I need coffee, can't tell my right from my left. In the above post change "left" to "right". Damned lithograph class I took in college fucked me up for life!
This makes me think once again that the 20th century was an abberation.
Before the 20th century if you wanted to know what time it was you pulled a clock out of your pocket. In the 20th century you looked at the clock on your wrist. After the 20th century you pulled your phone out of your pocket.
Before the 20th century musicians made their money by performing. During the 20th century many musicians made their money by recording music. After the advent of the internet musicians will once again make their money by performing and use their recordings as advertising (as everybody but the RIAA bands do now).
Before the 20th century there were few wires. During the 20th century wires were everywhere - strung from poles, on your phone, TV, computer eqiopment, everything that used electrity. After the 20th century everything is wireless.
Here in Springfield, our power plant runs on coal. Since my electricity's cost is not only the coal, but the maintenance and transmission of electricity, it should be cheaper to line my roof with these things than to buy it from Mr. Burns (he's the one in front of the giant check, on the left. He's also the one in the first linked picture, also on the left).
But at a dollar per watt I'd pay $20,000 for a single circuit... oh wait my math is wrong. At 100 volts that aould be $200. So I could power my whole house for a one time investment of less than $2k?
I agree with you there. It grates on my nerves, though, that everyone uses inferior software just because you have to use it because everybody uses it because nothing else is 100% compatible with it.
Perhaps we should use Georgia, whare a seventeen year old can go to prison for ten years for oral sex with a sixteen year old? Or any other state in the unuon, where you an go to prison for growing a certain species of plant?
Any operating system can be broken into. A bank vault can be broken into. Any OS can be rooted given an attacker has the expertise.
Any OS can be trojaned, but only one company's OS has viruses and spyware. And I think it incredibly unprofessional (incompetent?) that AV companies can't seeem to tell the difference between a virus and a trojan.
-mcgrew (not the security mcgrew, not the comedian mcgrew, but I do what I can to secure my PC and sometimes I can make people laugh).
Only if you live in the Microsoft world. A horse is a four legged animal, but having four legs does not make a cat the same as a horse.
A program is executable data. If you can execute it, it's a program. If you can't, it's data. A WMA file is a program, a n MP3 or OGG file is data.
If Microsoft would learn that data as data should NOT be executable they wouldn't have so much trouble making their stuff secure.
To crack a program with pure data (text file, MP3 file, etc) involves a bug or design defect in the program (stack overflow, etc). To crack a program whose data are really code (Word file, WMA file, etc) you don't need to find holes in the program; your dataset is a program.
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
So long as you folks keep thinking that way, the Republicrats will always be this country's only two-winged party. Stop worrying about whether or not your candidate is going to lose.
No vote is ever wasted just because the candidate it's cast for loses. But if you vote for a candidate that will pass laws against your interests, then you have indeed wasted your vote in the most foolish way possible.
I split my vote between the Greens and teh Libertariuans. If you people would stop thinking that I waste my vote, maybe one of these parties will actually win an election some day.
It's nice to see some judges can realise that a data set is not a program
Too bad Microsoft can't realise that! Of course, it's hard to impliment Dumb Restrictions on Music (DRM) without making your data file format (wma) also be a program. I can't understand why a plain word processing document should be a program though.
I'm surprised that they haven't come up with a photo file that your can write a virus in.
Data should be data and code should be code. The judge gets it, but unfortunately way too many computer programmers don't.
-mcgrew
(Today's journal is kinda sorta on-topic for this post)
Diebold is the corporation's choice for subverting democracy.
Imagine a world where people vote, but the votes don't matter because the corporations have bribed both wings of the single party in this plutocracy. They just sit in a machine controlled by puppets of the Corporation. We are living this dream.
So if the GP stopped complaining then MS would make something better than the Zune? I think you have that backwards, son. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the open mouth gets fed. If I complain about a crappy product (not saying zune is crappy, never used one) the company may or may not take my complaints seriously and change the next iteration.
If no one bitches then they'll pat themselves on the back. I'm not a good judge of my own product, you are.
