> I previously believed him to be a greedy, naieve, power-hungry egomaniac. If this article is accurate, and he will be giving away
> his money for food and medicine instead of for computers (which are pretty useless if you don't have anything to eat) then maybe
> slashdot should look into not portraying his as such an evil person. Maybe he has finally matured?
For the last souple of years (perhaps under the influence of this wife Malinda, perhaps not), Gates has been throwing money at various philanthropic targets. We're talking serious stuff like money to help homeless youth in the US Northwest, or to fund school programs in low-income school districts.
Does this mean he has gained a conscience? No, he's always demonstrated signs that his political views are left of center; it's something of a hold-over form growing in up in Seattle. I'd say his own political views are best described as a ``limousine liberal." He is eager to throw money as ``good" causes, but has never thought about how much money he made by causing problems that need to be addressed by those ``good" causes. He is eager to give millions to provide drugs for Africa, but does not understand that Africa does not have the money to buy computer software at $50-- a pop. (MS Office being extra.)
Have no fear: Billg is still the ``greedy, naive power-hungry egomaniac" we all know & love. And he's got a ring of folks around him who will do theri utmost to keep him that way. They check his computer daily to make sure he'll never see a BSOD, & assure him that he is the genius he thinks he is.
After all, if he realized just how bad things truly were, & how much he could have done to prevent those bad things, he'd also see that they were nothing more than a band of toadies & parasites, & be out on the street without stock options or job prospects.
Most of the time when I read/., it's from work. For the last couple of years, I've had to put up with NT on the desktop. At my current employer, they talk about moving us all over to Win2000. (I think I'll find out just how much they want me to work there by telling them, ``If you make me use Win 2000, I'll quit.")
Last place, the corporate standard was Netscape on NT; this one is IE on NT. Next place will be anything that is not Windows. Unless I leave because they insisted on ``upgrading" me.
Hmmf! Let's drop the pig into the d00m parody, & fly a cat first class. Yeah! Not only will the players get k-rad k3wl special effects, a high score means you get BACON!!!
(On an unrelated note, I only drank 3 Full Sail Stouts tonight before posting this. I guess my campaign to become the Homer Simpson of/. is d00med to failure.)
> I'm the real billg, and after I read that, I was wondering if I actually did write that...
No you're not. If you were the real Billg, you'd be saying something like:
``Don't those (expletive deleted) know I invented the microcomputer??? Why aren't those little (expletive deleteds) glad I made the Personal Computer cheap enough that they can play their little masturbatory games with them??? This is random!!! Entirely random!!! Who uses Linux??? A bunch of (deleted)-know-alls who will be starving on the (deleted) streets because they aren't making any money from their labors!!!"
The scarey thing is that I can see him emailing all of his business associates this exact passage. And all of them would reply with ``yes, you are right. You have massive badwidth. These goobers don't know how much you did for them.
Then again, I've drank 4 Alaskan Amber beers. I could probably imagine a lot of things I'd rather not admit to. Like Steve Ballinger in a pink rubber tutu dancing over the floor, singign: ``I won't stop unless you buy 5 more copies of Windows 2000!"
]knowing I'll lose lots of karma down for this post[
Geoff
> Why is everybody so obsessed with source code, Microsoft's or anybody else's? Just what in the heck are you going to *do* with
> a glimpse of some of the source code to Office or Windows?
Grab a bunch of old CS textbooks, & do a diff against various parts of the code. And publish the findings. Especially if the textbooks happen to date to the 1960's. (We all know how Microsoft uses modern code -- none of that old crap from the 1970's like UNIX does.)
I still want to know just how many rat's-nests of speghetti code are nothing more than thousands of man-hours of patches to fix a mistake caused when some coder forgot to include a line he was copying from a textbook at 4:00am.
> AOL may not be the choice for power users, but they are most certainly not going downhill. They are, by a huge margin, the #1
> consumer ISP.
I was referring to the experience an end-user has. AOL tries to represent itself as a friendly, small-town sort of place, but is more & more an empty suburban sprawl around a strip mall whose principal tenants are strip clubs, porno shops, & telemarketer call centers.
Steve Case once promised that an AOL customer would never see an ad on AOL -- & that the most important thing about AOL was the community. But without warning or even a preliminary survery, AOL changed all of that. (Case has this habit of making his decisions without warning.) Now AOL customers get bombarded with all sorts of ads, & their emphasis (thanks to Bob Pittman the ex-MTV guy) is now on a watered-down version of television. (That is, ``shut up & watch.")
As for users attitudes, from what I've seen it tends to be one of these four types:
1) doesn't care
2) doesn't know any better
3) doesn't like it, thinks it's k-rad kewl to complain about AOL
4) doesn't like it, is leaving/has left
If this is the ``consumer Internet experience," I'm glad I'm not part of it.
