I can hardly get through a TV program without having to watch one of MS "switcher" adds trying to convince people to drop Google search in favor of live search. Oh wait, that was in your reality, what was I thinking.
That's called projection. You consider your own circumstances universal and project your reasoning onto others. The results are wrong because the circumstances are different. There are no TV ads in my reality, so what you were thinking was wrong.
It was also stupid because you could just go look up M$, Yahoo and Google's advertising budget. M$ is the least transparent of the bunch, but their quarterly reports back up the billion dollars a month figure. I doubt Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and IBM spend as much as a group.
Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
So isn't it encouraging that people are able to see through the butterflies, "reach your potential" and other obvious bullshit that M$ spends a billion dollars a month on? If the results were really all about marketing M$ would have dominated the results as much as they do advertising. Yahoo's presence may be do to them spending a little more than Google, but the bottom line is performance. Advertising dollars saturate at a rather low level of trust. When your performance sucks bad enough, the advertising can be counter productive - another in your face annoyance you would rather have left at work.
Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?
Yes. Branding is something you buy with a billion dollars a month in advertising, like M$ does. Reputation is something you build with a quality product, like everyone else does. People can tell the difference.
The overall results of this study are that performance and reputation trump marketing money. M$ spends close to a billion dollars a month on advertising, dwarfing the combined spending of the rest, but people clearly think their stuff is second rate. This is how a the market should work and it's encouraging. People are not nearly as dumb as M$ thinks they are.
Reputation is a legitimate decision factor in information services. It's right for people to think M$'s search engine is goofey when M$ is such a dishonest company, their results have been poor in the past and they admit to selling placement. It's also right for people to have a neutral or favorable view of Google and Yahoo given the performance record of both companies in search. The neat thing about search is that things that don't look like useful results often are, at least when you use a good engine.
There were a few problems of sample size. The group size is to small and the responses were too poor to mean much. Only 36% of the results were judged relevant, which means the results from all the engines were poor. A larger study may show a real relationship between performance and trust that goes beyond marketing.
There's always a choice to not buy. No firearms are being directed at heads.
You like to eat don't you? Want to grow all of your food?
Legalizing price fixing is the most shocking piece of US law since Congress passed the torture is AOK bill. It's going to be abused by distributors and manufacturers to screw their smaller competition and you. If you think things are consolidated today, just wait until you see the effects of industry dancing with price floors to eliminate their competition. The results are cascading and multiplicative rather than a simple sum of their parts. It is impossible to imagine any way this will actually create more competition, despite the glib logic given by Kenedy.
First retailers and you will be squeezed. By setting a price floor, distributors can charge retailers more for their goods. Retailers will have to pass the difference on to you and will also have to bear the cost of not being able to dump goods that don't sell. When a retailer makes a mistake now, they are stuck with it and can't sell the goods off at or below cost.
More risks for retailers means a smaller market overall, because they will buy less, but that's just the beginning of a new manufacturer's problems. Price floor distort prices in a way that make monopoly rents easier. Imagine you find a process to make something better than everyone else. When you start making it, the monopolist can drop the floor on your one good while raising it just a little on everything else. New entrants always have less to offer than established businesses, so they won't be able to move their pricing around as well and will be crushed.
The majority thinks the courts can weed this kind of behavior out, but what they are really saying is that they don't care about startups that can't withstand the pressure for as long as an uncertain lawsuit takes. Shame on them!
Price floors create nothing but friction and economic friction is always harmful.
M$ is abnormal. The company does not act like a sociopath because that's the way big organizations are, it acts like one because the people running it are sociopaths.
PCs are clearly of major importance in the promotion of human well being. Electronic publication is cheap, effective and revolutionizing all fields of human practice and learning. A lifetime's worth of expensive textbooks can easily be replaced by one or two cheap electronic devices. Electronic records keeping and commerce saves business billions each years. Medical records prevent mixups and save lives. All of these savings can be safely recouped by the software industry if software piracy can be prevented.
M$ Research's amazing new Soul Scan has this potential. It is biometric feedback device that verifies the user's identity and deepest thoughts, which can be used for further profit as well as piracy prevention. Before using the computer, the consumer must insert his fingers into the Soul Scanner, which instantly creates a neural network to read the consumer's mind. If the consumer is not authorized to access the computer or any of it's records, the device electrocutes the consumer and ends the piracy threat. The cost of the device will add a trivial $100 cost per unit, which can be passed on, but much more will be extractable from users because of it.
