I hope and pray you're right. But reason seems to go out the window -- like law does -- when politicians start discussing emotional, "hot button" issues like child molestation, the drug economy, illegal immigration, and terrorism.
This makes me really sick.
Overall there is too much danger to Microsoft in this because the Office and Windows monopolies are mutually supporting.
This was what the original DoJ anti-trust effort against MSFT, if you'll recall, attempted to accomplish: a divestiture of MSFT's OS and applications divisions. It failed. We still have the three-headed Hydra whose left hand (Windows OS) supports it's right hand (Office and similar apps).
We are now seeing the oligopoly behaving like an oligopoly does: less choice, fewer options. Once upon a time, MSFT did release a Word for Mac and a Word for OS/2; but that was before Windows had its death grip on the desktop market. Now MSFT sees no need -- until ODF, there was no competition. Now there is. This ought to be interesting:)
Dammit. Had this technology existed in mid-June, I still might have the tip of my left thumb. Oh well, my budget's too tight for me to afford this bleeding edge (bad pun) tech anyway.
I still don't understand how they're going to get a saw blade with 100 teeth on it to stop in time once the capacitance change is detected... a typical saw blade rotates at 1750 RPM.
The bottom line is to use table saws for what they were intended: rips and cross-cuts. I was trying to use mine to shave a 1/64th inch off of a piece of oak. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I paid the price for it, though. Bleed and learn.
Couldn't have happened to a more worthy bunch of assholes, IMO. SCOX and this poor excuse for a strategy ought to be held up as an example to any and all CxOs who are tempted to follow this "get rich quick" scheme. Props to IBM for not giving in.
As to TFA, the SEC is so overloaded that they may never get around to McBride and his group of thieves. I don't expect justice in this case; but if it happens, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Justice delayed is justice denied.
The major problem isn't there little good software, but very few good software engineers.
If I had any mod points at all, you'd have gotten a more positive mod from me; but you can't do any better than a +5:-)
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Here in FOSS-land, there are no barriers to entry. This is a Good Thing and a Bad Thing all at once. In proprietary-land, there are numerous barriers to entry. I've been watching this phenomenon since the beginning of FOSS: quality exists only when the developers care about quality. I participate in a few FOSS projects (they're all 'major' packages) in which quality is a key concern. But I know there are FOSS offerings in which quality is not a concern... it's more a matter of some 12 y/o kid getting his first program some exposure. OK, so the FOSS 'model' allows that, and that's the way it is.
The concept of a barrier to entry is a Good Thing because it ultimately weeds out the incompetent -- although it takes far too long in many cases. I've watched lots of wannabes get weeded out over the last 30 years. Tough thing to watch, but so be it.
Barriers to entry are a Bad Thing because they tend to exclude the really radical ideas and people who hold them. No ground is ever broken until that next new radical, out-of-the-box thought hits the market. Any vision of an IT world without FOSS is a pretty damn bleak place. Hell, we'd all be coding for Windoze (ugh... I think I'd find another career field).
If -- with the FOSS model -- I have to trade a higher percentage of lower quality code for groundbreaking thought, then so be it. At least I generally don't have to throw money away having a look-see for myself. Look at everything labeled "disruptive technology" and note from whence it comes. Is it commercial software or FOSS? I'm not surprised when it comes from the FOSS side of the fence... I tend to be very surprised when it's commercial: radical ideas need backers ($$$) to survive in a for-pay marketplace.
You forgot something: the shrinkwrap stuff is $300 per seat. Your economic exercise fits if your company has 4 employees; but it's a disaster if you have hundreds or thousands.
And even the shrinkwrap stuff costs in terms of maintenance: just because there's "support" doesn't mean you won't be paying out the nose for it in ways you'd never expect. I work for a company with over 250,000 employees. Wanna guess what the company-wide 'upgrade' to XP SP 2 cost? (the answer is expressed in the tens of millions, with not a nickel going to MSFT)
Let's not even talk about the cost of applying security patches N times a week.