> It allows you to put the right angle on the quotes, and it's the preferred way of using quotes in high-quality typesetting
> environments (TeX, for instance).
Hmm. I picked it up as a minor idiosyncracy when I first started reading Usenet back in 1992. (``Everybody else was doing it -- & it looks cool.") Didn't know about the other part, though.
> it's a CORPORATION, and as such, can be
> severly hurt by bad publicity. it's also subject to government regulation.
Except that they've taken the first steps to isolate themselves from public opinion.
While probing the various links about the November meeting, I found the web page where the comments that get sent to comments@icann.org get posted. The page links to no letter more recent than May of 1999, & itself was last updated on 23 April 2000. (At least that's what it says.)
They're trying REAL hard to ignore their community now, aren't they?
Once upon a time, I used to be an AOL customer. Then their service got worse (this was after the 5er's hacker attack), & after a few years I moved on.
With that in mind, I have to share probably the most perceptive words on AOL ever written. From Michael Wolff's book, _Burn_Rate_:
``I never wanted to do a deal with AOL. At best, AOL just watered down the experience of the Internet and network technology; at worst, it was in some other business -- it was a direct marketing organization, infomercial shit.
``I never knew anybody who took AOL seriously as an Internet company.
``I never knew an AOL customer who didn't feel seriously abused by AOL.
``I never knew an AOL information provider who didn't feel that AOL was about to start turning the screws.
``I never knew an AOL executive who didn't think he or she was playing a part in a very serious shell game that, ideally, would end in an acquisition of AOL by a reputable company.
``I never knew anybody who really wanted to work for AOL, located in true Nowheresville, Virginia."
Wolff wrote this in 1998, long after I left AOL. from what I've heard & read, AOL has gone even further downhill.
> So could anyone tell me why use it in the first place?
Same reason you're using Rogers@home: they don't have any choice -- AOL is the sole ISP in their local area. Or the alternative is even more flakey. (``We're using the best technology out there, folks! NT 4.0 on Pentium 133's. No, we don't believe in installing any Service Packs -- gawd only know what's innem. Firewalls? Why NT is secure, right out of the box! Oh, like to stay & talk some more, but I gotta go back to the office & reboot the server again.")
And I know a few ``experienced" AOL users. Their entire contact with AOL is limited to:
log on
get email (queued)
send email (queued)
log off
And the only way they will use version 6.0 of the AOL software is if AOL writes a server-based program to disable all earlier versions (some of them are still using version 2.0 IIRC), & force an upgrade. And AOL will continue its slide into levels of incompetence that no one thought possible.
UCITA will be coming up for a vote in the state of Oregon next year. See http://www.econ.state.or.us/icom/legalisc.htm for further details.
What is especially appalling is that of the four people on the committee, two are IP landsharks, one is a VP of Microsoft, & only the last one is an elected official.
> (As a sidenote, why is there always one of those smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is
> wrong in any group of computerphiles? Somebody smack those idiots.)
Something like 15 years ago, I had the chance to meet Douglas Adams at a book-signing here in Portland. (Lookingglass Bookstore -- cool establishment, worth delaying the eventual trip to Powell's to visit.)
When I arrived with the 3 volumes of his Hitchhiker's trilogy for him to autograph (the fourth had yet to be published), I noticed that there was a chorus of 3 ``smart-alecky geeks" standing to one side, in awe of him. (I had the impression that if given the sign, they would have fallen to their knees & recited parts of the book to him in prayerful supplication.) Needless to say, they were there only because he could not summon himself to demand they be chased away.
(For the curious, Adams is quite taller in Real Life than he appears in his photographs. He wore a leather jacket, & looked rather athletic to me at the time.)
When it came my turn for him to autograph the books, I got to ask him two questions:
Question one: ``So what did you write for Monty Python?"
(The liner notes for one of the books I owned had claimed he had worked for Python et Co.)
His face brightened, & he explained that he had worked for Python for only ``a lunchtime" at the bequest of Terry Gilliam, who apparently was a friend of his. It was just something his publicist had elaborated on, much as publicists elaborate about Bill Gate's programming skills.
Encouraged, I asked my second question: ``So will you write another book in the series?"
At this point, he lost his smile, & his interest in me. I forget exactly what he said, but it was along the lines of ``maybe".
``And you'll explain the story of the creature Arthur Dent keeps killing in each reincarnation?" I added, desperate to reclaim his approval.
``Yes, yes," he murmurred, already attending to the next person in line. As far as he was concerned, I was just another one of the chorus of ``smart-alecky geeks" he didn't have the feck to have chased away.
