get over it. if microsoft had any talents in the mind control department, would slashdot even exist ? it seems that the mind control experts are clearly on the other side of the microsoft debate...
I learned Motif and awk in two of my university classes. I also taught myself to do all of my reports and math homework using LaTeX.
None of this prevented me from learning how to use.NET, SQL, and Word to do similar programming, data processing, and document preparation tasks once I left college.
this is another situation where somebody has a great scientific mind and no grasp of business realities.
lets say you're going to build a young female robot and sell it at a modest price. why would you teach it to _Read_ or _Talk_ when there still isn't an animitronic real-doll that uses a voice synthesizer for faking orgasms ?
I'd beleive that W95 would boot without MSHTML. I'd even beleive lots of things would work. Visual Studio wouldn't install without it (or without installing it first). HTML Help wont work without it. Any app that uses html help wont work without it.
Is it an issue of just deleting an icon and iexplore.exe in your mind ? If that was the specific question asked, and MS said "thats impossible", then I'd be more inclined to agree with you and say they were lying, but i can't even be sure of that since i don't know the complete code distribution between iexplore.exe and the various support DLLs, i.e. how much of a footprint do you need for
set F = new HTMLDocument
to succeed ? I don't know the answer to that question, do you ? Did the expert witness ?
On to the ld.so comparison - I won't get into an indisputability argument with you, or wether its part of linux or glibc (FYI, ld.so was there long before glibc existed)
What things are indisputably a part of the OS ? Is it possible yet to compile linux without IPv4 ? Would it be reasonable to require MS to not have an IP stack in their operating systems ? Once upon a time they didn't, and i beleive trumpet considered a lawsuit when one was finally included in win95..
I won't pretend that there was no malice towards netscape, or that having a working web browser upon first-bootup, perhaps eliminating the need for netscape was an unplanned side effect. However, the point you mentioned was wether or not it is "possible to remove IE form the OS". And i'm telling you that that question is meaningless w.r.t a reusable COM component that draws all the HTML on the platform.
It is Microsoft's position that providing a high quality programmable HTML renderer is now a function of a modern operating system.
It's your position that they shouldn't ship a web browser with an OS. Where should the two sides meet ?
whatever. there's no party line to spew, im telling you that shit breaks if you axe mshtml. just based on the dependancies my team has alone on mshtml and msxml, i am qualified to tell you that Trident (the IE rendering component's codename) needs to be on the box (today, anyway) the question of "is it possible to remove IE" is roughly analgous to "is it possible to remove ld.so from linux ?"
sure, you _could_ - it's just a file. but once you do, stuff starts breaking. are you saying that this clarification is irrelevant ? if so, why ? what am i missing ?
who's corrupted ? did you not see any merit to the point i made ? Are you so irate that you're not willing to discuss anything ? What about this is so frustrating for you that you're telling me to shove things (that don't exist, i'd argue) up my own ass ? Is that your typical method of discourse ?
I can't say anything about the video issue as i definitely wasn't in the court room - i wasn't even at MS then..
nothing stops you from critiquing the poor architectural decisions of any ms product you may have experience with. id be curious to here specific examples of frustrations you've had. i'll forward those on to the appropriate team, if you'd like.
hopefully you've played with the.net framework some - i beleive that has come a long way to get rid of some of the API of the month problems. if nothing else its hierarchial:) the.net sdk and c# compiler are a free download if you're interested..
(i work in the visual studio organization, incidentally)
i didn't write that software, nor did i interview the guy who wrote it..
i can tell you that i know of several sites that have pirated MS software on them. I haven't turned in any of them. i am just one employee though. maybe other employees are very aggressive about that sort of thing ?
that said, if there were a bot out there looking for pirated ms software, would that be some sort of rights violation ? would that be nefarious ? would it be wrong ? software piracy is illegal, after all.
that's not the point of this specific usenet analysis software (as near as what i can tell)
and you're right - im not an insider on lots of things. i've never met bill gates, much less given him a presentation or advice on anything..
it's hard for me to see myself as being a spin doctor. IMO, i speak too frankly and without sufficient refinement to be a plausible spin doctor of anything. I'm telling you what i've observed, given that I'm privy to lots of information and observatinos that you aren't. I _could_ be wrong about some of what i've said, and i've tried to make it apparent where I am observing or speculating and where i am sure of something..