Sure, proprietary software has its place; but only under certain terms which become more rare with every passing year. When there are enough seats involved, sometimes it makes sense to avoid the proprietary path at any cost short of dysfunction. This is how programmers like me get paid: and I make a lot more than $20/hour. Hell, I'm not afraid to use a F/OSS solution, as long as I'm allowed to play by the licensing rules -- it's often a better solution than a from-scratch in-house written one. And I usually insist on a second condition that we not be forced to lock users in to a windoze-only solution... I usually win on that one:-)
If I had any mod points (I don't), I'd mod the parent up. The only possible problem with this approach is that you may ultimately get to the "brick wall" point where the ladder ends: the corporation will not budge. I've had this happen with a telco (landline). Ultimately, there was no CSR or supervisor with the authority to reverse $1,800 in bogus charges.
They say I owe them $2,200; I say I don't. I'd gladly split the difference ($400) and settle with them; but they can't/won't even do that. The reason? They lost the accounting records, the pertinent parts of which date back to 2001. I have all the documentation and have sent it to them in years past, with no reaction whatsoever. This telco is going to look very stupid in court, if we ever get there: I've offered to settle (they won't), I've sent them the documentation (they always 'lose' it), I've done everything to keep this out of court... they haven't. OTOH, they haven't disconnected service; but they haven't written this off either. They know something's wrong; but for some unknown reason, they won't act at all.
I'm smart enough to know what happens next: I say "go ahead and sue me, you have no case" (they don't, and they know it). So now I'm sitting here waiting for the statute of limitations (6 years) to expire, which happens next May, with a disputed $2,200 item showing on my credit report. Small damage, to be sure, but damage nonetheless. If I were a lawyer (I'm not), I would probably sue for injunctive relief once the 6 years is up; and I might yet, depending on whether or not the telco keeps churning this negative credit report item (as they've done at least 4 times already).
Strangely enough, I've been expecting a call from a lawyer representing them for years now: no such call has been received. Dammit... I really wanted to have this argument with a real attorney, just to experience the joy of hearing a lawyer (for once) say "hey, you're right... we're wrong".
Parent post is very good advice: just be aware that ultimately, you risk reaching the brick wall point. If you're going to play this game, you have to play it through to the end; and depending upon where you live, it can take a very long time.
OK, Homer. Do me a HUGE favor. Have your hardware geniuses fix those FREAKING SCALES ("bagging area") so they don't vary with barometric pressure or somebody walking by on the floor (no kidding): that's what triggers those "PLEASE PLACE/REMOVE ITEM IN/FROM BAGGING AREA" messages. I know you guys need to stop people from stealing, but please: weighing products to the milligram is just a little extreme. Funny, the conveyor belts at Stop & Shop aren't that sensitive.
Another poster got it, too. You had to learn to use windoze, you can learn to use Linux, too. Or *BSD, or Mac OS. Anything other than windoze. Necessity makes it practical.
When you use windoze, you're using the most targeted OS on the Earth... you're lumping yourself in with a vast crowd of people who know absolutely nothing and suspect even less. Putting one of these machines on the 'Net is an invitation to be robbed -- literally; in many, many ways -- not to mention being held hostage by MS and whatever it decides to implement for DRM and other issues yet to be named.
No AV package/author is going to be able to stay even one step ahead of the black hats out there, who are getting more criminal as time goes on. You don't have to actively do anything other than visit a website to be infected/ripped off any more. The black hats have gotten very, very sophisticated. There's money available for the taking, and you're hanging it out there as long as you run windoze and store any kind of personal data on it.
I've heard all the excuses; none of them wash. Either you're intelligent enough to own, administer, and operate a computer; or you're not. If you have that level of intelligence, you are certainly capable of learning and retaining enough knowledge to run something else. So it takes an investment of time and effort... okay, live with it.
I am (was?) a raving AMD fanboy too. But not for much longer if the reports are true. I'm fickle to a superior CPU.
The heat dissipation results are very encouraging. The Conroe line seems to run a few degrees cooler (at peak) than does a 32-bit AMD Athlon XP (62 deg C) I'm staring at right now.
Now for total system price. I guess I need to keep eyes peeled on BIOS-updated i975 mobos over the next couple of weeks. Initial price/performance looks very, very good, with normal assumptions (memory & mobo markets don't go demand-to-the-wall on us). Multithreading performance also raises an encouraging eyebrow (as it does with most multicores, but this implementation's results seem to best all competing multicore CPUs out there, too).
