DreamSpark, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ThePirateBay
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@PJH said:
ObOT: House. The younger years.
Yeah, the show never really went into his life as a transvestite before becoming a doctor, which I'd say is a shame.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Stallman, etc.) actually own a large number of sanitariums
"sanitry" isn't a term you'd associate with Stallman...
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Maciuś, nie pierdol...
As of the "loads everything into RAM" issue, it's most probably IE6/XP's brain dead method of verifying the cryptographic signatures on the "files downloaded from the internet".
I have no idea what they thought doing it, but instead of "streaming" the file through the crypto function it loads it whole first. It's fixed since Vista, and a workaround (disabling sig checks) might be available if the "Attachment Manager" group policies exist on XP.
Alternatively, you have an antivirus with an in-process plugin for IE, which'd be a WTF of its own.
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@wrack said:
a workaround (disabling sig checks) might be available if the "Attachment Manager" group policies exist on XP.
That must be some kind of serious, hardcore user-friendliness shoved up one's ass. Group policies! Everyone in the Universe knows how to tweak those!
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Pfff, you just can't help being pedantic and/or willfully misunderstanding people, can you?
@morbiuswilters said:
So you're willing to dig through cat shit for free, but if somebody asks you to dig through shit for an actual benefit, that's bad?
This may come as a shocker for you, but some people actually do stuff for free. Because it helps other people (or, in this case, pets). Try it some time, it makes you feel good and it won't hurt you. Promise.
@morbiuswilters said:
Meanwhile, if you don't dig through that bag of shit, that dude gets to keep his gold.
I'm fine with that - let HIM get his hands dirty if he wants his gold so bad.
@morbiuswilters said:
If you get the gold, then you can make other people dig through shit for it.
Ah yes, that sounds like a completely reasonable life ambition. Seriously?
@morbiuswilters said:
I think you have a delusional idea of your own worth.
I think you have a delusional idea of what's being discussed here. Hint: it involves analogies, abstract concepts and maybe some sarcasm.
@morbiuswilters said:
People dig through shit all the time, just to survive. As Alex pointed out, some of us dig through shit as a hobby. Is your self-worth really that strongly tied to the idea of not having to ever get your hands dirty? If so, then isn't it true that you look down on people who do get their hands dirty for a living? You see yourself as better than a garbageman or a plumber, right?
Yes, yes, that's EXACTLY what I said! No, wait... Okay, let me explain it to you in simple terms: I have the greatest respect for people that do jobs that I consider "dirty" or "crappy". I pay them happily so I don't have to do/learn/put up with it. What I DON'T respect or understand is people that will dig through shit just to get at some gold, the value of which may just get you through the month, when you don't really need the extra money (I don't). If you're starving: by all means go ahead. Just getting your hands dirty to get even better off is sort of exactly what's wrong with the whole world system at the moment IMHO.
@morbiuswilters said:
So you've been given the opportunity to end world hunger* simply by getting shit on your hands for a few seconds, and your response is "I'll consider it"?? What kind of entitled jackass are you??
It's a stylistic form called "exaggeration". I should have known you wouldn't get it.
@morbiuswilters said:
*I have no idea how you think some quantity of money is going to end world hunger, since as it is most of the food aid given to poor countries simply undermines their local farmers and aids the criminal governments which keep them starving, making them even less able to feed themselves.
Neither do I (do I LOOK like a Nobel prize winner to you?), but I'm sure money is going to be involved somewhere in the process. At least until we invent Magical Bread-pooping Unicorns.
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@Monomelodies said:
This may come as a shocker for you, but some people actually do stuff for free. Because it helps other people (or, in this case, pets). Try it some time, it makes you feel good and it won't hurt you. Promise.
Wow, talk about willfully misunderstanding. I never said it was bad to do things for free, I said it was absurd that you'd dig through shit for free but not for gold.
@Monomelodies said:
Okay, let me explain it to you in simple terms: I have the greatest respect for people that do jobs that I consider "dirty" or "crappy". I pay them happily so I don't have to do/learn/put up with it. What I DON'T respect or understand is people that will dig through shit just to get at some gold, the value of which may just get you through the month, when you don't really need the extra money (I don't). If you're starving: by all means go ahead.
I hate arguing with dumb people. No amount of yelling or whipping is going to make your smarter. But, anyway, here we go: the extremely obvious fallacy in what you just said was that the garbageman/plumber/whatever isn't simply doing this stuff to eat. I mean, you quite obviously do not need trash service or indoor plumbing (or Internet access, for that matter) but you're quite willing to earn money to pay for them. Instead, you've drawn a completely arbitrary line and said "People who want or have the stuff I do (indoor plumbing, Internet access, vinyl records (seriously???)) are good, people who want or have more are bad." Really, your entire attitude is one of sickening self-righteousness and narcissism.
