No, MS Update is nothing like the Ubuntu Software center (or the software repositories on other distros). You cannot get software from Windows Update.
You apparently misunderstand my point. I am not saying that Ubuntu (or Linux in any form) is the end all and be all. My point is that the original poster had a point. The Linux model of software repositories of safe, free software for just about every conceivable purpose means that if I want software to do something that isn't important enough to spend money on it I don't have to search the web and risk that the software I find is malware (or contains malware).
That is certainly a possibility. However, the repository model does certainly provide for much greater security, especially when it contains such a large range of free software as most current Linux distributions. Considering that the Apple IOS app store model is the same sort of distribution model it seems likely that it scales.
I think that thunderbolt will fail, but I have not spent a lot of time looking at it vs USB 3.0. My opinion is based on the way it is being introduced and the way the companies behind it seem to be positioning it from my perspective (We've got this great new interface that our competitors don't).
That said your final line says the key thing. "Its(sic) way too early to tell, and anyone saying otherwise is full of it."
The thing is, once the defendants have this ruling, the next judge will be less likely to be willing to take the cases unless Righthaven can come up with some plausible argument as to why this judge is wrong (it doesn't have to be plausible to those of us on slashdot who are more than vaguely familiar with the case, just to someone who is not familiar with the case).
The other thing about where this judge is going is that it suggests that the "corporate barrier"* between Righthaven and its owners may be easily considered fictitious by the courts.
*There is a legal term for this that escapes my mind at the moment.
What? Because I helped a fellow store manager avoid losing money? Or should I have allowed students who earned more than both of us together continue to take advantage of her lack of knowledge (I did mention that this was an evening campus--that means that the overwhelming majority of the students were working full-time. What I didn't mention was that the campus was located in the financial district of a major city).
Actually, I think that was a result of the employees at the local chain store (quite possibly even including the manager) not understanding textbook pricing. The local chain bookstore was probably taking a bath on those textbooks. I worked at several regular retail bookstores before I got into the college bookstore business. Most books sold at a standard retail bookstore have a suggested list price and the publisher sells them to the bookstore at a discount off of that price. This is the price listed in Books-In-Print. Most college textbooks are listed by the publisher at net price, the price the publisher sells them for. This is the price that is listed in Books-In-Print. Most employees of chain bookstores do not know what "net price" is and when someone special orders a book, they charge them the price that is listed in Books-In-Print.
One of the college bookstores I managed was close to a chain bookstore that did what I just talked about. It was all evening classes, so one day I made an appointment to see the manager of the chain bookstore. I took a long lunch and explained the pricing situation to them, when they realized how much they were losing on every one of those sales they stopped doing it that way and I stopped getting complaints about how much cheaper they were.
When I was managing college bookstores, the publishers hated those. What they were trying to sell college professors was their own coursepacks that were a basically the same thing, only published by the publisher. These were actually a significantly better deal, if the publisher in question owned the rights to most of the material (60%+) you wanted to use. They were also better bound, so that if it was material you would want for the long haul it would hold up. Typically, they sold for about 80% of what the same thing put together at the campus copy shop cost(when permissions were paid for). The problem with those was that the professor had to know what he wanted to use approximately two-three months before classes started.
One of the biggest drivers of textbook costs is professors who tell the bookstore what books they want to use two weeks or less before classes start. This leads to many of the inefficiencies in the college textbook market that drive up costs (bookstore unable to get a good supply of used books, bookstore ordering too many copies and then returning the excess books to the publisher, bookstore ordering too few copies and then having to order additional copies, etc.).
Have you compared the cost of textbooks to the cost of tuition? Did you make that comparison when you were in college?
According to what I found, the average cost of tuition per year is about $12,000 a year at a state school (that does not include room and board and other fees), while textbooks average about $750 a year.
The reason that Universities have not done this yet is that relative to the money they are making off of the students, textbook costs are chump change. The price of textbooks has risen faster than the rate of inflation for at least the last 40 years. One of the few things to rise in price even faster is college tuition.