If all the numbers line up (and users don't report odd stuff like the F00F bug or premature burnout), I think I'm about to switch.
Now I wonder what, if anything, AMD might have up its sleeve to counter. If it's nothing, they're in some trouble. In the meantime, I'm gonna wait a couple weeks for the first bleeding edge real-user reports to come in. If all this is true, Intel's pulled off a pretty significant coup!
I was going to point out the length limits in older Unices, but to do so would have been redundant, thanks to your post. (Here comes the mod!!)
But isn't this entire subject so obvious as to be redundant, itself? As if it were a shocking, new discovery? I mean, I've dealt with this crap for years (that doesn't mean I like barriers to portability any more than when I first see them).
What I truly detest is converts to *nix wanting to hang.exe extensions on executable files. ARRRRRGH!!
Yes, I know how my car works. Yes, I know how my dishwasher works. And I do know how my computers work. You obviously cannot say the same.
But that isn't the point. The point is that MS products are closed-source. You couldn't know how your 'trusty' windoze data warehouse (after all, that's the point of the 'tool') worked even if you understood how computers worked, which you probably don't if you claim to have a "stable" XP system you've had to restore just once. Windows users have been electroshocked into thinking that "stable" means "don't have to restore or reinstall this week". You are the exact prototype of the person MS invented Windoze to serve: oops, bandwidth gone... oops, disk space gone... oops, data gone... oops, data compromised... oops, identity stolen. Oh well, I can always go back to the last system restore point and all's fine again. NOT.
I will not run windoze. Malware/spyware/viruses (gee, thanks... as if I didn't know that) and plain old crappy engineering are the reasons. I don't waste time or risk data re-installing a faulty OS. I haven't ever had a problem with spyware, and I've never had to run a virus scanner. But I've listened to seemingly millions of people tell me all about it. I've seen enough windoze boxes stopped dead cold to keep me away from it.
Had you read the article, you would have read that you don't have to download stupid crap any more. That was 1996 state of the windoze invasion art. It's 2006. Your windoze box can be infected by simply visiting any one of a number of web sites. They're inventing new ways of infecting your machine faster than the virus scanners can be updated. Are you sure you're not infected? I wouldn't be too sure, especially if you don't know how your machine works. Would you understand infection if it stared you in the face? Do you accept cookies? Do you run DirectX? Do you ever open e-mail attachments? It's not as simple as avoiding dumb downloads any more.
A virus scanner shouldn't be necessary. But for survival with Windoze, you must have one; and even then you're not safe. By definition, the malware writers are one step ahead of your scanner. This is the end result of running the worst-designed OS available today combined with greed. The greed starts with MS and ends all the way at the advertisers. Your windoze box is just the tool to expose you to their messages and get to your wallet.
See, way back when, there was this guy Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft, who invented the market for computer operating systems for people too stupid to run and administer a computer. It was called Windows. "What a great idea!", people said, and the market mushroomed. Gates was a zillionaire overnight.
Fast forward 15 years. Now, seeing the size of this market (TFA says 20 million machines are infected), of course the advertisers (through their overlords, the marketeers) reacted. They tried being nice guys over the years; but even trained monkeys had learned what happens when you pressed that browser button that said "HERE!! FREE SOFTWARE!!". So they got a little more devious, as advertisers are prone to do. When something for nothing doesn't work, there are more subtle ways to grow your market share.
Since Windoze is -- in and of itself -- so lame that it will allow its heavily touted, unique controls (DirectX, for example) to do so many things for all those unsuspecting sops without their having to know anything about what's going on or what they're doing; wouldn't it be natural that people intent on controlling what you see (advertisers) exploit weaknesses in those controls for purposes that even the morons at Microsoft never saw coming?
Just look at how bad MS' TCP/IP implementations have been over the years; holes you can drive a truck through. Even the IP stack in XP still sucks. Microsoft's OS development operations are a textbook case of how not to design, develop, and test operating systems.