@Monomelodies said:
Just getting your hands dirty to get even better off is sort of exactly what's wrong with the whole world system at the moment IMHO.
Your humble opinion is wrong. And stupid. What's wrong with the world is that people like you exist. Hard-working people aren't ruining things, it's the lazy, self-loving nitwits who think they are morally superior and therefore have the right to push everybody around. Guess what: you're little more than a medieval religious fanatic. You believe in irrational nonsense and you are so blinded by your own sense of self-worth and self-righteousness that you don't even notice your glaring hypocrisy.
@Monomelodies said:
It's a stylistic form called "exaggeration". I should have known you wouldn't get it.
It's not that I didn't get it, it's that it landed very poorly. See, the problem is, when you come off as a narcissistic douchebag, people are less likely to see sarcasm in what you say and are more likely to think you're as depraved as you seem to be.
@Monomelodies said:
do I LOOK like a Nobel prize winner to you?
Honestly, you're looking a lot like an Obama or a Gore or a Jimmy Carter. If you don't want to be mistaken for an arrogant jackass, don't act like one.
@Monomelodies said:
...but I'm sure money is going to be involved somewhere in the process.
We could genetically engineer a virus that kills poor people. That would get rid of world hunger and it would take money.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
So you're basically saying, that as long as something's free, we should all just shut up and enjoy it? Is MySQL great because it's free, and we're not allowed to complain? Is IE good because it's free, and the security concerns are just "a few hoops"? If somebody gave you a bag of feces with a gold nugget on the bottom for free, would you happily dig through, or would you just throw it in their face?
Yes, that's what the whole world is saying. You are still entitled to not enjoy it and whine about it, but in return the worlds population of reasonable people are entitled to think you're a douchebag. It's kinda like holocaust denial... go ahead and look like a colossal berk if you must, the rest of us will remain civilised and laugh about you when you leave the room (or indeed in your face). Your gold nugget in a bag of faeces analogy is nonsense... they haven't approached you and shoved the bag in your face, they have left the bag lying around and put the word out that its there if anyone wants it, with the unspoken caveat that if you don't want it you can go about your daily business without it being a problem.
@Maciejasjmj said:Just the sole fact that you're giving something for free is not going to magically win you a die-hard fanbase. It's especially true for Microsoft, and especially true among CS/IT students who use DreamSpark, because they already have a strong bias for Linux. It's MS that needs to try - if you've been a Linux user for quite a while, you're used to free AND quality content. And if your first Windows Experience is having to run to your school with a HDD because the shitty downloader won't run without employing some pretty serious magic - well, that wouldn't turn me to the dark side.
Er, they're not trying to win a fanbase... Microsoft have no need of crazy fanboys, they just need to retain their large userbase of cool-headed individuals who know MS provide decent tools, sometimes at incredibly low prices (or sometimes for free), who are happy to continue using (and indeed paying) for MS products without loudly bleating on some forums about how hard-done-by they are.
@Maciejasjmj said:And another thing you're not noticing - TANSTAAFL. Your student license will eventually expire, and the main goal of MSDNAA is to make you realize that you've grown so used to MS products that you'll be willing to spend money to buy them for real. It's not charity, it's an investment - and since they're expecting it to pay back, there's no excuse.
Yes indeed... the user license does expire, at which point you can just go and get another one, or you've probably moved into the professional arena and already have the stuff available though something like MSDN. Maybe you're working as a professional, but freelance, so you have to buy your own software... in which case that is precisely what you do... you pay for it.
And having paid for it you magically gain a new right: You can bitch about its problems all day long, without
1) MS being obliged to prosecute you,
2) people thinking you're a nob who should shut the fuck up,
3) your arguments sounding like the crying of an obese 5 year old child who's never been smacked.
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@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I dig through shit daily just to change my son's diaper. Hell yeah I would do it for gold.@Maciejasjmj said:
If somebody gave you a bag of feces with a gold nugget on the bottom for free, would you happily dig through, or would you just throw it in their face?
Wait, seriously? Gold is like $1,400 an ounce, and digging through feces is not that bad. I happily dig through feces every goddam spring just to get tomatoes, peppers, cukes, etc...
... but you wouldn't dig through feces to get gold!?
@blackeyrat said:
Fucking shit the world's full of entitled pricks.
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Holy smokes, to leave you guys for a day...<br >
<br >I've been legally using MS products for ages without ever paying for them (or just small amounts). When your student license expires, you find a job in a Microsoft based development shop and you make sure you get an MSDN subscription. You see, it's not YOUR money they are after. MS wants to grow the pool of developers and IT specialist to convince businesses to buy and use their technologies.
Still, they're making money thanks to that - whether it comes from my own pockets, or from a business I might one day manage, or from their earnings from a product I'll write for them. I'm not saying there's anything "bad" or "evil" in it - just let's not treat them like the next Mother Teresa.
