Re:Oh, I dunno
on
Why Microsoft?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Damage it to whom? Given, I'm a *nix admin type, not an application developer. Working at Microsoft would be sort of pointless for me, and since they don't likely have any jobs I'm really qualified for or interested in, however I fail to see how working at MS could be worse for your resume than working at some ridiculous 4square rip-off with a bunch of stoner kids who only program in Ruby.
So, you would rather take a crapshoot over the sure thing? Of course Google isn't going anywhere, but seriously... some random startup? Maybe I'm just not as young and adventurous as I once was.
Re:In the End...
on
Why Microsoft?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You would be surprised how much rationalization a higher salary can buy.
It doesn't even matter that this was Microsoft, other than the fact that if it were IBM we'd never have gotten an article about it. However, the kid in question may have been asking why IBM, or why Ford? Why not? Healthy, established companies with plenty of money that pay dividends. Everyone has heard of them and if you're "good enough" to work for them, then you should be "good enough" for anyone else later. Just because you and your buddy start a website in your dorm room and print up business cards declaring fancy titles doesn't mean that's going to be a good reference when you find out that becoming an accidental internet billionaire is harder than you thought and have to go find a real job.
But, oh yeah, Apple is "changing the world" with their "magical" products (disclaimer, this is being typed on a Mac), so clearly everyone who is anyone should want to go work there. Or the new flavor of the week Rails shop. Or wherever. And for some people, maybe that's a better option and if they can make it work, good for them. I work for a small company practically no one has heard of, and right now it works for me. But, I'm to the point where I would much rather have the greater stability that working for a larger company would provide. In a few years the questioner will likely start to see the same thing.
Well, what else would you expect them to do? Recently, Russia was raiding the offices of politically undesirable organizations using software piracy as an excuse, and Microsoft lawyers were involved. Microsoft had stopped agreeing to press charges once it became obvious that the government was just using them as an excuse. Now, they're going ever further than they already had and being explicit about who they are giving licenses to.
Just because it doesn't cost them anything doesn't mean it isn't still worth something. And providing free licenses is a big step up from not prosecuting pirates. They'll be able to get software updates and security patches, which will cut down on the amount of out-of-date, exploitable software out there to become part of spam bots, which is good for everyone.
Some of us just used it as an excuse to appear interested in some abstract notion of universal justice while at the same time getting to bash wikileaks. Frankly, it's no skin off my back whether any afghans were hit by the Taliban as a result of the wikileaks disclosure. I'm just against wikileaks on general, but that's because I hate snitches and they basically take snitching to an absurd extreme.
But on the other hand what this means is that they basically released a bunch of primary source material that wasnt news to anyone who has kept up even the slightest bit with the course of events in afghanistan and therefor were neither helpful nor revolutionary except to cause a big, sensationalist stir so that Julian can feel good about himself in public for a little while for being sooooo damned importan that the whole world has to be up in arms over the bs pseudo-controversy he engineered with the help of a diluted insider who though he was being slick.
this isn't a case of equality testing, it is a case of assignment. The Internet's current value gets clobbered to take on the value of TV. At least it'll be "on demand":-/. Web 3.0 is going to suck even harder than web 2.0, but I say that as the sterotypical guy who doesn't have a TV. Well, my roommate and I have one, but refuse to pay for cable and don't watch broadcast, so its just there for watching DVDs.
I heard he once told staffers of Nanci Pelosi and a pair of AIPAC lobbyists to get the hell out of his office and not come back. Word has it now he's denying it happened, but its the kind of thing he'd do, and really raised my estimation of him from that of cooky communist elf man to someone who also wants to tell AIPAC to go to hell.
I met him once by accident, briefly. However, he had wondered off before I could ask him to be in a short video clip saying "they're always after me lucky charms." His ears are slightly more pointed in person than they are on TV.
I believe that the concept is that hardware can be made to prevent free software from loading, for instance, a chip to check for digital signatures to prove the code is "authorized", and that therefor the non-libre hardware can prevent you from running the software you want, forcing you to have to use software that isn't libre.