Since then, I have seen how authors throw up an amazingly artificial & off-putting persona around themselves when they meet their readers. I'm sure that Adams was doing roughly the same thing to me all of those years ago. But if I had to put a moral to my little (& doubtlessly off-topic) story, it would be this: you will always be a ``smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is wrong" to someone. So when you are presented with such a creature, deal nicely with this person, for he/she is simply trying to gain your approval in the only way he/she knows how.
And if you figure out how to do this successfully, please let me know how to do it.
Corporations -- big or small -- exist to make a profit & constantly increase profits.
But don't take my word for this. Ask any Republican or Libertarian why a given corporation should be allowed to get away with some inethical behavior (e.g., cheap products, substandard service), & once you pin them down on the facts that what was done *is* inethical, they end up whining ``Well, they're just doing what every other comapny is doing. And they have to make a profit."
Gee, if an individual down the block abuses his children, treats his spouse like a servant, abuses alcohol or drugs, & someone were to say ``Well, he's busy making more money so we'll forgive him", that would be a lame excuse to me. So why do we allow fictive individuals -- which is what a corporation actually is -- to use this excuse?
Seems to me corporations have more rights than the rest of us already. And none of the responsibilities.
According to Lars Ulrich of Metallica, if I copy a live performance, then sell you copies from the trunk of my car, it's not piracy, it's a bootleg & a l33t mu5ik thing to do. But if I make a copy without charge for a friend to listen to, I'm a pirate & stealing his Intellectual Property. (Or is it his record labels? Seems to be something in the US Federal law that says Meticallica's album library is considered ``work for hire" -- unless that law *did* get changed.)
Same applies to software. Only the difference is that software corporations are letting the programmers remind people ``Hey, love us or hate us, if you don't pay for the software you're using, we won't be in business to maintain it."
Now if those software corporations could be convinced to fix bugs before they glue on more features . . .
> I find this pretty interesting - since when did the united states government ever have to get support
> from abroad to implement policies?
Since the Constitution was first ratified back in the 1780's.
Art. 2, 2.2 grants the power of making treaties with foreign powers to the Presidnet, if 2/3s of the Senate approves. Art.1, 8.1 grants the power of making laws to enforce treaties to Congress.
Past legislation to enforce treaties with powers that the US government are not explicitly granted by the Constitution have been upheld by the Supreme Court. (If I were a lawyer, I could cite the case law on this.) It's an end-run around our implicit rights that I've been waiting to happen since Netizens first formulated the Anarchist/Libertarian nature of the 'Net.
Only I thought the boogey-man the PTB would invoke to do this would be the child pornographers, not garden-variety crackers.
>Chalk this one up as another abuse of the patent system. I can't imagine why
> the patent office didn't throw this one out... the reviewer must never have
> owned an electronic device or even an etch-a-sketch.
Could it be because of the words ``weather-proofing" and ``fish-finder"? Not being a commercial fisherman, I'd guess that in the late 1980's they did not have water-proofed viewing screens, & this guy came up with this as one solution, then patented it with dreams of making a fortune.
And what happened? The obvious solution: the companies making fish-finders started making monitors that were sealed against the weather. This dweeb's patent was worthless.
Until PDAs became popular, & people started protecting the screen by putting a clear adhesive over it. This dweeb saw his chance to make some money, & pay off his landshark bills.
>What this needs is someone with deep pockets to sue this into the ground.
Unfortunately, most people will find it cheaper just to throw money at this dweeb to make him go away. Which is what he & his landshark are hoping for.
> But,
> just because it's impossible doesn't mean someone shouldn't try. Also, and
> perhaps I'm being naive here, but I believe that when things don't work they
> fall apart eventually.
I agree.
And I think we have to positively engage the problem here, not ignore it. If we allow this governing board to remain in a chokehold by corporate interests, we will end up with the equivalent of a third world petty dictatorship, instead of a flawed government like in Europe or North America, where we have some room to live our lives in privacy & security.
>..there appears to be no way to get people to follow PRINCIPLES, not laws.
It's a problem as old as history. There's the infamous example of the wealthy Roman who discovered that inflation had drastically reduced the amount of the fine for physical violence, & so one day walked around Rome, punching out anyone he didn't like, then have his slave pay up the fine of 25 asses (probably the equivalent of either 25 cents US, or 12 New Pence, UK). If there's a loophole, people will find it.
>What people do with said law is more important than the law itself.
No, what's important is the fact that it has finally reached the tiny reptilian brains of corporations that there is a ton of money to be made under the buzz-word of ``Intellectual Property." (Whatever that means -- having looked at the Ip section of the ICANN website, they imply it to include more than patents, copyright, trade secrets, & trademarks.) And that an unfettered Internet might prevent them from making more than half a ton of money, at best.
Their answer? Legislation to limit people's freedom, in the wise of encroaching on the public domain. In other words, every time Mickey Mouse (tm) & his friends is about to slip out of copyright status into the public domain, the Disney corporation will lobby & get an extension of copyright.
