//curious -- how come Microsoft has to compete with everyone who's making good progress in particular areas? Do they have a team of people who do nothing but read technical articles and news to see what everyone else is doing//
Every modern hi-tech business has a team of people who do nothing but read technical articles and news to see what everyone else is doing so they can target them as a potential competetive prospect. It's called a "marketing team". For a number of years I was employed in a company of just ~120 employees, compared to microsoft what, tens of thousands, and it had a quarter of people in just marketing and research, as opposed to only 5 in Research and Development.
Offtopic, yet why would one get an XP system for gaming, a few hundred bucks for the box itself + ~200 for the OS? Might as well keep the Mac and use a console for gaming, be it PS2 or Xbox or other. Just curious?
The problem is that such viruses don't propagate as well to reinfect, having killed the PC. A parallel example involving life, is Ebola and Marburg viruses in Africa. Because their letality is ~70-90% (turning a body into a bucket of unmoving haemorrhagic fluid in just over a week), a localized tribe or a village ends up dead before passing it on for spreading around. OTOH, benigh (often East Asian) cold and flue viruses kill a miserable percentage of old and weak, allowing the majority to still be able to travel or socialize long enough to allow the flue to propagate around the world.
Picard slapped Q in one of STNG books. I think it was mutual slapping or something. The book started about the universe pulling itself into a giant vortex soon after when Data and Picard went holodeck fishing, and the whole plot rotated about The End of Everything As We Know It or some such key phrase. For some reason, I tought the author was influenced by Douglas Adams books although I hoped it wasn't true.
If we count the books, which present an official part of Lucas galaxy, than we'll have to consider Admiral Thrawn as well. In the Empire, admiralship was preceded by captainship. Thrawn also commanded Himaera w/Pellaleon at the end of his career. I'd put Thrawn against Sheridan, Picard, Kirk or any other captain.
That's why there are customs and other governmental institutions that will assist and ban the offending products on the port of entry and even impose fine that will prevent the rip-off business overseas from doing any trade here whatsoever unless paid. Have you ever heard of a container with 1 ton of fake Rolexes intercepted and stopped from the distribution, or a shipment of fake adidas snickers, or boxes of disks w/pirated software from East Europe - they typically don't even reach the DCs, let alone retail sales. You don't need to be a part of Fortune500 with lots of polical weight to throw around (although it helps), just have the document signed by both of you about not disclosing the trade secrets and not to sell it here locally. Act timely - it should work. If you're a 5 men operation, yes, it's more difficult but entirely possible, the main problem being expensive trade consultants and attorneys. Local (NA) patent can also help the product from you only sold in your country. My take on the situation is that the company were not prepared to protect itself properly, likely due to lack of resources or slow thinking. The copycats can copy it over there in China but not export it to the countries where your market is. There are hundreds of situations and I can't guarantee this approach works for all but generally there are trade laws that could have helped the umbrella guys have they been prepared *before* feces hit the proverbial blowing device.
They ordered and recieved the items, had them in a warehouse, and started having them shipped. Maybe 5 months from inception to execution. By the time they got to the clients, a Malayasian company had gotten their hands on a sample, made a knockoff, and poached every single order.
I write:
Your company should have made either a separate agreement or a part of the same contract that they won't sell, promote, export, straight-copy your designs or make any similar devices of this kind, to make them available in North America and Europe, and if they do copy and sell them back in China, for example, they are not putting your trademarks and not using the company name and the style and color schemes do not look the same, the shape is different. It works very well for us - we only compete w/North American companies - mostly Targus, Logitech, MS, Belkin, in few narrow niches with each of them. The picture is clear which means we can be flexible and reacting well to the the market trends, and planning for the future is much easier, then if we had 20+ players to compete with. All it takes is one more clause in the agreement/contract.
Disclaimer: I'm a technician, not a marketroid/salesdroid.
I think 47 is the year the design went into production in the Soviet Union. AK stands for Automat Kalashnikova (Automatic rifle of Kalashnikov), wherer Kalashnikov is its inventor, who, by the way, is still alive and recently received yet another award like, 50 year in use I think? (besides a number of the awards and medals he had received for his inventiveness in weapons in the Soviet times). In 60 and 70s, many wooden parts were replaced with plastic and also the rifle started being made in China and other countries, with many other parts modified - like for a special quick assault forces, or with folding trunk, or with little legs and an optical sight.. or with flame and noise surpressor, or modified for urban warfare or for other uses in the Eastern Block. That's where the other letters came from - AKM, AKMS, mostly taken from abbreviations of Russian words for "modified", "special" and so on. It's been a long long while since I held one in my hands or taken one apart/put it back together that I don't exactly remember the exact words anymore. I also remember that The SU and the eastern block switched to (I think 5.4x mm calibre) 20 years ago and that model was more precise and less destructive, as opposed to the rest of the world that still uses its 7.62 mm original calibre in most guerilla fights. Also, in one of the interviews, I remember the inventor expressed being emotional and feeling controversy about his invention - it's so reliable, field-repairable and modifiable, and the most used weapon in armed conflicts yet it killed so many.