WSJ article a few days ago indicated that Verizon should have the iPhone in early 2011. Assuming that's true, a good indicator that they're moving that direction is having Verizon bundle the iPad. The MyFi device is probably just a temporary measure to get around the GSM-only hardware for cellular data.
Since the iPad doesn't need to make phone calls, using an adapter for cellular data access makes sense. They'll have to make some physical changes to the iPhone to have it actually work on a non-GSM carrier, so it makes sense to take longer moving in that direction, but using the iPad to get people used to the idea of a break in AT&T exclusivity.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. I actually wouldn't mind an iPhone, but I have no reason at all to want an iPad.
Not in the sense of a W or a K station, but its still broadcasting radio traffic. It still doesn't make you a common carrier due to other restrictions. Most things people think are common carriers aren't and never were. Likewise, "safe harbor" means that if the carrier meets the requirements for compliance with CALEA, that they can't be held liable for not being able to do anymore.
Either way, the end case is the same. Neither of these constructs have anything AT ALL to do with whether or not you're going to get boned if someone jumps on your AP and starts committing crimes.
No, not necessarily. Pure democracy is everyone getting exactly one equal vote. However, if you have a population which consists of more wolves than sheep, then of course they're going to win. Ironically, as real society is comprised of more sheep than wolves, and the sheep are still losing, then we can see we do not have a democracy.
Leaving your wireless AP open doesn't make you a common carrier. From Title II of the Communications Act of 1934:
(h) "Common carrier" or "carrier" means any person engaged as a common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio or in interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy, except where reference is made to common carriers not subject to this Act; but a person engaged in radio broadcasting shall not, insofar as such person is so engaged, be deemed a common carrier.
Running an AP basically makes you a person engaged in radio broadcasting, and as we see, that is explicitly not covered. Likewise, if you're not carrying traffic for hire and aren't under an FCC license, then you are also not covered.
But then again, this is Slashdot, where people keep repeating things they heard whether they actually know what they're talking about or not.
Additionally, you can buy Word or Excel individually if you really want just the one product. Many schools buy site licenses and provide full versions of software to their students. I still had my network login after I graduated in 2006, and went back a year or so later to visit some friends. While I was there, I helped myself to a full version of Office 2007 Enterprise Edition;)
But honestly, price or no price, I feel like a lot of the complaints against OOo in the video are actually valid. I find it incredibly unpleasant to use. Document formatting always gets wonky, and the interface largely tends to be "confusingly similar" to Office to the point where I would look for things where I thought they might be, then find out they were not there but somewhere else. I don't know if this has gotten better recently or not, but it was just not "worth" being free when I already didn't have to pay for Office and didn't really pirate it, either.
I use iWork on my MBP and on my iMac at work (mostly just multiplexing SSH anyway) for when I have to write documentation for our product. I don't like the word processor as much as MS Word, but Keynote and Numbers are pretty sweet.
I actually think iWork is worth a lot more than the $75 or whatever I paid or my home copy, and I like that it's not trying to clone Office. OOo seems to want to be an Office clone and that's the problem. Honestly, that's the problem with a lot of FLOSS software today -- trying to being the cheap/free version of a proprietary product, and thus always living in the shadows.
As Lisa Simpson said on this week's episode, "Anything that's the something of the something isn't the anything of the anything."
I think the first half of the video was basically talking about how you have to actually pay *nix admins more money because its harder to fake being competent, and that by using MS products and hiring a bunch of mouse-clicking drones, you can pay them less and therefor save money you need to buy MS software. But I may have missed the point.
Now that OpenOffice is in the hands of a company which isn't being criminally mismanaged and which has a well-known vendetta against Microsoft, maybe this is out of valid fears for real competition. On the other hand, Microsoft has a way of waving Linux and other FLOSS projects around for misdirection whenever they need to conjure a competitor to refute claims of their monopoly. Microsoft "admitting" that OO is a competitor would be like North Korea "admitting" they have nukes in order to try and bum rice off of the west.
