No, I think you've had enough. 
Posted on 05/13/2008 5:48:52 AM PDT by period end of story
Computer users now can fly through the universe, viewing stars, planets and celestial bodies as an astronomer would, with Tuesday's introduction of the Worldwide Telescope by Microsoft.
The virtual service combines images and databases from every major telescope and astronomical organization in the world.
Microsoft says it is providing the resource for free in memory of Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who disappeared last year while sailing his boat to the Farallon Islands on a trip to scatter his mother's ashes. The project is an extension of Gray's work.
"I never imagined (the telescope) would be so beautiful," said Alexander Szalay, an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked with Gray on astronomy projects for more than a decade.
Gray was an expert in databases, and he came to be accepted as "a card-carrying member" of the astronomical community for his work in bringing astronomical data online, Szalay said.
Point your cursor at a constellation, and the telescope will load all the objects near it and display them across the bottom of the screen. Pick one, and you'll be taken to it. Zoom in and out, view it through filters of different wavelengths - an infrared view, say, or x-ray - and right-click to pull up its name and more detail. Track the object's location in the sky - its ascension and declension - at the bottom right corner of your screen.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I've already been quite critical of some of Apple's business practices. I only like Apple so far as their products and services are better.
Although I don't remember Apple blocking eBay auctions, especially not signing up as an account to block legit auctions and then having eBay cleanse the account of the resulting negative ratings, and then deleting it once that was known.
And how dare you presume to know anything about me. All I know is that you are a dick and can not prove anything and neither can he. I have made my case, whether you choose to continue attacking thats your perogative.
Almost any program from the Free Software Foundation that doesn't actually deal with such data? I don't remember Firefox asking me for anything. Thunderbird did, but then it is an email program, but it doesn't send anything back to Mozilla. Handbrake is awesome and didn't ask for anything.
The bar you have put for personal info is pretty low. It's like Word asking for your initials so it can put it into documents when asked is a privacy problem. The question is how many applications actually send any of your info home. Worse, how many applications phone home without your knowledge, and even worse, despite your expressly setting the application to not phone home (Windows Update)?
If you have a Linux install it is quite possible to have thousands of free programs on your computer, as that is mostly what a Linux distribution is -- the kernel plus all of the the supporting applications from the small telnet client to the whole GUI shell.
No, I think you've had enough.
Well yeah if you look at it like that then certainly.
Out of those, it's kind of obvious that you would have to enter your information in a program that needs it in order to do the job you use it for, such as Yahoo Messenger and ICQ. How else are the programs supposed to do their job? Am I supposed to configure my email client without telling it what my email address is? As mentioned, iTunes is a pay service, so, yes, you'd have to put in some information. It is not right to include those in such a list.
For the free versions of the other applications I agree, they are harvesting information.
The point was that it asks for your info, even iTunes, whether you use it or not. In fact that is what is extremly irritating about downloading from Apple, or any big company like that or MS et al.
Mozilla doesn't ask you anything for its products. Handbrake asks nothing. For the most part, you have to go to open source software to not be asked.
not holding against it, never said it was bad for those type of clients to ask for that info. Just using them as example of free programs that want personal info, never took a moral position on it at all. Either way, to admit defeat there probably isnt a vast majority of free programs that ask for any sort of info, some will just take it, others dont bother at all. Either way I have no way to poll all programs to determine if I am right or wrong, it really was a stupid argument to begin with to be honest with you.
WTF do you mean, "doubt it".
Can you not even understand simple plain english? You're being dense, even for a paid shill.
This is probably over your head, but here are the numbers on my workstation...
The following shows there are 1366 separate packages on my workstation
$ rpm -qa --last | wc -l
1366
$
Most of those contain more than one program
Using the built-in command line completion of my shell (bash), pressing tab twice from a prompt presents me with the following...
$
Display all 3718 possibilities? (y or n)
This means I have 3718 executable programs in my path, none of which have ever asked me to send anything to anyone.
Just looking at /usr/bin shows the following...
$ ls /usr/bin | wc -l
2966
That's almost 3000 programs in /usr/bin alone.
We can go a little further...
$ rpm -qail | grep bin | wc -l
7466
That shows 7466 files with "bin" in the pathname. Most of those will be executables of one kind or another. None of these have asked me to send any information to anyone.
Just because you run a toy operating system on your computer, written by a company that is notorious for collecting information whether or not their customers want them to or not does not mean everyone exists in such a Big Brother friendly environment.
Next time, don't make such stupid sweeping generalities.
AmP
Yup. See my reply at 51. Some people apparently operate in thier own little universe and don't realize there is a whole world of computing not controlled from Redmond.
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