like i said, i was a slashdotter before i was an ms employee. im not paid to post to slashdot, much less to read it and come up with crafty, work approved responses. you might be amused to know that there are lots of people at MS reading slashdot within certain disciplines, and lots of articles/comments on slashdot are discussed internally at MS. However, i can't think of many occasions where there was an ms official "response" to something that came from slashdot. If i had to guess based on the discussions i've been a participant in, i'd say you wont get much official microsoft reaction to slashdot becase "microsoft" as a whole views "slashdot" as a whole as one giant troll. I mean, just from my original post look at some of the responses i've gotten ? what would be the point of MS spending money to have some PR person deal with slashdot articles/comments ? Really, for 90+% of slashdotters, theres nothing MS can do or say to "win", so why bother ?
I still feel the need to feed the trolls at a personal level, i guess:) My post was basically a plea along the lines of "look, many of you are smart and objective enough to be successful in the software/IT fields, please be objective enough to consider what im saying from a non-emotional perspective"...
Consider the issue of context. what if the question asked was:
"Is it possible to remove the browser from the operating system, without affecting dependant operating system components ?"
"No"
Then the MS answer would be truthful.
Now, assume that when the question asked was "would it be possible", that what was heard was "would it be possible to do without fucking stuff up". In that case, the answer of "No" is still truthful.
the IE HTML rendering component is re-used over and over by many MS apps and many non-msapps. removing MSHTML.DLL from a system affects the functionality of other apps on that system.
This is NOT big brother. This is about building valuable meta information on top of usenet. Why ? Because one of the things MS heard long ago is that people liked linux because they could go to a newsgroup and get help with it, often from the people that wrote the component in question ? What did MS do ? They responded - MS employees now monitor the microsoft.public news groups. We respond to posts, try and solve problems for people, answer questions, debug code, etc etc. I myself can be found occasionally posting in the Visual Basic newsgruops (where we have lots and lots of non-full-time or beginning programmers that really need just a little bit of help to get them going).
The people that _write_ the VB compiler are now monitoring VB newsgroups to try and help connect with real customers and to really understand how people use and dislike MS products.
Managing and making sense out of the whole mess that is usenet is a nightmare, and MS Research is doing some good work in this area. MS has some internal software that treats usenet posts as "issues" and determines if they've been resolved or not, if they need followup, etc etc. One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something.. like i said i don't know the details of that at all..
In any case, the point of this usenet data mining is to try and analyze the incredibly huge sea of usenet. We want to figure out what kinds of problems people have, what people are causing noise, what people are really helping other, etc etc. There is no nefarious invasion of privacy here, the only thing that is analyzable is what people explicitly post to a public forum...
Look at my userid - i was a slashdot reader long before i work where i currently do. Back then, the MS bashing and second guessing definitely took place, and i even participated. I'm still a slashdot reader but I do get awfully tired of the sheer volume and irrationality of negative-MS stuff that happens here.
When I started at MS, I found out awfully fast that many of my arguments against MS were speculative, but mostly it was me being factually wrong and talking out of my ass. I remember in my original interviews i was trying to lecture an NT developer about how putting GDI in kernel for NT4 was stupid because it would lead to crashes. How pompous of me! It was something I read on some stupid website or industry rag. Later I found out (from reading Inside W2k -- excellent book) that it was irrelevant because if the session manager sees that the GDI user-land process exits/crashes for some reason, it reboots the box anyhow, i.e. a problem with GDI reboots the box either way.
So after 8+ years of hating MS and talking out of my ass, followed by 3+ years of working at MS and realizing how much i was talking out of my ass, I'm doing two things:
1) talking out of my ass less 2) telling others that are clearly talking out of their ass that they are doing so, so that they can 2a) stop spreading misinformation 2b) have their eyes opened that nobody is impressed by their incorrect speculations and their emotional campaigns of disinformation
I know im not preaching to a sympathetic audience here, but honestly, the speculation, questions, etc people have about MS could be answered truthfully and honestly if some of you would bother to ask, or do some research. But unfortuneately i know all to well (because i used to do it) that its easier, and certainly more fun, to beleive everything you _want_ to beleive about MS that bolsters your own predetermined mindset. If, for example, you find yourself referring to an article that The Register wrote, please stop and ask yourself what the hell the regis
If only the MPAA and RIAA collectively had one giant anus. Then I'd be able to build a huge truck-sized glove made out of razor blades to fist them both to death.