I have a free NYTimes.com account, but also run ABP, so I never see the ads. I also don't actually buy newspapers in print. I guess I'm a leach, but I suspect I'm not in the minority.
I used the Watchmen as one example, but not the only one. For instance, take a look even at Beowulf (not the cluster), who may or may not be heroic. There are definitely moments where he and other characters, in order to prove how awesome they are, take exaggerated risks and put everyone else in danger. Oh, but hey, they fixed it in the end, so what does it matter that it was dude's fault that the dragon was out in the first place?
Or, what I got out of The Watchmen, which is, the line between heroism and villainy is really somewhat convoluted towards the extremes. Most super villains I've seen in movies or books seem to, more often than not, believe that what they're doing is for the good of humanity. When you're so exceptional that the ability to challenge you isn't generally present in the population its easy to get full of yourself and think you have all the answers. Its then a pretty short hop to just feeling like everyone who can't understand your vision is either an enemy or just unworthy. Heroes and villains feed off of each other and often times are the only ones who really understand each other. The fact that they take opposing sides has always sort of baffled me, as they would seem to be natural allies, or at least friends.
Even Dr Evil was more sympathetic than Captain Hammer, though. Its not always easy to say who is "good" or "bad"
Exactly, and sharing vital technology with the enemy is mostly just a good way to ensure that everybody loses. Parity and equilibrium aren't good once the war starts getting hot, because then you end up with WWI.
I don't care about the legality. I just don't think that the content has added much of anything actually useful. Combine that with all the additional javascript libraries, cross-site scripting, remote includes and whatnot and the web just keeps getting more cluttered and slower. Increasing the bandwidth would just encourage more stupid shit to be put onto "the cloud" and cause the problem to continue to persist.
Not to mention the fact that there is so much clutter now that finding actual information has become a chore. I'm about half way ready to just suck it up and buy my own JSTOR account to cut out the bullshit.
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Damage it to whom? Given, I'm a *nix admin type, not an application developer. Working at Microsoft would be sort of pointless for me, and since they don't likely have any jobs I'm really qualified for or interested in, however I fail to see how working at MS could be worse for your resume than working at some ridiculous 4square rip-off with a bunch of stoner kids who only program in Ruby.
So, you would rather take a crapshoot over the sure thing? Of course Google isn't going anywhere, but seriously... some random startup? Maybe I'm just not as young and adventurous as I once was.
You would be surprised how much rationalization a higher salary can buy.
It doesn't even matter that this was Microsoft, other than the fact that if it were IBM we'd never have gotten an article about it. However, the kid in question may have been asking why IBM, or why Ford? Why not? Healthy, established companies with plenty of money that pay dividends. Everyone has heard of them and if you're "good enough" to work for them, then you should be "good enough" for anyone else later. Just because you and your buddy start a website in your dorm room and print up business cards declaring fancy titles doesn't mean that's going to be a good reference when you find out that becoming an accidental internet billionaire is harder than you thought and have to go find a real job.
But, oh yeah, Apple is "changing the world" with their "magical" products (disclaimer, this is being typed on a Mac), so clearly everyone who is anyone should want to go work there. Or the new flavor of the week Rails shop. Or wherever. And for some people, maybe that's a better option and if they can make it work, good for them. I work for a small company practically no one has heard of, and right now it works for me. But, I'm to the point where I would much rather have the greater stability that working for a larger company would provide. In a few years the questioner will likely start to see the same thing.
Well, what else would you expect them to do? Recently, Russia was raiding the offices of politically undesirable organizations using software piracy as an excuse, and Microsoft lawyers were involved. Microsoft had stopped agreeing to press charges once it became obvious that the government was just using them as an excuse. Now, they're going ever further than they already had and being explicit about who they are giving licenses to.
Just because it doesn't cost them anything doesn't mean it isn't still worth something. And providing free licenses is a big step up from not prosecuting pirates. They'll be able to get software updates and security patches, which will cut down on the amount of out-of-date, exploitable software out there to become part of spam bots, which is good for everyone.
