Some people seem to be confused. A monopoly is not a free market, in fact it hinders a free market. One of the ways it hinders a free market in software is by adopting closed formats. Therefore forcing open formats promotes the free market, thus fostering innovation. Nothing is preventing Massachusetts from using Microsoft's products once they decided to adopt open formats.
And therein lies the insult to the taxpaying populace by the holier-than-all-others anti-Microsoft Open Sore movement: that Microsoft should dance to their tune and fark the people in the meantime until they do.
Fact: the majority of computer users interacting with the state of MA are Windows users.
Fact: anything the state of MA does to make those users' times harder to access state documents is an imposition on THEM and NOT Microsoft.
This is "the movement" showing its true colors as petty and pathetic bullies, using one of the worst tactics to get their way: beat the weakest down and tell them they will stop being beaten when they all turn on this one other party and follow the one doing the beating. Hurting a large group just to get at one group, using those people as an intermediary because you have no ground to stand on, no strategy of note, and no argument of merit and thus take the coward's way out and attack your opponent by going after innocents.
This is the tech world's equivalent of terrorism. Can't take on Microsoft? Losing to them? So use the political process which the geek brigades claim to hate and distrust to get your way, impose on Microsoft's customer base, and force Microsoft to do things your way by influencing that base. No different in structure and strategy than killing innocent civilians because you're too much the coward to fight a stand-up battle with uniformed troops in the open.
The Open Source world is dishonoring themselves by stooping to these tactics and I firmly expect they won't ever learn this. If they were even remotely capable of it, they might have expended their energies on coming up with a product that competed with those of Microsoft that the people actually wanted to buy. But since the people have voted with their pocketbooks for Microsoft, and done so in droves, force your way on them anyhow using government and manipulation of every situation.
More and more my disgust for Microsoft lessens and grows for its detractors. More and more, they replace Microsoft for me as the biggest threat to the IT world going forward. Not content to either do what it takes to win fairly or lose gracefully, they instead use the same tactics they accuse Microsoft of and engage in the holy effrontery of the self-righteous. Way to promote Open Source with honor there, people.
I feel kind of odd watching flamewars about who is tougher and more hardcore, C++ or some other language group, and I think to myself, "maybe they should have to actually deal with assembly, logic, and bits for real before they start talking hardcore. I remember when we were putting together kits out of catalogs with hex pads and light up bulbs and calling it computing.
Oh well. I think all this excitement has gotten to me. I'm going to go take a nap now. Where's my cane?
If you hate that the Bush Administration puts America in a bad light, why do you aid the cause by spreading misinformation which makes America look far worse than it really is?
They do it because it makes them feel better about themselves, more intelligent and wise than the next person. It boosts their ego. In a world where not nearly as much is going wrong and things are better than they claim, there's no need for their idiot theories, fixes, and blather in general. No need for them.
Insecurity, pure and simple. The world is bad enough without whipping up hysteria which only makes it worse and fulfills the prophecy.
First, they already have this tapping ability on all existing POTS lines. Extending it to digital is not a new idea.
Second, they still have to go through the same hoops to get a warrant as they always have had.
Third, free speech is not in any way under assault. Say whatever you want. The government doesn't have the ability to monitor even a small percentage of all calls at any given moment never mind all of yours no matter what your friends who live on that Manhattan street corner wearing signs regarding an imminent alien invasion tell you.
Therefore, the judges who grant those warrants and the politicians who appoint them should be of concern. DO NOT delude yourself into thinking voting liberal will be a cure. The left is just as likely as the far right to misuse warrants and criminal law when their politics are at stake and this was shown during the Clinton administration repeatedly. Don't think so? Three words: Branch Davidian Barbecue.
(All government is essentially mob rule and those who think they can stay on the good side of the mob much less control the mob are cretins, fools, and worse.)
Push for stronger laws and mandatory aftermath reviews of such operations where the results if any must be put in the public record. I do not mean the intercepted communications but how many taps and of how many lines and what the actual result was. They should have to get a warrant knowing not only do they need to convince a judge, they will need to justify it after the fact before the public. That might make them think twice before they grant the warrants or push for the appointment of a jurist who will abuse their judicial powers for the appointing politicians' benefit.
What gets into a court of law is not enough. If they investigate and find nothing and do not prosecute, their invasion of privacy may or may not have been necessary and the decision to allow it should be under public review either way. We know how many went to court. We do not know how many taps are not recorded as public knowledge due to lack of going ahead with prosecution.
They were beaten to this years ago by geeks
on
Solar-powered Handbag
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· Score: 2, Funny
when inattentive, overly permissive, or just adventurous DMs allowed Continual Light to be cast on a Bag of Holding, and they held about as much as most women in my family manage to hold in theirs. I think my mother-in-law has an entire convenience store in hers.
So LimeWire is doing what essentially amounts to an embrace of DRM by default, as in if they can't prove it legal it doesn't transfer it.
