners. From them, expensive and much of it ongoing in cost. Very limited collection. I really don't need to listen to Brittney or Fifty or whoever and their latest glittertrash noise.
However, through places like 3gupload.com and so on, as well as some devious techie kiddies and their apps, it is possible to get a ringtone like the old original Hamsterdance on my phone without paying an arm, a leg, and the rest. I already pay that monthly for my service, I don't get nearly enough service to justify that price I pay, and they really should cut me a better deal than that, but if they won't, oh well.
Better solution would be a Windows based PDA phone where I could put on just about any file I liked and hack it sixteen ways from Sunday (thank you MS for putting the SDKs and IDEs out so easy to get) and never think of the proprietary nonsense that the carriers gladly adopt with every phone model. Did people think that Sprint grudingly accepted Sanyo's idiocy of their platform design? They want it that way to charge you for proprietary limited availibility crap like this.
Like I said, there are ways around it, and Sprint needs to grasp that but just when they were making progress towards coolness, they seem to have been infected with the Nextel "we can be as closed, inaccessible, non-standard, and insane as we want" virus.
Sewer maintenance versus nude centerfold makeup artist for instance. This still doesn't beat the latter and given my lack of interest in playing games anymore doesn't even beat my day job of doing telecom support. Your milage may of course vary. It's just sad that there's going to be ten thousand boobs out there who point at this and say, "see? I'm not wasting my time!" Yes, you and that kid who couldn't sink a shot if he were dunked holding the ball are both wasting your time. Banking on the longshot and oddball is not where success is at. Nevertheless, I have no ill will towards this oddball so I hope for his sake and happiness that his success continues.
I used a newspaper and phone based system to meet women, found the one for me after two dates, been married seven years. There's a lot more than the so-called "compatibility points" that people have in their theories. There's hard work, selflessness, willingness to compromise, see the possibilties in the other person, etc. They don't come pre-packaged. Looking for that online or offline is idiotic and the cause of most failed pairings.
In addition, it pushes well beyond the data center to touch consumers where they live.
Quite frankly I don't need Cisco touching me and would appreciate it if they didn't touch my wife either.
I'm also kind of concerned that I might need a CCNA, you know, a Can't Configure Network Access certification, just to install a frigging cable box. CCNA holders have a high incidence of primma donnas amongst them and I can't see them deigning to be cable monkeys or accepting the sh*tty pay that the customer support techs do just to send commands to a box all day. I mean, not as though they want to do it now.
Disclaimer: I am not a CCNA holder and send commands to Cisco boxes all day but am willing to deal with almost sh*tty pay for many reasons among which would be that no one made me go out and get a CCNA first. At least it isn't cable work any more.
#ifconfig vid0 filterset allow porn vod
You know...
Tim Kehoe has stained the whites of his eyes deep blue.
It seems he even tried using melange. I am impressed.
If the Antivirus companies start destroying Sony copy-protection technologies, they're almost certain to get in trouble. Surely they don't want to violate the DMCA.
This points up an interesting concept: can a virus be protected under the DMCA? Can delving into its bits be considered an IP violation? Hmmm...
Invent something!
I see the political class' idea of command everything is spreading...
RTF, Rich Text File, MS and Linux apps can easily save to this, 99.9% of users are on Windows anyways or on MacOSX which can access most MS app files easily given MS support for the platform, next problem. MA residents aren't be shortchanged in any way, shape, or form by using MS apps.
/. to grasp any of this, but it's true. OPEN is not some magic word and those who wield it are frequently like the political correctness wonks on campus who whine about free speech but only as long as it is theirs: "the users" only matter as long as it is their hated enemy Microsoft that is getting the buys. When it comes to the users using open source code, then screw em cause you get what you pay for and it was free, so stop complaining and rewrite it yourself is the attitude.
They're being short changed by idiotic attempts to go away from them towards a software world ruled by masochistic morons, anti-useability clowns, and the true anarchistic scuttlers of real meaningful standards. Standards which don't seem to exist in the world of Linux, BSD, or anywhere else on the open source side of the fence because every other person in it is a veritable Donald Trump of ego who know what is best for the world of computer users. Meanwhile the users ignore them and continue to willfully purchase Windows and Office.
The problem isn't Microsoft embracing open standards, it's that the open standards being proposed are like the idiocy of the UN running the Internet: done for imposing power by one group on another for purely inane reasons of ego. The open standards and open source people in general want to humble MS. MS Office has no useability issues. OS office software does.
For instance, GnuCash bites compared to Money and even Quicken no argument (I've used both, only Money worked as needed every time). MS Word is well integrated to the whole of Windows which is the majority desktop out there and not one OS app ported to Windows even seems to take a portion of the time that long-time Windows closed source shareware/freeware writers do to make the integration seamless and the experience good.
It's not about the users. If it was, the Linux and other OS os/app people would actually try to honestly grok why the end users consistantly choose Microsoft Windows over Linux and BSD and so forth. It's about sticking it to Microsoft, it's about FUD about Microsoft, and paranoia about Microsoft. I don't expect too many on
Elf Racing fuel is 102 Octane
Working for Santa Claus, living in trees making chocolate-covered cookies, riding wolves, and wising off to dwarves... now racing?! Is there anything they won't stop at?!
Hopefully the corporate approach of CSI won't crush the life out of Black Hat.
I've never found that to be the case. Slow pacing, sudden plot twists, and overused "straight from the headlines" cliches maybe...
Oh.