The true irony is that the Winidiots are finally imploding. These were the guys who -- back in the day -- ran Wingate (thinking it was a powerful, admin-free firewall), binding all its services to 0.0.0.0, giving spammers and skript kiddiez alike free phony IP addresses and bandwidth behind which they could cause all sorts of mischief. Today, these same losers are threatening to kill people who infect their computers. It's sweet justice, says I: your choice of the same poorly designed, top-secret, commodity OS that the rest of the ignorant mass uses now threatens to turn you into a bonafide criminal (issuing death threats is still against the law).
If you run Windoze, you've done this to yourself. Windows: the OS for idiots invented by idiots. Is it any surprise this should be the most hacked OS on the face of the earth? Nobody except Microsoft knows how it really works, and the devious geniuses out there have figured out how to exploit the mile-wide loopholes MS has left for them to use. If you're a windoze user, there is no longer any way for you to remain free from malware/spyware/virii by modifying your behaviors. And I suppose there are people out there who didn't see this coming. MS sure didn't.
Now, quick: hang the real criminals (the marketeers, advertisers, and Dark Artists) before they learn how to infect the rest of the OSes out there for fun and profit. Hurry: make an example of these scum before anybody else invents any more 'brilliant' advertising paradigms (at least they could patent this shit and sue each other to death, ya know?). At least the Windoze experience won't have been in vain.
You mean "they are the price we pay to live in a warmongering, corrupt society". Eliminate those two and your taxes will drop to less than half what they currently are.
You're obviously very young or have a very short memory. Government rarely adjusts taxes to meet its needs except when government itself predicts a revenue shortfall. Corruption, war, economic imbalance, social disasters... these things don't matter at all, except to raise taxation rates. It takes a truly thick-skinned, courageous politician/leader to adjust government seizures downward because they're no longer necessary: there are always bureaucrats who'll swear they need more, segments of society who want to dismantle the "rich", and groups with similar motives. Gutless leaders simply leave taxes as they are, or raise them instead of ordering bureaucrats to do with what they have.
What matters is the government's propensity to seize property: if they see fit to do so, they will. Whether politicians call it "progressive" or "regressive" is mere rhetoric. At the end of the day, they've still taken your property. If you can succeed in getting them to seize someone else's property instead of yours, then your 'side' has won the political skirmish of the day.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. Government just about always exercises its powers, often just because it can. There is no such thing as a 'temporary' tax.
I read the article at Tom's Hardware. Very interesting.
But the peripheral requirements -- particularly FB-DIMM -- are interesting, too. And maybe a little scary. Anybody got a clue how these FB-DIMM units are gonna be priced per GB?
We haven't seen any details on mobo pricing, either.
I like the idea of lower power consumption and greater throughput. But if I can't afford to build the system, it doesn't do me much good.
This announcement does sorta smell like marketing hype; I guess the implementations will tell the tale. Intel finally recognizes in public that they're getting their asses kicked by AMD, though, which is a good thing, IMO. Now if they'd just focus on price/performance competitiveness, they might even get me back as a customer.
"It's the Luddite mentality that we need to change."
There, in a nutshell, is everything wrong with the state of our industry. Now, if only we knew how to do it, we'd be all set. No more asshats stealing data, no more PHBs making our lives difficult. Naaaah, won't happen.
I don't disagree at all. I'm as old as TFA author, and I remember those days. There were no options, no choice. In fact, computers weren't even a commodity item way back then. One couldn't own a 'serious' computer -- no, Apple }{ was not one of those (and besides, it was $2,000).
I can't imagine the world of commodity hardware without FOSS. Billy would have us all by the short and curlies -- face it, if FOSS didn't exist, someone would have to invent it.
I've done quite a bit of closed & open project work. It really doesn't matter. Neither is automatically more prone to success or failure. What matters most is the personalities of those doing the really hard work (is there a good mix?) and whether or not they're willing to go all the way (through documentation and customer support). Closed source projects are usually motivated by cash, and nothing more. FOSS projects, on the other hand, tend to be motivated by ideals and good ideas.
The total "fit and finish" of the end product often reflects the motivations of its creators: do you, as a user, not like it? Chances are pretty good that the development team didn't, either.
