I just pulled those out of my ass in about 30 seconds and all of them appear to be taken already, but I'm sure someone in MS marketing can come up with something original, or they can license one they like. A new name won't be a huge problem, the bigger problem is any name recognition they had is gone.
Also, DriveSky doesn't solve anything because it was the use of the word Sky in the name that caused the trademark problems.
Umm... the entire reason that the government has different branches is so that there are checks and balances in place. It wouldn't be "some random judge", but the judicial branch of the government IS capable of overturning laws made by the legislative branch. IIRC the US Supreme court has so far refused to rule on the constitutionality of the damages in these types of cases, but it doesn't mean it won't happen eventually and the gap in what the consortiums are asking for in settlement vs. the damages awarded would be relevant.
Well, that opens up a whole different always online being a stupid PITA for consumers argument. School's internet goes down = no adobe. My internet goes down = no adobe. Also, that's a potential solution at the college level, but what's the likelihood of public schools getting a key server and giving access to students? How old were most people here when their technology habits were formed?
My guess is this is a move to combat widespread piracy among home users. The benefit to home user's pirating your software is that people get to know your product, and then want to use it at work. That's one of the big reasons why MS has turned a blind eye to small time home piracy. Those home users aren't going to pay a $200+ license (or a $50/month subscription) so allowing them to pirate doesn't equate to a lost sale, it encourages companies to stick with a product their workforce is familiar with, and it ultimately get the vendor sales through those companies.
Basically I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot, but not in the way the summary implies. The companies who buy adobe products probably aren't going to baulk at the switch (and in fact a subscription makes things easier on start-ups since they don't have the overhead of a much more expensive license). It's going to hurt them because there will likely be less people familiar with their product in/entering the workforce. They can offset that somewhat by giving it away/giving heavy discounts to education sectors, but at the end of the day if the person can't fire it up on their home computer free/cheap it's going to make a difference.
As someone who lives in a rural area and is forced to use wireless internet (still have copper for my phone though), the reliability and speed still aren't anywhere near that of wired. Speed may not be an issue for just phone, but the inconsistent connection may well be.
Someone mentioned this above, but part of the problem with assuming BB missed out on #1 is in assuming that there's only money in greater market share. Remember that Blackberry's niche is more business than consumer. If someone can come up with an app that's attractive to business they can charge more, making up for the lack of market share.
It's similar to a discussion that cropped up the other week about the cost of medical software. It can often cost 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars because of a small, professional customer base.
Basically, just because you can't make money selling.99 cent games in the BB app store because of lack of market share, doesn't mean you can't make money on a $20+ app that's attractive to businesses who tend to provide employees with Blackberries.
As to what that app is, or even if it exists, I don't know. If I did I wouldn't be wasting my time commenting here.
I admittedly don't have experience with something this old, but up until about 8 years ago the college I work for was still using an old HP mainframe for student information and course scheduling. I don't think we've done any metrics on it, but I would guess a 3 fold increase in productivity is likely when we moved to our new system. A few factors:
-We had 2 programmers who knew COBOL, and I was on a different development team so we only had 1 programmer who knew COBOL who worked with that system. We now have 2 dedicated programmers working on the new student system, on top of a decrease in development time to using a less cumbersome language this has lead to a huge decrease in time to get new reports written. -If you wanted a report printed, you had to go into the server room and pray to the mainframe gods that the feed printer didn't jam (he rarely listened to our prayers). -There was no kind of self service options for our staff/faculty/students on the old system, so a lot of manpower was used in looking up information in the system that's not on the new one.
Yes, there was a huge overhead in costs and manpower to get moved over to the new student system, but it's more than paid for itself at this point. Again I don't have any solid metrics on that because I don't know that anyone tracked development/manpower time that went into the old or new system.
Along those lines. Like the joke about a physicist solving an engineering problem. "This will work... In a zero gravity vacuum."
Actually had a real world example of this.
My then fiance was telling us around the dinner table about her teacher and his wife who were both mathematicians. They did ridiculous stuff in their free time like figuring out the most efficient way to mow their lawn. They came up with the idea it was more efficient to mow in circles instead of box/rows. When I laughed, she said they showed the equations that proved it. I asked, "Did they take into account the fact that a riding mower generally has a wide turning radius and can't mow a perfectly filled circle, or that a push mower generally has to be lifted to turn since they have fixed wheels?" "...no." "That's why you don't ask a mathematician how to mow a lawn..."
