For example, I was planning on buying a new widescreen tv and a psp, but because of the rootkit etc I decided against a Sony tv and i'm probably going to buy either a Nintendo DS or the GPX2.
I wonder, if Sony has lost any sales because of this. Just how much in cash it has cost them?
I too dropped any plans to buy Sony products, and removed their products from my wish list and explained to people I usually exchange gifts with why. I expect that that response is common on/. It is especially annoying because I have been a satisfied customer for decades and now I have to learn to shop again. And it's all changed.
SELECT manufacturer FROM manufacturerTable WHERE (name 'SONY') AND NOT riaaMember AND (quality > sucks);
but Dan Qua[y]le still invented the [I]nternet right?
No, but he did assemble Al Gore from balsa wood as a science fair project. (Al was adopted by the Gore family when the elder senator found him as part of a National Science Fair display in the Capitol Rotunda. Walt Disney put the senator in contact with a cricket who knew a puppet maker in exchange for the movie rights. The rest is history.)
Better known for his work with potatos, Senator Quayle has since given up working in balsa.
Good post, but incorrect. It doesn't matter if the civilisation is a million years more advanced than our, for them to deliberatly write a virus using the SETI recieve buffer as a vector is simply impossible. The systems are ours, any infection via this method MUST comply with out systems operating parameters (IE Instruction sets etc...). The code MUST execute on our systems, for which it MUST contain vaild opcodes. Even then, it relies on security flaws in OUR software (which may or may not exist).
To use your analogy, its like assaulting a Roman wall in a place where the laws of physics prevent flight.
Your analysis assumes a blind first contact scenario. What if, as part of a mad alien plan for world domination, the alien's planted some bit of core technology to pave the way for their domination of Terra? This technology would have to become quite ubiquitous to assure success, and be protected by powerful standards committees to assure that it does not morph beyond usability.
Before you object, please bear in mind that I am merely raising the possibility here. I have no actual proof that SQL (pronounced skweel) is alien technology, but ask yourself: what human would have specified a '%' sign as the wildcard character.
True story, ca. 1977. A manager takes over the development group for Administrative Services at a major university. Inheriting essentially a COBOL shop, there is one clever fellow maintaining an essential enterprise application written in something called autocoder (described to me as a technological precursor to assembly language that didn't really resemble a functionally oriented programming language or much else anyone but an historian or fellow dinosaur might be familiar). Having a safe niche in an obscure language, he coded all of the variable names as a sequence of zeroes and O's and kept a data dictionary in a notepad that he kept on his person.
The new manager came in and Mr. Zero was summarily given a quick bum's rush. Mom never wasted much time on such things.
If the folks at the Telegraph would spend less company time moderating on/. (see parent) they might occasionally find the points of their stories on their own. The loss of Nigel Short seems to have been a bad omen. (In the same vein: Weekend at the beach, checked the Sci-Fi channel a dozen times, it was all vampires and medieval warfare all the time on our samplings. There was more and better Sci-Fi on Cartoon Network.)
I'm french. I live in Paris. As I understand it from reading the news today, those blogs (ran by kids respectively 18, 16, and 14 years old) were taken down and their authors were arrested not because they expressed opinions but because they called for more violence and murdering of police officers (namely by setting them on fire). Which is illegal according to french laws. Law broken. Law breaker arrested. I fail to see what the big deal is.
Bravo! And there would likely have been charges brought here in the US under similar circumstances, with the same sorts of people objecting. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution was always intended to protect citizens from retaliation by Government for political speech, and has never extended to speech advocating violent criminal activity or, in the classic example from a Supreme Court case, those screaming "FIRE!!!" in a crowded theater (sans fire, of course).
As long as they don't take money from the federal government, then "yes", "yes", and "yes".
The only reason some of them don't is that they don't want to get caught doing it and then suffer the consequences.
Or they don't want their school to be micromanaged by politicians in order to receive Federal dollars they can do without. (Imagine, these egotistical administrators and academics thinking they can operate an institution of higher learning better than our shining political elite! The arrogance of some people.)