So what? Do we HAVE to use it? I'd be more afraid if every ISP began using transparent proxies that stopped all unapproved traffic.
Predictably, a few will go, "what? I thought they already did." Might want to up those meds.
The rest can... rest. Not a big deal here. It's the choice of the rightful owners of a privately made application and not one that has a lot of usage to begin with.
The reasons are many and varied and mostly center on physics. If you look at best case scenarios with current off the shelf technology and the efficiencies as you scale up, there's a sweet spot where the size versus distribution versus etc. all reaches an optimum level. Our present system is much closer to that sweet spot than microgrids or the other end of the spectrum, one giant planet-wide power station.
We could use high temperature superconductors, fission reactors and with fusion later when they get it to work, and a lot of clearing of the way by the federal government for deployment which is now held up by people using the environment as a smokescreen when what it comes down to is a lot of NIMBY and more to the point a bountiful opportunity for pitiful and pathetic unimportant people to make themselves feel important.
I live in a state where every highway project takes years longer and millions more because the enviros hold up everything *after* the damage is already done until they've milked out the publicity for themselves and finally it gets done in the end and there was no change and nothing saved in terms of environment and plenty of time and money wasted. All for their inane ego festivals.
Right now those same imbeciles are doing everything they can to keep the power transmission companies from fixing outdated and antiquated transmission lines and equipment which first keeps efficiency low and cost of the power transmission high, second it keeps jacking up the danger of massive local outages every year, third it increases the danger to the workers who maintain the system, fourth it increases the chance of creating a regional chain reaction outage, and fifth it increases the chance of a catastrophic failure on one of the big circuits going through the woods and starting a fire.
They are also trying everything they can do to prevent us from tying into regional grids through the west side of CT into New York and across the sound to Long Island. And lastly doing all they can to stand in the way of a gas tanker and pipeline facility. The sanity of putting liquid natural gas ships more than ten miles offshore is obvious in this new age of mega-terrorism and conversely the insanity of making the tankers put into ports near population centers equally obvious. They just don't care. It's all about them.
The best thing we can do with our end of things as consumers is insulate, make efficient use of what we consumer, and use solar electric, thermal, and hydro *where* economical and efficient on our homes. When superconductive storage systems finally come around, we can store the energy compactly that way onsite and until then, unless we want to deal with the danger of poisonous battery chemicals and five thousand pounds of them per home, we're better off simply having a system where we use the energy we generate first and the main grid's power secondly.
But generators aren't going to cut it. We're going from a few hundred stations to a few million and with less efficiency and more pollution and no inspection. Tack on inspection and you can add the psycho enviro leftists to the far right terrorist under every bed paranoids as one more group pushing us closer to a police state; no way would they let fossil fuel generators increase like that without mandating mandatory inspections on your property at any time for any or no reason with no prior notice and reserve the right to shut you down whenever they felt like it.
I don't see a need to create a massive new intrusion on our rights. Like I said, insulate, make efficient use, be efficient in generation where it is fitting to generate it yourself.
Fittingly a lot of the enviros of today were the Mother Earth News types of twenty-five years ago advocating that we all use wood and coal stoves, forge and smelt our own metals, and operate pig farms to feed methane stills. Their former zeal for old low tech is utterly incompatible with their stated beliefs of today. Much like the pictures of them in mullets, gold chains, and neon orange leisure suits were twenty-five years ago.
A single rail need only be aligned with the path of travel and be self-consistant with regard to that path. IOW, no curves, breaks, bends, etc., locally but a line that is smoothly following the path. Two rails need be aligned with each other at all times and the carriage of the system therefore becomes more complex. Granted we've been doing it forever because we essentially transferred the idea of the bi-wheeled cart to a track but monorails are a bit simpler.
Of course, there's a lot of other considerations. If we had high temperature superconductors and plentiful nuclear power we'd be able to churn our maglev systems never mind monorails, all over the farking place. We've been waiting since the early sixties and they ain't here yet so...
I think we may have to ultimately build settlements around mass transit in the end, something like the cities in Bullfrog's Syndicate. Self-contained yet interconnected, the streets elevated above the ground. All electric transportation. Of course, the only entities that can really do this are megacorporations like Halliburton and Microsoft. Might make an interesting experiment to have a company build their own town ala the company mining and manufacturing settlements of the 19th century, but with the latest high-tech systems.
Don't it just bite that the dreams of/. can either be done by hated corporations or by the big bad state using your tax dollars? I think this is where the old lines about double-edged swords, mothers-in-law driving new cars off cliffs, cognitive dissonance, and TANSTAAFL come in. Feel free to insert them here:
Seriously, they're jumping the gun. They haven't even filled the Supreme Court yet and the end of the administration is still three years away from being over. Way early for this self-defeating crack-up. You'd think no one grasped that since the Meese Crusade, Gallery went from simple nudes to full hardcore and the only thing that the whole affair managed was to insert more obscenity into the congressional records than anything else ever could have.
