Nice emotive language, bringing up the KKK. I think you will find most people who poopoo MS have slightly different reasoning than the Klan.
To mention a couple of those reasons:
1. Microsoft has broken the law, and a fairly major one, and avoided punishment. In other words, they have been willing to act against laws designed to support businesses and consumers from unethical activities. (You personally are reaping the benefits of that lack of legal and legitimate punishment, so I can understand your defense of the corp.)
2. Microsoft has leveraged their immense wealth, and corporate/social impact, in trying to avoid laws in Europe, designed to protect businesses and consumers.
3. Microsoft has a history of dealing in bad faith, and using destructive and vindictive business practices. Although not illegal, perhaps, they are certainly a valid reason for a negative view of the corporation.
4. Microsoft has a history of offering unready, ill conceived software to the market, and avoiding market backlash due to their monopolistic position. Certainly, they come up with some really good software, but, as often as not, they rush out poorly designed and/or poorly tested solutions. This gives the impression that they are more interested in cashing in on their monopoly status, at the expense of value to their paying customers.
And many more...
You may be happy where you work, and you may be happy with your corporation, but please don't spew such irrational nonsense when there are plenty of legitimate reasons to consider your company bad news. It may be quite rosy working where you work, but that is quite irrelevant. Bill Gates may be a really decent guy, and a wonderful philanthropist, but that is also irrelevant. Your corporation is behaving against the interests of many of us who don't work there. Evil, no. I don't buy the concept. Worthy of rebuke, certainly. Bad, certainly.
Ok, to address the several outrageous things you said:
"Flame me all you want, but all you people thinking this was blown way out of proportion aren't thinking very realisticly"
Realistically, it was blown out of proportion. It was, in reality, not a bomb, so the response was by definition unrealistic.
"But one thing that any soldier who has fought in any conflict will tell you is that you NEVER touch something that catches your eye as potentially interesting until you can determine that it's not dangerous."
Okay, just because you are at war does not mean Boston is a place of "conflict". If you feel it is, that Boston is in actuality a warzone, in the sense that Baghdad, Cu Chi, or Iwo Jima were warzones, then you should probably just stay at home, and let everybody else who has a decent assessment of the probable risks get on with their business. This doesn't even address the fact that many soldiers don't know that, since it still has some efficacy.
"These things could very well have been rigged with explosives or biologic/chemical agents. The flashing lights could have been intended to attract attention to them."
They could have also been a new form of slot machine, wrongly configured, which would put a million dollars in your bank account when you stepped near them. I only mention it since you are talking "realisticly".
"If I was a terrorist and wanted to maximize casualties in a major metropolitan city I just might pack a bunch of explosives into something like these advertising devices. Rig it to start flashing around rush hour and have a motion switch or timer to set off the explosives. Somebody walking by decides to take it home as a souvineer, or just to see what it does, and the explosives get detonated."
You have an inaccurate view of how dangerous explosives are. Any device than can be picked up and carried home as a souvenir is unlikely to kill anyone except the person carrying it. Personally, I would have a different tack. I'd wait until a moment of police paranoia caused mass congestion of people, and, having prepared for instant deployment, I would send a suicide bomber weighed down with a hundred pounds of decent explosives into that area. Still, unlikely to kill very many people, but a lot more successful than your souvenir scenario.
"People seem to forget the lessons learned from 9/11, the train bombings in Spain, the subway bombings in London, etc. Just because there haven't been any similar mass-transit attacks in the US doesn't mean it'll never happen."
Yes, some people have undoubtedly learned little from those attacks. However, some others have learned the wrong things, or over-learned the right things. It sickens me when free men are willing to argue themselves into slavery.
All it takes is one or two intelligent and motivated terrorists to come up with something like this." br/>
Apparently it didn't even take one or two motivated terrorists. It took a cartoon advertisement.
Don't forget having to put on the all-vegetable-fabric blue smocks to get on a plane or in a government building. Ten years ago, such an idea would have appeared ludicrous to me, now I'm not so sure. When people are so sh*t scared all the time, largely because a couple of planes killed a few people, they make for sh+tty citizens, and even sh*ttier govts or cops.
This article makes me think, though... Could I call in and say I saw some funny lights on the Luxxor, or on some big display in Time's Square, that I think might be bombs, and get the same reaction? I doubt it. So maybe there's some hope the current panic will end, and people will return to the realization that life isn't some big orgy of fear and hostility and death. (At least, any moreso than it's always been.)
No it is NOT stealing. It is copyright INFRINGEMENT (at least in my country). If your entire philosophy of the issue is based on equivocating the term "steal" into meaninglessness, then you really have no understanding of the issue. There is a reason why IP has been governed by a different set of laws, and one of the main ones is that it is not stealing, but should have SOME protection.