There's an OS X version. If you launch it in a browser on OS X, you get offered the OS X installer.
Gee, thanks. So, there are no other operating systems beside Windows and OS X. These Linux neckbeards? Pfft.
Fun fact, you don't have to. If you're downloading an OS, you can just order it, get the key and use whatever media you have (except for XP because it gets bitchy if you use the wrong key with the wrong media (and who uses XP these days)).
Okay, point for you (though it might be a bit more difficult to find Pro version instead of Ultimate).
I'd call it good because it installed SDM and nothing else personally. I never expected it to install a toolbar.
I don't know. Whenever I see that some site wants me to install a "downloader" for something I can easily get without it, I usually just close the page and try to find it somewhere else. The very concept of downloaders is in 90% of cases associated with malware and adware, and I bet people at Mic^H^H^HKivuto knew that.
Not liking something solely for the sake of not liking it (even though it's competent) is a poor reason to not like something.
Okay, I don't like it, because IE has been ignorant to standards for so many ears that I simply don't believe they fixed everything in one release. Oh, and I don't need two browsers, but good luck at removing IE. Maybe it sucks less, but it's not going to make me leave Chrome.
What part of "Kivuto are the ones responsible for the SDM not Microsoft" do you not understand? It is not Microsoft forcing you to use it, it is Kivuto, an entirely separate entity to Microsoft. Proof.
Half a point for you, because at some point someone at MS had to see the product, use it and say "Yes, that's much more awesome than having a download link, here's your gajillion dollars!"
Define "better download engines". Beyond the fact that Chrome's downloads appear at the bottom of the screen, Firefox's appear as a popup from a button on the toolbar and IE's appear in a separate window,
Why? You just did that. They're inobtrusive. And if it only forced me to use IE and its downloader, it might actually work - but we get a separate app using scripting tricks.
In any case, solution 1: install it, test, remove it. Solution 2: use a non-N version of Windows like the majority of the world does.
So, if they gave you a version of OS X without iTunes, and then you'd find out that some unrelated functionalities have been removed too, because fuck you, would you be happy with that?
Unless the website in question hasn't been updated since, oh, 2004? You shouldn't run into any of them.
[url=http://www.edicy.com/blog/edicy-going-internet-explorer-only]There's a good example from 2009[/url], I'm not sure if it still applies, though.
You should then also be used to wrestling with counterintuitive and/or nonstandard UIs plus convoluted procedures to get things done.
Ah, but it's free, so you're not allowed to criticize.
do not have any Windows VM amongst them that they could use to begin the first download
Guess what you need for a Windows VM, beside VM?
Those are software choices. You sound like one of those spoiled brats who whines because they only got $6,000 for clothes shopping, or got a white iPhone instead of the black one. Windows may or may not be the superior option for whatever you're doing, but if you're getting a copy for free for your education, yes, you should shut up and stop bitching and accept it as a grant to further your education without personal expense, which is what it freaking is.
Aah, and they help me with my education because they're just that cool, not wanting to earn money or anything. Guess I should just shut up and not complain, just like I shouldn't complain about that shady looking guy that tried to give me pure grade cocaine FOR FREE! He just tried to be cool, y'know.
If you actually managed to get into a tech college having never touched Windows, that's a miracle. Quit your entitled whining.
It's not like getting into tech college requires any knowledge of computers here. Besides, my first PC came with no OS, and my second one came with Mandriva, so if it wasn't for pirating Windows back when I was a teen, that would be a good possibility.
"Guys, I wanted to like my new Ford, but about 14 miles down the road I suddenly got the impression psychotic gremlins were following me on a motorcycle, so you see Ford makes bad cars. Because motorcycle-gremlins."
More like "Guys, I wanted to try out my new Ford, but I have driven 10 cars before and every time the motorcycle psychotic gremlins kept following me. Do you think there might be some pattern?"
Wait, seriously? Gold is like $1,400 an ounce, and digging through feces is not that bad. I happily dig through feces every goddam spring just to get tomatoes, peppers, cukes, etc...
<br >... but you wouldn't dig through feces to get gold!?
Okay, let's make it a big bag of feces. The one you can't just reach into, but you have to take a deep breath, dive head-down and then maybe find your teeny-tiny gold nugget. Oh, and it all happens in your living room, so even after you do that, you still have a bag of shit you have to get rid of.<br >But is it? I don't know. Neither do you. I'm arguing on the side of "I doubt it". The OP read the full terms and conditions (#10: We can break your shit and give you a fiver, bitch), so mabye he can shed some Polish light on this seemingly important question.
Yep, from what I know, the only important thing is the key you get before your download. The ISO image isn't in any way special, it's exactly the same thing you'd get on any warez site. Guess it's legal - in case BSA (or whoever-the-hell-cares-about-that-in-our-country) breaks my door for downloading Windows from TPB, I can just show them it's legal and activated.