Scientists once thought that pathogens could not reach drinking water wells sunk into deep, protected groundwater aquifers.
And from TFA: Groundwater models predicted that surface contaminants would require tens to hundreds of years to reach wells in these aquifers, which typically sit more than 700 feet underground.
They may still be right about their overall assumption, but were just wrong about those handful of wells being "protected". Basically, it's not THAT the viruses reached the aquifers (the models predicted they'd get there, but that it would take longer than the virus could survive: 700 years), it's HOW they did it so much more quickly than was modelled.
Also from TFAs: Bradbury thinks that the problem probably occurs in any city with wells located under sewage pipes.
The most likely source of the viruses in the wells was leakage of untreated sewage from sanitary sewer pipes.
Emphasis mine. Anyone want to bet that the 700 year models were based on uncompromised pipes that didn't leak, and only calculated the time for potential contaminants to get from the sewage outlet to the well?
Ummmm... that's not what happened. They weren't using a stock release of MySQL. They were using an old 5.1 fork that Facebook created and has been maintaining. They decided they wanted the enhancements that the newer releases offered, and had a choice of migrating to a newer release of MySQL, or migrating to a newer release of MariaDB. Either way, they were migrating and had to put forth the effort to do so.
5, according to my user page, although I lurked for a number of years before I made an account. Regardless of that, the idea that a certain UID (or age) is necessary to have insight into this industry is ridiculous. I know a number of brilliant programmers and IT folks who are younger than me. Experience is great, but it's not the only factor that goes into making someone competent.
Slashdot is an aggregation/discussion site. Of course it's going to have stories after site X, because that's the very nature of a site that aggregates news.
Slashdot Mirror
CloudDrive
CloudStore
NetDrive
NetStore
WebDrive
WebStore
I just pulled those out of my ass in about 30 seconds and all of them appear to be taken already, but I'm sure someone in MS marketing can come up with something original, or they can license one they like. A new name won't be a huge problem, the bigger problem is any name recognition they had is gone.
Also, DriveSky doesn't solve anything because it was the use of the word Sky in the name that caused the trademark problems.
Umm... the entire reason that the government has different branches is so that there are checks and balances in place. It wouldn't be "some random judge", but the judicial branch of the government IS capable of overturning laws made by the legislative branch. IIRC the US Supreme court has so far refused to rule on the constitutionality of the damages in these types of cases, but it doesn't mean it won't happen eventually and the gap in what the consortiums are asking for in settlement vs. the damages awarded would be relevant.
Can their settlement offers not be used as leverage to show that their actual damage claims are way out of line?
"There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over."
- Jack Bergman
Well, that opens up a whole different always online being a stupid PITA for consumers argument. School's internet goes down = no adobe. My internet goes down = no adobe. Also, that's a potential solution at the college level, but what's the likelihood of public schools getting a key server and giving access to students? How old were most people here when their technology habits were formed?
My guess is this is a move to combat widespread piracy among home users. The benefit to home user's pirating your software is that people get to know your product, and then want to use it at work. That's one of the big reasons why MS has turned a blind eye to small time home piracy. Those home users aren't going to pay a $200+ license (or a $50/month subscription) so allowing them to pirate doesn't equate to a lost sale, it encourages companies to stick with a product their workforce is familiar with, and it ultimately get the vendor sales through those companies.
Basically I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot, but not in the way the summary implies. The companies who buy adobe products probably aren't going to baulk at the switch (and in fact a subscription makes things easier on start-ups since they don't have the overhead of a much more expensive license). It's going to hurt them because there will likely be less people familiar with their product in/entering the workforce. They can offset that somewhat by giving it away/giving heavy discounts to education sectors, but at the end of the day if the person can't fire it up on their home computer free/cheap it's going to make a difference.
As someone who lives in a rural area and is forced to use wireless internet (still have copper for my phone though), the reliability and speed still aren't anywhere near that of wired. Speed may not be an issue for just phone, but the inconsistent connection may well be.
Someone mentioned this above, but part of the problem with assuming BB missed out on #1 is in assuming that there's only money in greater market share. Remember that Blackberry's niche is more business than consumer. If someone can come up with an app that's attractive to business they can charge more, making up for the lack of market share.
It's similar to a discussion that cropped up the other week about the cost of medical software. It can often cost 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars because of a small, professional customer base.
Basically, just because you can't make money selling .99 cent games in the BB app store because of lack of market share, doesn't mean you can't make money on a $20+ app that's attractive to businesses who tend to provide employees with Blackberries.