Thats a good way to widen your audience -- Just misclassify things as SciFi.
Laura Croft is no more SciFi than Indiana Jones -- Its adventure. Buffy/Xena is Mytho. No Science involved at all, just adjusted beliefs leading to an alternate reality.
You nailed it. The article refers to viewership of the "Sci-Fi" channel and they have simply improved their female demographic by abandoning their format for gods, vampires, and the T&A clone of Indiana Jones. Not even a token space opera to provide a Sci-Fi figleaf. Then the Telegraph is clueless enough to miss the story by a hundred parsecs.
Isn't ASCII itself data transferred in a neutral form?
Oh great! We had them stopped cold on the whole XML thing, and then you hand them the whole ASCII angle! Then there'll be EBCDIC! Pretty soon we'll be down to it being a patent acoherent audible signals and these guys'll have a patent on every school intercom system in the country!!! Stop the madness!!!
I've been looking for a good magazine sci-fi fix ever since.
My fix is Analog, the magazine where Heinlein and many others got their foot in the door. Single issues and subscription plans in PDF are available from fictionwise.com. I never lose an issue and can pack years worth when I go on the road for no extra weight or volume.
Besides, spamming is okay as long as you're a big corporation that either does or may contribute or lobby congress at some point.
Spamming is only bad if you're a private citizen doing it, sort of like how raping teenage babysitters, doing coke, driving drunk and killing women when you drive off a bridge and wander away is only bad for private citizens.
"Big corporations" tend to play by the rules, making them highly filterable. If you use a big corporation opt-out link you even have a pretty good chance of their stopping at their end. The Internet attracts some "respectable" on-line businesses that behave reprehensibly in this area, and engage in other deceptive practices such as "invoicing" people via snail mail for Internet services not requested or desired. These things are shaking themselves out. Corporations are natural targets for retaliation as well as wielders of power and influence, a pattern of serious misbehavior gets noticed by savvy investors as well as prosecutors at all levels and the media.
The rest of this sounds more like a diatribe against the conduct of a well-known political family than of any particular corporation. Those with money, lawyers, and influence have always been able to avoid responsibility, and even justice, in the odd case. I am happy to see the Internet pajama platoons correcting the long-standing role of big media in supporting the trend. (And it is so much fun watching Dan tour the country and vent, proving he has not the slightest clue. Big media's own Nixon. Ironic.)
I assume you'll be able to watch it on a PC or a TV, not just a tiny iPod screen.
iTunes 6.0 (downloaded and installed on my Mac yesterday as part of a standard update) includes "movie" support and the iTunes "Music Store" is offering Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night Stalker, The Suite Life, and That's So Raven at per/episode and per/season pricing ($1.99 per episode for either from what I've seen so far). There are also new links on the Music Store for music videos and Pixar content. Looks like you'll be able to watch from an iTunes equipped Mac, and probably a PC.
When you have over 90% of all computers running on the same family of Operating Systems, with the other less then 10% trying to keep the features to work with the other 90% of the computers. Is a disaster waiting to happen. You can firewall every box, Windows could be the most secure OS in the world, but when you have 90% market share it is going to be a target. Secondly people are afraid to have an independent audits on their computer security, they worry about loosing their jobs if the auditors find a problem. Also you have the problem where people assume the first line of defence is all you need, so if a virus got threw the firewall and virus scanner it just spreads all threw the network.
To my experience, the major issues involved in a desktop procurement from a Federal manager's point of view are: what are my licensing costs? what are my training costs (it is nearly impossible in the Federal workforce to find someone who has never used any version of Windows or Office, and for any other solution the training costs are typically a significant multiple of MS licensing costs)? what are the security issues (it is very difficult for managers to see how open source could possibly be more secure than Microsoft, and most think that any software as heavily targeted would see a similar track record, though the security folks are often more open on this point)? how is his decision going to impact what he pays for IT personnel? will he even be able to find IT personnel? how will he answer his GS15 or SES boss who has just thrown his monitor through the window and into Constitution Avenue because he made a stupid mistake with an unfamiliar user interface ("I'll have Khalid bring up an XP build right away, sir!")?