Here's an analogy I think might make sense in your country: Let's say your neighbor is finding it tiresome and expensive to engage in foreplay with this sheep. Would you want him crossing the line of rusty, Soviet-era tractor parts that separates your quarter acre of mud from his quarter acre of mud, and having his way with your nubile sheep? Those were your sheep, dammit! You were going to have your way with them!
Me no understanding. Me sharing sheep every day with my neighbours and cousins. Me from a post-communist country, me believe everyone should share their wealth.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
More like "Guys, I wanted to try out my new Ford, but I have driven 10 cars before and every time the motorcycle psychotic gremlins kept following me. Do you think there might be some pattern?"
Yeah. You're a crazy-person.
Again: it reflects more on you than on Microsoft/DreamSpark/whoever.
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i don't know why any one gives stallman the time of day - he is the equivalent of a drunk street preacher, with poorer personal hygiene
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@morbiuswilters said:
Wow, talk about willfully misunderstanding. I never said it was bad to do things for free, I said it was absurd that you'd dig through shit for free but not for gold.
Why is that absurd? I never said I do it for fun, the point is I don't care about gold enough to have to do it.
Against my better judgement, I'm going to react to the rest of your crazy rant. I guess part of me is still hoping there's some sense in you:
@morbiuswilters said:
I hate arguing with dumb people. No amount of yelling or whipping is going to make your smarter. But, anyway, here we go: the extremely obvious fallacy in what you just said was that the garbageman/plumber/whatever isn't simply doing this stuff to eat. I mean, you quite obviously do not need trash service or indoor plumbing (or Internet access, for that matter) but you're quite willing to earn money to pay for them. Instead, you've drawn a completely arbitrary line and said "People who want or have the stuff I do (indoor plumbing, Internet access, vinyl records (seriously???)) are good, people who want or have more are bad." Really, your entire attitude is one of sickening self-righteousness and narcissism.
Wow. Just wow. I actually feel sorry for your lack of reading comprehension skills at this point.
"Digging through shit to get a gold nugget" is an analogy. Translated: you're prepared to do something pretty disgusting just to make yourself better. As long as you just get your own hands covered in shit, fine, but I assumed the implications of the analogy were slightly more obvious. In the real world, "getting your hands dirty" tends to mean "other people get hurt, but you get richer, so whatever" (okay, it can also mean "dive in and learn the ropes", but you surely get my point). It's like a politician making $300k a year but willfully overestimating his travel expenses because, you know, that extra $1k a year he REALLY needs.
I don't care whether or not I WANT the stuff people do. If other people want it and they can make a living off of it, more power to them. What I do feel strongly about is the kinds of people that bend the rules to their advantage. Technically not illegal maybe, but morally certainly abject.
@morbiuswilters said:
Your humble opinion is wrong. And stupid. What's wrong with the world is that people like you exist. Hard-working people aren't ruining things, it's the lazy, self-loving nitwits who think they are morally superior and therefore have the right to push everybody around. Guess what: you're little more than a medieval religious fanatic. You believe in irrational nonsense and you are so blinded by your own sense of self-worth and self-righteousness that you don't even notice your glaring hypocrisy.
I'm going to assume here the above tirade stems from your misunderstanding of the "digging through shit" analogy. Nobody ever claimed hard workers are evil (au contraire). Digging through shit to get at a gold nugget isn't hard work. It's easy, it's just dirty. Like fraud. Or war profiteering. Or drug trafficking. That was my point.
@morbiuswilters said:
It's not that I didn't get it, it's that it landed very poorly. See, the problem is, when you come off as a narcissistic douchebag, people are less likely to see sarcasm in what you say and are more likely to think you're as depraved as you seem to be.
Well, luckily for you you never seem to have that problem, right?
@morbiuswilters said:
We could genetically engineer a virus that kills poor people. That would get rid of world hunger and it would take money.
That remark is just so devoid of a fundamental understanding of economic principles that I'm going to choose to ignore it so as to not embarass you any further. In the meantime, soon as you come up with a solution to world hunger that will NOT cost us (as in, The West) money, I'm all ears. And before you get started - 'cause I know you love to oversimplify anything that doesn't fit your pathetic America-centred world view - yes, corruption is a big problem in lots of countries. No, magically eradicating it won't acutely make those countries rich. That's not how the world works, unfortunately.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Maciejasjmj said:
More like "Guys, I wanted to try out my new Ford, but I have driven 10 cars before and every time the motorcycle psychotic gremlins kept following me. Do you think there might be some pattern?"
Yeah. You're a crazy-person.
Again: it reflects more on you than on Microsoft/DreamSpark/whoever.
It's you who came up with this analogy, so I'd dare to say it reflects more on you than me, but fine. Let's play your game.