It's a spoof. It's gotta be. Not even SCOX is this stupid. It isn't hard to ape the language McBride and the rest of those inbred assholes use. The law firm representing SCOX is just too good to let them act like this. If this thing is real, Boies, Schiller et al just walked out the door. Trust me.
Caution: virii do not respect spoken language, irrespective of the language in which the threat/lead/hook is cast. It won't be long before English speaking winidiots are scratching their heads and wondering why their windoze box is speaking Spanish at them.
Could it be that some politicos actually figured out what DRM is?
Is the media-consuming public FINALLY gonna get a break from the tyrants?
Naaah. Pinch me when the UK implements a stricter version of the DMCA. This has to be too good to be true. Imagine that: constraints on the likes of Sony, Vivendi... no... this just can't be.
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I hope and pray you're right. But reason seems to go out the window -- like law does -- when politicians start discussing emotional, "hot button" issues like child molestation, the drug economy, illegal immigration, and terrorism. This makes me really sick.
Compared to everybody else on the list (see Intel), AMD looks pretty clean.
And ya know what the really sad part is? There's probably a judge out there who would actually hear that lawsuit, too. Sigh.
This was what the original DoJ anti-trust effort against MSFT, if you'll recall, attempted to accomplish: a divestiture of MSFT's OS and applications divisions. It failed. We still have the three-headed Hydra whose left hand (Windows OS) supports it's right hand (Office and similar apps).
We are now seeing the oligopoly behaving like an oligopoly does: less choice, fewer options. Once upon a time, MSFT did release a Word for Mac and a Word for OS/2; but that was before Windows had its death grip on the desktop market. Now MSFT sees no need -- until ODF, there was no competition. Now there is. This ought to be interesting :)
I still don't understand how they're going to get a saw blade with 100 teeth on it to stop in time once the capacitance change is detected ... a typical saw blade rotates at 1750 RPM.
The bottom line is to use table saws for what they were intended: rips and cross-cuts. I was trying to use mine to shave a 1/64th inch off of a piece of oak. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I paid the price for it, though. Bleed and learn.
If there's an 'idiot' mod, I'm gonna catch it :-)
I don't either. But you know that if MS (or its shills) can make it appear so, they will.
As to TFA, the SEC is so overloaded that they may never get around to McBride and his group of thieves. I don't expect justice in this case; but if it happens, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Justice delayed is justice denied.
If I had any mod points at all, you'd have gotten a more positive mod from me; but you can't do any better than a +5 :-)
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Here in FOSS-land, there are no barriers to entry. This is a Good Thing and a Bad Thing all at once. In proprietary-land, there are numerous barriers to entry. I've been watching this phenomenon since the beginning of FOSS: quality exists only when the developers care about quality. I participate in a few FOSS projects (they're all 'major' packages) in which quality is a key concern. But I know there are FOSS offerings in which quality is not a concern ... it's more a matter of some 12 y/o kid getting his first program some exposure. OK, so the FOSS 'model' allows that, and that's the way it is.
The concept of a barrier to entry is a Good Thing because it ultimately weeds out the incompetent -- although it takes far too long in many cases. I've watched lots of wannabes get weeded out over the last 30 years. Tough thing to watch, but so be it.
Barriers to entry are a Bad Thing because they tend to exclude the really radical ideas and people who hold them. No ground is ever broken until that next new radical, out-of-the-box thought hits the market. Any vision of an IT world without FOSS is a pretty damn bleak place. Hell, we'd all be coding for Windoze (ugh ... I think I'd find another career field).
If -- with the FOSS model -- I have to trade a higher percentage of lower quality code for groundbreaking thought, then so be it. At least I generally don't have to throw money away having a look-see for myself. Look at everything labeled "disruptive technology" and note from whence it comes. Is it commercial software or FOSS? I'm not surprised when it comes from the FOSS side of the fence ... I tend to be very surprised when it's commercial: radical ideas need backers ($$$) to survive in a for-pay marketplace.
And even the shrinkwrap stuff costs in terms of maintenance: just because there's "support" doesn't mean you won't be paying out the nose for it in ways you'd never expect. I work for a company with over 250,000 employees. Wanna guess what the company-wide 'upgrade' to XP SP 2 cost? (the answer is expressed in the tens of millions, with not a nickel going to MSFT)
Let's not even talk about the cost of applying security patches N times a week.