Hopefully, in 20 years, people with Maya will be making feature length original movies on their desktops.
possibly, although you can make the argument that living off of society is already a "crime".
imo, the only right you have is the ability to choose. that doesn't mean that the choices will be easy, or that there will always be a good alternative. unless we're talking about a situation of forced prostitution or something, its not anybody's fault but the persons if they turn to a life of crime or what have you. the circumstances may promote that, but its still their choice, and its silly to hold someone else responsible for that..
pay to play - if you want handouts, you get tagged.
all you want is free food and free shelter. the government asks that you submit to beig electronically tagged and tracked in return. its still your decision.
this is way worse than when someone writes a worm that intentionally targets home windows+broadband users to destroy the functionality of the internet. see, when someone is doing that, they're making a political/religious/security statement that windows sux0rs.
on the other hand, when someone owns the primary distribution server for the worlds most important, relevant free software and the maintainers really have no clue how badly they've been stung over a period of 6 months, well, nobody questions the bullshit about "many eyeballs", and "i just cant trust microsoft/windows update", etc.
instead, someone has committed a MORAL CRIME that has you feeling sick about humanity.
its time for a readjustment folks. more slashdotter has told me that microsoft is "more evil" than saddam hussein. another suggests that microsoft should be held accountable for when MS machines get hacked, or when non-MS machines running MS software get hacked. Another has said that any system that depends on patches for security fixes is garbage, and linux should be used instead.
Wake up and smell reality.
the people that write and use exploits target what is most likely to give them their kicks, whatever that may be. nothing is secure enough against a suitably motivated attacker. the rablidly pro-linux anti-MS community has been making a lot of unsubstantiated statements for a long time, and the fallacies contained therin are starting to come back to haunt them.
when there is a kernel crash, a kernel dump is recorded (you can change what is recorded - nothing, mini dump, or full dump). when the machine boots it detects that it bugcheck'd and if it finds a dump, it will ask you if you want to upload it to MS for analysis. this is the same thing that unixes do with things like "savecore" etc (except for the auto uploading part, which no commercial unix does that i am aware of).
So, its not called "dr watson", its called "OCA", and it does exist. visit oca.microsoft.com some time..
isn't this the same slashdot that complains about how schools are already like prisons, and its the rule of the "popular kids" and how kids are getting singled out and treated unfairly, etc etc.
wouldn't something like this potentially HELP that problem ? no kid is going to punch someone in the nose in clear view of a camera.. no teacher is going to incorrectly single out a child when the people that matter are watching.
i would have loved it if there were cameras watching all the crap that went on at school, instead of the "selective vision" that lots of the administrators seemed to have had..
how did the government grant MS its monopoly ? Last i heard, the government was trying awfully hard (at the impetus of all the sorry competitors that MS beat over time) to break microsoft up ?
Say what you want about how MS came to be in the position its in, but it sure as hell isn't because the government was helping them out!
Your assessment of Microsoft's interest in security is not accurate. Full disclosure did not cause microsoft to give a damn about security. Security became important at MS when customers started saying "we care about security, your shit sucks, we're not buying it anymore". MS doesn't give a damn about a bunch of egotistical self-serving "researchers" that are looking to sell their name as a brand and shop around for consulting dollars. Security is a priority now at MS because customers have finally said that they want it, and are willing to pay for it. It's that simple.
MS doesn't as a general rule try and make poor software. It doesn't try to make insecure systems. I'm sure MS loses more sleep and money over its security problems then you do. When you own 50 million lines of the worlds most widely deployed code and never have to issue a security patch, im sure MS will pay you whatever amount of money you can think of to tell them how to do it.
Incidentally, the ideal system from MS' point of view is staggered disclosure -- exactly what you describe.