As to what that app is, or even if it exists, I don't know. If I did I wouldn't be wasting my time commenting here.
I admittedly don't have experience with something this old, but up until about 8 years ago the college I work for was still using an old HP mainframe for student information and course scheduling. I don't think we've done any metrics on it, but I would guess a 3 fold increase in productivity is likely when we moved to our new system. A few factors:
-We had 2 programmers who knew COBOL, and I was on a different development team so we only had 1 programmer who knew COBOL who worked with that system. We now have 2 dedicated programmers working on the new student system, on top of a decrease in development time to using a less cumbersome language this has lead to a huge decrease in time to get new reports written.
-If you wanted a report printed, you had to go into the server room and pray to the mainframe gods that the feed printer didn't jam (he rarely listened to our prayers).
-There was no kind of self service options for our staff/faculty/students on the old system, so a lot of manpower was used in looking up information in the system that's not on the new one.
Yes, there was a huge overhead in costs and manpower to get moved over to the new student system, but it's more than paid for itself at this point. Again I don't have any solid metrics on that because I don't know that anyone tracked development/manpower time that went into the old or new system.
Not if you're hacking with a box cutter.
"If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
The wanted to have it learn how to solve the Riemann hypothesis, but decided to go with a more difficult task instead.
What part of Nigeria is China in?
A team of 4-5 sys admins? Do you guys all have the passwords? Someone should tell San Francisco.
You end up with unmaintainable code, late deadlines and an environment where numerous employees want to kill each other.
Assholes create and cause shit. Noted.
To keep employees happy, Duffy says, it's better to make them go home to their families for dinner.
That's fine for regular employees, but assuming sys admins want to go home to their families is just silly.
http://xkcd.com/705/
Along those lines. Like the joke about a physicist solving an engineering problem. "This will work... In a zero gravity vacuum."
Actually had a real world example of this.
My then fiance was telling us around the dinner table about her teacher and his wife who were both mathematicians. They did ridiculous stuff in their free time like figuring out the most efficient way to mow their lawn. They came up with the idea it was more efficient to mow in circles instead of box/rows. When I laughed, she said they showed the equations that proved it. I asked, "Did they take into account the fact that a riding mower generally has a wide turning radius and can't mow a perfectly filled circle, or that a push mower generally has to be lifted to turn since they have fixed wheels?" "...no." "That's why you don't ask a mathematician how to mow a lawn..."
Scientists once thought that pathogens could not reach drinking water wells sunk into deep, protected groundwater aquifers.
And from TFA:
Groundwater models predicted that surface contaminants would require tens to hundreds of years to reach wells in these aquifers, which typically sit more than 700 feet underground.
They may still be right about their overall assumption, but were just wrong about those handful of wells being "protected". Basically, it's not THAT the viruses reached the aquifers (the models predicted they'd get there, but that it would take longer than the virus could survive: 700 years), it's HOW they did it so much more quickly than was modelled.
Also from TFAs:
Bradbury thinks that the problem probably occurs in any city with wells located under sewage pipes.
The most likely source of the viruses in the wells was leakage of untreated sewage from sanitary sewer pipes.
Emphasis mine. Anyone want to bet that the 700 year models were based on uncompromised pipes that didn't leak, and only calculated the time for potential contaminants to get from the sewage outlet to the well?
Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
Kind of like the rage virus from 28 days later, except it's going to unleash an epidemic of people rocking in the corner and talking to themselves.
That's phase 2, where they export the robots to Japan.
Ummmm... that's not what happened. They weren't using a stock release of MySQL. They were using an old 5.1 fork that Facebook created and has been maintaining. They decided they wanted the enhancements that the newer releases offered, and had a choice of migrating to a newer release of MySQL, or migrating to a newer release of MariaDB. Either way, they were migrating and had to put forth the effort to do so.
Or they become part of the couch?
"Mob mentality continues to be irrational and unreliable when using digital means."
Might make an interesting psychology or sociology paper material here for someone working on a thesis, but it honestly doesn't seem that surprising.
5, according to my user page, although I lurked for a number of years before I made an account. Regardless of that, the idea that a certain UID (or age) is necessary to have insight into this industry is ridiculous. I know a number of brilliant programmers and IT folks who are younger than me. Experience is great, but it's not the only factor that goes into making someone competent.
Slashdot is an aggregation/discussion site. Of course it's going to have stories after site X, because that's the very nature of a site that aggregates news.