Imagine now that 90% of cars (i.e. downloaders) came with a motorcycle psychotic gremlin (i.e. malware) attached. And he does not only follow you when you drive, he also tends to break into your apartment, smash your kitchenware and sleep in your bed. Would you be willing to buy a car in that case?
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Let ya slide on the last one, but...
@Monomelodies said:
Digging through shit to get at a gold nugget isn't hard work. It's easy, it's just dirty. Like fraud. Or war profiteering. Or drug trafficking. That was my point.
Digging through feces is literally dirty, and it's not inherently illegal.
Fraud at el are figuratively dirty and are all like, felony illegal.
I think you were trying to equate "typing in a few fields and clicking a bunch of buttons with your mouse" to be the former. Which,is arguably significantly easier than digging through feces... and the end result (free software) is arguably less valuable than a feces-covered gold nugget.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
Imagine now that 90% of cars (i.e. downloaders) came with a motorcycle psychotic gremlin (i.e. malware) attached. And he does not only follow you when you drive, he also tends to break into your apartment, smash your kitchenware and sleep in your bed. Would you be willing to buy a car in that case?
I've had worse roommates.
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@Monomelodies said:
In the real world, "getting your hands dirty" tends to mean "other people get hurt, but you get richer, so whatever"
What the fuck, man, what shithole country do you live in? Where I live, "getting your hands dirty" means, um, "getting your hands dirty". Hence the entire discussion of bags of shit, gold nuggets, garbagemen, etc.. did you zone out for that entire part of the conversation? How did you start hallucinating stuff about the Mafia?
@Monomelodies said:
What I do feel strongly about is the kinds of people that bend the rules to their advantage. Technically not illegal maybe, but morally certainly abject.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was defending immoral behavior, because, you know, that's how I roll. Or, actually, I was defending literally getting your hands dirty.
@Monomelodies said:
I'm going to assume here the above tirade stems from your misunderstanding of the "digging through shit" analogy.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you misunderstood Alex's analogy. It was "doing something icky for gain" not "doing something evil for gain."
@Monomelodies said:
That remark is just so devoid of a fundamental understanding of economic principles that I'm going to choose to ignore it so as to not embarass you any further.
Really? I'm pretty sure killing poor people would eliminate hunger. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it would work. What economic principle do you think is being missed here?
@Monomelodies said:
In the meantime, soon as you come up with a solution to world hunger that will NOT cost us (as in, The West) money, I'm all ears.
World hunger stems almost entirely from political problems. So we could fix their political problems, but that would require prolonged stretches of colonization, which I don't think there's any appetite (har har) for in the West. Other than that, we could just let them work it out on their own. This wouldn't cost us money in the traditional sense. But, really, the West is so sure of its power to control the world that we simply won't let that happen. Instead we will trying decades of failing programs which only make the areas worse-off. But, hey, Westerners gotta feel good about themselves, no matter how many brown people it hurts, so the Welfare State rolls on.
@Monomelodies said:
...your pathetic America-centred world view...
What has your country given the world? A few dozen kinds of cheese? An efficient method of surrender?
@Monomelodies said:
yes, corruption is a big problem in lots of countries. No, magically eradicating it won't acutely make those countries rich. That's not how the world works, unfortunately.
Nice straw man.
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I actually bothered to sign in to my account to post this:
@Maciejasjmj said:
There's a good example from 2009, I'm not sure if it still applies, though.
Please check the date that was posted. It never applied.
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@Monomelodies said:
Why is that absurd? I never said I do it for fun, the point is I don't care about gold enough to have to do it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, nobody said what you had to use the gold for. If it was me, I'd give it to charity. You could really help a lot of people that way, but apparently you're so stuck on the idea that you're above getting your hands dirty..
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Monomelodies said:
Why is that absurd? I never said I do it for fun, the point is I don't care about gold enough to have to do it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, nobody said what you had to use the gold for. If it was me, I'd give it to charity. You could really help a lot of people that way, but apparently you're so stuck on the idea that you're above getting your hands dirty..
What is a charity going to do with a gold nugget covered in feces? Do you think these things through before you post them?
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@morbiuswilters said:
Oh, I'm sorry, I was defending immoral behavior, because, you know, that's how I roll. Or, actually, I was defending literally getting your hands dirty
The immoral behavior thingy sounds like the more authentic morbiuswilters to me.
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@boomzilla said:
@morbiuswilters said:
Oh, I'm sorry, I was defending immoral behavior, because, you know, that's how I roll. Or, actually, I was defending literally getting your hands dirty
The immoral behavior thingy sounds like the more authentic morbiuswilters to me.
Quiet, you! I've had mens' legs broken for less!
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@Ben L. said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@Monomelodies said:
Why is that absurd? I never said I do it for fun, the point is I don't care about gold enough to have to do it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, nobody said what you had to use the gold for. If it was me, I'd give it to charity. You could really help a lot of people that way, but apparently you're so stuck on the idea that you're above getting your hands dirty..