Sure, proprietary software has its place; but only under certain terms which become more rare with every passing year. When there are enough seats involved, sometimes it makes sense to avoid the proprietary path at any cost short of dysfunction. This is how programmers like me get paid: and I make a lot more than $20/hour. Hell, I'm not afraid to use a F/OSS solution, as long as I'm allowed to play by the licensing rules -- it's often a better solution than a from-scratch in-house written one. And I usually insist on a second condition that we not be forced to lock users in to a windoze-only solution ... I usually win on that one :-)
They say I owe them $2,200; I say I don't. I'd gladly split the difference ($400) and settle with them; but they can't/won't even do that. The reason? They lost the accounting records, the pertinent parts of which date back to 2001. I have all the documentation and have sent it to them in years past, with no reaction whatsoever. This telco is going to look very stupid in court, if we ever get there: I've offered to settle (they won't), I've sent them the documentation (they always 'lose' it), I've done everything to keep this out of court... they haven't. OTOH, they haven't disconnected service; but they haven't written this off either. They know something's wrong; but for some unknown reason, they won't act at all.
I'm smart enough to know what happens next: I say "go ahead and sue me, you have no case" (they don't, and they know it). So now I'm sitting here waiting for the statute of limitations (6 years) to expire, which happens next May, with a disputed $2,200 item showing on my credit report. Small damage, to be sure, but damage nonetheless. If I were a lawyer (I'm not), I would probably sue for injunctive relief once the 6 years is up; and I might yet, depending on whether or not the telco keeps churning this negative credit report item (as they've done at least 4 times already).
Strangely enough, I've been expecting a call from a lawyer representing them for years now: no such call has been received. Dammit ... I really wanted to have this argument with a real attorney, just to experience the joy of hearing a lawyer (for once) say "hey, you're right ... we're wrong".
Parent post is very good advice: just be aware that ultimately, you risk reaching the brick wall point. If you're going to play this game, you have to play it through to the end; and depending upon where you live, it can take a very long time.
OK, Homer. Do me a HUGE favor. Have your hardware geniuses fix those FREAKING SCALES ("bagging area") so they don't vary with barometric pressure or somebody walking by on the floor (no kidding): that's what triggers those "PLEASE PLACE/REMOVE ITEM IN/FROM BAGGING AREA" messages. I know you guys need to stop people from stealing, but please: weighing products to the milligram is just a little extreme. Funny, the conveyor belts at Stop & Shop aren't that sensitive.
When you use windoze, you're using the most targeted OS on the Earth ... you're lumping yourself in with a vast crowd of people who know absolutely nothing and suspect even less. Putting one of these machines on the 'Net is an invitation to be robbed -- literally; in many, many ways -- not to mention being held hostage by MS and whatever it decides to implement for DRM and other issues yet to be named.
No AV package/author is going to be able to stay even one step ahead of the black hats out there, who are getting more criminal as time goes on. You don't have to actively do anything other than visit a website to be infected/ripped off any more. The black hats have gotten very, very sophisticated. There's money available for the taking, and you're hanging it out there as long as you run windoze and store any kind of personal data on it.
I've heard all the excuses; none of them wash. Either you're intelligent enough to own, administer, and operate a computer; or you're not. If you have that level of intelligence, you are certainly capable of learning and retaining enough knowledge to run something else. So it takes an investment of time and effort ... okay, live with it.
Use windoze at your own risk.
The heat dissipation results are very encouraging. The Conroe line seems to run a few degrees cooler (at peak) than does a 32-bit AMD Athlon XP (62 deg C) I'm staring at right now.
Now for total system price. I guess I need to keep eyes peeled on BIOS-updated i975 mobos over the next couple of weeks. Initial price/performance looks very, very good, with normal assumptions (memory & mobo markets don't go demand-to-the-wall on us). Multithreading performance also raises an encouraging eyebrow (as it does with most multicores, but this implementation's results seem to best all competing multicore CPUs out there, too).