Er, yeah it might, but I wouldn't worry. I'm, uh, gonna go back to watching tv now...
The same people who considered naming our new anti-terrorism satellite system the Global Observation Navigation And Defense System (GONADS).
DRM protections are ALREADY on DBS and cable and have been for a long while. This new step was needed or else the content providers vowed they'd stonewall digital cable content delivery to PCs for eternity.
Sadly, the same content providers who didn't care if you watched a VHS tape of the nightly news at one point now see the future of DRM as being pay per view everything. A time when they can arbitrarily at any time revoke your ability to watch anything. The cable companies are NOT happy about being in the middle and THEY have been the ones stonewalling the advance of DRM on your television more than anything else.
Marriage born in Hell, but aren't they all?
Biggest one: lack of coherent standards and framework. It must be remembered that it was designed to ape Unix and all the garbage packed in pretty packages that went with it. That means the core of the behaviors, the text interface, the X system on top, the more advanced graphical things on top of X, the helter skelter nature of applications and resource allocations... If I run eMule, Yum, and Nautilus under Gnome at the same time, it immediately causes one or more of them to slow down, eat resources, and grind the drive in swap file overdrive for a good fifteen to twenty minutes. The hype is that Linux doesn't have these drawbacks of clashing code and resources. It does.
At least Windows is consistantly going to do this without any illusions. I'd like a similar consistancy applied to Linux so no one expects anything approaching the pseudo-perfection that is claimed of it constantly.
This title of course will turn people off who'd rather avoid things like judgement, guilt, responsibility, morality, and heck, reality itself. This points up why people avoid the classics: they were more morality tale than anything of today. Even the "morality tale lite" nature of the original Trek gave way to the pop politics posturing and beat you senseless with the not too subtle message style of the ST:tNG. People don't want to learn anything that might cause introspection about themselves, how they think, what they do. They might face confusion from comparison between those things and other ideas and ideals.
Being challenged intellectually is a deeply moving thing at times and people avoid it. It makes their heads hurt.
I keep a copy of The Inferno on my desk. It reminds me to try hard not to be too quick to jump and to persevere at being laid back and calm. Pride and a lot of other things go before great falls. I've learned other things from other old works too but I don't think that the trend will change.
As has been said many times, many ways, no not Merry Xmas, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean it isn't your nothing. You can hide nothing if you feel like it. No one's business if you do.
I think one of the next things to happen will be OSS software which by default requires encryption and hashes of all communication and has no facility for logging by design. Chained systems which scatter communications across tunnels from one point to another will become the norm, especially as more and more bidirectional broadband lines become the norm.
Privacy services have a bright future ahead. And the bad guys will reap the benefits as a consequence of this, so easily they won't need to deal with techies on the side or try to get some who might align with their ideals and politics. They'll be able to spend five minutes with Google and point and click their way to encryption and security that will in the aggregate with so many layers interoperating and protecting each other be extremely non-trivial to break.
Control freakery always leads to a response from society. Fifties prudishness still didn't stop almost obscene double entendre from happening in music. So too will it continue now.
This all follows with the trend during the modern last several decades of "dumbing down", "going with the lowest common denominator", and "adjusting expectations downward". Now we criminalize more and more, make the situations damn near a fait accompli, and then profit off of it. If we can't find a way to come to honorable accomodations between each other as a society and between society and that damnable necessity, government, then we'll simply go for the easy way out.
This will continue, I have no doubt. Justice Griffin's words from Judge Dredd ring out, "we need to expand the death penalty to include lesser crimes!" I also hear Princess Leia's words to Darth Vader from Star Wars regarding systems slipping through fingers. All this will do is increase the tension and resistance in society to structure and law and make things worse. Sadly, those who seem to most get into government also seem to be the least likely to grasp this.
On we march towards control freakery and civil disobedience, tit for tat...
I'm not sure I want to watch Ted Kennedy sitting on the john. I mean, ogrish.com is one thing, but watching the private moments of some politicians is just way too far.
Although, eMule/etc. uses a custom routine based on MD4 so how long till that is poisoned regularly?
THANK YOU SONY!
You knew it was coming.
I am banning my family from using their Windows PCs to play CDs thanks to this. Was on the fence, but not anymore. I don't need this aggravation and have enough crapware to remove thanks to their frenetic ADD click every frigging thing tendencies.
I wonder how long until I see such things infecting my customers with traffic generating trojans and viruses that they can't figure out how to remove.
to embracing text in general and getting away from graphics. Text messaging people was great for a long while but the modern WWW graphics glut is influencing people to think they need all that glitz on their cell phones now. So the essence of the messaging, the transmission of information, is being lost to the "gee whiz" aspect and we know how well that works on the web.
I would love to see a resurgence of interest in Lynx. Especially with it coming with most distos of Linux and the shell being where true Linux geeks live. $lynx (url) and you're off. Easy, simple, transmission of information.
I vote we put a smackdown on new blogs which at the current rate of creation will outnumber the species which creates and reads them. I have one. Just one. I swear. I hardly use it. But come on... I know people with three or four. Saying nothing of value four times over... So mostly like the congressional record... Never mind...
MS and others are busy trying to make the *AA and company's wet dreams of perfect DRM come true and this happens. It's not possible that the malware crowd won't notice and put 2 and 2 together. Anyone want to place wagers on other DRM systems being targeted to be used in the furtherance of malware? It's like leaving an armory wide open with a sign reading, come on in bad guys, we got your tools right here...
The only thing as impenetrable for Americans as some manga would be Zippy the Pinhead.