What is a charity going to do with a gold nugget covered in feces? Do you think these things through before you post them?
Are you, like, serious? I mean, you do know that poop and gold can be separated without alchemy, right? And that gold is very valuable? Heck, most charities will accept almost anything you will give them*, and even if they didn't want a gold nugget you could just exchange that for, I dunno, some kind of paper which is a representative medium of value, and then give that to the charity..
(*I once donated 50,000 copies of the anti-video-game, Joe Don Baker vehicle "Joy Sticks" to United Way.. shudder Had a negative tax liability that year, which was sweet, but I still feel kind of guilty about it.)
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@Maciejasjmj said:
Holy smokes, to leave you guys for a day...
Just like you shouldn't treat the companies that 'open source' their products like Mother Teresa. Any serious company or government institution that wants to use a so-called "free" OS need to take support contracts with Redhat or Novell... which is where the "free" story ends. And obviously you need to re-train 99% of your staff which also is not free.
I've been legally using MS products for ages without ever paying for them (or just small amounts). When your student license expires, you find a job in a Microsoft based development shop and you make sure you get an MSDN subscription. You see, it's not YOUR money they are after. MS wants to grow the pool of developers and IT specialist to convince businesses to buy and use their technologies.
Still, they're making money thanks to that - whether it comes from my own pockets, or from a business I might one day manage, or from their earnings from a product I'll write for them. I'm not saying there's anything "bad" or "evil" in it - just let's not treat them like the next Mother Teresa.Redhat, Novell and others are hooking you onto their products by making the consumer editions completely free but it will start costing money of the business you might one day manage or a product you will write for them.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Monomelodies said:
Why is that absurd? I never said I do it for fun, the point is I don't care about gold enough to have to do it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, nobody said what you had to use the gold for. If it was me, I'd give it to charity. You could really help a lot of people that way, but apparently you're so stuck on the idea that you're above getting your hands dirty..
This. In fact, the Against Malaria Foundation saves a life, on average, for every $1,200 donated, so if that nugget was worth more than that, it means you're an EVIL MURDERER.Though by that logic you've already murdered dozens of people, so don't worry about that.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
Gee, thanks. So, there are no other operating systems beside Windows and OS X. These Linux neckbeards? Pfft.
For all intensive purposes, there are no other operating systems besides Windows and Linux. According to StatCounter, it gets lumped in with "Other" for April, and for all time accounts for 0.8%.
@Maciejasjmj said:Okay, point for you (though it might be a bit more difficult to find Pro version instead of Ultimate).
Windows 7 Premium, Pro and Ultimate ISOs, all legitimate. Even the silly N versions.
@Maciejasjmj said:I don't know. Whenever I see that some site wants me to install a "downloader" for something I can easily get without it, I usually just close the page and try to find it somewhere else. The very concept of downloaders is in 90% of cases associated with malware and adware, and I bet people at Mic^H^H^HKivuto knew that.
Worst case scenario, it would have asked you if you wanted the Bing Bar. Annoying, yes. Malware, no.
@Maciejasjmj said:Okay, I don't like it, because IE has been ignorant to standards for so many ears that I simply don't believe they fixed everything in one release.
Well, they did it over 4. 7 was the first attempt, failed miserbaly. 8 improved on that, did okay. 9 was better, actually did a decent job, and 10 is their best by far. You could, also, you know, try it. Especially as you now have access to various versions of Windows that run it and whatnot.
@Maciejasjmj said:Why? You just did that. They're inobtrusive. And if it only forced me to use IE and its downloader, it might actually work - but we get a separate app using scripting tricks.
I defined download managers (incidentally the default behaviour in IE9 and IE10 is to pop a small bar up at the bottom of the browser, a little similar to Chrome). Download manager == download engine. As for the SDM, be it as it may, it works. Again, first case I've heard of it going bezerk.
@Maciejasjmj said:So, if they gave you a version of OS X without iTunes, and then you'd find out that some unrelated functionalities have been removed too, because fuck you, would you be happy with that?
By the sound of things this is backwards world, where I use OSX, therefore iTunes is competent, therefore I would want it. On the other hand, if this is the real world, I'd rather commit seppuku than use OS X or iTunes for an extended period of time (ie. longer than fifteen seconds). If this option were forbidden, I'd just install iTunes and never bother to use it.
Fun fact: I don't use Windows Media Player, I hate the damned thing, I just ignore it and go about my business.
@Maciejasjmj said:There's a good example from 2009, I'm not sure if it still applies, though.
Ah, April 1, such a fine date. Why, on April 1, Google announced Google SCHMICK, which was a delight to make over my house with.@Maciejasjmj said:More like "Guys, I wanted to try out my new Ford, but I have driven 10 cars before and every time the motorcycle psychotic gremlins kept following me. Do you think there might be some pattern?"