It's not that you're in US that you here these stories. They mostly come from tabloids, in any country. Romanian people are friendly just like in many other neighbouring countries. I've met very many of them. Much of the crime or fraud and other unusual acts in Europe is perpetrated by Romanian gipsies instead, giving more material for tabloids and similar shitty press.
Remember that virus/security company that MS recently purchased a few month ago? It is based in Romania. There's no grain of salt in it. Try reading encyclopedia and other proper sources for good information about the country. The problem with many people in US that they don't know much about the geography and culture of other countries, especially in the Eastern block.
Couldn't it be a signal from a stationary source that's being modulated as a carrier wave? Think outside your tiny box once in a while...:) [ Reply to This ]
It may not help you to type faster, but I once had a computer so fast, it would execute an infinite loop in under.18 millisecs!
Your computer must have been infinitely fast then, in both, negative and positive directions of infinity. Like compiling the kernel before you hardly finished typing 'make'.
You say: "Does that mean that Slashdot editors also believe drugs should be legalized?"
Which ones? Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are all powerful drugs, on par with many illegal drugs, and are legalized. As you may remember, historically they were not legal in many countires in some time periods. As well as possession of some drugs illegal in your country (I presume you live in US) is not controlled or prosecuted for in others.
I do agree that in technology-related forums like this, extreme comparisons (to drugs, nazis and so on) should be avoided as too controversial and irrelevant. Whatever the heck made one bring both "war on drugs" and "war on taping movies" in one sentence, it was of poor taste. OK what I'm writing here is sort of offtopic too but I never moderate and therefore could care less about the whole karma thing..
I see there are lots of ideas floating around about sex chip implant, gaming chip implants, other recreational and educational uses, what not.. Why not go to the very top? Implement a brain IC that after being implanted midst the dopaminergic systems of nucleus accumbens will stimulate specific opiate receptors on the will of the owner for a paradise on earth - wouldn't that be the ultimate use for this technology.. being in the most perfect mood all the time, a constant joy of living without crude and primitive methods we employ today like drugs, binge eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, workaholism, desire for power, wealth, sex indulgence, wars, crime, the seven sins.. all this may simply vanish in irrelevance - live in the mood you wish, explore, travel, work, create arts or do nothing at all, all for your own pleasure and not for a necessity any longer...
What's the obsession with online ordering? Here is how to spend your 4 days in New York.
Day 1. Arrive, unpack, get in a hotel. No online orders. Go to a computer store. No, they may not have Dell but may have Vayos, Thinkpads, HP/Compaqs, Toshibas etc. (Dell, IMHO, is not really the greatest choice anyway.) Go to a display of several brands. Press the buttons, play around with features, try keyboard feel, compare displays crispness, peripherals and so on.. Get your notebook in the store at the lower price - that's the where the profit part comes.. *and* you know what you're getting.
Days 2 - 3 - 4, enjoy your stay and relax, see the sights and places. No having to open of a PO box or a temp address in a hurry, no nervously waiting that the ordered laptop may get here on day 5 due to a delay, no fear of finding that a wrong configuration was shiped, no incorrect billing, no spending hours on the phone with clueless reps trying to escalate your call while your plane is about to leave blah blah blah... On day 4 just pack up and prepare to leave back to U.K. in a good mood, with no stress, and with the newly acquired toy.
To some of us who used X Window System with twm on non X86 boxes in early 90s, and Xfree86 with fvwm a bit later, pager is a *very* familiar name that does not associate with Motorola at all. It was not a binary executable directly from xterm but a module that could run only within window manager environment called 'fvwmpager'. There were a number of early fvwm offsprings with widgets looking like other desktop environments, for example fvwm95 that looked like Windows 95,UI, and its module called similarly - 'fvwm95pager' methinks. The original pager had a number of interesting features that even its clones from KDE, Window Maker, and Gnome desktops failed to emulate, like dragging a little app window from anywhere on the pager onto the current virtual desktop and having that application materialize on it, or dragging it from one pager desktop to another one made the actual application move from one virtual desktop to another in the same manner. When I saw a Windows Longhorn screenshot the first time, I thought it took ten years for MS to catch up and create such a useful utility for its UI. In order to demonstrate the prior art of this "pager", all you have to do is sent to your patent office (I'm not in the US) a Slackware CD circa 1995 pre-installed on an old $100-worth 486DX100 or P-66 laptop. It'll be on the desktop with a default installation of Xfree86 and probably any other window manager that came with it.