Some of us just used it as an excuse to appear interested in some abstract notion of universal justice while at the same time getting to bash wikileaks. Frankly, it's no skin off my back whether any afghans were hit by the Taliban as a result of the wikileaks disclosure. I'm just against wikileaks on general, but that's because I hate snitches and they basically take snitching to an absurd extreme.
But on the other hand what this means is that they basically released a bunch of primary source material that wasnt news to anyone who has kept up even the slightest bit with the course of events in afghanistan and therefor were neither helpful nor revolutionary except to cause a big, sensationalist stir so that Julian can feel good about himself in public for a little while for being sooooo damned importan that the whole world has to be up in arms over the bs pseudo-controversy he engineered with the help of a diluted insider who though he was being slick.
Is that you, Mr Edison, behind that Guy Fawkes mask?
this isn't a case of equality testing, it is a case of assignment. The Internet's current value gets clobbered to take on the value of TV. At least it'll be "on demand" :-/. Web 3.0 is going to suck even harder than web 2.0, but I say that as the sterotypical guy who doesn't have a TV. Well, my roommate and I have one, but refuse to pay for cable and don't watch broadcast, so its just there for watching DVDs.
I heard he once told staffers of Nanci Pelosi and a pair of AIPAC lobbyists to get the hell out of his office and not come back. Word has it now he's denying it happened, but its the kind of thing he'd do, and really raised my estimation of him from that of cooky communist elf man to someone who also wants to tell AIPAC to go to hell.
I met him once by accident, briefly. However, he had wondered off before I could ask him to be in a short video clip saying "they're always after me lucky charms." His ears are slightly more pointed in person than they are on TV.
I believe that the concept is that hardware can be made to prevent free software from loading, for instance, a chip to check for digital signatures to prove the code is "authorized", and that therefor the non-libre hardware can prevent you from running the software you want, forcing you to have to use software that isn't libre.
WSJ article a few days ago indicated that Verizon should have the iPhone in early 2011. Assuming that's true, a good indicator that they're moving that direction is having Verizon bundle the iPad. The MyFi device is probably just a temporary measure to get around the GSM-only hardware for cellular data.
Since the iPad doesn't need to make phone calls, using an adapter for cellular data access makes sense. They'll have to make some physical changes to the iPhone to have it actually work on a non-GSM carrier, so it makes sense to take longer moving in that direction, but using the iPad to get people used to the idea of a break in AT&T exclusivity.
Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. I actually wouldn't mind an iPhone, but I have no reason at all to want an iPad.
Not in the sense of a W or a K station, but its still broadcasting radio traffic. It still doesn't make you a common carrier due to other restrictions. Most things people think are common carriers aren't and never were. Likewise, "safe harbor" means that if the carrier meets the requirements for compliance with CALEA, that they can't be held liable for not being able to do anymore.
Either way, the end case is the same. Neither of these constructs have anything AT ALL to do with whether or not you're going to get boned if someone jumps on your AP and starts committing crimes.
No, not necessarily. Pure democracy is everyone getting exactly one equal vote. However, if you have a population which consists of more wolves than sheep, then of course they're going to win. Ironically, as real society is comprised of more sheep than wolves, and the sheep are still losing, then we can see we do not have a democracy.
Leaving your wireless AP open doesn't make you a common carrier. From Title II of the Communications Act of 1934:
(h) "Common carrier" or "carrier" means any person engaged as a common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio or in interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy, except where reference is made to common carriers not subject to this Act; but a person engaged in radio broadcasting shall not, insofar as such person is so engaged, be deemed a common carrier.
Running an AP basically makes you a person engaged in radio broadcasting, and as we see, that is explicitly not covered. Likewise, if you're not carrying traffic for hire and aren't under an FCC license, then you are also not covered.
But then again, this is Slashdot, where people keep repeating things they heard whether they actually know what they're talking about or not.
You mean its not Timothy? He seems to be able to provoke a lot of reaction around here...