Microsoft has been arguing for years that people aren't buying their software, merely leasing it.
It's this stifling effect of old men grasping after every last dollar that will keep the next generation from new discoveries & new wealth. Who wants to investigate, say, P2P data transfers, when the corporations that control the media, literature, & music feel they need to further fatten their profit margins, in order to pay their senior executives obscene salaries that will come to the next generation only thru inheritence?
Right now I'm working as part of a five-man QA team which is going to audit a utility billing software package.
Good news: at 42, I'm the baby of the group. It looks like we'll be able to do the job in 40-hour weeks (i.e., no overtime), we're getting the training we need, & life is good.
The bad news: the week before we kicked off this project, I mentioned to one of my coworkers (his age is about 50) about my fear that I could get laid off work & it would take months to find another job. He understood me without much effort: when you've been in the corporate jungle^Wworld for a couple of decades, you've seen people screwed out of their rightful pay, pensions, & rewards in order to keep some PHB happy & content. Laying people off because they are ``too old" is just one more ugly stunt.
I wish I had better advice than to always keep looking over your shoulder, & never relax concerning your security. Even if your boss, & your boss's boss are clued & cool, they can be replaced in a matter of weeks, & your nice little job that you hoped to retire from has turned into a greased chute into hell.
>Strangely though, they normally have a copy of Windows on them anyway,
>its probably what they use for testing.
The other weekend I installed a new SCSI harddrive in my computer, & before I fdisked & mkfsext2'd it, I took a look at what was there. Hmm: fdisk says it has a Win98 partition on it. Mount it, look at the files on, & it appears that someone had done just that, tested the drive with some second-rate software. I suspect it was all they had -- & probably the only good use I've seen for this product.
I felt good reclaiming the hard drive with a real OS.
When I looked at this post, it was rated ``5, Informative" (although another quick peek has shown it has dropped to ``4"). Unless you practice a form of anal hygene I'd rather not know about, this post doesn't provide any information that can't be found elsewhere in this discussion.
Not to say that I don't agree with this rant. (let's give the man a wire brush & a map to the local telemarketer's call center -- then deny all knowledge of this.) But there are other options to scoring a post positively beyond ``Informative."
>Indeed, I think I do have some problems. However, the system runs happily (at 100% CPU usage) for days on end, but has never
>stayed alive for more than about 4 hours with a Netscape running.
I've seen this on my own system, & I think it's due to a funky memory chip.
Hint: for torture-testing a system, can't due worse than running the Mersenne Prime program on it from http://www.mersenne.org. (The download page is at http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm.) Download, untar, run it as mprime -m, & select the torture test option. Oh yeah, & be sure to read the reeadme.txt file.
> Usenet started dieing after the emergence of many of the sites like slashdot and it's use of a very unreliable protocol for transporting
> information around.
Yes and no.
Usenet was showing a drop in traffic long before/. ever appeared on the scene. (And AFAIK,/. was the first web site to offer a manageable reader feedback area where people could read & comment on each other's posts.)
Why this is, I can't say; but I have seen the more serious usenet groups (e.g. comp.mail.misc) fall from several dozen post in a day to less than 10 over a period of a couple of years. Part of this (speaking from my impression) is probably due to spam, part of it due to scaling problems (to offer a full newsfeed in 1996, you needed more than a T1 line to suck all of the articles down -- & many ISPs are falling back to a strategy of contracting their newsfeeds to a third party, & only sucking down those newsgroups that its users read), & part of it due to competition for eyes with the web (``comp.mail.misc? What kind of URL is that? I always go to www.jesseberst.com for all of my computer news! I just click on the links & he tells me everything I should know").
On the other hand, mailinglists seem healthy & just as vibrant as ever -- at least from the half dozen I am subscribed to. Spam is more easily dealt with, you don't get as many trolls or off-topic posts, but you still have 100% of the kooks & characters the Usenet cabal established for you in 1990!
>Um... you obviously do not understand how these things work. How do you think Windows got installed on that computer, as a gift
>from your OEM?
I meant ``since" in the temporial sense. As in ``_after_ I bought the machine."
And at least I got install media with it. Nowadays, the best some poor sucker can hope for when you buy a computer with the Windows' license is a CD that will wipe & reinstall the original image of the hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wow, I just compared Bill Gates to Buddha. I suddenly feel the need to go wash.
Naw, just remember the old Zen koan:
``If you meet the Buddha on the road, KILL HIM!"
(Note to the humor impared & windows-lovers out there: yes, I *am* making a joke.)
Geoff
> I previously believed him to be a greedy, naieve, power-hungry egomaniac. If this article is accurate, and he will be giving away
> his money for food and medicine instead of for computers (which are pretty useless if you don't have anything to eat) then maybe
> slashdot should look into not portraying his as such an evil person. Maybe he has finally matured?
