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Heh you will like this:

Adventures of Action Item, Professional Superhero

Thank you very much for the screen shot of your task manager. OK, so your processor is only 1% used. I also see that Vista is using 1.08 GB of your RAM, and that you only have 30MB of your 2GB actually listed as "Free", after the caching is done. (I assume you took this screen shot after a clean boot, with no user applications manually launched.)

Your observations about RAM seem a little contradictory. On the one hand, you assume I have no applications launched. On the other hand, you note that the system is using 1.08GB of RAM. Do you really believe Vista uses that much just on boot-up?

If you re-read my post, you'll notice I said I had Thunderbird and some other apps running. I don't remember exactly what they were. But try looking at the Uptime on the screenshot. Or if you want, here's another screenshot.

Vista will still peg your processor at around 30% most of the time, mostly for bullshit you don't need or want.

This is the second time I've heard this figure cited on Slashdot and I have no idea where it's coming from. I call bullshit. Here is the Task Manager of my Vista system running idle. This is a 3.4GHz single-core P4 system (with HyperThreading, hence the two CPU meters), with 2GB RAM and an nVidia 6600 with 256MB. I have Aero enabled and this screen shows the system with several processes running, including Thunderbird and the Windows Media Center services.

The only thing I can guess is that a lot of the people who are reporting outrageous system demands from Vista are running to check the performance meters right after the system boots. (Just because you can move the mouse doesn't mean it's done yet.)

I've not yet seen Vista in the wild but read up about it. And I understand that even on a fast computer the CPU 'idles' at around 20%.

I'm not saying Vista is all that great or anything, but you heard wrong.
(This is running on a 3.4GHz P4, single core, 2GB RAM, nVidia 6600, Aero Glass enabled.)

Reminds me of "The Adventures of ACTION ITEM(TM)"!

Gotta love this comic strip:

http://www.fatalexception.org/action_item.html

who adds value

professionally irresponsible

That's just because his Action Items didn't include utilizing his resources with synergy.

Interesting, however, you fail to see the point of the article. It is my opinion that:

It seems to me that the people who support the idea of the Creative Commons license are the people who believe very strongly in this idea of "the commons." As far as I can tell, this seems to be an idealistic doctrine which says that the sum total of human creative endeavor is the birthright of every human being, and that everybody should ideally have access to every creative work (either now, or at some point in the future). This ideology naturally makes anyone who wants to profit off his/her own creative works tend to bristle. I don't think Creative Commons is really a bad thing in any particular way, though; like Orlowski, I'm just not sure if there's really any need for it.

In practice, the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works in some kind of "viral" way. The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it, I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you unless you try to profit from it.")

But how do you define "profit"? If nobody would benefit in any way from the use of your work, then why would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and profit are synonymous here. Maybe they don't sell your song. But maybe they post it on a Web site that accepts advertising. Are they profiting from your song then? It seems to me that if you want to set up all these profit/don't profit clauses, you need to write a little bit more fine print than your average Creative Commons license gives you.

Second, copyright law already gives the author of a work absolute and complete control of how it is used. I'll give you an example of how this works. I am the author and copyright holder of a comic strip called The Adventures of Action Item. Since I first drew it in 1999, this comic strip has had a fairly storied existence. It's been e-mailed around the known universe, printed up in magazines, used as a print sample, and it's constantly available on the Web page above. Every now and again someone writes me to ask if they can use it in one way or another, and my response varies.

• When they wanted to print it in a couple of different magazines, I said OK, since it was going to be used as editorial content. But not for free; I negotiated a fee each time. You're selling magazines, I want a cut.
• When people e-mail blast it to all their friends, I do nothing. Not just because it would be a little difficult to do anything about that, but because I honestly don't care. Go right ahead. (Hey look at that, I just got viral distribution and I never used a Creative Commons license.)
• When people want to host it on their own Web sites, on the other hand, I usually decline. Just link to mine, please. Occasionally someone will post it without asking, and occasionally I will find out who they are and ask them to remove it.
• When Xerox wrote to ask me if they could use it as a print sample for one of their printers, I decided that was an acceptable advertising-related purpose, because they weren't trying to co-opt the content or "message" of the strip. The (admittedly garish) colors in the artwork were what was being shown off. Plus they printed it up on cool-looking newsprint stock. I said OK -- and negotiated a fee.
• When companies write to ask me if they can use it in some kind of company publication, however, I usually decline. I don't want the strip associated with their company. It's probably meant to make fun of their company.
• Then again, sometimes people write me and ask if they can print up fifty copies and hand them out as an icebreaker or other materials for a class they're teaching, and I'll probably say that's fine.