This too will be a waste of time, tax dollars, and energies and will only be shot down in the long term.
Namely, that people are growing smarter and that smarter (by this faction's definition) means people will see Microsoft and AOL for being shams and suddenly see the light and adopt the (sadomasochistic) ways of Linux.
Excuse me while I open a window and laugh.
Car manuals that put the New York Yellow Pages to shame for size and are competitive with sets of encyclopedias have been on the shelves of libraries for years. People know less and less every year about their cars. They know less and less every year about most things because the people who know more and more tend to be doing their jobs correctly: they make it work, and they make it work transparently to the user as to the guts of the process.
You don't need to know how a mainframe works to do your banking, you need not know how a cash register works to buy something. You need not know what an unsigned integer is to compose a letter on a word processor. Windows is easy to use. AOL is easy to use. Put them together and you have the all around ease of use killer setup for home users.
Once again, the tail does not wag the dog. Your kids at school do not control your PC buying decisions and if they did Apple would be the only brand in the USA and there'd be NO Internet as it back then DID NOT fit into Apple's (Job's) worldview. Your average anti-corporate anti-conformity geek in the IT department does not control the corporate PC buying decisions and if they did, we'd all be using BSD command line only boxes. The general "I don't care how it works, I just want it to work" public controls the market.
Sorry to burst your fanciful bubbles, but the Tyranny of the Masses has been the rule and not the exception since before Hannibal crossed the Alps. We can just bring it to you faster and more efficiently than the Roman populace ever could to their wrongly pontificating intellectuals.
Anyway isn't this another one of those Rhythms/Covad/Northpoint etc. companies.
Northpoint went arse end up in early 2000 and Rhythms followed in the end of summer 2000, both largely due to building out and burning cash at the behest of investors who earmarked funding to leash these companies, and starved them for advertising dollars, and pushed them on the unworkable idea of being solely dslam presense providers for third party ISPs, the majority of which were two college guys and a used Cisco router. Covad took money from SBC the way Apple took money from Microsoft.
...or at least one of his tribunes, bringing forth the message, being ignored as usual, and watching the foretold calamity from a nearby hilltop and muttering to myself, "and so it begins."
Sooner or later the haughty attitude and assumption of near omniscience and perfection catches up and the weaknesses which built and multiplied and were covered with a coat of paint as it were cannot longer be hidden and the whole thing crashes down.
Microsoft's earlier buggy code was partially a result of this sort of idiocy. The very foundations of bug hunting and removal are in the writing of the code in the first place and those who believe all they do to be blessed and special are more prone than any others to make the grievous errors that in the end destroy the reputation of the writers, the publisher, and the product itself and as Microsoft has clearly shown by their own peccadillos, reputation is easier kept than restored after a loss.
The Firefox has fallen in the mud. Better not let the flames go out and the hunters catch it...
Audio scrambling systems using acoustic couplers have been used for years on phones and with advanced technology it is only a matter of time before they create scrambled audio that requires an authorized headphone set that will allow it to be heard and for everyone else in the room, it will be garbage.
Various methods of obfuscation for visual media also exist mostly based on polarization but some use color as well. As technology advances and RFID tech comes into its own, you will eventually have public video boards like billboards whose protected content can't be seen without the appropriate active glasses and every TV at the store will go seemingly blank or static when protected content is shown.
It's coming and as long as the government rolls over for the *AA people, it is a done deal. And you thought the idiots at Kinkos refusing to make copies out of school books for your kid's schoolwork was moronic.
I've never understood how a company that does nothing but promote misery stays afloat, much less profits.
Neither have I, but somehow those companies spreading misery keep putting the likes of Yahoo Serious, Pauli Shore, Paris Hilton, and the entire cast of the WWE in front of the cameras. It only makes sense if you assume great masochism on the part of the public at large which is not too hard given how many people still use Lynx and Vi right here in geekdom.
No one thought the Unix systems of yesteryear were so vulnerable. They were. No thinks the Unix systems of today are as vulnerable. They are. In years past it was naive lack of understanding of the basic nature of the user base. These days, naive lack of fear.
I've seen people have that same attitude before someone draws down and leaves them a crumpled mess on a bar rooom floor. It didn't help them and doesn't help the OSX, BSD, and Linux crowd. You cannot underestimate the danger of the average users' whimsy and inexperience, the truly committed crackers, and the legions of script kiddies who learn their tools from the first two. It isn't Windows that is insecure and dangerous. Windows does nothing it isn't told to by people stupid enough to tell it so by accident or on purpose.
The future is pointed at self-contained encrypted containers of both interpreted and compiled code objects flitting about the global net and this future will be embraced by Microsoft and the only way that Microsoft will not entirely control it is if the major vendors arrayed against them co-opt the paradigm with standards themselves. The law of unintended consequences being what it is, there is no way that the non-MS community can say credibly that the sheer combinatoric explosion of possibilities for system interaction in this future will not affect them, no matter what their safeguards. It's like trying to guess the outcome of a mating based on a glimpse of a few genes of one parent.