Having managed two different college bookstores, I am pretty sure this case is the result of the campus copy shop making copies from several different textbooks and bundling them together in a course packet, which they then sell to the students. Most textbook publishers have a system in place to provide permission for this practice, however, most college professors think the amount the publishers charge is excessive.
The college textbok process has many inefficiencies in it that result in the high price of textbooks. Publishers do not actually make a very large margin on textbooks. In spite of this, the price of textbooks has risen slower than the price of tuition (at least I think this is still the case, I did the math 10 years ago).
While there is some truth to what you say a bigger factor is that the overwhelming majority of people think it is enough to go out and vote once every other year (too many only every four years). If you want to change things you need to be willing to work at it for however long it takes. And you have to realize that even if one election goes your way, it isn't over. If you want to change things you need to be willing to dedicate yourself to it.
That is related to part of the reason I rarely use self checkout even when I am only buying one or two items. When the two major grocery store chains near me introduced self checkout, they kept making an announcement over the instore PA something like this, "Now for your convenience, we have self checkout." Well, I knew full well that they did not institute self checkout for the shoppers' convenience, they introduced self checkout to save money on cashiers. I would not mind that, but I did mind them repeatedly lying to me every time I went into the store.
I was just talking with someone the other day that I had to tell three times that there are viruses out there for Macs before they stopped saying that the way to avoid getting a virus was to just get a Macintosh. Unless something changes, when Macs cross a critical threshold, they will be even more infested with viruses than Windows PCs. Not because Macs are not more secure, but because the combination of stupid users that you get on any platform that is above a certain market share and the Mac users who believe that because it is a Mac there are no viruses out there for it.
The most important take away from this is that polls are a bad idea This study suggests to me that the aggressive reporting on the results of polls related to upcoming elections explains why the quality of our leading politicians has been declining over the last several decades.
The problem with biological warfare is that, while it is very devestating, it is impossible to avoid significant risk of blowback on one's own civilian and military population. Even with recent advances in biological science, I think that the ability to reliably target a particular population without significant risks to other populations is still beyond the foreseeable future.
How is it evil to hang onto some so that you can make a vaccination should an outbreak occur? Especially when you know that there are other stockpiles of this organism, the summary even says that the Russians have some.
The thing is, right after the summary says that the U.S. is preserving the last remaining known strains it says that Russia also has some that it is preserving. So, the U.S. doesn't even have the last known strains, the Russians are also known to have some.
The difference here is that for years scientists (in particular nutritionists) have been telling us that drinking a lot of coffee is bad for us and doing studies to try and prove it. Gradually, bit by bit, the studies have been coming back showing that not only is coffee not bad for us, it is actually good for us. For every study that shows that coffee has some minor negative health affect, there are two studies showing that coffee has some significant positive health affect. Sometime in the last 10 years they finally gave up on the idea that coffee is bad for us.
Well, he seemed to be challenging someone who said that configuring Linux at the level that you use the registry to configure Windows is equally difficult by saying that the example was something that only a sysadmin should be doing...from your explanation of what he said, the same thing is true of registry settings in Windows. In which case, his comment added nothing to the discussion.
You make a good point. What most people on here don't realize is that this would not be 50 different tax rates. It would be much more than that. Many states allow different municipalities to charge an varying amount of sales tax over and above the state tax and all of it is collected by the state tax department. There is no easy way to know what sales tax rate applies. If you ship a box to 108 Smith Rd, Somewhere NY 13290 and another box to 109 Smith Rd, Somewhere NY 13290, there is no guarantee that the same tax rate applies because the county/city line might run between them.
While that is not that difficult for Amazon to deal with, it would be a significant expense for a one person outfit that does $20,000 in sales total throughout the entire country each year.
Slashdot Mirror
No, MS Update is nothing like the Ubuntu Software center (or the software repositories on other distros). You cannot get software from Windows Update.