For the last souple of years (perhaps under the influence of this wife Malinda, perhaps not), Gates has been throwing money at various philanthropic targets. We're talking serious stuff like money to help homeless youth in the US Northwest, or to fund school programs in low-income school districts.
Does this mean he has gained a conscience? No, he's always demonstrated signs that his political views are left of center; it's something of a hold-over form growing in up in Seattle. I'd say his own political views are best described as a ``limousine liberal." He is eager to throw money as ``good" causes, but has never thought about how much money he made by causing problems that need to be addressed by those ``good" causes. He is eager to give millions to provide drugs for Africa, but does not understand that Africa does not have the money to buy computer software at $50-- a pop. (MS Office being extra.)
Have no fear: Billg is still the ``greedy, naive power-hungry egomaniac" we all know & love. And he's got a ring of folks around him who will do theri utmost to keep him that way. They check his computer daily to make sure he'll never see a BSOD, & assure him that he is the genius he thinks he is.
After all, if he realized just how bad things truly were, & how much he could have done to prevent those bad things, he'd also see that they were nothing more than a band of toadies & parasites, & be out on the street without stock options or job prospects.
Geoff
Most of the time when I read /., it's from work. For the last couple of years, I've had to put up with NT on the desktop. At my current employer, they talk about moving us all over to Win2000. (I think I'll find out just how much they want me to work there by telling them, ``If you make me use Win 2000, I'll quit.")
Last place, the corporate standard was Netscape on NT; this one is IE on NT. Next place will be anything that is not Windows. Unless I leave because they insisted on ``upgrading" me.
Geoff
> I've never been more proud to live in seattle :)
/. is d00med to failure.)
Why? Because a pig flew first class to your city?
Hmmf! Let's drop the pig into the d00m parody, & fly a cat first class. Yeah! Not only will the players get k-rad k3wl special effects, a high score means you get BACON!!!
(On an unrelated note, I only drank 3 Full Sail Stouts tonight before posting this. I guess my campaign to become the Homer Simpson of
Geoff
> I'm the real billg, and after I read that, I was wondering if I actually did write that...
No you're not. If you were the real Billg, you'd be saying something like:
``Don't those (expletive deleted) know I invented the microcomputer??? Why aren't those little (expletive deleteds) glad I made the Personal Computer cheap enough that they can play their little masturbatory games with them??? This is random!!! Entirely random!!! Who uses Linux??? A bunch of (deleted)-know-alls who will be starving on the (deleted) streets because they aren't making any money from their labors!!!"
The scarey thing is that I can see him emailing all of his business associates this exact passage. And all of them would reply with ``yes, you are right. You have massive badwidth. These goobers don't know how much you did for them.
Then again, I've drank 4 Alaskan Amber beers. I could probably imagine a lot of things I'd rather not admit to. Like Steve Ballinger in a pink rubber tutu dancing over the floor, singign: ``I won't stop unless you buy 5 more copies of Windows 2000!"
]knowing I'll lose lots of karma down for this post[
Geoff
> Why is everybody so obsessed with source code, Microsoft's or anybody else's? Just what in the heck are you going to *do* with
> a glimpse of some of the source code to Office or Windows?
Grab a bunch of old CS textbooks, & do a diff against various parts of the code. And publish the findings. Especially if the textbooks happen to date to the 1960's. (We all know how Microsoft uses modern code -- none of that old crap from the 1970's like UNIX does.)
I still want to know just how many rat's-nests of speghetti code are nothing more than thousands of man-hours of patches to fix a mistake caused when some coder forgot to include a line he was copying from a textbook at 4:00am.
Bet there's more than a few.
Geoff
> AOL may not be the choice for power users, but they are most certainly not going downhill. They are, by a huge margin, the #1
> consumer ISP.
I was referring to the experience an end-user has. AOL tries to represent itself as a friendly, small-town sort of place, but is more & more an empty suburban sprawl around a strip mall whose principal tenants are strip clubs, porno shops, & telemarketer call centers.
Steve Case once promised that an AOL customer would never see an ad on AOL -- & that the most important thing about AOL was the community. But without warning or even a preliminary survery, AOL changed all of that. (Case has this habit of making his decisions without warning.) Now AOL customers get bombarded with all sorts of ads, & their emphasis (thanks to Bob Pittman the ex-MTV guy) is now on a watered-down version of television. (That is, ``shut up & watch.")
As for users attitudes, from what I've seen it tends to be one of these four types:
1) doesn't care
2) doesn't know any better
3) doesn't like it, thinks it's k-rad kewl to complain about AOL
4) doesn't like it, is leaving/has left
If this is the ``consumer Internet experience," I'm glad I'm not part of it.