Even people on full disclosure lists are starting to play along with this and realize that releasing exploit code without giving vendors and more importantly people running the affected systems time to patch first is doing the entire internet a huge disservice. It simply isn't responsible, and people making this an emotional or idealistic issue rather than a pragmatic one are the sort of "security people" that i hope eventually fade away...
if the TCO analysis includes the time it takes to apply patches and hotfixes, then the issue of worms and viruses falls out of the picture (for MS) because there hasn't yet been a widespread worm that didn't have a pre-existing patch for it. Nimda, CodeRed, Slammer, etc, all had WU patches posted months before they hit.
If the TCO were to have a section on # of relevant patches, time to apply them, and manual intervention involved, that would be interesting. I think that if you compared Windows Update and RHN it could be possible that Wu was faster and required less admin intervention, and was probably cheaper from a business perspective (WU is free, RHN isn't)
you know, i want really badly to agree with you. What everyone wants is some black and white way to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that its time to put away some repulsive violent criminal. Who wouldn't be 100% in favor of putting away rapists every time ?
When i first heard about people protesting DNA evience i was really outraged because it seemed to easy, so black and white, to get convictions that were difficult or impossible otherwise.
Upon reflection, im greatly worried. If faith in DNA evidence is unquestioning then i worry that any way it is used at all becomes an upen and shut conviction.
Consider the scenario that my friend hands me a gun, then 2 hours later uses it in a glove job. My finger prints are on the gun. My DNA matches those in the prints _exactly_.
Here's what the jury will hear: "The irrefutable DNA evidence links the defendant with the murder weapon."
a more realistic and frightening scenario, perhaps, was used in the mid 90s hollywood production, "The Crush". The teenage girl with an unhealthy fixation on the man renting the room from her parents fishes a used condom out of the trash and manages to insert the expelled semen into herself. She fabricates a rape story and the police have evidence of semen inside her body that is of course a perfect DNA match...
reliance upon technology to determine what did or didn't happen will continue to increase. the risk is that the application of this information will be misused. I do not trust a jury to have healthy skepticism of the CIRCUMSTANCES that produce a DNA sample in light of the fact that a DNA _match_ is 100% irrefutable identification and makes the job of being a good juror so... easy..
think about where you are leaving your dna and how you might be implicated by it..
who do i need to be sensitive to ? i mean, we're talking about people we dislike enough that we're planning on killing them. should we kill them sensitively ? with tact and subtlety ? does that make it better for you ?
building our society on subtlety and tact has given us what we have now - people afraid to voice their opinion, a country that is apathetic about politics, the state of mind where people get uncomfortable at the thought of a fighter plane being described as a killing machine (it's certainly not decorative..)
Our glorious civilization, with subtlety and tact as its supporting tenets, still needs people that cut through the bullshit and get things done.
I don't deserve the life I've been given at the expense of others and I don't see the point in being subtle about how much i respect what they do for me, 24 hours a day. That it ruffles somebody's feathers whom I've already prejudged (a valid complaint against me, perhaps) as being rationally deficient doesn't concern me. If I've made an enourmous mistake with the tone of my response, somebody more convincing than you will alert me to my error.
Re:Remarkably frank ...
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
it apparently disturbs you.
thats too bad, because it somewhat indicates you are uncomfortable with reality.
I pay a lot of tax money every year to guarantee that the united states has a highly effective group of people who only exist for the purpose of killing.
I fully support killing.
I am glad that I pay my government to refine the process of killing, to make it more efficient, and to have major universities dedicated to the art and science of efficient killing.
Without killing, some disagreements just cant be settled. Im glad someone is willing to do the killing for me, so every disagreement doesn't ruin my life. I'm glad that i have the option to let someone else stick up for my interests in these disagreements that can only be settled with killing. I'm glad that the killers i dont like don't get to roll over me according to their whims.
Slashdot Mirror
get over it. if microsoft had any talents in the mind control department, would slashdot even exist ? it seems that the mind control experts are clearly on the other side of the microsoft debate...
.NET, SQL, and Word to do similar programming, data processing, and document preparation tasks once I left college.
I learned Motif and awk in two of my university classes. I also taught myself to do all of my reports and math homework using LaTeX.