You apparently misunderstand my point. I am not saying that Ubuntu (or Linux in any form) is the end all and be all. My point is that the original poster had a point. The Linux model of software repositories of safe, free software for just about every conceivable purpose means that if I want software to do something that isn't important enough to spend money on it I don't have to search the web and risk that the software I find is malware (or contains malware).
That is certainly a possibility. However, the repository model does certainly provide for much greater security, especially when it contains such a large range of free software as most current Linux distributions. Considering that the Apple IOS app store model is the same sort of distribution model it seems likely that it scales.
If you think that is the same, you have not worked with Linux.
Except that Windows does not have anything like the Ubuntu Software center, or whatever the repository is called in other distributions.
I think that thunderbolt will fail, but I have not spent a lot of time looking at it vs USB 3.0. My opinion is based on the way it is being introduced and the way the companies behind it seem to be positioning it from my perspective (We've got this great new interface that our competitors don't).
That said your final line says the key thing. "Its(sic) way too early to tell, and anyone saying otherwise is full of it."
The thing is, once the defendants have this ruling, the next judge will be less likely to be willing to take the cases unless Righthaven can come up with some plausible argument as to why this judge is wrong (it doesn't have to be plausible to those of us on slashdot who are more than vaguely familiar with the case, just to someone who is not familiar with the case).
The other thing about where this judge is going is that it suggests that the "corporate barrier"* between Righthaven and its owners may be easily considered fictitious by the courts.
*There is a legal term for this that escapes my mind at the moment.
What? Because I helped a fellow store manager avoid losing money? Or should I have allowed students who earned more than both of us together continue to take advantage of her lack of knowledge (I did mention that this was an evening campus--that means that the overwhelming majority of the students were working full-time. What I didn't mention was that the campus was located in the financial district of a major city).
In other words, if your systems rely on PLC systems from Siemens, you had better hope that no attacker can get through your firewall.
Actually, I think that was a result of the employees at the local chain store (quite possibly even including the manager) not understanding textbook pricing. The local chain bookstore was probably taking a bath on those textbooks. I worked at several regular retail bookstores before I got into the college bookstore business. Most books sold at a standard retail bookstore have a suggested list price and the publisher sells them to the bookstore at a discount off of that price. This is the price listed in Books-In-Print. Most college textbooks are listed by the publisher at net price, the price the publisher sells them for. This is the price that is listed in Books-In-Print. Most employees of chain bookstores do not know what "net price" is and when someone special orders a book, they charge them the price that is listed in Books-In-Print.
One of the college bookstores I managed was close to a chain bookstore that did what I just talked about. It was all evening classes, so one day I made an appointment to see the manager of the chain bookstore. I took a long lunch and explained the pricing situation to them, when they realized how much they were losing on every one of those sales they stopped doing it that way and I stopped getting complaints about how much cheaper they were.
When I was managing college bookstores, the publishers hated those. What they were trying to sell college professors was their own coursepacks that were a basically the same thing, only published by the publisher. These were actually a significantly better deal, if the publisher in question owned the rights to most of the material (60%+) you wanted to use. They were also better bound, so that if it was material you would want for the long haul it would hold up. Typically, they sold for about 80% of what the same thing put together at the campus copy shop cost(when permissions were paid for). The problem with those was that the professor had to know what he wanted to use approximately two-three months before classes started.
One of the biggest drivers of textbook costs is professors who tell the bookstore what books they want to use two weeks or less before classes start. This leads to many of the inefficiencies in the college textbook market that drive up costs (bookstore unable to get a good supply of used books, bookstore ordering too many copies and then returning the excess books to the publisher, bookstore ordering too few copies and then having to order additional copies, etc.).
Have you compared the cost of textbooks to the cost of tuition? Did you make that comparison when you were in college?
According to what I found, the average cost of tuition per year is about $12,000 a year at a state school (that does not include room and board and other fees), while textbooks average about $750 a year.
The reason that Universities have not done this yet is that relative to the money they are making off of the students, textbook costs are chump change. The price of textbooks has risen faster than the rate of inflation for at least the last 40 years. One of the few things to rise in price even faster is college tuition.