Because the profit potential is so strong that all major governments are being lobbied at this moment to mandate Soul Scann. They are being told that it's the only way to defeat the terrorists and others who would exist outside the US economy.
The US still is under the impression that sanctions and trade embargoes will actually cause regime change in these countries. Even though they haven't worked at all...
They started working they day they were made. While regime change is nice, it's not the only reason to have trade embargoes. A more fundamental reason is to stop helping tyrants. Trade is always mutually beneficial, the first goal of embargoes is to end that benefit to countries that oppress their own people. A second reason is to maintain the value of your own labor. The whole purpose of oppression is to make yourself rich off other people's work, aka slavery. Trade with countries that use slave labor puts free industry at risk. These goals are noble and worthwile, despite obvious contradictions and omissions like China's most favored nation status and other of our own misdeeds.
That being said, this article stinks. Export controls have been used against free software before and were entirely pointless. The line of reasoning would extinguish any and all network software distribution, free and non free. Focusing that line of reasoning onto free software as "free software aids terrorists" is a tactic that was predicted:
I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.
Using OLPC for this purpose is particularly asinine. They might as well outlaw cookbook publication because some hated foreign leader might get his hands on the Joy of Cooking and use the fresh pork section as a guide to cooking babies.
Related to this is the annoying habit of the most zealous ideologues who post their opinions on web forums to end their unsupported, often ludicrous, assertions with FACT!
It's a fact that the word zealous and zealot are insulting terms used by astroturfers and PR flacks to smear people opposed to them. It's namecalling and people dip to it when the facts are not in their favor.
In this case, the Bush administration intentended to create a "marketplace" of two vendors. Each person is supposed to be able to chose between a cable company and a phone company for broadband and market pressures will make each behave. The most obvious flaw is that the policy has failed to provide even that level of competition. It's performance is poor, even by the FCC's convoluted "broadband" collection statistics, where everyone in a zip code has access to broadband if a single person there does. The second problem is that both parties all obviously collaborating with the powerful entertainment industry, where government "protection" has also led to a catastrophic lack of competition. Finally, the position is not even philosophically sound - if you believe in market forces you will open up the public servitude and spectrum to real competition. They can't have it both ways, you either regulate for the public good or you allow the public to mind it's own business. After a century of regulation, the former monopolies have a tremendous advantage that was built at everyone's expense, and should be as carefully watched as former Soviet companies until real competition emerges. What the impartial observer finds in Bush policy that it's designed to protect select private business, a private-public cooperation favoring few at the expense of all others. There are plenty of names for that kind of thing, Fascism, cronies, but the lables don't do it justice. The contraditions and poor performance are evident on their own, despite the Bush administration's best ability to eliminate facts from the picture. The contry that invented the internet should have the best public network in the world.
This is true and people have been using animal fat as a fuel ever since they discovered fire. Exxon realized that 150,000 people already die each year from global warming and their bodies represent an untapped, carbon neutral fuel source. Check out the results at Vivoleum.com, and you to may want to be a candle or SUV fodder. Burn guilt free!
Too little too late, indeed..mac springs to mind as do dozens of specialized services from Yahoo, Google and others. Offerings by "social networking" sites and photo sharing sites redouble it all. How much do you want to bet that M$ adds insult to injury by selling adverts on the service?
It's very good that non functional people can be brought into consciousness but the BBC description of the symptoms, cause and cure show potential for massive abuse:
They found that inhibiting the enzyme stopped mice with Fragile X Syndrome behaving in erratic ways. Prior to treatment they showed signs of hyperactivity, purposeless and repetitive movements.
People with Fragile X Syndrome have more dendritic spines than usual, but each is longer and thinner, and transmits weaker electric signals.
Using purposeless and repetitive movements as markers for disease is frightenting. Children need those to develop muscles and co-ordination. Most adults would be better off not suppressing them as well.
Changing the structure of a person's mind is an even more frightening prospect. How do we know that the extra connections are not in some way useful? Could they be responsible for creativity and problem solving? This kind of treatment should be very carefully applied and only to those who are obviously bad off. A significant further ethical problem is one of long term efficacy and dependency explored in novels like Flowers for Algernon.
Society has already demonstrated it's willingness to abuse drugs in the name of conformity against hyperactivity. There is no doubt that too many children are medicated. The effects of those drugs are mild compared to this new class. It would be sad if society takes to altering people's brain structure they way it has taken to feeding kids uppers. The BBC's descriptions are right in line with that outcome.