Earth orbiting the Sun is yet another hoax and myth propagated by a small number infamous alhemists and revisionists since a few centuries ago and now commonly accepted as fact that's been driving many intelligent people mad. It is quite common sense that the opposite is true. You can see it with the naked eye every day - the f***ing shiny thing - which by the way is such a good hoax that it also seems as large as the moon - comes out, moves across the sky and rolls behind the horizon while the observer is completely stationary. Any conspiracy theorists out there to mull over where this might lead to in the course of time and why the government does not do anything?
I didn't learn phycics. At least, not in English and not recently. It was a light, semi-joking sarcasm - like it was a sin on Slashdot not to know phycics or something? Let's keep our minds open - if you were to come to a muscle car club (or a similar web thread/discussion) you might be laughed off a bit if you insisted calling things accordingly to science, although without any snobbism. I haven't experienced any, at least, when I used the terminology suitable to this thread and people looked funny at me in the club until I settled down and started calling things what they were to the audience. Now, is it perhaps a bit easier to understand that for most people, decceleration is, and will always be, a perfectly suitable term, *completely* opposite to acceleration.:) Here too, some common folk might be reading this and be a bit confused, no? That was the event that I recalled when I wrote that line, just a thought and a recollection. Not really much of a sarcasm - just semantics. So, let's move on, nothing to see here. -vladpetersen
Slashdot Mirror
//curious -- how come Microsoft has to compete with everyone who's making good progress in particular areas? Do they have a team of people who do nothing but read technical articles and news to see what everyone else is doing //
Every modern hi-tech business has a team of people who do nothing but read technical articles and news to see what everyone else is doing so they can target them as a potential competetive prospect. It's called a "marketing team". For a number of years I was employed in a company of just ~120 employees, compared to microsoft what, tens of thousands, and it had a quarter of people in just marketing and research, as opposed to only 5 in Research and Development.
Offtopic, yet why would one get an XP system for gaming, a few hundred bucks for the box itself + ~200 for the OS? Might as well keep the Mac and use a console for gaming, be it PS2 or Xbox or other. Just curious?
Vlad Petersen
quote > end quote
The problem is that such viruses don't propagate as well to reinfect, having killed the PC. A parallel example involving life, is Ebola and Marburg viruses in Africa. Because their letality is ~70-90% (turning a body into a bucket of unmoving haemorrhagic fluid in just over a week), a localized tribe or a village ends up dead before passing it on for spreading around. OTOH, benigh (often East Asian) cold and flue viruses kill a miserable percentage of old and weak, allowing the majority to still be able to travel or socialize long enough to allow the flue to propagate around the world.
> the launch titles will be Duke Nukem and Team Fortress 2
With Daikatana II preview
Such a conversation would have seconds - or even minutes if Mars is located on the other side of Sun compared to Earth - of pausing between each line.
Anyone would like to make bets on which rover lasts longer?
Picard slapped Q in one of STNG books. I think it was mutual slapping or something. The book started about the universe pulling itself into a giant vortex soon after when Data and Picard went holodeck fishing, and the whole plot rotated about The End of Everything As We Know It or some such key phrase. For some reason, I tought the author was influenced by Douglas Adams books although I hoped it wasn't true.
~vp
In the SW books, he went as far as General.
If we count the books, which present an official part of Lucas galaxy, than we'll have to consider Admiral Thrawn as well. In the Empire, admiralship was preceded by captainship. Thrawn also commanded Himaera w/Pellaleon at the end of his career. I'd put Thrawn against Sheridan, Picard, Kirk or any other captain.
More info here:
www.starwars.com/databank/character/
(click on the name)
~vp
Sheridan > Sisko > Sinclair > Picard > Kirk
Captain Solo?
It's simply a private cash settlement. Saves public money to run the courts.