Assume the worst or the worst will happen to you. Hold true in survival on the streets, in the jungle, or on the Internet. Blowing off the very idea is foolhardy in the extreme. The only option for Linux for its part to avoid it is to remain a sado-masochistic wrong and hard is better than right and easy platform which scares away the average user. In that case, Microsoft's hegemony is assured simply through the incompetence of their opponents, not that it isn't close to that already.
Jeff Dunham: "Walter, if you were to get a tattoo what would it be?"
Walter: "A pretty woman's face."
Jeff Dunham: "And where would you get that tattoo?"
Walter: "On my wife's face."
C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows!
The others were authored by *cough* Google *cough*...
...is most applicable. They are accusing based on evidence that would not stand up even in most civil courts never mind criminal, demanding a settlement before the filing of any suit, and then refusing to negotiate regarding said settlement, all on the basis that defending yourself is more expensive than paying. This is indeed a protection racket and the RICO hammer needs to be wielded against the RIAA.
I hope some crusading federal DAs have their children targeted and decide to go after the RIAA.
No, we are not trying to prove open source is bad. If anything, this contest illustrates that we need more code review, not less.
This is only funny if you actually believe OSS means more code review and not less. The reverse is actually true as OSS has the aura of suggesting the first case so in effect, it becomes the opposite by way of assumption of it having been or being checked, so few bother. Like everyone assuming someone else is buying the milk and bread.
Now if there was some sort of OSS review team that took it upon themselves to review every source code file they could find on a project by project basis... Nah, who in their right mind would?
(No one in their right mind would, hence what is the value of a review by someone not in their right mind? In closed source, you can review and be in your right mind more often due to the simple self interest of being paid to do the reviewing or at least being able to smack the coding team with a phone book if they mess up.)
This would be like... something on the order of Microsoft Foundation Classes being promulgated for the larger framework outside of the kernel. The deuce you say!
Seriously, no, nothing really and truly fits the bill and putting the source code to the various distro package repository working groups is probably best in addition to actually hosting the source for anyone who wants it.
Just remember to start from the basics that have the widest applicability between distros. The lack of compatibility is a reflection of the wrongness of the idea that all you need is a kernel and some standards and the rest falls into place. Linux is not Windows when it comes to this sort of thing and this is one of the places it really needs to be more like it. Fark, there was a time when there were umpteen installation systems for Win apps and that didn't work for one platform never mind a scattered one like Linux.
...they don't tend to be very big on the business accumen. Any enterprise where stuff like this can happen, needs to have contracts in force that head them off. The big business closed source world lives and dies by contracts and legally binding agreements. The licenses on the code produced should not be where the thoughts of legalities end. Internal legal matters are perhaps far more important.
IBM was supposedly going to stop Microsoft from ever getting where they have.
IBM's OS/2 was going to kill Windows.
Netscape Navigator would eliminate Internet Explorer.
Oracle would stomp SQL Server.
AOL would plow MSN under
Linux would replace Windows everywhere because it was server strength with a useable desktop and above all free.
ALL the while, aspersions were cast on Microsoft's internal politics and atmosphere from the head of the company on down. NO ONE it was said could possibly be all that happy without being crazy and sooner or later seething disconten would stop Microsoft from within while their enemies would overtake them from without.
People play the lottery on the same theory that eventually the random number generator of life's chaotic side would just go their way. This is business however, and gambling is something for companies that have nothing to start with and nothing to lose. AOL, Linux, IBM, Orace, Netscape, and all the other forces which DID have something to lose have.
Gambling doesn't work. Actual facts do. Windows XP was adopted in far larger numbers than any of the naysayers wanted to believe would happen and despite all the problems, people aren't dropping it in record numbers for Apple or something else. History is on Microsoft and Windows' side and anyone continuing to gamble on the RNG IS building on a house of cards to agree with Balmer.
MS is in the game to win and their opponents aren't. Those employees who are looking down their nose at the company that has provided their wonderful salaries, perks, and benefits should consider what kind of past successes led to those things being in Microsoft's hands to offer them in the first place. MS doesn't play the RNG, it plays to win. That's the kind of company you want to be with.
Google looks shiny and cool now but that will fall apart like the idea of working at Big Blue and suddenly being a made man in a pinstripe suit simply based on the name. Eventually people will learn there's the faddish playing the numbers and then there's the tried and true playing the game seriously to win. I don't see Google being that and if I worked Microsoft, I'd not be ignoring a certain Aesop's Fable involving a dog, a bone, and an illusion.
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Some people seem to be confused. A monopoly is not a free market, in fact it hinders a free market. One of the ways it hinders a free market in software is by adopting closed formats. Therefore forcing open formats promotes the free market, thus fostering innovation. Nothing is preventing Massachusetts from using Microsoft's products once they decided to adopt open formats.
