Notice how this report is released 1 week after Obama was sworn in and Bush and his censoring cronies left town. I don't think that that timing is accidental.
Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?
You mean the shills paid for by big oil and other industrial entities? Some of them seem to be the same people who got paid to tell people that the jury was still out on tobacco causing cancer and lung disease -- until a lawsuit resulted in the release of thousands of pages that indicated that the tobacco companies were fully aware that tobacco and cancer were pretty clearly linked..
Yeppers, I can make my system usable again. I'll just boot my computer and download the.....
oh, crap.
Metaphors break down, but they rarely
get bricked.
Bricks break, but they rarely get bricked.
Seagate drives get bricked, and they can also be un-bricked.
You, on the other hand are simply 'thick as a brick'.
((
Yes, I know, you're physically thicker than your average brick, but it's just a metaphor. ))
Microsoft is a special case. They've got a monopoly and there are so many people who think that there is no other choice. If they were to repackage windows 3.1 as windows 7.5 and put as much effort into selling it as they did Vista, they'd probably still be able to browbeat 50M people, worldwide into buying it.
Perhaps Google raised questions about the constitutionality of the no-warrant data searches while MS simply rolled over and asked for some really hefty 'administrative fees'.
This would seem to suggest that all efforts to make software easier to use will hurt the company's bottom line.
Only in the short term. If you insist in making the software difficult to use, then one of 2 things will happen:
customers will go elsewhere,
customers will fork a usable version (which is what the OP is threatening to do with the broken 'Open Source' version).
and the possibility of #2 is precisely why some companies are now turning to Open Source. (not that they really want to, but the capability is important).
then there's the fact that companies are more likely to be willing to pay big bucks for support of a good project than a crappy one.
The plan was done by Microsoft's vampire core. When it was exposed to the light of day (and media stories), the deal evaporated. The deal was actually exposed some number of months ago Microsoft doesn't like such deals being exposed. Deals like this being illegal doesn't help the situation.
Well, given that Wally's the one effectively breaking something that they sold to their customers, I'd say that they'd be liable for a refund. It's not like they can claim 'wear and tear', or 'customer mistreatment', or even 'bit rot'. (which are the usual reasons why time diminishes the value of a product). Wallmart is breaking my product -- so now they're responsible for fixing it.
Now, whether or not a customer is going to get anything back on their ~$2.00 purchase, short of a class-action lawsuit, is an entirely different question.
and you should notice that the direct part of the quote ends after 'light'. The 'and whoof, there was a universe' comes from big bang theory, but it's not that different than 'and there was light' in genesis.
You have to remember, too, that the bible was written for people for whom the closest thing to quantum theory was "there's nothing smaller than a penny" (well, whatever the equivalent was back then), and it wasn't intended as a science text.
All he's asking is that science teachers acknowledge that
Some people actually believe in creationism, and
creationism (in it's various forms) is *not* science.
Both of those points can be scientifically proven, and thus, 'admitting' them is science, and attempting to gloss over, or ignore, those facts is antiscientific.
Taking this approach could also open to door to discussing how the biblical descriptions of creation are not necessarily at odds with creation.
for example:
Science only address how, not who or why.
The bible really only addresses who, of creation, and offers precious little detail on how (and almost nothing of why). Most creationism proponents make up the details and then act like the made-up details were actually written in the bible.
"God said 'let there be light'," and whoof there was a universe. -- and that's inconsistent with 'big bang', in just what way?
How long is God's day? Remember, the earth doesn't even exist until day 2. Saying that God's days are 24 human hours long is creating God in man's image, not the other way 'round.
the biblical account is severely lacking in details. Most creationists have added details and then acted like those added details are actually in the bible.
Once you acknowledge the creationist's world view, and address them from within it, you actually have some hope of getting them to seriously look at the scientific world view. At the very least, it gets them to acknowledge their creationist view as
non-scientific.
Science and religion have very different purposes.
The acolyte went to the the senior monk and asked "What is the difference between faith and knowledge?"
"Knowledge is like the sun", said the monk. "Faith is like a candle."
The acolyte was scandalized. "That must be wrong! Shouldn't faith be bright and strong like the sun, and knowledge the little candle?."
The monk sighed, and thought for a moment.
"Come back and ask me again at midnight", he said.
That's a really effective way to lose a girlfriend.
..... five seconds later, steel spikes shoot up from between the keys and impale your hands. The spikes may be tipped with a poison of your choice if so desired.... Right: Slashdot.... Nevermind.
Unless the process of inserting the ad capability into the game threatens to cost more than the ads will pay, I see it as something of a no-loss proposition for the games maker. If a player doesn't mind, then you've got an extra revenue stream... and if they do then they can just turn it off. It's something kinda hard to knock from my (somewhat cynical) point of view.