Geoff
> It allows you to put the right angle on the quotes, and it's the preferred way of using quotes in high-quality typesetting
> environments (TeX, for instance).
Hmm. I picked it up as a minor idiosyncracy when I first started reading Usenet back in 1992. (``Everybody else was doing it -- & it looks cool.") Didn't know about the other part, though.
Geoff
> it's a CORPORATION, and as such, can be
> severly hurt by bad publicity. it's also subject to government regulation.
Except that they've taken the first steps to isolate themselves from public opinion.
While probing the various links about the November meeting, I found the web page where the comments that get sent to comments@icann.org get posted. The page links to no letter more recent than May of 1999, & itself was last updated on 23 April 2000. (At least that's what it says.)
They're trying REAL hard to ignore their community now, aren't they?
Geoff
Once upon a time, I used to be an AOL customer. Then their service got worse (this was after the 5er's hacker attack), & after a few years I moved on.
With that in mind, I have to share probably the most perceptive words on AOL ever written. From Michael Wolff's book, _Burn_Rate_:
``I never wanted to do a deal with AOL. At best, AOL just watered down the experience of the Internet and network technology; at worst, it was in some other business -- it was a direct marketing organization, infomercial shit.
``I never knew anybody who took AOL seriously as an Internet company.
``I never knew an AOL customer who didn't feel seriously abused by AOL.
``I never knew an AOL information provider who didn't feel that AOL was about to start turning the screws.
``I never knew an AOL executive who didn't think he or she was playing a part in a very serious shell game that, ideally, would end in an acquisition of AOL by a reputable company.
``I never knew anybody who really wanted to work for AOL, located in true Nowheresville, Virginia."
Wolff wrote this in 1998, long after I left AOL. from what I've heard & read, AOL has gone even further downhill.
Geoff
> So could anyone tell me why use it in the first place?
Same reason you're using Rogers@home: they don't have any choice -- AOL is the sole ISP in their local area. Or the alternative is even more flakey. (``We're using the best technology out there, folks! NT 4.0 on Pentium 133's. No, we don't believe in installing any Service Packs -- gawd only know what's innem. Firewalls? Why NT is secure, right out of the box! Oh, like to stay & talk some more, but I gotta go back to the office & reboot the server again.")
And I know a few ``experienced" AOL users. Their entire contact with AOL is limited to:
log on
get email (queued)
send email (queued)
log off
And the only way they will use version 6.0 of the AOL software is if AOL writes a server-based program to disable all earlier versions (some of them are still using version 2.0 IIRC), & force an upgrade. And AOL will continue its slide into levels of incompetence that no one thought possible.
Geoff
UCITA will be coming up for a vote in the state of Oregon next year. See http://www.econ.state.or.us/icom/legalisc.htm for further details.
What is especially appalling is that of the four people on the committee, two are IP landsharks, one is a VP of Microsoft, & only the last one is an elected official.
Guess which way this committe is leaning.
Geoff
> (As a sidenote, why is there always one of those smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is
> wrong in any group of computerphiles? Somebody smack those idiots.)
Something like 15 years ago, I had the chance to meet Douglas Adams at a book-signing here in Portland. (Lookingglass Bookstore -- cool establishment, worth delaying the eventual trip to Powell's to visit.)
When I arrived with the 3 volumes of his Hitchhiker's trilogy for him to autograph (the fourth had yet to be published), I noticed that there was a chorus of 3 ``smart-alecky geeks" standing to one side, in awe of him. (I had the impression that if given the sign, they would have fallen to their knees & recited parts of the book to him in prayerful supplication.) Needless to say, they were there only because he could not summon himself to demand they be chased away.
(For the curious, Adams is quite taller in Real Life than he appears in his photographs. He wore a leather jacket, & looked rather athletic to me at the time.)
When it came my turn for him to autograph the books, I got to ask him two questions:
Question one: ``So what did you write for Monty Python?"
(The liner notes for one of the books I owned had claimed he had worked for Python et Co.)
His face brightened, & he explained that he had worked for Python for only ``a lunchtime" at the bequest of Terry Gilliam, who apparently was a friend of his. It was just something his publicist had elaborated on, much as publicists elaborate about Bill Gate's programming skills.
Encouraged, I asked my second question: ``So will you write another book in the series?"
At this point, he lost his smile, & his interest in me. I forget exactly what he said, but it was along the lines of ``maybe".
``And you'll explain the story of the creature Arthur Dent keeps killing in each reincarnation?" I added, desperate to reclaim his approval.
``Yes, yes," he murmurred, already attending to the next person in line. As far as he was concerned, I was just another one of the chorus of ``smart-alecky geeks" he didn't have the feck to have chased away.