And therein lies the insult to the taxpaying populace by the holier-than-all-others anti-Microsoft Open Sore movement: that Microsoft should dance to their tune and fark the people in the meantime until they do.
Fact: the majority of computer users interacting with the state of MA are Windows users.
Fact: anything the state of MA does to make those users' times harder to access state documents is an imposition on THEM and NOT Microsoft.
This is "the movement" showing its true colors as petty and pathetic bullies, using one of the worst tactics to get their way: beat the weakest down and tell them they will stop being beaten when they all turn on this one other party and follow the one doing the beating. Hurting a large group just to get at one group, using those people as an intermediary because you have no ground to stand on, no strategy of note, and no argument of merit and thus take the coward's way out and attack your opponent by going after innocents.
This is the tech world's equivalent of terrorism. Can't take on Microsoft? Losing to them? So use the political process which the geek brigades claim to hate and distrust to get your way, impose on Microsoft's customer base, and force Microsoft to do things your way by influencing that base. No different in structure and strategy than killing innocent civilians because you're too much the coward to fight a stand-up battle with uniformed troops in the open.
The Open Source world is dishonoring themselves by stooping to these tactics and I firmly expect they won't ever learn this. If they were even remotely capable of it, they might have expended their energies on coming up with a product that competed with those of Microsoft that the people actually wanted to buy. But since the people have voted with their pocketbooks for Microsoft, and done so in droves, force your way on them anyhow using government and manipulation of every situation.
More and more my disgust for Microsoft lessens and grows for its detractors. More and more, they replace Microsoft for me as the biggest threat to the IT world going forward. Not content to either do what it takes to win fairly or lose gracefully, they instead use the same tactics they accuse Microsoft of and engage in the holy effrontery of the self-righteous. Way to promote Open Source with honor there, people.
I feel kind of odd watching flamewars about who is tougher and more hardcore, C++ or some other language group, and I think to myself, "maybe they should have to actually deal with assembly, logic, and bits for real before they start talking hardcore. I remember when we were putting together kits out of catalogs with hex pads and light up bulbs and calling it computing.
Oh well. I think all this excitement has gotten to me. I'm going to go take a nap now. Where's my cane?
If you hate that the Bush Administration puts America in a bad light, why do you aid the cause by spreading misinformation which makes America look far worse than it really is?
They do it because it makes them feel better about themselves, more intelligent and wise than the next person. It boosts their ego. In a world where not nearly as much is going wrong and things are better than they claim, there's no need for their idiot theories, fixes, and blather in general. No need for them.
Insecurity, pure and simple. The world is bad enough without whipping up hysteria which only makes it worse and fulfills the prophecy.
First, they already have this tapping ability on all existing POTS lines. Extending it to digital is not a new idea.
Second, they still have to go through the same hoops to get a warrant as they always have had.
Third, free speech is not in any way under assault. Say whatever you want. The government doesn't have the ability to monitor even a small percentage of all calls at any given moment never mind all of yours no matter what your friends who live on that Manhattan street corner wearing signs regarding an imminent alien invasion tell you.
Therefore, the judges who grant those warrants and the politicians who appoint them should be of concern. DO NOT delude yourself into thinking voting liberal will be a cure. The left is just as likely as the far right to misuse warrants and criminal law when their politics are at stake and this was shown during the Clinton administration repeatedly. Don't think so? Three words: Branch Davidian Barbecue.
(All government is essentially mob rule and those who think they can stay on the good side of the mob much less control the mob are cretins, fools, and worse.)
Push for stronger laws and mandatory aftermath reviews of such operations where the results if any must be put in the public record. I do not mean the intercepted communications but how many taps and of how many lines and what the actual result was. They should have to get a warrant knowing not only do they need to convince a judge, they will need to justify it after the fact before the public. That might make them think twice before they grant the warrants or push for the appointment of a jurist who will abuse their judicial powers for the appointing politicians' benefit.
What gets into a court of law is not enough. If they investigate and find nothing and do not prosecute, their invasion of privacy may or may not have been necessary and the decision to allow it should be under public review either way. We know how many went to court. We do not know how many taps are not recorded as public knowledge due to lack of going ahead with prosecution.
when inattentive, overly permissive, or just adventurous DMs allowed Continual Light to be cast on a Bag of Holding, and they held about as much as most women in my family manage to hold in theirs. I think my mother-in-law has an entire convenience store in hers.
So LimeWire is doing what essentially amounts to an embrace of DRM by default, as in if they can't prove it legal it doesn't transfer it.
So what? Do we HAVE to use it? I'd be more afraid if every ISP began using transparent proxies that stopped all unapproved traffic.
Predictably, a few will go, "what? I thought they already did." Might want to up those meds.
The rest can... rest. Not a big deal here. It's the choice of the rightful owners of a privately made application and not one that has a lot of usage to begin with.