None of this prevented me from learning how to use
this is another situation where somebody has a great scientific mind and no grasp of business realities.
lets say you're going to build a young female robot and sell it at a modest price. why would you teach it to _Read_ or _Talk_ when there still isn't an animitronic real-doll that uses a voice synthesizer for faking orgasms ?
define "break the os" ?
I'd beleive that W95 would boot without MSHTML. I'd even beleive lots of things would work. Visual Studio wouldn't install without it (or without installing it first). HTML Help wont work without it. Any app that uses html help wont work without it.
Is it an issue of just deleting an icon and iexplore.exe in your mind ? If that was the specific question asked, and MS said "thats impossible", then I'd be more inclined to agree with you and say they were lying, but i can't even be sure of that since i don't know the complete code distribution between iexplore.exe and the various support DLLs, i.e. how much of a footprint do you need for
set F = new HTMLDocument
to succeed ? I don't know the answer to that question, do you ? Did the expert witness ?
On to the ld.so comparison -
I won't get into an indisputability argument with you, or wether its part of linux or glibc (FYI, ld.so was there long before glibc existed)
What things are indisputably a part of the OS ? Is it possible yet to compile linux without IPv4 ? Would it be reasonable to require MS to not have an IP stack in their operating systems ? Once upon a time they didn't, and i beleive trumpet considered a lawsuit when one was finally included in win95..
I won't pretend that there was no malice towards netscape, or that having a working web browser upon first-bootup, perhaps eliminating the need for netscape was an unplanned side effect. However, the point you mentioned was wether or not it is "possible to remove IE form the OS". And i'm telling you that that question is meaningless w.r.t a reusable COM component that draws all the HTML on the platform.
It is Microsoft's position that providing a high quality programmable HTML renderer is now a function of a modern operating system.
It's your position that they shouldn't ship a web browser with an OS. Where should the two sides meet ?
whatever. there's no party line to spew, im telling you that shit breaks if you axe mshtml. just based on the dependancies my team has alone on mshtml and msxml, i am qualified to tell you that Trident (the IE rendering component's codename) needs to be on the box (today, anyway) the question of "is it possible to remove IE" is roughly analgous to "is it possible to remove ld.so from linux ?"
sure, you _could_ - it's just a file. but once you do, stuff starts breaking. are you saying that this clarification is irrelevant ? if so, why ? what am i missing ?
who's corrupted ? did you not see any merit to the point i made ? Are you so irate that you're not willing to discuss anything ? What about this is so frustrating for you that you're telling me to shove things (that don't exist, i'd argue) up my own ass ? Is that your typical method of discourse ?
I can't say anything about the video issue as i definitely wasn't in the court room - i wasn't even at MS then..
nothing stops you from critiquing the poor architectural decisions of any ms product you may have experience with. id be curious to here specific examples of frustrations you've had. i'll forward those on to the appropriate team, if you'd like.
.net framework some - i beleive that has come a long way to get rid of some of the API of the month problems. if nothing else its hierarchial :) the .net sdk and c# compiler are a free download if you're interested..
hopefully you've played with the
(i work in the visual studio organization, incidentally)
i didn't write that software, nor did i interview the guy who wrote it..
:) My post was basically a plea along the lines of "look, many of you are smart and objective enough to be successful in the software/IT fields, please be objective enough to consider what im saying from a non-emotional perspective"...
i can tell you that i know of several sites that have pirated MS software on them. I haven't turned in any of them. i am just one employee though. maybe other employees are very aggressive about that sort of thing ?
that said, if there were a bot out there looking for pirated ms software, would that be some sort of rights violation ? would that be nefarious ? would it be wrong ? software piracy is illegal, after all.
that's not the point of this specific usenet analysis software (as near as what i can tell)
and you're right - im not an insider on lots of things. i've never met bill gates, much less given him a presentation or advice on anything..
it's hard for me to see myself as being a spin doctor. IMO, i speak too frankly and without sufficient refinement to be a plausible spin doctor of anything. I'm telling you what i've observed, given that I'm privy to lots of information and observatinos that you aren't. I _could_ be wrong about some of what i've said, and i've tried to make it apparent where I am observing or speculating and where i am sure of something..
