111–120 of 248 posts
The Linux being an illegal operating system is only a slight exaggeration of the FUD being put out by Microsoft at the time. Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When this first appeared I thought I remembered it had been picked up by the mainstream press, but I can't find a mention of it on news search. You can imagine how easily the masses would have accepted this in 2001.
I recall thinking back then that hackers were mysterious and cool. Fast forward to becoming a computer programmer and spending my life reverse engineering basically everything to be able to do my job and it seems laughable how much fear people have of basically anyone that spends time understanding anything they don't. Look! A witch! :D Also, I guess if you were a girl, you had a free pass, because if this article wa…
"If your son is using Quake, you should make hime understand that this is not acceptable to you. You should ensure all the firearms in your house are carefully locked away, and have trigger locks installed. You should also bring your concerns to the attention of his school." Holy moly!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that governments spend their money responsibly and according to the wishes of their citizens is... The kindest thing I can say is that it's not a universally held opinion (or even, in my experience, a significant-minority held opinion).
You know, it feels that way to citizens because the government is spending money in ways that other citizens want, but not them specifically. Iowa corn growers love corn subsidies and politicians make ethanol pledges to appease them, home owners love mortgage tax deductions so no politician will dare threaten them, military equipment manufactures love that we spend ludicrous amounts of money on our arguably insanely-…
If that is the case, then a certain portion of wealth going to actually good causes rather than the government would be a good thing, not an ethical violation. If the government cannot be relied on to spend the wealth of its people responsibly - if instead it fritters that resource away in power games and appeasement - then avoiding said taxes is not, fundamentally, immoral.
Off the top of my head for other bad and expensive government programs, there's the TSA and other Department of Homeland Security initiatives that fall under the umbrella of Security Theater; the support, both legal and economic, of the private prison industry; arms sales to ethically dubious partners; political vanity projects like the "Bridge to Nowhere"; ideologically driven propaganda (Reefer Madness, anyone?); and straight-up war crimes.
Representative government may be a good reflection of the people - I have misgivings about that claim, but I'll let them go - but the people should demand better than a reflection. I don't want my moral equal leading me; I want someone better. I want someone who isn't afraid to make an unpopular decision when it's the right thing to do.
At Mark Zuckerberg's school I remember a story about him getting in trouble for PHP. The school had a zero tolerance drug policy and PHP was confused with PCP.
This just shows that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The Linux being an illegal operating system is only a slight exaggeration of the FUD being put out by Microsoft at the time. Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.
Microsoft has been around a long time and they seem to adapt pretty rapidly. I wonder what percentage of the company today was around during Ballmer days, and how the culture has changed over time within the company. Naturally it's going to be driven by the market, but I wonder, are older MS folks moving with the culture shift? Or is it newer hires that are pushing for the open source ethos? As a Mac and Linux user,…
When AWS first blew up they sort of struggled in European Enterprise because they originally went Google route or automating everything while taking a “our way or the high-way” attitude toward legalisation and localised agreements. This is basically why Azure was capable to fill the void that AWS was struggling to fill. Modern AWS has learned a lot from Kim that though, and are now ahead of Microsoft in many areas. I still can’t get a guarantee that only European citizens working in the EU will be the only people who work on my Azure cloud like I can from Amazon.
But as a whole, the sort of setup where I can call Redmond directly when shits hit the fan, and they will even give me hourly updates via phone until the issue has been resolved. That’s a Balmer sort of thing. And so is the financial aspect of how much more sense it makes to chose the Microsoft option once you’re already in bed with them. If anything that last hit has only grown under the new Microsoft.
I mean, how can I justify to my political leadership that I need to buy a Microsoft Teams competitor when it’s already included in our office365 setup? I can’t, and this just snowballs over time.
I’m not unhappy about this by the way. Through the past many decades Microsoft has been one of our best business partners as far as Tech goes. Which is very likely why AWS has adopted the approach.
At Mark Zuckerberg's school I remember a story about him getting in trouble for PHP. The school had a zero tolerance drug policy and PHP was confused with PCP.
His offense? He had a shortcut to Notepad in his shared folder, which was seen as a scripting tool.
Ahahahaha. I remember (vaguely) pinging AOL's irc servers with hays cmdset commands and as a result my parents getting a letter to the effect that I was a computer criminal and we were on some 'blacklist' forever, fortunately this apparently blacklist didn't seem to be shared between ISPs so I was back causing chaos within days >_ And now here I am, mid thirties, children, and I wonder if I would let my kid play DOOM…