You think that stealing from Best Buy is better? That's strange. You are actually costing the IP holder (or their proxy) something when you do that. When you download it, it costs them nothing. To say it costs them a sale is wishful thinking, and entirely unsubstantiated. There may be truth to it, but without that individual data, it has no actual basis in fact.
Who the f*ck would mod that troll? Inconsistency of tagging and verbosity are major problems with VB. Yeah, good code can be written in it, undoubtedly, but the markup has a pretty heavy overhead. It has its uses, and good code can be written in it, but it definitely falls short on quickness of coding and terseness (and hence productivity) compared to equally functional models.
I saw "pony", "laptop", "girlfriend", and "my own... parts" and almost lost it. "Newegg" was a bit of a let down, though. And it was all nicely wrapped in a container of "what I want". Jeez.
If GM created a car that locked me out due to anti-theft features, and caused me to have to sit on a phone with some half-wit and explain and cajole that I actually bought my car and prove it somehow, would I accept that? Would anybody? Corporate I'P' c*cksuckers are reaping the benefits of customer ignorance and the industry status quo, and at the same time demanding I'P' protection in a way GM never would for their vehicles, when no one actually loses anything by supposed 'theft'. ie: They are reaping unusual benefits, compared to most markets, and demanding special protections, compared to most markets. If it had to come to it, I'd rather do without.
My question is:
After such treatment from MS, why continue using their products on five machines? You've probably done it already, but if not, wouldn't it be worth it to check out Mac or Linux offerings and see if you can, even with some difficulty or cost, get the same functionality? Why support a company which treats their customers like that? I guess if you gotta, you gotta, but it's really too bad.
"Bowing down to credentials is the mark of the fanboy, respecting who says things instead of what is being said."
Agreed. However, saying stuff that even I, as a user of digital audio recording software (both as a home user on a PC and (granted only a few times) in genuine studios) can sniff a fundamental misunderstanding on, does not recommend your opinion to me, especially when you post as an AC. By my experience, Jack does a stunningly good job, and given the same hardware, I greatly doubt that the (???) $5000+++ (???)$15000... packages I've seen would actually be able to compete on desktop machines. If I saw Jack on the same hardware as those bigger commercial packages, I suspect (though I don't know) it would be able to keep up. This is, of course, my own anecdotal experience, but posting as an AC, and then saying things that, by my experience, are wrong, doesn't help your argument.
I am not a sound engineer, or even remotely an expert of the internals of audio software, but your complaints struck me as philosophical idealism which doesn't exist in digital audio recording software anywhere. As AGram said, you DO have to configure the daemon to get optimal performance. Type jackd in a terminal, and you should understand the options given well enough to get the daemon running fairly optimally, assuming you understand the basis of digital recording. If latency is still a problem, consider what to do about it.... Is your hardware good enough (I've got garbage and can get decent performance)? What other processes are you running? If you were serious about setting up a desktop for the decent audio recording, reconfigure some of the CRON fucketry, and kill various unnecessary servers for the task. If you were on Windows, you would know enough to kill certain services. The same thing applies in Linux.
Why on Earth are MS signing drivers which suck, are buggy, and slow? They are giving trust to Vista drivers without a reason to trust those drivers. Does this sound secure to you?
If I gave an explanation like that for a malfunction in Linux, Microsoft fans would be sitting back smugly thinking that MS "just works", and Linux is not ready for the desktop. Hmm...
I think it would be more accurate to say that DRM exists primarily to protect the profits of billionaire/+100millionaire corporations. I think it would also be more accurate to say that we have to live with DRM because these billionaire/+100millionaire corporations are able to pressure politicians into creating inequitable laws, for their own profitability, and at the cost of the general human interest. The rest of it, I agree with.:)
That's what I've been thinking.... For one thing, I suspect the iPhone, on release, will have a lot more storage than 8 GB. I bet if the keynote had mentioned 30 GB iPhones, their iPod sales would have suffered a little due to people waiting, but when one hears 8 GB, it still makes sense to buy an iPod for the storage.
If three things were different in the iPhone: A lot more storage, no carrier lock in, and (to dream) it had GPS, I think they could have sold them for at least $1000 and made a killing. As it is, I don't think it's going to make as huge of a splash as Apple's last few major offerings. I have no doubt it'll be a quality product, but I'm not entirely sure it's tailored any better to the likely markets than several other cheaper, competitor products.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's really sure, but it happens with surprising regularity.
I knew I kept the Cop-killer album around for a reason.
Nice emotive language, bringing up the KKK. I think you will find most people who poopoo MS have slightly different reasoning than the Klan.
To mention a couple of those reasons:
1. Microsoft has broken the law, and a fairly major one, and avoided punishment. In other words, they have been willing to act against laws designed to support businesses and consumers from unethical activities. (You personally are reaping the benefits of that lack of legal and legitimate punishment, so I can understand your defense of the corp.)