Since then, I have seen how authors throw up an amazingly artificial & off-putting persona around themselves when they meet their readers. I'm sure that Adams was doing roughly the same thing to me all of those years ago. But if I had to put a moral to my little (& doubtlessly off-topic) story, it would be this: you will always be a ``smart-alecky geeks with the nervous sniff and inability to shut up when he is wrong" to someone. So when you are presented with such a creature, deal nicely with this person, for he/she is simply trying to gain your approval in the only way he/she knows how.
And if you figure out how to do this successfully, please let me know how to do it.
Geoff
Corporations -- big or small -- exist to make a profit & constantly increase profits.
But don't take my word for this. Ask any Republican or Libertarian why a given corporation should be allowed to get away with some inethical behavior (e.g., cheap products, substandard service), & once you pin them down on the facts that what was done *is* inethical, they end up whining ``Well, they're just doing what every other comapny is doing. And they have to make a profit."
Gee, if an individual down the block abuses his children, treats his spouse like a servant, abuses alcohol or drugs, & someone were to say ``Well, he's busy making more money so we'll forgive him", that would be a lame excuse to me. So why do we allow fictive individuals -- which is what a corporation actually is -- to use this excuse?
Seems to me corporations have more rights than the rest of us already. And none of the responsibilities.
Geoff
> Piracy is ALWAYS wrong.
Define piracy.
According to Lars Ulrich of Metallica, if I copy a live performance, then sell you copies from the trunk of my car, it's not piracy, it's a bootleg & a l33t mu5ik thing to do. But if I make a copy without charge for a friend to listen to, I'm a pirate & stealing his Intellectual Property. (Or is it his record labels? Seems to be something in the US Federal law that says Meticallica's album library is considered ``work for hire" -- unless that law *did* get changed.)
Same applies to software. Only the difference is that software corporations are letting the programmers remind people ``Hey, love us or hate us, if you don't pay for the software you're using, we won't be in business to maintain it."
Now if those software corporations could be convinced to fix bugs before they glue on more features . . .
Geoff
> I find this pretty interesting - since when did the united states government ever have to get support
> from abroad to implement policies?
Since the Constitution was first ratified back in the 1780's.
Art. 2, 2.2 grants the power of making treaties with foreign powers to the Presidnet, if 2/3s of the Senate approves. Art.1, 8.1 grants the power of making laws to enforce treaties to Congress.
Past legislation to enforce treaties with powers that the US government are not explicitly granted by the Constitution have been upheld by the Supreme Court. (If I were a lawyer, I could cite the case law on this.) It's an end-run around our implicit rights that I've been waiting to happen since Netizens first formulated the Anarchist/Libertarian nature of the 'Net.
Only I thought the boogey-man the PTB would invoke to do this would be the child pornographers, not garden-variety crackers.
Geoff
>Chalk this one up as another abuse of the patent system. I can't imagine why
> the patent office didn't throw this one out... the reviewer must never have
> owned an electronic device or even an etch-a-sketch.
Could it be because of the words ``weather-proofing" and ``fish-finder"? Not being a commercial fisherman, I'd guess that in the late 1980's they did not have water-proofed viewing screens, & this guy came up with this as one solution, then patented it with dreams of making a fortune.
And what happened? The obvious solution: the companies making fish-finders started making monitors that were sealed against the weather. This dweeb's patent was worthless.
Until PDAs became popular, & people started protecting the screen by putting a clear adhesive over it. This dweeb saw his chance to make some money, & pay off his landshark bills.
>What this needs is someone with deep pockets to sue this into the ground.
Unfortunately, most people will find it cheaper just to throw money at this dweeb to make him go away. Which is what he & his landshark are hoping for.
Ain't American Entrepreneurialism grand?
Geoff
> But,
> just because it's impossible doesn't mean someone shouldn't try. Also, and
> perhaps I'm being naive here, but I believe that when things don't work they
> fall apart eventually.
I agree.
And I think we have to positively engage the problem here, not ignore it. If we allow this governing board to remain in a chokehold by corporate interests, we will end up with the equivalent of a third world petty dictatorship, instead of a flawed government like in Europe or North America, where we have some room to live our lives in privacy & security.
Geoff
>..there appears to be no way to get people to follow PRINCIPLES, not laws.
It's a problem as old as history. There's the infamous example of the wealthy Roman who discovered that inflation had drastically reduced the amount of the fine for physical violence, & so one day walked around Rome, punching out anyone he didn't like, then have his slave pay up the fine of 25 asses (probably the equivalent of either 25 cents US, or 12 New Pence, UK). If there's a loophole, people will find it.
>What people do with said law is more important than the law itself.
No, what's important is the fact that it has finally reached the tiny reptilian brains of corporations that there is a ton of money to be made under the buzz-word of ``Intellectual Property." (Whatever that means -- having looked at the Ip section of the ICANN website, they imply it to include more than patents, copyright, trade secrets, & trademarks.) And that an unfettered Internet might prevent them from making more than half a ton of money, at best.