They already do have different packaging versions of Office for different prices. See here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/office-2010-which-suite-is-right-for-you-FX101825640.aspx
Additionally, you can buy Word or Excel individually if you really want just the one product. Many schools buy site licenses and provide full versions of software to their students. I still had my network login after I graduated in 2006, and went back a year or so later to visit some friends. While I was there, I helped myself to a full version of Office 2007 Enterprise Edition ;)
But honestly, price or no price, I feel like a lot of the complaints against OOo in the video are actually valid. I find it incredibly unpleasant to use. Document formatting always gets wonky, and the interface largely tends to be "confusingly similar" to Office to the point where I would look for things where I thought they might be, then find out they were not there but somewhere else. I don't know if this has gotten better recently or not, but it was just not "worth" being free when I already didn't have to pay for Office and didn't really pirate it, either.
I use iWork on my MBP and on my iMac at work (mostly just multiplexing SSH anyway) for when I have to write documentation for our product. I don't like the word processor as much as MS Word, but Keynote and Numbers are pretty sweet.
I actually think iWork is worth a lot more than the $75 or whatever I paid or my home copy, and I like that it's not trying to clone Office. OOo seems to want to be an Office clone and that's the problem. Honestly, that's the problem with a lot of FLOSS software today -- trying to being the cheap/free version of a proprietary product, and thus always living in the shadows.
As Lisa Simpson said on this week's episode, "Anything that's the something of the something isn't the anything of the anything."
I think the first half of the video was basically talking about how you have to actually pay *nix admins more money because its harder to fake being competent, and that by using MS products and hiring a bunch of mouse-clicking drones, you can pay them less and therefor save money you need to buy MS software. But I may have missed the point.
Now that OpenOffice is in the hands of a company which isn't being criminally mismanaged and which has a well-known vendetta against Microsoft, maybe this is out of valid fears for real competition. On the other hand, Microsoft has a way of waving Linux and other FLOSS projects around for misdirection whenever they need to conjure a competitor to refute claims of their monopoly. Microsoft "admitting" that OO is a competitor would be like North Korea "admitting" they have nukes in order to try and bum rice off of the west.
I think the point of the article is that you've probably just earned yourself a tracking device, thanks to this post/idea. Enjoy that.
I have a free NYTimes.com account, but also run ABP, so I never see the ads. I also don't actually buy newspapers in print. I guess I'm a leach, but I suspect I'm not in the minority.
I used the Watchmen as one example, but not the only one. For instance, take a look even at Beowulf (not the cluster), who may or may not be heroic. There are definitely moments where he and other characters, in order to prove how awesome they are, take exaggerated risks and put everyone else in danger. Oh, but hey, they fixed it in the end, so what does it matter that it was dude's fault that the dragon was out in the first place?
Or, what I got out of The Watchmen, which is, the line between heroism and villainy is really somewhat convoluted towards the extremes. Most super villains I've seen in movies or books seem to, more often than not, believe that what they're doing is for the good of humanity. When you're so exceptional that the ability to challenge you isn't generally present in the population its easy to get full of yourself and think you have all the answers. Its then a pretty short hop to just feeling like everyone who can't understand your vision is either an enemy or just unworthy. Heroes and villains feed off of each other and often times are the only ones who really understand each other. The fact that they take opposing sides has always sort of baffled me, as they would seem to be natural allies, or at least friends.
Even Dr Evil was more sympathetic than Captain Hammer, though. Its not always easy to say who is "good" or "bad"
Exactly, and sharing vital technology with the enemy is mostly just a good way to ensure that everybody loses. Parity and equilibrium aren't good once the war starts getting hot, because then you end up with WWI.
It was Ken Thompson, the man himself, that you're referring to. The talk in question can be found here: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
I don't care about the legality. I just don't think that the content has added much of anything actually useful. Combine that with all the additional javascript libraries, cross-site scripting, remote includes and whatnot and the web just keeps getting more cluttered and slower. Increasing the bandwidth would just encourage more stupid shit to be put onto "the cloud" and cause the problem to continue to persist.
Not to mention the fact that there is so much clutter now that finding actual information has become a chore. I'm about half way ready to just suck it up and buy my own JSTOR account to cut out the bullshit.