like i said, i was a slashdotter before i was an ms employee. im not paid to post to slashdot, much less to read it and come up with crafty, work approved responses. you might be amused to know that there are lots of people at MS reading slashdot within certain disciplines, and lots of articles/comments on slashdot are discussed internally at MS. However, i can't think of many occasions where there was an ms official "response" to something that came from slashdot. If i had to guess based on the discussions i've been a participant in, i'd say you wont get much official microsoft reaction to slashdot becase "microsoft" as a whole views "slashdot" as a whole as one giant troll. I mean, just from my original post look at some of the responses i've gotten ? what would be the point of MS spending money to have some PR person deal with slashdot articles/comments ? Really, for 90+% of slashdotters, theres nothing MS can do or say to "win", so why bother ?
I still feel the need to feed the trolls at a personal level, i guess
I wasn't at the court hearing. Were you ?
Consider the issue of context. what if the question asked was:
"Is it possible to remove the browser from the operating system, without affecting dependant operating system components ?"
"No"
Then the MS answer would be truthful.
Now, assume that when the question asked was "would it be possible", that what was heard was "would it be possible to do without fucking stuff up". In that case, the answer of "No" is still truthful.
the IE HTML rendering component is re-used over and over by many MS apps and many non-msapps. removing MSHTML.DLL from a system affects the functionality of other apps on that system.
Do you disagree ?
hey, here's a few statements for you to consider
1) microsoft employees have written more lines of secure code then you have
2) microsoft employees have fixed more security bugs then you have
aren't you hot shit ?
are seeing this for what it is: "No big deal"
/crashes for some reason, it reboots the box anyhow, i.e. a problem with GDI reboots the box either way.
This is NOT big brother. This is about building valuable meta information on top of usenet. Why ? Because one of the things MS heard long ago is that people liked linux because they could go to a newsgroup and get help with it, often from the people that wrote the component in question ? What did MS do ? They responded - MS employees now monitor the microsoft.public news groups. We respond to posts, try and solve problems for people, answer questions, debug code, etc etc. I myself can be found occasionally posting in the Visual Basic newsgruops (where we have lots and lots of non-full-time or beginning programmers that really need just a little bit of help to get them going).
The people that _write_ the VB compiler are now monitoring VB newsgroups to try and help connect with real customers and to really understand how people use and dislike MS products.
Managing and making sense out of the whole mess that is usenet is a nightmare, and MS Research is doing some good work in this area. MS has some internal software that treats usenet posts as "issues" and determines if they've been resolved or not, if they need followup, etc etc. One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something.. like i said i don't know the details of that at all..
In any case, the point of this usenet data mining is to try and analyze the incredibly huge sea of usenet. We want to figure out what kinds of problems people have, what people are causing noise, what people are really helping other, etc etc. There is no nefarious invasion of privacy here, the only thing that is analyzable is what people explicitly post to a public forum...
Look at my userid - i was a slashdot reader long before i work where i currently do. Back then, the MS bashing and second guessing definitely took place, and i even participated. I'm still a slashdot reader but I do get awfully tired of the sheer volume and irrationality of negative-MS stuff that happens here.
When I started at MS, I found out awfully fast that many of my arguments against MS were speculative, but mostly it was me being factually wrong and talking out of my ass. I remember in my original interviews i was trying to lecture an NT developer about how putting GDI in kernel for NT4 was stupid because it would lead to crashes. How pompous of me! It was something I read on some stupid website or industry rag. Later I found out (from reading Inside W2k -- excellent book) that it was irrelevant because if the session manager sees that the GDI user-land process exits
So after 8+ years of hating MS and talking out of my ass, followed by 3+ years of working at MS and realizing how much i was talking out of my ass, I'm doing two things:
1) talking out of my ass less
2) telling others that are clearly talking out of their ass that they are doing so, so that they can
2a) stop spreading misinformation
2b) have their eyes opened that nobody is impressed by their incorrect speculations and their emotional campaigns of disinformation
I know im not preaching to a sympathetic audience here, but honestly, the speculation, questions, etc people have about MS could be answered truthfully and honestly if some of you would bother to ask, or do some research. But unfortuneately i know all to well (because i used to do it) that its easier, and certainly more fun, to beleive everything you _want_ to beleive about MS that bolsters your own predetermined mindset. If, for example, you find yourself referring to an article that The Register wrote, please stop and ask yourself what the hell the regis
If only the MPAA and RIAA collectively had one giant anus. Then I'd be able to build a huge truck-sized glove made out of razor blades to fist them both to death.