Their answer? Legislation to limit people's freedom, in the wise of encroaching on the public domain. In other words, every time Mickey Mouse (tm) & his friends is about to slip out of copyright status into the public domain, the Disney corporation will lobby & get an extension of copyright.
Microsoft has been arguing for years that people aren't buying their software, merely leasing it.
It's this stifling effect of old men grasping after every last dollar that will keep the next generation from new discoveries & new wealth. Who wants to investigate, say, P2P data transfers, when the corporations that control the media, literature, & music feel they need to further fatten their profit margins, in order to pay their senior executives obscene salaries that will come to the next generation only thru inheritence?
Geoff
Right now I'm working as part of a five-man QA team which is going to audit a utility billing software package.
Good news: at 42, I'm the baby of the group. It looks like we'll be able to do the job in 40-hour weeks (i.e., no overtime), we're getting the training we need, & life is good.
The bad news: the week before we kicked off this project, I mentioned to one of my coworkers (his age is about 50) about my fear that I could get laid off work & it would take months to find another job. He understood me without much effort: when you've been in the corporate jungle^Wworld for a couple of decades, you've seen people screwed out of their rightful pay, pensions, & rewards in order to keep some PHB happy & content. Laying people off because they are ``too old" is just one more ugly stunt.
I wish I had better advice than to always keep looking over your shoulder, & never relax concerning your security. Even if your boss, & your boss's boss are clued & cool, they can be replaced in a matter of weeks, & your nice little job that you hoped to retire from has turned into a greased chute into hell.
Geoff
>Strangely though, they normally have a copy of Windows on them anyway,
>its probably what they use for testing.
The other weekend I installed a new SCSI harddrive in my computer, & before I fdisked & mkfsext2'd it, I took a look at what was there. Hmm: fdisk says it has a Win98 partition on it. Mount it, look at the files on, & it appears that someone had done just that, tested the drive with some second-rate software. I suspect it was all they had -- & probably the only good use I've seen for this product.
I felt good reclaiming the hard drive with a real OS.
Geoff
When I looked at this post, it was rated ``5, Informative" (although another quick peek has shown it has dropped to ``4"). Unless you practice a form of anal hygene I'd rather not know about, this post doesn't provide any information that can't be found elsewhere in this discussion.
Not to say that I don't agree with this rant. (let's give the man a wire brush & a map to the local telemarketer's call center -- then deny all knowledge of this.) But there are other options to scoring a post positively beyond ``Informative."
Furrfu!
Geoff
>Indeed, I think I do have some problems. However, the system runs happily (at 100% CPU usage) for days on end, but has never
>stayed alive for more than about 4 hours with a Netscape running.
I've seen this on my own system, & I think it's due to a funky memory chip.
Hint: for torture-testing a system, can't due worse than running the Mersenne Prime program on it from http://www.mersenne.org. (The download page is at http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm.) Download, untar, run it as mprime -m, & select the torture test option. Oh yeah, & be sure to read the reeadme.txt file.
Geoff
> Usenet started dieing after the emergence of many of the sites like slashdot and it's use of a very unreliable protocol for transporting
/. ever appeared on the scene. (And AFAIK, /. was the first web site to offer a manageable reader feedback area where people could read & comment on each other's posts.)
> information around.
Yes and no.
Usenet was showing a drop in traffic long before
Why this is, I can't say; but I have seen the more serious usenet groups (e.g. comp.mail.misc) fall from several dozen post in a day to less than 10 over a period of a couple of years. Part of this (speaking from my impression) is probably due to spam, part of it due to scaling problems (to offer a full newsfeed in 1996, you needed more than a T1 line to suck all of the articles down -- & many ISPs are falling back to a strategy of contracting their newsfeeds to a third party, & only sucking down those newsgroups that its users read), & part of it due to competition for eyes with the web (``comp.mail.misc? What kind of URL is that? I always go to www.jesseberst.com for all of my computer news! I just click on the links & he tells me everything I should know").
On the other hand, mailinglists seem healthy & just as vibrant as ever -- at least from the half dozen I am subscribed to. Spam is more easily dealt with, you don't get as many trolls or off-topic posts, but you still have 100% of the kooks & characters the Usenet cabal established for you in 1990!
Geoff
>Um... you obviously do not understand how these things work. How do you think Windows got installed on that computer, as a gift
>from your OEM?
I meant ``since" in the temporial sense. As in ``_after_ I bought the machine."
And at least I got install media with it. Nowadays, the best some poor sucker can hope for when you buy a computer with the Windows' license is a CD that will wipe & reinstall the original image of the hard drive.
Sorry to be unlcear.
Geoff