That's why there are customs and other governmental institutions that will assist and ban the offending products on the port of entry and even impose fine that will prevent the rip-off business overseas from doing any trade here whatsoever unless paid. Have you ever heard of a container with 1 ton of fake Rolexes intercepted and stopped from the distribution, or a shipment of fake adidas snickers, or boxes of disks w/pirated software from East Europe - they typically don't even reach the DCs, let alone retail sales. You don't need to be a part of Fortune500 with lots of polical weight to throw around (although it helps), just have the document signed by both of you about not disclosing the trade secrets and not to sell it here locally. Act timely - it should work. If you're a 5 men operation, yes, it's more difficult but entirely possible, the main problem being expensive trade consultants and attorneys. Local (NA) patent can also help the product from you only sold in your country. My take on the situation is that the company were not prepared to protect itself properly, likely due to lack of resources or slow thinking. The copycats can copy it over there in China but not export it to the countries where your market is. There are hundreds of situations and I can't guarantee this approach works for all but generally there are trade laws that could have helped the umbrella guys have they been prepared *before* feces hit the proverbial blowing device.
You write:
They ordered and recieved the items, had them in a warehouse, and started having them shipped. Maybe 5 months from inception to execution. By the time they got to the clients, a Malayasian company had gotten their hands on a sample, made a knockoff, and poached every single order.
I write:
Your company should have made either a separate agreement or a part of the same contract that they won't sell, promote, export, straight-copy your designs or make any similar devices of this kind, to make them available in North America and Europe, and if they do copy and sell them back in China, for example, they are not putting your trademarks and not using the company name and the style and color schemes do not look the same, the shape is different. It works very well for us - we only compete w/North American companies - mostly Targus, Logitech, MS, Belkin, in few narrow niches with each of them. The picture is clear which means we can be flexible and reacting well to the the market trends, and planning for the future is much easier, then if we had 20+ players to compete with. All it takes is one more clause in the agreement/contract.
Disclaimer: I'm a technician, not a marketroid/salesdroid.
I think 47 is the year the design went into production in the Soviet Union. AK stands for Automat Kalashnikova (Automatic rifle of Kalashnikov), wherer Kalashnikov is its inventor, who, by the way, is still alive and recently received yet another award like, 50 year in use I think? (besides a number of the awards and medals he had received for his inventiveness in weapons in the Soviet times). In 60 and 70s, many wooden parts were replaced with plastic and also the rifle started being made in China and other countries, with many other parts modified - like for a special quick assault forces, or with folding trunk, or with little legs and an optical sight.. or with flame and noise surpressor, or modified for urban warfare or for other uses in the Eastern Block. That's where the other letters came from - AKM, AKMS, mostly taken from abbreviations of Russian words for "modified", "special" and so on. It's been a long long while since I held one in my hands or taken one apart/put it back together that I don't exactly remember the exact words anymore. I also remember that The SU and the eastern block switched to (I think 5.4x mm calibre) 20 years ago and that model was more precise and less destructive, as opposed to the rest of the world that still uses its 7.62 mm original calibre in most guerilla fights. Also, in one of the interviews, I remember the inventor expressed being emotional and feeling controversy about his invention - it's so reliable, field-repairable and modifiable, and the most used weapon in armed conflicts yet it killed so many.
-vp
how different supercomputers from around the world are working to predict large storms tracks
Additionally, the scientists discovered that all supercomputers predicted different tracks for the same storm..
It's not that you're in US that you here these stories. They mostly come from tabloids, in any country. Romanian people are friendly just like in many other neighbouring countries. I've met very many of them. Much of the crime or fraud and other unusual acts in Europe is perpetrated by Romanian gipsies instead, giving more material for tabloids and similar shitty press.
Remember that virus/security company that MS recently purchased a few month ago? It is based in Romania. There's no grain of salt in it. Try reading encyclopedia and other proper sources for good information about the country. The problem with many people in US that they don't know much about the geography and culture of other countries, especially in the Eastern block.
BTW, I'm not from there myself.
Couldn't it be a signal from a stationary source that's being modulated as a carrier wave? Think outside your tiny box once in a while... :)
[ Reply to This ]
A Dyson shpere?
It may not help you to type faster, but I once had a computer so fast, it would execute an infinite loop in under .18 millisecs!
Your computer must have been infinitely fast then, in both, negative and positive directions of infinity. Like compiling the kernel before you hardly finished typing 'make'.
will they help me to type faster?
You say: "Does that mean that Slashdot editors also believe drugs should be legalized?"
Which ones? Alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are all powerful drugs, on par with many illegal drugs, and are legalized. As you may remember, historically they were not legal in many countires in some time periods. As well as possession of some drugs illegal in your country (I presume you live in US) is not controlled or prosecuted for in others.
I do agree that in technology-related forums like this, extreme comparisons (to drugs, nazis and so on) should be avoided as too controversial and irrelevant. Whatever the heck made one bring both "war on drugs" and "war on taping movies" in one sentence, it was of poor taste.
OK what I'm writing here is sort of offtopic too but I never moderate and therefore could care less about the whole karma thing..