The point of all this? Every case is different. But that's just the thing -- existing copyright law gives me that right. I

• When they wanted to print it in a couple of different magazines, I said OK, since it was going to be used as editorial content. But not for free; I negotiated a fee each time. You're selling magazines, I want a cut.
• When people e-mail blast it to all their friends, I do nothing. Not just because it would be a little difficult to do anything about that, but because I honestly don't care. Go right ahead. (Hey look at that, I just got viral distribution and I never used a Creative Commons license.)
• When people want to host it on their own Web sites, on the other hand, I usually decline. Just link to mine, please. Occasionally someone will post it without asking, and occasionally I will find out who they are and ask them to remove it.
• When Xerox wrote to ask me if they could use it as a print sample for one of their printers, I decided that was an acceptable advertising-related purpose, because they weren't trying to co-opt the content or "message" of the strip. The (admittedly garish) colors in the artwork were what was being shown off. Plus they printed it up on cool-looking newsprint stock. I said OK -- and negotiated a fee.
• When companies write to ask me if they can use it in some kind of company publication, however, I usually decline. I don't want the strip associated with their company. It's probably meant to make fun of their company.
• Then again, sometimes people write me and ask if they can print up fifty copies and hand them out as an icebreaker or other materials for a class they're teaching, and I'll probably say that's fine.

The point of all this? Every case is different. But that's just the thing -- existing copyright law gives me that right. I can really do whatever I want with my own works, and I can grant that other people can use them for whatever

If you like that, try this.

If we're going to tackle this corporate jargon problem, team, we're going to have to leverage our core competencies. We're going have to be goal-oriented and results-driven.

I say we kick off our anti-buzzword action plan by hitting the ground running. Now, who's going to own the mid-level implementation plan for this milestone?

P.S. Props to Action Item, Superhero for inspiration.

ACTION ITEM!

http://www.fatalexception.org/action_item.htmli found this comic, it's pretty gross. and this is random text to beat the lameness of this post.

Marketing-speak from marketers can be annoying, but it's also easy to dismiss. It is, after all, their job.

Much worse is when your company hires a new manager for you that talks that way.

"We need to take the bull by the horns and make this our major action item. Let's round-table this so that we can get buy-in from all of the stakeholders."

In a perfect world, the response would be clear...

STAFF: What country you from!

MANGER: What?

STAFF: "What" ain't no country I know! Do they speak English in "What?"

MANAGER: What?

...

But no, we have to go along with this nonsense, where civil disobedience can be nothing more than pointedly avoiding cliches, trying to use proper spelling & diction, and especially not verbing perfectly innocent nouns like "round-table".

The English language is a beautiful thing. I'm going to miss it when it's gone...

The Audacity team has had a fine product out there for some time; I'm sure 1.2 will be that much better, and will push the level of expectation for "entry level" up for users and software producers alike.

And you of all people should know desktop publishing gave us 'zines, comix, as well as homegrown amateur pornography.

Before the advent of vanity sites and blogs, desktopPub was what certain creative-types used to do with their time to get their bitching and moaning "heard."

Oh, yeah - it also kinda became a multi-billion dollar industry that begat other multi-billion-dollar industries.

yr pal -

s mcnally

Basically, it sounds like Blu-Ray will eventually become a standard for recordable DVD media, but the DVD Steering Committee wants to keep using standard formats for commercial DVD-HD, and just cram more data on there with something like MPEG-4.

Sounds like there's a standards battle in the works. But then, since nobody much is going to own HDTV sets until that standards battle gets worked out, maybe it's a moot point?

Once you realize that, on DVD, you don't HAVE to fast forward until you find the Simpsons episode you want to see, you'll be hooked!

That said, I am a little skeptical about the benefits of HDTV. I don't watch much TV anyway. But hey -- with HDTV around the corner, next-generation DVDs can't be far behind!