Having managed two different college bookstores, I am pretty sure this case is the result of the campus copy shop making copies from several different textbooks and bundling them together in a course packet, which they then sell to the students. Most textbook publishers have a system in place to provide permission for this practice, however, most college professors think the amount the publishers charge is excessive.
The college textbok process has many inefficiencies in it that result in the high price of textbooks. Publishers do not actually make a very large margin on textbooks. In spite of this, the price of textbooks has risen slower than the price of tuition (at least I think this is still the case, I did the math 10 years ago).
While there is some truth to what you say a bigger factor is that the overwhelming majority of people think it is enough to go out and vote once every other year (too many only every four years). If you want to change things you need to be willing to work at it for however long it takes. And you have to realize that even if one election goes your way, it isn't over. If you want to change things you need to be willing to dedicate yourself to it.
That is related to part of the reason I rarely use self checkout even when I am only buying one or two items. When the two major grocery store chains near me introduced self checkout, they kept making an announcement over the instore PA something like this, "Now for your convenience, we have self checkout." Well, I knew full well that they did not institute self checkout for the shoppers' convenience, they introduced self checkout to save money on cashiers. I would not mind that, but I did mind them repeatedly lying to me every time I went into the store.
I was just talking with someone the other day that I had to tell three times that there are viruses out there for Macs before they stopped saying that the way to avoid getting a virus was to just get a Macintosh. Unless something changes, when Macs cross a critical threshold, they will be even more infested with viruses than Windows PCs. Not because Macs are not more secure, but because the combination of stupid users that you get on any platform that is above a certain market share and the Mac users who believe that because it is a Mac there are no viruses out there for it.
The most important take away from this is that polls are a bad idea This study suggests to me that the aggressive reporting on the results of polls related to upcoming elections explains why the quality of our leading politicians has been declining over the last several decades.
The problem with biological warfare is that, while it is very devestating, it is impossible to avoid significant risk of blowback on one's own civilian and military population. Even with recent advances in biological science, I think that the ability to reliably target a particular population without significant risks to other populations is still beyond the foreseeable future.
How is it evil to hang onto some so that you can make a vaccination should an outbreak occur? Especially when you know that there are other stockpiles of this organism, the summary even says that the Russians have some.
The thing is, right after the summary says that the U.S. is preserving the last remaining known strains it says that Russia also has some that it is preserving. So, the U.S. doesn't even have the last known strains, the Russians are also known to have some.
Maybe, it is not how research is supposed to work, but a lot of research does work that way, especially in the field of nutrition.
The difference here is that for years scientists (in particular nutritionists) have been telling us that drinking a lot of coffee is bad for us and doing studies to try and prove it. Gradually, bit by bit, the studies have been coming back showing that not only is coffee not bad for us, it is actually good for us. For every study that shows that coffee has some minor negative health affect, there are two studies showing that coffee has some significant positive health affect. Sometime in the last 10 years they finally gave up on the idea that coffee is bad for us.
Well, he seemed to be challenging someone who said that configuring Linux at the level that you use the registry to configure Windows is equally difficult by saying that the example was something that only a sysadmin should be doing...from your explanation of what he said, the same thing is true of registry settings in Windows. In which case, his comment added nothing to the discussion.
So, what you are saying is that people should have to pay someone to something like this on their home computer?
You make a good point. What most people on here don't realize is that this would not be 50 different tax rates. It would be much more than that. Many states allow different municipalities to charge an varying amount of sales tax over and above the state tax and all of it is collected by the state tax department. There is no easy way to know what sales tax rate applies. If you ship a box to 108 Smith Rd, Somewhere NY 13290 and another box to 109 Smith Rd, Somewhere NY 13290, there is no guarantee that the same tax rate applies because the county/city line might run between them.
While that is not that difficult for Amazon to deal with, it would be a significant expense for a one person outfit that does $20,000 in sales total throughout the entire country each year.