All the power of a WinCE or Palm in a tiny little board. They are missing USB hosting and video for the complete package.
All the power of Palm and then some. With 64MB RAM, you can easily run X and forward your programs to yourself from the device if you want images. It would be better to use the device as a data collector and make graphs on your laptop from the results.
As for a Beowulf cluster, if the power to flops ratio is good that can work.
I'd like to see one with ethernet jacks on both ends... then it could be an inline analysis tool.
Analysis is better done with a tap than a pass though. Why waste processor time duplicating packets when you could spend time analyzing, storing and reporting the results from a tap? You only need a tap to listen.
The choice of software only reflects what the politician wants to project, not what they will actually do. Previous actions are better guides than words.
When it comes to the tools that matters, GNU/Linux has already won. Check out the growing RNC email scandal - when it came to work that counted, GWB used GNU/Linux. What the White House uses for it's glad handle front page is meaningless when things are viewed from this perspective.
Don't think, however, that GWB has been good for software freedom. He's not only let M$ run rampant instead of enforcing the anti-trust trial, he's come to their defense in EU anti-trust cases. It's pathetic.
I'm not really sure if the Democrats will do any better. They are the party that crafted and passed the DMCA. Their use of free tools is as meaningless as the RNC's.
Private offices for employees is a big benefit. See http://joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/March2007. html. Play this up. Take a cue from Google and loosen up a little about offices. Let people call facilities and have their office painted any color they want. Have the standard office come with a guest chair and a brightly colored Microsoft branded bean-bag chair.
... google abhors private offices and loves open-space plans, was the moment any temptation to go work for them evaporated for me.
Do you really think you will find privacy in Mr. Gates' empire? You could work in a vault, but every file on your computer, every email, phone call, and web site you visit will be monitored. You might even get fired for making a blog post at home that Mr. Gates did not like.
Slashdot Mirror
an amazing AC troll blurt:
I can hardly get through a TV program without having to watch one of MS "switcher" adds trying to convince people to drop Google search in favor of live search. Oh wait, that was in your reality, what was I thinking.
That's called projection. You consider your own circumstances universal and project your reasoning onto others. The results are wrong because the circumstances are different. There are no TV ads in my reality, so what you were thinking was wrong.
It was also stupid because you could just go look up M$, Yahoo and Google's advertising budget. M$ is the least transparent of the bunch, but their quarterly reports back up the billion dollars a month figure. I doubt Yahoo, Google, Apple, Sun and IBM spend as much as a group.
Google good and MS bad, that type of thing. Then you throw in colors, images of happy people, etc, and you get a positive reaction. It may not be enough to surpress logical thinking, but these associations are powerful.
So isn't it encouraging that people are able to see through the butterflies, "reach your potential" and other obvious bullshit that M$ spends a billion dollars a month on? If the results were really all about marketing M$ would have dominated the results as much as they do advertising. Yahoo's presence may be do to them spending a little more than Google, but the bottom line is performance. Advertising dollars saturate at a rather low level of trust. When your performance sucks bad enough, the advertising can be counter productive - another in your face annoyance you would rather have left at work.
Isn't there a difference between branding and reputation?
Yes. Branding is something you buy with a billion dollars a month in advertising, like M$ does. Reputation is something you build with a quality product, like everyone else does. People can tell the difference.
The overall results of this study are that performance and reputation trump marketing money. M$ spends close to a billion dollars a month on advertising, dwarfing the combined spending of the rest, but people clearly think their stuff is second rate. This is how a the market should work and it's encouraging. People are not nearly as dumb as M$ thinks they are.
Reputation is a legitimate decision factor in information services. It's right for people to think M$'s search engine is goofey when M$ is such a dishonest company, their results have been poor in the past and they admit to selling placement. It's also right for people to have a neutral or favorable view of Google and Yahoo given the performance record of both companies in search. The neat thing about search is that things that don't look like useful results often are, at least when you use a good engine.
There were a few problems of sample size. The group size is to small and the responses were too poor to mean much. Only 36% of the results were judged relevant, which means the results from all the engines were poor. A larger study may show a real relationship between performance and trust that goes beyond marketing.
It's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to honest companies and not to dishonest ones.
There is no nice word for people like dedazo. The phrase used by Orwell was "professional liar".
There's always a choice to not buy. No firearms are being directed at heads.
You like to eat don't you? Want to grow all of your food?