Spend an hour with a Federal help desk operation and you will move on to achievable objectives, like ending world hunger. Serious inroads will be made in academia, business, and local government before widespread adoption by the Fed.
In the meantime, the Federal security folks are in the position of defending everybody's favorite target OS.
The article cites a string of predictably obscure accomplishments in non-standard extensions to technical standards. For example: adding generics to C++ to remedy code bloat was first debated by the standards people in the early 90's and rejected repeatedly. Now Sun adopts generics in Java and it becomes a Microsoft innovation in C++. As a developer who used generics in Ada in the mid 1980's, I wonder if DoD appreciated that a generation later generics would be a Microsoft "innovation".
The mindset revealed in the article, that Microsoft makes the best products because Microsoft has the resources to make their products more monolithic than the competition, lacks a basic appreciation of the mechanisms of innovation. Innovation frequently emerges as a criticism to the limitations of the mainstream or monolithic position.
Based on this article, any Microsoft technology adoption is "innovative", even if it is a late response to the presumably "uninnovative" competition.
It depends on what you mean by "win." You see, for the case in Iraq at the moment their fighters are culturally influenced by Asian and Steppe fighting methods (the history of this stems from Sun Tzu and other cultural writings being moved along the Silk Road and also from Mongol invasions) which posits that running away is in fact winning in their mindset. The western mindset, which you so eloquently put in your example of winning, is about fighting the enemy in a decisive battle and if the enemy runs that is a "win" in our mindset. So at a tactical level our western mindset might see it as a win but for the enemy it is part of a longer term strategic culture that champions running away to fight again another day.
Sun Tzu has been taught in Western military academies for a very long time, and is only part of the intellectual arsenal. The Western military mindset is to take and hold territory. A retreat that keeps a force intact as a threat to maintaining control of territory is not a victory for the other side. George Washington, in the face of a superior British force, was nothing if not evasive. He wasn't bigger, so he had to be faster. His tactic to take and hold territory was to exhaust the resources of his enemies to take back and hold territory. Once the enemy was exhausted, they could all kick back and toast Cincinnatus.
This may not have been the way of Gregory Peck and Robert Taylor, but their job was heroic myth-making not practical military dominance.
Clearly something does stop Spyware authors, otherwise Mac users would be complaining about spyware.
Unlike with Windows home users and developers, Mac users do not tend to run continuously in all powerful "Administrator Mode". All of those "annoying" password requesters complained about elsewhere are a user explicitly authorizing an Admin-level operation (typically and install or preferences change). Outside of locked-down IT operations, not many Windows users are so well shielded.
I was a loyal Symantec user and used their product religiously on my PCs and Macs, knowing that sooner or later something ugly would rip through the Mac community. When I renewed a license on the Mac side the license they gave me didn't work. I emailed customer service twice and still received no response. When I read the fine print, the license must be applied within a month of being issued or it does not work. I did that, and followed all of their installation directions, but no luck. The lack of response from their customer support was the last straw, none of my systems run Symantec products now. Their troubles may run deeper than a lack of scary OS X security stories to drive their sales.
As to the original topic, does Hollywood depict *anything* accurately?
Of course, Hollywood's average work lacks the credibility and verisimilitude of, say, the average/. post. But through their mystic abilities and the magic of mass media they have been able to reap massive profits from something called Wayne's World.
This calls for more than just your run of the mill +3 dagger!
Slashdot Mirror
"I couldn't watch video ?"
That's because you're using a clunker operating system.
He forgot to follow the new procedures for all Sony customers. "First, ask your rootkit to phone home for permission..."
For example, I was planning on buying a new widescreen tv and a psp, but because of the rootkit etc I decided against a Sony tv and i'm probably going to buy either a Nintendo DS or the GPX2.
/. It is especially annoying because I have been a satisfied customer for decades and now I have to learn to shop again. And it's all changed.