The driver being wanted by the Motorcycle Gremlin Gang.
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@Maciejasjmj said:
Step 11: Bash your head against the desk upon realizing that your "Secure Download Manager" is a thinly-veiled cover-up for IE6. And the file you downloaded? It's a plain-text URL to a webpage riddled with Active Scripting, which works in IE only. Yeah, apparently Microsoft's idea of "security" are IE6-based scripts. Like if we didn't know how that ended up...
It could be worse. It could be the utterly half-assed downloader that's part of Games for Windows Live, which is so badly implemented that it gets upset (or rather fails to download anything at all) when the MTU on your router isn't the smallest on the entire route back to Microsoft. Given that you can just open a TCP connection without difficulty and have the OS hide all that shit — even on Windows — it takes major effort to screw things up that badly. I'm guessing/hoping that the problem was a terrible TFTP implementation, but it could be much worse than that…
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@bjolling said:
And obviously you need to re-train 99% of your staff which also is not free.
IME, I've found that "retraining" is actually "training" - most people are self-taught and stop learning once they achieve a minimum level comfortable to perform daily tasks. Training simply exposes more (or different) ways of achieving the same task but quicker/easier, so makes them more effective at what they do.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@Monomelodies said:
That remark is just so devoid of a fundamental understanding of economic principles that I'm going to choose to ignore it so as to not embarass you any further.
Really? I'm pretty sure killing poor people would eliminate hunger
Well, poor is a matter of degree, what poor in a rich country mean is totally different from a poor country so killing poor people might only move the (poverty) line a bit. However killing all people should work and there is even some precedence on how to recoup cost form corpses so is possible to break even or even make a profit
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@Douglasac said:
For all intensive purposes,
My purpose is intense dude! That was some fucking intense purpose!
Seriously, how do people hear "intents and" as "intensive"? They sound nothing alike. And why do people think the phrase "intense purpose" is ... a phrase and not just two words strung together? I don't get where this comes from.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Really? I'm pretty sure killing poor people would eliminate hunger.
I propose we kill them through starvation.Seriously though, the only way killing poor people would (permanently) eliminate hunger is if you somehow prevented existing people from becoming poor and stop new poor people being born. Of course, killing them would be a way, it would just have to be a continuous process. Side effect: there would be more motivation for people not to let themselves become poor.
(this is assuming only poor people starve, of course. Also that at least some of the new poor people would come to starve)
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Hunger is caused by corrupt or ineffective governance, not lack of food or excess of population.
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@blakeyrat said:
Hunger is [...] not lack of food
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@Ben L. said:
I prefer [...] to have explicit gay sex.
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@joe.edwards said:
I prefer [...] to have explicit gay sex.
Well, if you're just going to add words and change meanings around, sure, you can say that.
blakey did actually say that lack of food is not a cause of hunger.
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@Ben L. said:
@joe.edwards said:
I prefer [...] to have explicit gay sex.
Well, if you're just going to add words and change meanings around, sure, you can say that.
blakey did actually say that lack of food is not a cause of hunger.
It may not be completely obvious, but it's pretty obvious what he said in the context of the discussion. He wasn't discussing hunger, the biological state of malnutrition. He was talking Hunger, as in the social state-- as in the thing that there's late night commercials pleading with you about. The Hunger than somehow requires vast amounts of influx of first world cash.
The end result is starving people, but the cause of it isn't lack of food. If you paid enough money to buy enough food-- and assuming all that food got to the starving people-- it would not solve the problem. For a while, they would have food to eat. But the underlying problems that caused the issue would not be solved.
And those problems are inept/malicious government. It's all traceable back to there. Inability to maintain water supplies? Too much red tap to fund revitalization projects? Too corrupt to ensure that foreign aid is applied to the right places? Not educating your citizens on health procedures, birth control, or modern farming techniques?
All inept government. And THAT is was Blakey was saying.
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@serguey123 said:
Well, poor is a matter of degree, what poor in a rich country mean is totally different from a poor country so killing poor people might only move the (poverty) line a bit.
Sure, but once those people become poor, they are then susceptible to the virus. It's the beautiful equilibrium of nature.
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@Zecc said:
Seriously though, the only way killing poor people would (permanently) eliminate hunger is if you somehow prevented existing people from becoming poor and stop new poor people being born. Of course, killing them would be a way, it would just have to be a continuous process.
Like, say, a virus? My virus would kill you if you were poor or if you became poor. In fact, I can do you one better and have the virus proactively kill fetuses that are at risk of becoming poor. I mean, in most of the West killing a fetus isn't even considered murder.
And think of all the future poor people who would never be born. Billions and billions of people whose only existence is to be born, suffer and starve, and die. I would be saving them from the same agonizing fate as their forebears. So even if you think killing a few billion poor people today is evil, just think of the hundreds of billions of future people we saved from starvation.