Legalizing price fixing is the most shocking piece of US law since Congress passed the torture is AOK bill. It's going to be abused by distributors and manufacturers to screw their smaller competition and you. If you think things are consolidated today, just wait until you see the effects of industry dancing with price floors to eliminate their competition. The results are cascading and multiplicative rather than a simple sum of their parts. It is impossible to imagine any way this will actually create more competition, despite the glib logic given by Kenedy.
First retailers and you will be squeezed. By setting a price floor, distributors can charge retailers more for their goods. Retailers will have to pass the difference on to you and will also have to bear the cost of not being able to dump goods that don't sell. When a retailer makes a mistake now, they are stuck with it and can't sell the goods off at or below cost.
More risks for retailers means a smaller market overall, because they will buy less, but that's just the beginning of a new manufacturer's problems. Price floor distort prices in a way that make monopoly rents easier. Imagine you find a process to make something better than everyone else. When you start making it, the monopolist can drop the floor on your one good while raising it just a little on everything else. New entrants always have less to offer than established businesses, so they won't be able to move their pricing around as well and will be crushed.
The majority thinks the courts can weed this kind of behavior out, but what they are really saying is that they don't care about startups that can't withstand the pressure for as long as an uncertain lawsuit takes. Shame on them!
Price floors create nothing but friction and economic friction is always harmful.
Competition != Mortal Enemies.
M$ is abnormal. The company does not act like a sociopath because that's the way big organizations are, it acts like one because the people running it are sociopaths.
PCs are clearly of major importance in the promotion of human well being. Electronic publication is cheap, effective and revolutionizing all fields of human practice and learning. A lifetime's worth of expensive textbooks can easily be replaced by one or two cheap electronic devices. Electronic records keeping and commerce saves business billions each years. Medical records prevent mixups and save lives. All of these savings can be safely recouped by the software industry if software piracy can be prevented.
M$ Research's amazing new Soul Scan has this potential. It is biometric feedback device that verifies the user's identity and deepest thoughts, which can be used for further profit as well as piracy prevention. Before using the computer, the consumer must insert his fingers into the Soul Scanner, which instantly creates a neural network to read the consumer's mind. If the consumer is not authorized to access the computer or any of it's records, the device electrocutes the consumer and ends the piracy threat. The cost of the device will add a trivial $100 cost per unit, which can be passed on, but much more will be extractable from users because of it.
Because the profit potential is so strong that all major governments are being lobbied at this moment to mandate Soul Scann. They are being told that it's the only way to defeat the terrorists and others who would exist outside the US economy.
The US still is under the impression that sanctions and trade embargoes will actually cause regime change in these countries. Even though they haven't worked at all ...
They started working they day they were made. While regime change is nice, it's not the only reason to have trade embargoes. A more fundamental reason is to stop helping tyrants. Trade is always mutually beneficial, the first goal of embargoes is to end that benefit to countries that oppress their own people. A second reason is to maintain the value of your own labor. The whole purpose of oppression is to make yourself rich off other people's work, aka slavery. Trade with countries that use slave labor puts free industry at risk. These goals are noble and worthwile, despite obvious contradictions and omissions like China's most favored nation status and other of our own misdeeds.
That being said, this article stinks. Export controls have been used against free software before and were entirely pointless. The line of reasoning would extinguish any and all network software distribution, free and non free. Focusing that line of reasoning onto free software as "free software aids terrorists" is a tactic that was predicted:
Using OLPC for this purpose is particularly asinine. They might as well outlaw cookbook publication because some hated foreign leader might get his hands on the Joy of Cooking and use the fresh pork section as a guide to cooking babies.
*Microsoft paid me $100 to post this.
You do act like a M$ PR drone, but I doubt your effort earn you more than $5/hour. Talk is cheap.
People who blog for a living can't afford to sell their reputation. Working with M$ is kind of like driving the car while someone robs a bank.
Could that be a backdoor and a good reason for countries like China to develop their own CPUs?
China will use these backdoors like anyone else, why would they bother to invent their own?
Related to this is the annoying habit of the most zealous ideologues who post their opinions on web forums to end their unsupported, often ludicrous, assertions with FACT!
It's a fact that the word zealous and zealot are insulting terms used by astroturfers and PR flacks to smear people opposed to them. It's namecalling and people dip to it when the facts are not in their favor.