2. Microsoft has leveraged their immense wealth, and corporate/social impact, in trying to avoid laws in Europe, designed to protect businesses and consumers.
3. Microsoft has a history of dealing in bad faith, and using destructive and vindictive business practices. Although not illegal, perhaps, they are certainly a valid reason for a negative view of the corporation.
4. Microsoft has a history of offering unready, ill conceived software to the market, and avoiding market backlash due to their monopolistic position. Certainly, they come up with some really good software, but, as often as not, they rush out poorly designed and/or poorly tested solutions. This gives the impression that they are more interested in cashing in on their monopoly status, at the expense of value to their paying customers.
And many more...
You may be happy where you work, and you may be happy with your corporation, but please don't spew such irrational nonsense when there are plenty of legitimate reasons to consider your company bad news. It may be quite rosy working where you work, but that is quite irrelevant. Bill Gates may be a really decent guy, and a wonderful philanthropist, but that is also irrelevant. Your corporation is behaving against the interests of many of us who don't work there. Evil, no. I don't buy the concept. Worthy of rebuke, certainly. Bad, certainly.
Ok, to address the several outrageous things you said:
/>
Apparently it didn't even take one or two motivated terrorists. It took a cartoon advertisement.
"Flame me all you want, but all you people thinking this was blown way out of proportion aren't thinking very realisticly"
Realistically, it was blown out of proportion. It was, in reality, not a bomb, so the response was by definition unrealistic.
"But one thing that any soldier who has fought in any conflict will tell you is that you NEVER touch something that catches your eye as potentially interesting until you can determine that it's not dangerous."
Okay, just because you are at war does not mean Boston is a place of "conflict". If you feel it is, that Boston is in actuality a warzone, in the sense that Baghdad, Cu Chi, or Iwo Jima were warzones, then you should probably just stay at home, and let everybody else who has a decent assessment of the probable risks get on with their business. This doesn't even address the fact that many soldiers don't know that, since it still has some efficacy.
"These things could very well have been rigged with explosives or biologic/chemical agents. The flashing lights could have been intended to attract attention to them."
They could have also been a new form of slot machine, wrongly configured, which would put a million dollars in your bank account when you stepped near them. I only mention it since you are talking "realisticly".
"If I was a terrorist and wanted to maximize casualties in a major metropolitan city I just might pack a bunch of explosives into something like these advertising devices. Rig it to start flashing around rush hour and have a motion switch or timer to set off the explosives. Somebody walking by decides to take it home as a souvineer, or just to see what it does, and the explosives get detonated."
You have an inaccurate view of how dangerous explosives are. Any device than can be picked up and carried home as a souvenir is unlikely to kill anyone except the person carrying it. Personally, I would have a different tack. I'd wait until a moment of police paranoia caused mass congestion of people, and, having prepared for instant deployment, I would send a suicide bomber weighed down with a hundred pounds of decent explosives into that area. Still, unlikely to kill very many people, but a lot more successful than your souvenir scenario.
"People seem to forget the lessons learned from 9/11, the train bombings in Spain, the subway bombings in London, etc. Just because there haven't been any similar mass-transit attacks in the US doesn't mean it'll never happen."
Yes, some people have undoubtedly learned little from those attacks. However, some others have learned the wrong things, or over-learned the right things. It sickens me when free men are willing to argue themselves into slavery.
All it takes is one or two intelligent and motivated terrorists to come up with something like this."
br
Isn't that their State motto?
Don't forget having to put on the all-vegetable-fabric blue smocks to get on a plane or in a government building. Ten years ago, such an idea would have appeared ludicrous to me, now I'm not so sure. When people are so sh*t scared all the time, largely because a couple of planes killed a few people, they make for sh+tty citizens, and even sh*ttier govts or cops.
This article makes me think, though... Could I call in and say I saw some funny lights on the Luxxor, or on some big display in Time's Square, that I think might be bombs, and get the same reaction? I doubt it. So maybe there's some hope the current panic will end, and people will return to the realization that life isn't some big orgy of fear and hostility and death. (At least, any moreso than it's always been.)
No it is NOT stealing. It is copyright INFRINGEMENT (at least in my country). If your entire philosophy of the issue is based on equivocating the term "steal" into meaninglessness, then you really have no understanding of the issue. There is a reason why IP has been governed by a different set of laws, and one of the main ones is that it is not stealing, but should have SOME protection.
You think that stealing from Best Buy is better? That's strange. You are actually costing the IP holder (or their proxy) something when you do that. When you download it, it costs them nothing. To say it costs them a sale is wishful thinking, and entirely unsubstantiated. There may be truth to it, but without that individual data, it has no actual basis in fact.