Hopefully, in 20 years, people with Maya will be making feature length original movies on their desktops.
possibly, although you can make the argument that living off of society is already a "crime".
imo, the only right you have is the ability to choose. that doesn't mean that the choices will be easy, or that there will always be a good alternative. unless we're talking about a situation of forced prostitution or something, its not anybody's fault but the persons if they turn to a life of crime or what have you. the circumstances may promote that, but its still their choice, and its silly to hold someone else responsible for that..
pay to play - if you want handouts, you get tagged.
all you want is free food and free shelter. the government asks that you submit to beig electronically tagged and tracked in return. its still your decision.
you're confused. you're thinking of ftp.gnu.org
Stuff from WU is cryptographically signed and protected.
sony makes its own stuff, mostly.
nvidia made out ok with their xbox contribution. they got stung with some inventory, but made handsome profits last quarter, mostly due to xbox sales
yeah
this is way worse than when someone writes a worm that intentionally targets home windows+broadband users to destroy the functionality of the internet. see, when someone is doing that, they're making a political/religious/security statement that windows sux0rs.
on the other hand, when someone owns the primary distribution server for the worlds most important, relevant free software and the maintainers really have no clue how badly they've been stung over a period of 6 months, well, nobody questions the bullshit about "many eyeballs", and "i just cant trust microsoft/windows update", etc.
instead, someone has committed a MORAL CRIME that has you feeling sick about humanity.
its time for a readjustment folks. more slashdotter has told me that microsoft is "more evil" than saddam hussein. another suggests that microsoft should be held accountable for when MS machines get hacked, or when non-MS machines running MS software get hacked. Another has said that any system that depends on patches for security fixes is garbage, and linux should be used instead.
Wake up and smell reality.
the people that write and use exploits target what is most likely to give them their kicks, whatever that may be. nothing is secure enough against a suitably motivated attacker. the rablidly pro-linux anti-MS community has been making a lot of unsubstantiated statements for a long time, and the fallacies contained therin are starting to come back to haunt them.
you are wrong.
when there is a kernel crash, a kernel dump is recorded (you can change what is recorded - nothing, mini dump, or full dump). when the machine boots it detects that it bugcheck'd and if it finds a dump, it will ask you if you want to upload it to MS for analysis. this is the same thing that unixes do with things like "savecore" etc (except for the auto uploading part, which no commercial unix does that i am aware of).
So, its not called "dr watson", its called "OCA", and it does exist. visit oca.microsoft.com some time..
isn't this the same slashdot that complains about how schools are already like prisons, and its the rule of the "popular kids" and how kids are getting singled out and treated unfairly, etc etc.
wouldn't something like this potentially HELP that problem ? no kid is going to punch someone in the nose in clear view of a camera.. no teacher is going to incorrectly single out a child when the people that matter are watching.
i would have loved it if there were cameras watching all the crap that went on at school, instead of the "selective vision" that lots of the administrators seemed to have had..
how did the government grant MS its monopoly ? Last i heard, the government was trying awfully hard (at the impetus of all the sorry competitors that MS beat over time) to break microsoft up ?
Say what you want about how MS came to be in the position its in, but it sure as hell isn't because the government was helping them out!
Your assessment of Microsoft's interest in security is not accurate. Full disclosure did not cause microsoft to give a damn about security. Security became important at MS when customers started saying "we care about security, your shit sucks, we're not buying it anymore". MS doesn't give a damn about a bunch of egotistical self-serving "researchers" that are looking to sell their name as a brand and shop around for consulting dollars. Security is a priority now at MS because customers have finally said that they want it, and are willing to pay for it. It's that simple.
MS doesn't as a general rule try and make poor software. It doesn't try to make insecure systems. I'm sure MS loses more sleep and money over its security problems then you do. When you own 50 million lines of the worlds most widely deployed code and never have to issue a security patch, im sure MS will pay you whatever amount of money you can think of to tell them how to do it.