If all the numbers line up (and users don't report odd stuff like the F00F bug or premature burnout), I think I'm about to switch.
Now I wonder what, if anything, AMD might have up its sleeve to counter. If it's nothing, they're in some trouble. In the meantime, I'm gonna wait a couple weeks for the first bleeding edge real-user reports to come in. If all this is true, Intel's pulled off a pretty significant coup!
But isn't this entire subject so obvious as to be redundant, itself? As if it were a shocking, new discovery? I mean, I've dealt with this crap for years (that doesn't mean I like barriers to portability any more than when I first see them).
What I truly detest is converts to *nix wanting to hang .exe extensions on executable files. ARRRRRGH!!
But that isn't the point. The point is that MS products are closed-source. You couldn't know how your 'trusty' windoze data warehouse (after all, that's the point of the 'tool') worked even if you understood how computers worked, which you probably don't if you claim to have a "stable" XP system you've had to restore just once. Windows users have been electroshocked into thinking that "stable" means "don't have to restore or reinstall this week". You are the exact prototype of the person MS invented Windoze to serve: oops, bandwidth gone ... oops, disk space gone ... oops, data gone ... oops, data compromised ... oops, identity stolen. Oh well, I can always go back to the last system restore point and all's fine again. NOT.
I will not run windoze. Malware/spyware/viruses (gee, thanks ... as if I didn't know that) and plain old crappy engineering are the reasons. I don't waste time or risk data re-installing a faulty OS. I haven't ever had a problem with spyware, and I've never had to run a virus scanner. But I've listened to seemingly millions of people tell me all about it. I've seen enough windoze boxes stopped dead cold to keep me away from it.
Had you read the article, you would have read that you don't have to download stupid crap any more. That was 1996 state of the windoze invasion art. It's 2006. Your windoze box can be infected by simply visiting any one of a number of web sites. They're inventing new ways of infecting your machine faster than the virus scanners can be updated. Are you sure you're not infected? I wouldn't be too sure, especially if you don't know how your machine works. Would you understand infection if it stared you in the face? Do you accept cookies? Do you run DirectX? Do you ever open e-mail attachments? It's not as simple as avoiding dumb downloads any more.
A virus scanner shouldn't be necessary. But for survival with Windoze, you must have one; and even then you're not safe. By definition, the malware writers are one step ahead of your scanner. This is the end result of running the worst-designed OS available today combined with greed. The greed starts with MS and ends all the way at the advertisers. Your windoze box is just the tool to expose you to their messages and get to your wallet.
Fast forward 15 years. Now, seeing the size of this market (TFA says 20 million machines are infected), of course the advertisers (through their overlords, the marketeers) reacted. They tried being nice guys over the years; but even trained monkeys had learned what happens when you pressed that browser button that said "HERE!! FREE SOFTWARE!!". So they got a little more devious, as advertisers are prone to do. When something for nothing doesn't work, there are more subtle ways to grow your market share.
Since Windoze is -- in and of itself -- so lame that it will allow its heavily touted, unique controls (DirectX, for example) to do so many things for all those unsuspecting sops without their having to know anything about what's going on or what they're doing; wouldn't it be natural that people intent on controlling what you see (advertisers) exploit weaknesses in those controls for purposes that even the morons at Microsoft never saw coming?
Just look at how bad MS' TCP/IP implementations have been over the years; holes you can drive a truck through. Even the IP stack in XP still sucks. Microsoft's OS development operations are a textbook case of how not to design, develop, and test operating systems.
The true irony is that the Winidiots are finally imploding. These were the guys who -- back in the day -- ran Wingate (thinking it was a powerful, admin-free firewall), binding all its services to 0.0.0.0, giving spammers and skript kiddiez alike free phony IP addresses and bandwidth behind which they could cause all sorts of mischief. Today, these same losers are threatening to kill people who infect their computers. It's sweet justice, says I: your choice of the same poorly designed, top-secret, commodity OS that the rest of the ignorant mass uses now threatens to turn you into a bonafide criminal (issuing death threats is still against the law).