I wonder, if Sony has lost any sales because of this. Just how much in cash it has cost them?
I too dropped any plans to buy Sony products, and removed their products from my wish list and explained to people I usually exchange gifts with why. I expect that that response is common on
SELECT manufacturer FROM manufacturerTable WHERE (name 'SONY') AND NOT riaaMember AND (quality > sucks);
but Dan Qua[y]le still invented the [I]nternet right?
No, but he did assemble Al Gore from balsa wood as a science fair project. (Al was adopted by the Gore family when the elder senator found him as part of a National Science Fair display in the Capitol Rotunda. Walt Disney put the senator in contact with a cricket who knew a puppet maker in exchange for the movie rights. The rest is history.)
Better known for his work with potatos, Senator Quayle has since given up working in balsa.
Good post, but incorrect. It doesn't matter if the civilisation is a million years more advanced than our, for them to deliberatly write a virus using the SETI recieve buffer as a vector is simply impossible. The systems are ours, any infection via this method MUST comply with out systems operating parameters (IE Instruction sets etc...). The code MUST execute on our systems, for which it MUST contain vaild opcodes. Even then, it relies on security flaws in OUR software (which may or may not exist).
To use your analogy, its like assaulting a Roman wall in a place where the laws of physics prevent flight.
Your analysis assumes a blind first contact scenario. What if, as part of a mad alien plan for world domination, the alien's planted some bit of core technology to pave the way for their domination of Terra? This technology would have to become quite ubiquitous to assure success, and be protected by powerful standards committees to assure that it does not morph beyond usability.
Before you object, please bear in mind that I am merely raising the possibility here. I have no actual proof that SQL (pronounced skweel) is alien technology, but ask yourself: what human would have specified a '%' sign as the wildcard character.
True story, ca. 1977. A manager takes over the development group for Administrative Services at a major university. Inheriting essentially a COBOL shop, there is one clever fellow maintaining an essential enterprise application written in something called autocoder (described to me as a technological precursor to assembly language that didn't really resemble a functionally oriented programming language or much else anyone but an historian or fellow dinosaur might be familiar). Having a safe niche in an obscure language, he coded all of the variable names as a sequence of zeroes and O's and kept a data dictionary in a notepad that he kept on his person.
The new manager came in and Mr. Zero was summarily given a quick bum's rush. Mom never wasted much time on such things.
If the folks at the Telegraph would spend less company time moderating on /. (see parent) they might occasionally find the points of their stories on their own. The loss of Nigel Short seems to have been a bad omen. (In the same vein: Weekend at the beach, checked the Sci-Fi channel a dozen times, it was all vampires and medieval warfare all the time on our samplings. There was more and better Sci-Fi on Cartoon Network.)
I'm french. I live in Paris.
As I understand it from reading the news today, those blogs (ran by kids respectively 18, 16, and 14 years old) were taken down and their authors were arrested not because they expressed opinions but because they called for more violence and murdering of police officers (namely by setting them on fire).
Which is illegal according to french laws.
Law broken. Law breaker arrested. I fail to see what the big deal is.
Bravo! And there would likely have been charges brought here in the US under similar circumstances, with the same sorts of people objecting. The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution was always intended to protect citizens from retaliation by Government for political speech, and has never extended to speech advocating violent criminal activity or, in the classic example from a Supreme Court case, those screaming "FIRE!!!" in a crowded theater (sans fire, of course).
As long as they don't take money from the federal government, then "yes", "yes", and "yes".
The only reason some of them don't is that they don't want to get caught doing it and then suffer the consequences.
Or they don't want their school to be micromanaged by politicians in order to receive Federal dollars they can do without. (Imagine, these egotistical administrators and academics thinking they can operate an institution of higher learning better than our shining political elite! The arrogance of some people.)
Check out http://www.technocrat.net/ . It's /. for adults.
They put the story up Friday (though with the caveat stated up front in the summary that it could be hokum).
Thats a good way to widen your audience -- Just misclassify things as SciFi.
Laura Croft is no more SciFi than Indiana Jones -- Its adventure.