The reasons are many and varied and mostly center on physics. If you look at best case scenarios with current off the shelf technology and the efficiencies as you scale up, there's a sweet spot where the size versus distribution versus etc. all reaches an optimum level. Our present system is much closer to that sweet spot than microgrids or the other end of the spectrum, one giant planet-wide power station.
We could use high temperature superconductors, fission reactors and with fusion later when they get it to work, and a lot of clearing of the way by the federal government for deployment which is now held up by people using the environment as a smokescreen when what it comes down to is a lot of NIMBY and more to the point a bountiful opportunity for pitiful and pathetic unimportant people to make themselves feel important.
I live in a state where every highway project takes years longer and millions more because the enviros hold up everything *after* the damage is already done until they've milked out the publicity for themselves and finally it gets done in the end and there was no change and nothing saved in terms of environment and plenty of time and money wasted. All for their inane ego festivals.
Right now those same imbeciles are doing everything they can to keep the power transmission companies from fixing outdated and antiquated transmission lines and equipment which first keeps efficiency low and cost of the power transmission high, second it keeps jacking up the danger of massive local outages every year, third it increases the danger to the workers who maintain the system, fourth it increases the chance of creating a regional chain reaction outage, and fifth it increases the chance of a catastrophic failure on one of the big circuits going through the woods and starting a fire.
They are also trying everything they can do to prevent us from tying into regional grids through the west side of CT into New York and across the sound to Long Island. And lastly doing all they can to stand in the way of a gas tanker and pipeline facility. The sanity of putting liquid natural gas ships more than ten miles offshore is obvious in this new age of mega-terrorism and conversely the insanity of making the tankers put into ports near population centers equally obvious. They just don't care. It's all about them.
The best thing we can do with our end of things as consumers is insulate, make efficient use of what we consumer, and use solar electric, thermal, and hydro *where* economical and efficient on our homes. When superconductive storage systems finally come around, we can store the energy compactly that way onsite and until then, unless we want to deal with the danger of poisonous battery chemicals and five thousand pounds of them per home, we're better off simply having a system where we use the energy we generate first and the main grid's power secondly.
But generators aren't going to cut it. We're going from a few hundred stations to a few million and with less efficiency and more pollution and no inspection. Tack on inspection and you can add the psycho enviro leftists to the far right terrorist under every bed paranoids as one more group pushing us closer to a police state; no way would they let fossil fuel generators increase like that without mandating mandatory inspections on your property at any time for any or no reason with no prior notice and reserve the right to shut you down whenever they felt like it.
I don't see a need to create a massive new intrusion on our rights. Like I said, insulate, make efficient use, be efficient in generation where it is fitting to generate it yourself.
Fittingly a lot of the enviros of today were the Mother Earth News types of twenty-five years ago advocating that we all use wood and coal stoves, forge and smelt our own metals, and operate pig farms to feed methane stills. Their former zeal for old low tech is utterly incompatible with their stated beliefs of today. Much like the pictures of them in mullets, gold chains, and neon orange leisure suits were twenty-five years ago.
A single rail need only be aligned with the path of travel and be self-consistant with regard to that path. IOW, no curves, breaks, bends, etc., locally but a line that is smoothly following the path. Two rails need be aligned with each other at all times and the carriage of the system therefore becomes more complex. Granted we've been doing it forever because we essentially transferred the idea of the bi-wheeled cart to a track but monorails are a bit simpler.
/. can either be done by hated corporations or by the big bad state using your tax dollars? I think this is where the old lines about double-edged swords, mothers-in-law driving new cars off cliffs, cognitive dissonance, and TANSTAAFL come in. Feel free to insert them here:
Of course, there's a lot of other considerations. If we had high temperature superconductors and plentiful nuclear power we'd be able to churn our maglev systems never mind monorails, all over the farking place. We've been waiting since the early sixties and they ain't here yet so...
I think we may have to ultimately build settlements around mass transit in the end, something like the cities in Bullfrog's Syndicate. Self-contained yet interconnected, the streets elevated above the ground. All electric transportation. Of course, the only entities that can really do this are megacorporations like Halliburton and Microsoft. Might make an interesting experiment to have a company build their own town ala the company mining and manufacturing settlements of the 19th century, but with the latest high-tech systems.
Don't it just bite that the dreams of
...someone cleaned up DeviantArt.
Seriously, they're jumping the gun. They haven't even filled the Supreme Court yet and the end of the administration is still three years away from being over. Way early for this self-defeating crack-up. You'd think no one grasped that since the Meese Crusade, Gallery went from simple nudes to full hardcore and the only thing that the whole affair managed was to insert more obscenity into the congressional records than anything else ever could have.
This too will be a waste of time, tax dollars, and energies and will only be shot down in the long term.
Crazy. And people compare Microsoft to the Borg. What's next, GoogleLaundromat? GoogleBeer? (beer Googles?)
.