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@Ben L. said:
blakey did actually say that lack of food is not a cause of hunger.
Either you're illiterate or you knew goddamn well he meant "a shortage of food within a society" and not "individuals who lack food." Seriously, pretending that you can't understand basic English does not make you look smart. If you don't have anything useful to say, don't bother chiming in.
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@Lorne Kates said:
All inept government. And THAT is was Blakey was saying.
Thank you yes.
And if you want to solve hunger (the social issue), please give to charities that are savvy enough to recognize the *real* problem and solve the underlying cause, instead of charities that will just drop bags of rice in some warlord's livingroom.
The Gates Foundation is one of the savvy ones. And mentioning it probably pisses off all the open source people reading this, so win-win.
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@morbiuswilters said:
@serguey123 said:
Well, poor is a matter of degree, what poor in a rich country mean is totally different from a poor country so killing poor people might only move the (poverty) line a bit.
Sure, but once those people become poor, they are then susceptible to the virus. It's the beautiful equilibrium of nature.
Indeed, until all humans are dead
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@Lorne Kates said:
But the underlying problems that caused the issue would not be solved.
In fact, it's usually worsened:
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Free food from Western countries undermines local agricultural markets, putting farmers out of business and making the entire country even more dependent on foreign aid.
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By allowing in just enough food aid to keep their people from revolting, corrupt governments are able to maintain power for longer, prolonging their abuses.
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A shocking percentage of food aid never gets to the people it was intended for. It's stolen by governments or terrorists and re-sold on the black market to fund their evil activities.
A better way to help these countries would be to overthrow their leaders and establish provisional governments that would work on things like land reform and on helping them to bootstrap local agriculture. But 1) that's not popular in the West; and 2) there's a good chance you'll just end up with an insurgency on your hands. I'm starting to believe the best foreign aid we could possibly give is to drop crates of AK-47s in poor villages in these corrupt countries. It would at least give them a fighting chance to overthrow their government and establish something good. A lot of people will die, but a lot of people are going to die no matter what you do or don't do.
But, no, it's not a lack of land or drought or whatever that is causing people to starve. Those things can make things rather hard, but plenty of countries have managed to survive while dealing with them. A lot of that is thanks to the advances made by American agriculture. I'm guessing you've probably never heard of Norman Borlaug, but you should have. The next time you hear somebody say something like "Steve Jobs was a hero", slap the dicks out of their mouth and point them to that article. In the mid-20th century, many poorer countries were facing imminent starvation due to overpopulation and the collapse of organized agriculture in post-colonial countries. This guy comes along and finds ways to triple agricultural output, saving an estimated one billion (yes, with a "b") people from starvation.
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@blakeyrat said:
And mentioning it probably pisses off all the open source people reading this, so win-win.
But.. but.. Bill Gates is evil!!! I mean, on Slashdot, they even did a poor job of Photoshopping him to make him look like one of the Borg, so clearly he is evil!
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@morbiuswilters said:
2) By allowing in just enough food aid to keep their people from revolting, corrupt governments are able to maintain power for longer, prolonging their abuses.
The Dune series introduced me to the concept of hydraulic despotism, which is power held by monopolizing control over a scarce-but-vital resource (eg water, food, or the spice melange).
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
AK-47s
You had me until this.
Don't perpetuate war, you fool.
Seriously. And when you do, at least advocate dropping AK-74s. Especially at today's ammo prices.
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@dhromed said:
@morbiuswilters said:
AK-47s
You had me until this.
Don't perpetuate war, you fool.
War is just a political action, carried out by other means. (At least, that's the Clausewitzian interpretation..)
Look, I don't want these countries to have to go through civil wars, but sometimes that's the only way to solve things. The US had to go through two civil wars (and nearly a third) just to get our shit together. Who is going to stand up to these governments that are harming their own people? The governments are already armed (probably with AK-47s), I'm just proposing we do what we can to level the playing field.
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@morbiuswilters said:
But, no, it's not a lack of land or drought or whatever that is causing people to starve. Those things can make things rather hard, but plenty of countries have managed to survive while dealing with them. A lot of that is thanks to the advances made by American agriculture. I'm guessing you've probably never heard of Norman Borlaug, but you should have. The next time you hear somebody say something like "Steve Jobs was a hero", slap the dicks out of their mouth and point them to that article. In the mid-20th century, many poorer countries were facing imminent starvation due to overpopulation and the collapse of organized agriculture in post-colonial countries. This guy comes along and finds ways to triple agricultural output, saving an estimated one billion (yes, with a "b") people from starvation.
But... but... genetic engineering is EVIL! (Or so my wife says)
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I seem to recall another time we armed the people of a foreign nation and encouraged them to overthrow their dictatorial government.