Buffy/Xena is Mytho. No Science involved at all, just adjusted beliefs leading to an alternate reality.
You nailed it. The article refers to viewership of the "Sci-Fi" channel and they have simply improved their female demographic by abandoning their format for gods, vampires, and the T&A clone of Indiana Jones. Not even a token space opera to provide a Sci-Fi figleaf. Then the Telegraph is clueless enough to miss the story by a hundred parsecs.
Isn't ASCII itself data transferred in a neutral form?
Oh great! We had them stopped cold on the whole XML thing, and then you hand them the whole ASCII angle! Then there'll be EBCDIC! Pretty soon we'll be down to it being a patent acoherent audible signals and these guys'll have a patent on every school intercom system in the country!!! Stop the madness!!!
I've been looking for a good magazine sci-fi fix ever since.
My fix is Analog, the magazine where Heinlein and many others got their foot in the door. Single issues and subscription plans in PDF are available from fictionwise.com. I never lose an issue and can pack years worth when I go on the road for no extra weight or volume.
Besides, spamming is okay as long as you're a big corporation that either does or may contribute or lobby congress at some point.
Spamming is only bad if you're a private citizen doing it, sort of like how raping teenage babysitters, doing coke, driving drunk and killing women when you drive off a bridge and wander away is only bad for private citizens.
"Big corporations" tend to play by the rules, making them highly filterable. If you use a big corporation opt-out link you even have a pretty good chance of their stopping at their end. The Internet attracts some "respectable" on-line businesses that behave reprehensibly in this area, and engage in other deceptive practices such as "invoicing" people via snail mail for Internet services not requested or desired. These things are shaking themselves out. Corporations are natural targets for retaliation as well as wielders of power and influence, a pattern of serious misbehavior gets noticed by savvy investors as well as prosecutors at all levels and the media.
The rest of this sounds more like a diatribe against the conduct of a well-known political family than of any particular corporation. Those with money, lawyers, and influence have always been able to avoid responsibility, and even justice, in the odd case. I am happy to see the Internet pajama platoons correcting the long-standing role of big media in supporting the trend. (And it is so much fun watching Dan tour the country and vent, proving he has not the slightest clue. Big media's own Nixon. Ironic.)
I assume you'll be able to watch it on a PC or a TV, not just a tiny iPod screen.
iTunes 6.0 (downloaded and installed on my Mac yesterday as part of a standard update) includes "movie" support and the iTunes "Music Store" is offering Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night Stalker, The Suite Life, and That's So Raven at per/episode and per/season pricing ($1.99 per episode for either from what I've seen so far). There are also new links on the Music Store for music videos and Pixar content. Looks like you'll be able to watch from an iTunes equipped Mac, and probably a PC.
didn't evolve on this planet
So if flight evolves separately on another planet it doesn't count?
Typical terracentric rubbish!
And the event only merited one on-topic post in its first 20 minutes.
When you have over 90% of all computers running on the same family of Operating Systems, with the other less then 10% trying to keep the features to work with the other 90% of the computers. Is a disaster waiting to happen. You can firewall every box, Windows could be the most secure OS in the world, but when you have 90% market share it is going to be a target. Secondly people are afraid to have an independent audits on their computer security, they worry about loosing their jobs if the auditors find a problem. Also you have the problem where people assume the first line of defence is all you need, so if a virus got threw the firewall and virus scanner it just spreads all threw the network.
To my experience, the major issues involved in a desktop procurement from a Federal manager's point of view are: what are my licensing costs? what are my training costs (it is nearly impossible in the Federal workforce to find someone who has never used any version of Windows or Office, and for any other solution the training costs are typically a significant multiple of MS licensing costs)? what are the security issues (it is very difficult for managers to see how open source could possibly be more secure than Microsoft, and most think that any software as heavily targeted would see a similar track record, though the security folks are often more open on this point)? how is his decision going to impact what he pays for IT personnel? will he even be able to find IT personnel? how will he answer his GS15 or SES boss who has just thrown his monitor through the window and into Constitution Avenue because he made a stupid mistake with an unfamiliar user interface ("I'll have Khalid bring up an XP build right away, sir!")?