The mind, it boggles
No, it Googles
I'm thinking GooglePr0n... No, their free image search function with the filter off already does that.
Namely, that people are growing smarter and that smarter (by this faction's definition) means people will see Microsoft and AOL for being shams and suddenly see the light and adopt the (sadomasochistic) ways of Linux.
Excuse me while I open a window and laugh.
Car manuals that put the New York Yellow Pages to shame for size and are competitive with sets of encyclopedias have been on the shelves of libraries for years. People know less and less every year about their cars. They know less and less every year about most things because the people who know more and more tend to be doing their jobs correctly: they make it work, and they make it work transparently to the user as to the guts of the process.
You don't need to know how a mainframe works to do your banking, you need not know how a cash register works to buy something. You need not know what an unsigned integer is to compose a letter on a word processor. Windows is easy to use. AOL is easy to use. Put them together and you have the all around ease of use killer setup for home users.
Once again, the tail does not wag the dog. Your kids at school do not control your PC buying decisions and if they did Apple would be the only brand in the USA and there'd be NO Internet as it back then DID NOT fit into Apple's (Job's) worldview. Your average anti-corporate anti-conformity geek in the IT department does not control the corporate PC buying decisions and if they did, we'd all be using BSD command line only boxes. The general "I don't care how it works, I just want it to work" public controls the market.
Sorry to burst your fanciful bubbles, but the Tyranny of the Masses has been the rule and not the exception since before Hannibal crossed the Alps. We can just bring it to you faster and more efficiently than the Roman populace ever could to their wrongly pontificating intellectuals.
Anyway isn't this another one of those Rhythms/Covad/Northpoint etc. companies.
Northpoint went arse end up in early 2000 and Rhythms followed in the end of summer 2000, both largely due to building out and burning cash at the behest of investors who earmarked funding to leash these companies, and starved them for advertising dollars, and pushed them on the unworkable idea of being solely dslam presense providers for third party ISPs, the majority of which were two college guys and a used Cisco router. Covad took money from SBC the way Apple took money from Microsoft.
Just so you know.
...or at least one of his tribunes, bringing forth the message, being ignored as usual, and watching the foretold calamity from a nearby hilltop and muttering to myself, "and so it begins."
Sooner or later the haughty attitude and assumption of near omniscience and perfection catches up and the weaknesses which built and multiplied and were covered with a coat of paint as it were cannot longer be hidden and the whole thing crashes down.
Microsoft's earlier buggy code was partially a result of this sort of idiocy. The very foundations of bug hunting and removal are in the writing of the code in the first place and those who believe all they do to be blessed and special are more prone than any others to make the grievous errors that in the end destroy the reputation of the writers, the publisher, and the product itself and as Microsoft has clearly shown by their own peccadillos, reputation is easier kept than restored after a loss.
The Firefox has fallen in the mud. Better not let the flames go out and the hunters catch it...
Audio scrambling systems using acoustic couplers have been used for years on phones and with advanced technology it is only a matter of time before they create scrambled audio that requires an authorized headphone set that will allow it to be heard and for everyone else in the room, it will be garbage.
Various methods of obfuscation for visual media also exist mostly based on polarization but some use color as well. As technology advances and RFID tech comes into its own, you will eventually have public video boards like billboards whose protected content can't be seen without the appropriate active glasses and every TV at the store will go seemingly blank or static when protected content is shown.
It's coming and as long as the government rolls over for the *AA people, it is a done deal. And you thought the idiots at Kinkos refusing to make copies out of school books for your kid's schoolwork was moronic.
I've never understood how a company that does nothing but promote misery stays afloat, much less profits.
Neither have I, but somehow those companies spreading misery keep putting the likes of Yahoo Serious, Pauli Shore, Paris Hilton, and the entire cast of the WWE in front of the cameras. It only makes sense if you assume great masochism on the part of the public at large which is not too hard given how many people still use Lynx and Vi right here in geekdom.
According to Tolkein they were.
No one thought the Unix systems of yesteryear were so vulnerable. They were. No thinks the Unix systems of today are as vulnerable. They are. In years past it was naive lack of understanding of the basic nature of the user base. These days, naive lack of fear.
I've seen people have that same attitude before someone draws down and leaves them a crumpled mess on a bar rooom floor. It didn't help them and doesn't help the OSX, BSD, and Linux crowd. You cannot underestimate the danger of the average users' whimsy and inexperience, the truly committed crackers, and the legions of script kiddies who learn their tools from the first two. It isn't Windows that is insecure and dangerous. Windows does nothing it isn't told to by people stupid enough to tell it so by accident or on purpose.
The future is pointed at self-contained encrypted containers of both interpreted and compiled code objects flitting about the global net and this future will be embraced by Microsoft and the only way that Microsoft will not entirely control it is if the major vendors arrayed against them co-opt the paradigm with standards themselves. The law of unintended consequences being what it is, there is no way that the non-MS community can say credibly that the sheer combinatoric explosion of possibilities for system interaction in this future will not affect them, no matter what their safeguards. It's like trying to guess the outcome of a mating based on a glimpse of a few genes of one parent.