Who the f*ck would mod that troll? Inconsistency of tagging and verbosity are major problems with VB. Yeah, good code can be written in it, undoubtedly, but the markup has a pretty heavy overhead. It has its uses, and good code can be written in it, but it definitely falls short on quickness of coding and terseness (and hence productivity) compared to equally functional models.
Somebody mod the parent up.
No good, because then Americans could point out how unfair it is since it's metric.
...Shows Gonzales is either ignorant or lying.
I saw "pony", "laptop", "girlfriend", and "my own... parts" and almost lost it. "Newegg" was a bit of a let down, though. And it was all nicely wrapped in a container of "what I want". Jeez.
But thanks for the unintentional FUD anyhow.
Something just occurred to me...
[Sorry,car analogy]
If GM created a car that locked me out due to anti-theft features, and caused me to have to sit on a phone with some half-wit and explain and cajole that I actually bought my car and prove it somehow, would I accept that? Would anybody? Corporate I'P' c*cksuckers are reaping the benefits of customer ignorance and the industry status quo, and at the same time demanding I'P' protection in a way GM never would for their vehicles, when no one actually loses anything by supposed 'theft'. ie: They are reaping unusual benefits, compared to most markets, and demanding special protections, compared to most markets. If it had to come to it, I'd rather do without.
My question is:
After such treatment from MS, why continue using their products on five machines? You've probably done it already, but if not, wouldn't it be worth it to check out Mac or Linux offerings and see if you can, even with some difficulty or cost, get the same functionality? Why support a company which treats their customers like that? I guess if you gotta, you gotta, but it's really too bad.
I believe we call it Gnometris, though I'm not a hardcore gamer....
Shouldn't that equation be:
Evil Empire + Evil Empire = Suse's Ultra Sinister Edition ???
"Bowing down to credentials is the mark of the fanboy, respecting who says things instead of what is being said."
Agreed. However, saying stuff that even I, as a user of digital audio recording software (both as a home user on a PC and (granted only a few times) in genuine studios) can sniff a fundamental misunderstanding on, does not recommend your opinion to me, especially when you post as an AC. By my experience, Jack does a stunningly good job, and given the same hardware, I greatly doubt that the (???) $5000+++ (???)$15000... packages I've seen would actually be able to compete on desktop machines. If I saw Jack on the same hardware as those bigger commercial packages, I suspect (though I don't know) it would be able to keep up. This is, of course, my own anecdotal experience, but posting as an AC, and then saying things that, by my experience, are wrong, doesn't help your argument.
I am not a sound engineer, or even remotely an expert of the internals of audio software, but your complaints struck me as philosophical idealism which doesn't exist in digital audio recording software anywhere. As AGram said, you DO have to configure the daemon to get optimal performance. Type jackd in a terminal, and you should understand the options given well enough to get the daemon running fairly optimally, assuming you understand the basis of digital recording. If latency is still a problem, consider what to do about it.... Is your hardware good enough (I've got garbage and can get decent performance)? What other processes are you running? If you were serious about setting up a desktop for the decent audio recording, reconfigure some of the CRON fucketry, and kill various unnecessary servers for the task. If you were on Windows, you would know enough to kill certain services. The same thing applies in Linux.
Why on Earth are MS signing drivers which suck, are buggy, and slow? They are giving trust to Vista drivers without a reason to trust those drivers. Does this sound secure to you?
If I gave an explanation like that for a malfunction in Linux, Microsoft fans would be sitting back smugly thinking that MS "just works", and Linux is not ready for the desktop. Hmm...
I think it would be more accurate to say that DRM exists primarily to protect the profits of billionaire/+100millionaire corporations. I think it would also be more accurate to say that we have to live with DRM because these billionaire/+100millionaire corporations are able to pressure politicians into creating inequitable laws, for their own profitability, and at the cost of the general human interest. The rest of it, I agree with. :)
Well spoken!
That's what I've been thinking.... For one thing, I suspect the iPhone, on release, will have a lot more storage than 8 GB. I bet if the keynote had mentioned 30 GB iPhones, their iPod sales would have suffered a little due to people waiting, but when one hears 8 GB, it still makes sense to buy an iPod for the storage.
If three things were different in the iPhone: A lot more storage, no carrier lock in, and (to dream) it had GPS, I think they could have sold them for at least $1000 and made a killing. As it is, I don't think it's going to make as huge of a splash as Apple's last few major offerings. I have no doubt it'll be a quality product, but I'm not entirely sure it's tailored any better to the likely markets than several other cheaper, competitor products.
Tell, you what... use Windows Firewall, and I may PAY you $5, my botnet pretty!
And Oolon Colluphid's next book:
Well, That About Wraps It Up For SCO
Jeez, relax, man. Here, have a nobel prize. Happy now, you long lived sonuvabi---