Spend an hour with a Federal help desk operation and you will move on to achievable objectives, like ending world hunger. Serious inroads will be made in academia, business, and local government before widespread adoption by the Fed.
In the meantime, the Federal security folks are in the position of defending everybody's favorite target OS.
The article cites a string of predictably obscure accomplishments in non-standard extensions to technical standards. For example: adding generics to C++ to remedy code bloat was first debated by the standards people in the early 90's and rejected repeatedly. Now Sun adopts generics in Java and it becomes a Microsoft innovation in C++. As a developer who used generics in Ada in the mid 1980's, I wonder if DoD appreciated that a generation later generics would be a Microsoft "innovation".
The mindset revealed in the article, that Microsoft makes the best products because Microsoft has the resources to make their products more monolithic than the competition, lacks a basic appreciation of the mechanisms of innovation. Innovation frequently emerges as a criticism to the limitations of the mainstream or monolithic position.
Based on this article, any Microsoft technology adoption is "innovative", even if it is a late response to the presumably "uninnovative" competition.
Come back in 20 years when you have been dumped on, shit on, fired, layed off, the building locked upon your arrival ......................
Have to ask: What job search method/firm/site do you use?
It depends on what you mean by "win." You see, for the case in Iraq at the moment their fighters are culturally influenced by Asian and Steppe fighting methods (the history of this stems from Sun Tzu and other cultural writings being moved along the Silk Road and also from Mongol invasions) which posits that running away is in fact winning in their mindset. The western mindset, which you so eloquently put in your example of winning, is about fighting the enemy in a decisive battle and if the enemy runs that is a "win" in our mindset. So at a tactical level our western mindset might see it as a win but for the enemy it is part of a longer term strategic culture that champions running away to fight again another day.
Sun Tzu has been taught in Western military academies for a very long time, and is only part of the intellectual arsenal. The Western military mindset is to take and hold territory. A retreat that keeps a force intact as a threat to maintaining control of territory is not a victory for the other side. George Washington, in the face of a superior British force, was nothing if not evasive. He wasn't bigger, so he had to be faster. His tactic to take and hold territory was to exhaust the resources of his enemies to take back and hold territory. Once the enemy was exhausted, they could all kick back and toast Cincinnatus.
This may not have been the way of Gregory Peck and Robert Taylor, but their job was heroic myth-making not practical military dominance.
Clearly something does stop Spyware authors, otherwise Mac users would be complaining about spyware.
Unlike with Windows home users and developers, Mac users do not tend to run continuously in all powerful "Administrator Mode". All of those "annoying" password requesters complained about elsewhere are a user explicitly authorizing an Admin-level operation (typically and install or preferences change). Outside of locked-down IT operations, not many Windows users are so well shielded.
I was a loyal Symantec user and used their product religiously on my PCs and Macs, knowing that sooner or later something ugly would rip through the Mac community. When I renewed a license on the Mac side the license they gave me didn't work. I emailed customer service twice and still received no response. When I read the fine print, the license must be applied within a month of being issued or it does not work. I did that, and followed all of their installation directions, but no luck. The lack of response from their customer support was the last straw, none of my systems run Symantec products now. Their troubles may run deeper than a lack of scary OS X security stories to drive their sales.
The compilation takes two weeks on machine? By the time I finish it, the support is over. No good
This is where the CFO's decision to stand by those reliable 386 workstations proves a tad shortsighted.
As to the original topic, does Hollywood depict *anything* accurately?
/. post. But through their mystic abilities and the magic of mass media they have been able to reap massive profits from something called Wayne's World.
Of course, Hollywood's average work lacks the credibility and verisimilitude of, say, the average
This calls for more than just your run of the mill +3 dagger!
Pirates may run Linux, but ninjas run OpenBSD, therefore they are even smarter!
That just means they are much more secure. Given the standard tradeoff between utility and security, they may not be able to do much.