Incidentally, the ideal system from MS' point of view is staggered disclosure -- exactly what you describe.
Even people on full disclosure lists are starting to play along with this and realize that releasing exploit code without giving vendors and more importantly people running the affected systems time to patch first is doing the entire internet a huge disservice. It simply isn't responsible, and people making this an emotional or idealistic issue rather than a pragmatic one are the sort of "security people" that i hope eventually fade away...
if the TCO analysis includes the time it takes to apply patches and hotfixes, then the issue of worms and viruses falls out of the picture (for MS) because there hasn't yet been a widespread worm that didn't have a pre-existing patch for it. Nimda, CodeRed, Slammer, etc, all had WU patches posted months before they hit.
If the TCO were to have a section on # of relevant patches, time to apply them, and manual intervention involved, that would be interesting. I think that if you compared Windows Update and RHN it could be possible that Wu was faster and required less admin intervention, and was probably cheaper from a business perspective (WU is free, RHN isn't)
you know, i want really badly to agree with you. What everyone wants is some black and white way to know beyond the shadow of a doubt that its time to put away some repulsive violent criminal. Who wouldn't be 100% in favor of putting away rapists every time ?
... easy ..
When i first heard about people protesting DNA evience i was really outraged because it seemed to easy, so black and white, to get convictions that were difficult or impossible otherwise.
Upon reflection, im greatly worried. If faith in DNA evidence is unquestioning then i worry that any way it is used at all becomes an upen and shut conviction.
Consider the scenario that my friend hands me a gun, then 2 hours later uses it in a glove job. My finger prints are on the gun. My DNA matches those in the prints _exactly_.
Here's what the jury will hear:
"The irrefutable DNA evidence links the defendant with the murder weapon."
a more realistic and frightening scenario, perhaps, was used in the mid 90s hollywood production, "The Crush". The teenage girl with an unhealthy fixation on the man renting the room from her parents fishes a used condom out of the trash and manages to insert the expelled semen into herself. She fabricates a rape story and the police have evidence of semen inside her body that is of course a perfect DNA match...
reliance upon technology to determine what did or didn't happen will continue to increase. the risk is that the application of this information will be misused. I do not trust a jury to have healthy skepticism of the CIRCUMSTANCES that produce a DNA sample in light of the fact that a DNA _match_ is 100% irrefutable identification and makes the job of being a good juror so
think about where you are leaving your dna and how you might be implicated by it..
they invariably find its convenient to have barbaric friends when they get invaded..
what's wrong with simpletons ?
who do i need to be sensitive to ? i mean, we're talking about people we dislike enough that we're planning on killing them. should we kill them sensitively ? with tact and subtlety ?
does that make it better for you ?
building our society on subtlety and tact has given us what we have now - people afraid to voice their opinion, a country that is apathetic about politics, the state of mind where people get uncomfortable at the thought of a fighter plane being described as a killing machine (it's certainly not decorative..)
Our glorious civilization, with subtlety and tact as its supporting tenets, still needs people that cut through the bullshit and get things done.
I don't deserve the life I've been given at the expense of others and I don't see the point in being subtle about how much i respect what they do for me, 24 hours a day. That it ruffles somebody's feathers whom I've already prejudged (a valid complaint against me, perhaps) as being rationally deficient doesn't concern me. If I've made an enourmous mistake with the tone of my response, somebody more convincing than you will alert me to my error.
it apparently disturbs you.
thats too bad, because it somewhat indicates you are uncomfortable with reality.
I pay a lot of tax money every year to guarantee that the united states has a highly effective group of people who only exist for the purpose of killing.
I fully support killing.
I am glad that I pay my government to refine the process of killing, to make it more efficient, and to have major universities dedicated to the art and science of efficient killing.
Without killing, some disagreements just cant be settled. Im glad someone is willing to do the killing for me, so every disagreement doesn't ruin my life. I'm glad that i have the option to let someone else stick up for my interests in these disagreements that can only be settled with killing. I'm glad that the killers i dont like don't get to roll over me according to their whims.
I support killing.