Please, enlighten me as to how much more would get done if people who do ACTUAL WORK had OpenOffice to use on a daily basis?
AFAICS having office suites that interoperate with different companies' suites would smooth business quite a bit. MS Office isn't so widespread because of its quality, it's widespread because only another Office user can interoperate seamlessly with it, and because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I am not a Microsoft apologist
I couldn't tell that from your post but I'll take your word for it.
Oddly enough, so am I! Just ask my daughters, they'll tell you who Santa Clause really is.
I'm thinking they probably have patents on Bob, Clippy, stuff like that. I remember reading about a lawyer who filed a patent for his kid on swinging on a swingset and the Patent Office granted it.
I remember something about some lame online bookstore patenting one-click shopping. Microsoft holding a shipload of patents? That doesn't surprise me. Innovative? Having a shipload of patents doesn't mean you're innovative. Does anyone really think Amazon's one-click patent was innovative?
Damn, my mod points just expired moments before trying to mod you Insightful, AC.
Doesn't matter, I'm invited to metamoderate several times a day and you would have lost karma for bad modding. The post showed no insight whatever, added nothing to the discussion, and backhandedly insulted slashdot's readers. In short, it was flamebait. And I still havent caught up on my sleep after the night before last.
First, he could have waited until someone actually commented before trying to predict the future, especially since a quick scan of the comments so far shows that his crystal balls are shooting blanks. At least he didn't say anything about Frosty the Yellow Snowman.
Second, he seems to have a problem with anyone making jokes about Microsoft.
Third, he thinks such jokes wouldn't be funny.
Fourth, funny is in the mind of the beholder.
I have a hunch if I were at MS HQ right now I'd be dodging chairs.
FIRST POST!...at least, first post with a bad Ballmer chair joke. So I'm fulfilling the AC's lame prophesy. Lets see, what else can I come up with?
Imagine a beowold cluster of flying chairs (damn that was lame. ok... try again...)
In soviet USSR, microsoft innovates YOU! No?
Um, something about MS patenting Natalie Portman and her pony named Hot Grits?
When I was in the Air Force, we "first termers" called the lifers "flies", because they eat shit and bother people.
So all we have to do is get the cops to stop eating shit and bothering people. Although if they stopped bothering people I wouldn't care if they ate shit.
Yes, especially if the drunk was driving a semi and had gotten his licence by bribery and didn't speak English. you could kill a lot of people driving drunk, but I don't think it would be possible to kill as many people as a jumbo jet loaded with fuel and passengers sliding through a subdivision or a city's center.
Do you think anyone could cause the 9-11 carnage driving drunk? That could have happened by accident, and when the first plane slammed into the WTC that's what they thought had happened.
That reminds me of a something I heard in a bar. A guy is talking to a woman about an item in the paper about prostitution and he asked her if she'd have sex with a stranger for a million dollars. "Anybody would" she said.
"How about a buck fifty?"
"What do you think I am???"
"We already determined that, now we're just haggling over the price."
Yes, but not compared to punishments for pot, prostitution, or gambling. Imagine how long I'd stay in the pokey if they caught me playing strip poker with one of my friends while passing a joint?
I could endanger lives while driving drunk and face a steep fine and/or short incaration at the county jail, or smoke a little pot with a hooker and spend years in prison.
And people wonder why the US has more prisoners per capita than any other country? The more laws you pass, the more criminals you create.
-mcgrew
PS- why is it legal for me to fuck my congressman's wife but illegal to pay her for it?
Slashdot Mirror
I need coffee, can't tell my right from my left. In the above post change "left" to "right". Damned lithograph class I took in college fucked me up for life!
So do rechargeable batteries.
This makes me think once again that the 20th century was an abberation.
Before the 20th century if you wanted to know what time it was you pulled a clock out of your pocket. In the 20th century you looked at the clock on your wrist. After the 20th century you pulled your phone out of your pocket.
Before the 20th century musicians made their money by performing. During the 20th century many musicians made their money by recording music. After the advent of the internet musicians will once again make their money by performing and use their recordings as advertising (as everybody but the RIAA bands do now).