-Vlad Petersen
I see there are lots of ideas floating around about sex chip implant, gaming chip implants, other recreational and educational uses, what not.. Why not go to the very top? Implement a brain IC that after being implanted midst the dopaminergic systems of nucleus accumbens will stimulate specific opiate receptors on the will of the owner for a paradise on earth - wouldn't that be the ultimate use for this technology.. being in the most perfect mood all the time, a constant joy of living without crude and primitive methods we employ today like drugs, binge eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, workaholism, desire for power, wealth, sex indulgence, wars, crime, the seven sins.. all this may simply vanish in irrelevance - live in the mood you wish, explore, travel, work, create arts or do nothing at all, all for your own pleasure and not for a necessity any longer...
What's the obsession with online ordering? Here is how to spend your 4 days in New York.
Day 1. Arrive, unpack, get in a hotel. No online orders. Go to a computer store. No, they may not have Dell but may have Vayos, Thinkpads, HP/Compaqs, Toshibas etc. (Dell, IMHO, is not really the greatest choice anyway.) Go to a display of several brands. Press the buttons, play around with features, try keyboard feel, compare displays crispness, peripherals and so on.. Get your notebook in the store at the lower price - that's the where the profit part comes.. *and* you know what you're getting.
Days 2 - 3 - 4, enjoy your stay and relax, see the sights and places. No having to open of a PO box or a temp address in a hurry, no nervously waiting that the ordered laptop may get here on day 5 due to a delay, no fear of finding that a wrong configuration was shiped, no incorrect billing, no spending hours on the phone with clueless reps trying to escalate your call while your plane is about to leave blah blah blah... On day 4 just pack up and prepare to leave back to U.K. in a good mood, with no stress, and with the newly acquired toy.
-vladpetersen
More like a botched surgery.
To some of us who used X Window System with twm on non X86 boxes in early 90s, and Xfree86 with fvwm a bit later, pager is a *very* familiar name that does not associate with Motorola at all. It was not a binary executable directly from xterm but a module that could run only within window manager environment called 'fvwmpager'. There were a number of early fvwm offsprings with widgets looking like other desktop environments, for example fvwm95 that looked like Windows 95,UI, and its module called similarly - 'fvwm95pager' methinks. The original pager had a number of interesting features that even its clones from KDE, Window Maker, and Gnome desktops failed to emulate, like dragging a little app window from anywhere on the pager onto the current virtual desktop and having that application materialize on it, or dragging it from one pager desktop to another one made the actual application move from one virtual desktop to another in the same manner. When I saw a Windows Longhorn screenshot the first time, I thought it took ten years for MS to catch up and create such a useful utility for its UI. In order to demonstrate the prior art of this "pager", all you have to do is sent to your patent office (I'm not in the US) a Slackware CD circa 1995 pre-installed on an old $100-worth 486DX100 or P-66 laptop. It'll be on the desktop with a default installation of Xfree86 and probably any other window manager that came with it.
Check out http://xwinman.org/ to feel nostalgic.
Earth orbiting the Sun is yet another hoax and myth propagated by a small number infamous alhemists and revisionists since a few centuries ago and now commonly accepted as fact that's been driving many intelligent people mad. It is quite common sense that the opposite is true. You can see it with the naked eye every day - the f***ing shiny thing - which by the way is such a good hoax that it also seems as large as the moon - comes out, moves across the sky and rolls behind the horizon while the observer is completely stationary. Any conspiracy theorists out there to mull over where this might lead to in the course of time and why the government does not do anything?
I didn't learn phycics. At least, not in English and not recently. It was a light, semi-joking sarcasm - like it was a sin on Slashdot not to know phycics or something? Let's keep our minds open - if you were to come to a muscle car club (or a similar web thread/discussion) you might be laughed off a bit if you insisted calling things accordingly to science, although without any snobbism. I haven't experienced any, at least, when I used the terminology suitable to this thread and people looked funny at me in the club until I settled down and started calling things what they were to the audience. Now, is it perhaps a bit easier to understand that for most people, decceleration is, and will always be, a perfectly suitable term, *completely* opposite to acceleration. :) Here too, some common folk might be reading this and be a bit confused, no? That was the event that I recalled when I wrote that line, just a thought and a recollection. Not really much of a sarcasm - just semantics. So, let's move on, nothing to see here. -vladpetersen
quote / Brakes make you go slower, reducing speed is acceleration. /end quote
In my world, that's deceleration.
deceleration - n: decrease in velocity [syn: slowing, retardation] [ant: acceleration]
(From a dictionary)
I didn't know about that meaning. The first thing that came to mind when I saw it was Simon Fraser University (in Vancouver BC).