In this case, the Bush administration intentended to create a "marketplace" of two vendors. Each person is supposed to be able to chose between a cable company and a phone company for broadband and market pressures will make each behave. The most obvious flaw is that the policy has failed to provide even that level of competition. It's performance is poor, even by the FCC's convoluted "broadband" collection statistics, where everyone in a zip code has access to broadband if a single person there does. The second problem is that both parties all obviously collaborating with the powerful entertainment industry, where government "protection" has also led to a catastrophic lack of competition. Finally, the position is not even philosophically sound - if you believe in market forces you will open up the public servitude and spectrum to real competition. They can't have it both ways, you either regulate for the public good or you allow the public to mind it's own business. After a century of regulation, the former monopolies have a tremendous advantage that was built at everyone's expense, and should be as carefully watched as former Soviet companies until real competition emerges. What the impartial observer finds in Bush policy that it's designed to protect select private business, a private-public cooperation favoring few at the expense of all others. There are plenty of names for that kind of thing, Fascism, cronies, but the lables don't do it justice. The contraditions and poor performance are evident on their own, despite the Bush administration's best ability to eliminate facts from the picture. The contry that invented the internet should have the best public network in the world.
You can still see the tribute video here. It has all of the good parts anyway. The press release is also preserved elsewhere.
This is true and people have been using animal fat as a fuel ever since they discovered fire. Exxon realized that 150,000 people already die each year from global warming and their bodies represent an untapped, carbon neutral fuel source. Check out the results at Vivoleum.com, and you to may want to be a candle or SUV fodder. Burn guilt free!
Too little too late, indeed. .mac springs to mind as do dozens of specialized services from Yahoo, Google and others. Offerings by "social networking" sites and photo sharing sites redouble it all. How much do you want to bet that M$ adds insult to injury by selling adverts on the service?
It's very good that non functional people can be brought into consciousness but the BBC description of the symptoms, cause and cure show potential for massive abuse:
Using purposeless and repetitive movements as markers for disease is frightenting. Children need those to develop muscles and co-ordination. Most adults would be better off not suppressing them as well.
Changing the structure of a person's mind is an even more frightening prospect. How do we know that the extra connections are not in some way useful? Could they be responsible for creativity and problem solving? This kind of treatment should be very carefully applied and only to those who are obviously bad off. A significant further ethical problem is one of long term efficacy and dependency explored in novels like Flowers for Algernon.
Society has already demonstrated it's willingness to abuse drugs in the name of conformity against hyperactivity. There is no doubt that too many children are medicated. The effects of those drugs are mild compared to this new class. It would be sad if society takes to altering people's brain structure they way it has taken to feeding kids uppers. The BBC's descriptions are right in line with that outcome.
... or he has nothing to toss.
All the power of a WinCE or Palm in a tiny little board. They are missing USB hosting and video for the complete package.
All the power of Palm and then some. With 64MB RAM, you can easily run X and forward your programs to yourself from the device if you want images. It would be better to use the device as a data collector and make graphs on your laptop from the results.
As for a Beowulf cluster, if the power to flops ratio is good that can work.
I'd like to see one with ethernet jacks on both ends... then it could be an inline analysis tool.
Analysis is better done with a tap than a pass though. Why waste processor time duplicating packets when you could spend time analyzing, storing and reporting the results from a tap? You only need a tap to listen.
The choice of software only reflects what the politician wants to project, not what they will actually do. Previous actions are better guides than words.
When it comes to the tools that matters, GNU/Linux has already won. Check out the growing RNC email scandal - when it came to work that counted, GWB used GNU/Linux. What the White House uses for it's glad handle front page is meaningless when things are viewed from this perspective.
Don't think, however, that GWB has been good for software freedom. He's not only let M$ run rampant instead of enforcing the anti-trust trial, he's come to their defense in EU anti-trust cases. It's pathetic.
I'm not really sure if the Democrats will do any better. They are the party that crafted and passed the DMCA. Their use of free tools is as meaningless as the RNC's.
aptly named suv4x4, looses his cool and tries to act like a dick:
I'm not going to see four instances of "M$" in a single line of text and stand here taking it like a pussy. I'm coming for ya! Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
It was two lines, and whatever you tossed relieved only yourself.
A bean bag chair and paint? Oh yeah, that will make the next version of IE better. Perhaps they can be a company that does not make you grovel, beg and feel like a school girl to get anything done. Nah, that would be a different company - here's a M$ bean bag, which is ergonomic like an oversized sack..
The whole article is one of the most infantile and petty cases of corporate penis envy I've ever seen.
Do you really think you will find privacy in Mr. Gates' empire? You could work in a vault, but every file on your computer, every email, phone call, and web site you visit will be monitored. You might even get fired for making a blog post at home that Mr. Gates did not like.