Before the 20th century there were few wires. During the 20th century wires were everywhere - strung from poles, on your phone, TV, computer eqiopment, everything that used electrity. After the 20th century everything is wireless.
-mcgrew
Here in Springfield, our power plant runs on coal. Since my electricity's cost is not only the coal, but the maintenance and transmission of electricity, it should be cheaper to line my roof with these things than to buy it from Mr. Burns (he's the one in front of the giant check, on the left. He's also the one in the first linked picture, also on the left).
But at a dollar per watt I'd pay $20,000 for a single circuit... oh wait my math is wrong. At 100 volts that aould be $200. So I could power my whole house for a one time investment of less than $2k?
Sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?
I agree with you there. It grates on my nerves, though, that everyone uses inferior software just because you have to use it because everybody uses it because nothing else is 100% compatible with it.
Perhaps we should use Georgia, whare a seventeen year old can go to prison for ten years for oral sex with a sixteen year old? Or any other state in the unuon, where you an go to prison for growing a certain species of plant?
It just struck me that I wish the company that makes my favorite brand of condoms would change its name.
Any operating system can be broken into. A bank vault can be broken into. Any OS can be rooted given an attacker has the expertise.
Any OS can be trojaned, but only one company's OS has viruses and spyware. And I think it incredibly unprofessional (incompetent?) that AV companies can't seeem to tell the difference between a virus and a trojan.
-mcgrew (not the security mcgrew, not the comedian mcgrew, but I do what I can to secure my PC and sometimes I can make people laugh).
Data vs. document is a spectrum
Only if you live in the Microsoft world. A horse is a four legged animal, but having four legs does not make a cat the same as a horse.
A program is executable data. If you can execute it, it's a program. If you can't, it's data. A WMA file is a program, a n MP3 or OGG file is data.
If Microsoft would learn that data as data should NOT be executable they wouldn't have so much trouble making their stuff secure.
To crack a program with pure data (text file, MP3 file, etc) involves a bug or design defect in the program (stack overflow, etc). To crack a program whose data are really code (Word file, WMA file, etc) you don't need to find holes in the program; your dataset is a program.
-mcgrew
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
So long as you folks keep thinking that way, the Republicrats will always be this country's only two-winged party. Stop worrying about whether or not your candidate is going to lose.
No vote is ever wasted just because the candidate it's cast for loses. But if you vote for a candidate that will pass laws against your interests, then you have indeed wasted your vote in the most foolish way possible.
I split my vote between the Greens and teh Libertariuans. If you people would stop thinking that I waste my vote, maybe one of these parties will actually win an election some day.
Why do I in any case guess that this database is either MSDE or SQL Express?
Why do I guess that it's Microsoft Access?
It's nice to see some judges can realise that a data set is not a program
Too bad Microsoft can't realise that! Of course, it's hard to impliment Dumb Restrictions on Music (DRM) without making your data file format (wma) also be a program. I can't understand why a plain word processing document should be a program though.
I'm surprised that they haven't come up with a photo file that your can write a virus in.
Data should be data and code should be code. The judge gets it, but unfortunately way too many computer programmers don't.
-mcgrew
(Today's journal is kinda sorta on-topic for this post)
Let me fix those typos for you:
Diebold is the corporation's choice for subverting democracy.
Imagine a world where people vote, but the votes don't matter because the corporations have bribed both wings of the single party in this plutocracy. They just sit in a machine controlled by puppets of the Corporation. We are living this dream.
Patents are a product of lawyers, who are doing it for the money.
I can't figure out why that made me think of my friends.
Monopoly maintenance.
I smell a copyright lawsuit from Parker Brothers
Clippy has been gone for so many years now...
I wish you'd tell Tom that. I hate walking into his office. He has all those annoying sound effects turned on, too.
Because you're busy complaining?
So if the GP stopped complaining then MS would make something better than the Zune? I think you have that backwards, son. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, the open mouth gets fed. If I complain about a crappy product (not saying zune is crappy, never used one) the company may or may not take my complaints seriously and change the next iteration.