If you run Windoze, you've done this to yourself. Windows: the OS for idiots invented by idiots. Is it any surprise this should be the most hacked OS on the face of the earth? Nobody except Microsoft knows how it really works, and the devious geniuses out there have figured out how to exploit the mile-wide loopholes MS has left for them to use. If you're a windoze user, there is no longer any way for you to remain free from malware/spyware/virii by modifying your behaviors. And I suppose there are people out there who didn't see this coming. MS sure didn't.
Now, quick: hang the real criminals (the marketeers, advertisers, and Dark Artists) before they learn how to infect the rest of the OSes out there for fun and profit. Hurry: make an example of these scum before anybody else invents any more 'brilliant' advertising paradigms (at least they could patent this shit and sue each other to death, ya know?). At least the Windoze experience won't have been in vain.
You're obviously very young or have a very short memory. Government rarely adjusts taxes to meet its needs except when government itself predicts a revenue shortfall. Corruption, war, economic imbalance, social disasters ... these things don't matter at all, except to raise taxation rates. It takes a truly thick-skinned, courageous politician/leader to adjust government seizures downward because they're no longer necessary: there are always bureaucrats who'll swear they need more, segments of society who want to dismantle the "rich", and groups with similar motives. Gutless leaders simply leave taxes as they are, or raise them instead of ordering bureaucrats to do with what they have.
What matters is the government's propensity to seize property: if they see fit to do so, they will. Whether politicians call it "progressive" or "regressive" is mere rhetoric. At the end of the day, they've still taken your property. If you can succeed in getting them to seize someone else's property instead of yours, then your 'side' has won the political skirmish of the day.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. Government just about always exercises its powers, often just because it can. There is no such thing as a 'temporary' tax.
It works very well. Thank you!!
But the peripheral requirements -- particularly FB-DIMM -- are interesting, too. And maybe a little scary. Anybody got a clue how these FB-DIMM units are gonna be priced per GB? We haven't seen any details on mobo pricing, either.
I like the idea of lower power consumption and greater throughput. But if I can't afford to build the system, it doesn't do me much good.
This announcement does sorta smell like marketing hype; I guess the implementations will tell the tale. Intel finally recognizes in public that they're getting their asses kicked by AMD, though, which is a good thing, IMO. Now if they'd just focus on price/performance competitiveness, they might even get me back as a customer.
There, in a nutshell, is everything wrong with the state of our industry. Now, if only we knew how to do it, we'd be all set. No more asshats stealing data, no more PHBs making our lives difficult. Naaaah, won't happen.
I can't imagine the world of commodity hardware without FOSS. Billy would have us all by the short and curlies -- face it, if FOSS didn't exist, someone would have to invent it.
I've done quite a bit of closed & open project work. It really doesn't matter. Neither is automatically more prone to success or failure. What matters most is the personalities of those doing the really hard work (is there a good mix?) and whether or not they're willing to go all the way (through documentation and customer support). Closed source projects are usually motivated by cash, and nothing more. FOSS projects, on the other hand, tend to be motivated by ideals and good ideas.
The total "fit and finish" of the end product often reflects the motivations of its creators: do you, as a user, not like it? Chances are pretty good that the development team didn't, either.
It's a spoof. It's gotta be. Not even SCOX is this stupid. It isn't hard to ape the language McBride and the rest of those inbred assholes use. The law firm representing SCOX is just too good to let them act like this. If this thing is real, Boies, Schiller et al just walked out the door. Trust me.
Caution: virii do not respect spoken language, irrespective of the language in which the threat/lead/hook is cast. It won't be long before English speaking winidiots are scratching their heads and wondering why their windoze box is speaking Spanish at them.
Well, well, well. So I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Craft a law just like the US version of the DMCA, except:
2. Make any violation of thie Act a misdemeanor with no civil penalties possible.
3. Make the penalty exactly $1 CDN and 1 minute in jail.
There. That should be the lesson the **AA needs: there is a letter of the law and a spirit of the law. They don't seem to recognize the difference.
Could it be that some politicos actually figured out what DRM is?
Is the media-consuming public FINALLY gonna get a break from the tyrants?
Naaah. Pinch me when the UK implements a stricter version of the DMCA. This has to be too good to be true. Imagine that: constraints on the likes of Sony, Vivendi ... no ... this just can't be.