Assume the worst or the worst will happen to you. Hold true in survival on the streets, in the jungle, or on the Internet. Blowing off the very idea is foolhardy in the extreme. The only option for Linux for its part to avoid it is to remain a sado-masochistic wrong and hard is better than right and easy platform which scares away the average user. In that case, Microsoft's hegemony is assured simply through the incompetence of their opponents, not that it isn't close to that already.
No need for a face transplant.
Jeff Dunham: "Walter, if you were to get a tattoo what would it be?"
Walter: "A pretty woman's face."
Jeff Dunham: "And where would you get that tattoo?"
Walter: "On my wife's face."
Loosely quoting...
C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows!
The others were authored by *cough* Google *cough*...
(Weird that, huh?)
...is most applicable. They are accusing based on evidence that would not stand up even in most civil courts never mind criminal, demanding a settlement before the filing of any suit, and then refusing to negotiate regarding said settlement, all on the basis that defending yourself is more expensive than paying. This is indeed a protection racket and the RICO hammer needs to be wielded against the RIAA.
I hope some crusading federal DAs have their children targeted and decide to go after the RIAA.
Are you trying to prove open source is bad?
No, we are not trying to prove open source is bad. If anything, this contest illustrates that we need more code review, not less.
This is only funny if you actually believe OSS means more code review and not less. The reverse is actually true as OSS has the aura of suggesting the first case so in effect, it becomes the opposite by way of assumption of it having been or being checked, so few bother. Like everyone assuming someone else is buying the milk and bread.
Now if there was some sort of OSS review team that took it upon themselves to review every source code file they could find on a project by project basis... Nah, who in their right mind would?
(No one in their right mind would, hence what is the value of a review by someone not in their right mind? In closed source, you can review and be in your right mind more often due to the simple self interest of being paid to do the reviewing or at least being able to smack the coding team with a phone book if they mess up.)
This would be like... something on the order of Microsoft Foundation Classes being promulgated for the larger framework outside of the kernel. The deuce you say!
Seriously, no, nothing really and truly fits the bill and putting the source code to the various distro package repository working groups is probably best in addition to actually hosting the source for anyone who wants it.
Just remember to start from the basics that have the widest applicability between distros. The lack of compatibility is a reflection of the wrongness of the idea that all you need is a kernel and some standards and the rest falls into place. Linux is not Windows when it comes to this sort of thing and this is one of the places it really needs to be more like it. Fark, there was a time when there were umpteen installation systems for Win apps and that didn't work for one platform never mind a scattered one like Linux.
...they don't tend to be very big on the business accumen. Any enterprise where stuff like this can happen, needs to have contracts in force that head them off. The big business closed source world lives and dies by contracts and legally binding agreements. The licenses on the code produced should not be where the thoughts of legalities end. Internal legal matters are perhaps far more important.
IBM was supposedly going to stop Microsoft from ever getting where they have.
IBM's OS/2 was going to kill Windows.
Netscape Navigator would eliminate Internet Explorer.
Oracle would stomp SQL Server.
AOL would plow MSN under
Linux would replace Windows everywhere because it was server strength with a useable desktop and above all free.
ALL the while, aspersions were cast on Microsoft's internal politics and atmosphere from the head of the company on down. NO ONE it was said could possibly be all that happy without being crazy and sooner or later seething disconten would stop Microsoft from within while their enemies would overtake them from without.
People play the lottery on the same theory that eventually the random number generator of life's chaotic side would just go their way. This is business however, and gambling is something for companies that have nothing to start with and nothing to lose. AOL, Linux, IBM, Orace, Netscape, and all the other forces which DID have something to lose have.
Gambling doesn't work. Actual facts do. Windows XP was adopted in far larger numbers than any of the naysayers wanted to believe would happen and despite all the problems, people aren't dropping it in record numbers for Apple or something else. History is on Microsoft and Windows' side and anyone continuing to gamble on the RNG IS building on a house of cards to agree with Balmer.
MS is in the game to win and their opponents aren't. Those employees who are looking down their nose at the company that has provided their wonderful salaries, perks, and benefits should consider what kind of past successes led to those things being in Microsoft's hands to offer them in the first place. MS doesn't play the RNG, it plays to win. That's the kind of company you want to be with.
Google looks shiny and cool now but that will fall apart like the idea of working at Big Blue and suddenly being a made man in a pinstripe suit simply based on the name. Eventually people will learn there's the faddish playing the numbers and then there's the tried and true playing the game seriously to win. I don't see Google being that and if I worked Microsoft, I'd not be ignoring a certain Aesop's Fable involving a dog, a bone, and an illusion.
Does this mark the end of netscape???
Netcraft confirms it.
Ohhh... You meant the browser. Er... yeah, that too.