If no one bitches then they'll pat themselves on the back. I'm not a good judge of my own product, you are.
Please, enlighten me as to how much more would get done if people who do ACTUAL WORK had OpenOffice to use on a daily basis?
AFAICS having office suites that interoperate with different companies' suites would smooth business quite a bit. MS Office isn't so widespread because of its quality, it's widespread because only another Office user can interoperate seamlessly with it, and because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I am not a Microsoft apologist
I couldn't tell that from your post but I'll take your word for it.
Wow, it seems like the OP's view of microsoft is completely informed by Slashdot
You were expecting the Wall Street Journal or the Nicrosoft Times?
I'm Santa Claus
Oddly enough, so am I! Just ask my daughters, they'll tell you who Santa Clause really is.
I'm thinking they probably have patents on Bob, Clippy, stuff like that. I remember reading about a lawyer who filed a patent for his kid on swinging on a swingset and the Patent Office granted it.
I remember something about some lame online bookstore patenting one-click shopping. Microsoft holding a shipload of patents? That doesn't surprise me. Innovative? Having a shipload of patents doesn't mean you're innovative. Does anyone really think Amazon's one-click patent was innovative?
Damn, my mod points just expired moments before trying to mod you Insightful, AC.
...at least, first post with a bad Ballmer chair joke. So I'm fulfilling the AC's lame prophesy. Lets see, what else can I come up with?
Doesn't matter, I'm invited to metamoderate several times a day and you would have lost karma for bad modding. The post showed no insight whatever, added nothing to the discussion, and backhandedly insulted slashdot's readers. In short, it was flamebait. And I still havent caught up on my sleep after the night before last.
First, he could have waited until someone actually commented before trying to predict the future, especially since a quick scan of the comments so far shows that his crystal balls are shooting blanks. At least he didn't say anything about Frosty the Yellow Snowman.
Second, he seems to have a problem with anyone making jokes about Microsoft.
Third, he thinks such jokes wouldn't be funny.
Fourth, funny is in the mind of the beholder.
I have a hunch if I were at MS HQ right now I'd be dodging chairs.
FIRST POST!
Imagine a beowold cluster of flying chairs (damn that was lame. ok... try again...)
In soviet USSR, microsoft innovates YOU! No?
Um, something about MS patenting Natalie Portman and her pony named Hot Grits?
Sorry, I got nothin. Tough room.
NCAA, shoot yourself in the foot much?
The NCAA deals more with balls than feet, making the shot far more painful.
-mcgrew
When I was in the Air Force, we "first termers" called the lifers "flies", because they eat shit and bother people.
So all we have to do is get the cops to stop eating shit and bothering people. Although if they stopped bothering people I wouldn't care if they ate shit.
Very good point.
Yes, especially if the drunk was driving a semi and had gotten his licence by bribery and didn't speak English. you could kill a lot of people driving drunk, but I don't think it would be possible to kill as many people as a jumbo jet loaded with fuel and passengers sliding through a subdivision or a city's center.
Do you think anyone could cause the 9-11 carnage driving drunk? That could have happened by accident, and when the first plane slammed into the WTC that's what they thought had happened.
That reminds me of a something I heard in a bar. A guy is talking to a woman about an item in the paper about prostitution and he asked her if she'd have sex with a stranger for a million dollars. "Anybody would" she said.
"How about a buck fifty?"
"What do you think I am???"
"We already determined that, now we're just haggling over the price."
Yes, but not compared to punishments for pot, prostitution, or gambling. Imagine how long I'd stay in the pokey if they caught me playing strip poker with one of my friends while passing a joint?
I could endanger lives while driving drunk and face a steep fine and/or short incaration at the county jail, or smoke a little pot with a hooker and spend years in prison.
And people wonder why the US has more prisoners per capita than any other country? The more laws you pass, the more criminals you create.
-mcgrew
PS- why is it legal for me to fuck my congressman's wife but illegal to pay her for it?