..... Their terminal guidance and overall control appeared to have been *far* superior to the typical Soviet system. Much smoother and neater and apparently much finer control. Perhaps this is what they were talking about -- As I remember it, the final approach of Progress was far from automated. If this new system is mostly or fully automated, then it does qualify for a first...
Real ID is an attempt to eliminate the cartoon-drawing Driver's Licenses that some states hand out. If that was all that realid did, it would simply have to mandate minimum standards for drivers licenses -- and if that was all it did, I doubt that California would mind joining in on it.
What Realid also does, is force states to combine all of their records together where the federal government can access them, and allows the federal government to join that data with private and government data for whatever purpose it wants.
All of that data in one place is a really big prize for somebody wanting to mess with somebody's life -- especially when you consider that DHS has consistently failed security audits for it's computer networks.
First you attack him claiming that he's not really a lawyer. Then, when that point is blunted, you attack him because he is a lawyer. If you balance the equation, it becomes clear that his being a lawyer has nothing to do with it. This is now clearly an ad persona attack -- presumably because you don't like (or were paid to dislike) the conclusion that his group came to.
Like any other proposed violation of people's rights -- this is only a good idea when it's somebody else who's affected. That's exactly why racism and prejudice is able to take hold... It's really easy to verify that you're not a member of the 'them' that is being negatively impacted by it.
really low power consumption is rather important when your battery is the size of Bill Gate's Di...git.
It's only recently that flash drives have gotten big enough (4-20GB) for most people to seriously consider them as their primary computer storage device. 128KB, on the other hand is acceptable for storing your personal top-80 list (which is more than many music stations will play in a day.. modulo commercials).
It was only recently that hard drives got small enough to be able to fit in most MP3 players. Remember the ads about the guy with the 5 pound MP3 player? not too far from the truth if you use 5-year old HD solutions.
You write new songs {once a day ~ once a month}, then you listen to them {dozens ~ hundreds} of times. This read-mostly usage works just peachy with flash (which has to go through all sorts of contortions to be able to survive continual writes).
That's 20000 writes. If you're using EXT[23] file system with access time updates enabled (the default), you can end up with 20000 updates to the superblock entries of popular files in pretty short order. Write levelling helps this, but it's not perfect. If you have a high number of writes to your drive, you're stil going to have problems a lot faster with flash than with many hard drive solutions.
I saw a lot of queries, last year, on the EXT3-users mailing list from people who put ext[23] on an embedded flash application and found problems a lot sooner than they expected.
Where Flash drives are in their glory is with read-mostly applications. MP3 players are a perfect example of this. You write a song once, and then play it back dozens or hundreds of times with no further modification. Computer applications where some blocks of data are continuously written to are a flash engineer's nightmare. Intel may have solved this problem, or they may just hope that the drive will last long enough to make the people who buy this solution happy.
Remember that people who pay $4000 just for a hard drive are generally also the kind of people who will probably replace their machine every year or too, anyways. Those people will probably give away their flash-drive laptop before the drive is likely to fail.
SFLC is real lawyers. Eben Moglen is a real and practicing lawyer... Yeah, he moonlights as a law professor, he also spent time helping the the most respected judge on the Supreme Court of the USA write the court's decisions000000000000. I'd say that he's a far better lawyer than 90% of the hacks that you'll find in the yellow pages.
What MS is doing to the ISO process is a problem in, and of itself. Think of turning the SCOTUS into a profit-driven enterprise, and you'll get a sense of what they're doing. They're turning what had been (until last year) a respected and reasonably neutral technical committee and turning it into a corporate lapdog. Unless what they do is reversed, people will no longer have strong trust of what comes out of the ISO. What the ISO fast-track process in designed to do is, is vet standards that comes from other bodies and only pass them if they're up to ISO standards. The normal track is designed to either generate a standard, or work on a almost-OK standard until it's up to ISO standards. To the extent to which MSDOC (aka OOXML) could be considered an almost-OK standard, it should have been put into the standard track, not fast-tracked far before it's time.
Microsoft has been pushing MSDOC by saying that it's an open standard -- that's one of their selling points. If the open promise is garbage, then that's like selling a 'car' with balsa-wood wheels. It doesn't do what it looks like it's designed to do... It won't even get you safely home.
It's not a 20 year old format. It's a 20 year old format in an XML wrapper being touted as XML. Once again, it doesn't do what it looks like (and has been advertised as) it was designed to do -- which is provide the benefits of XML. The binary blobs inside the format make it XML-opaque.
It's like putting a layer of mud in between two panes of glass, and selling the result as a 'transparent solution'. The glass is transparent, but the mud layer makes it useless as a window). People who buy into the 'transparent' PR will be hosed, but they won't know that they're hosed until the so-called transparent solution is installed.
It's the tip of the wedge.... One of the arguments of why to go to Windows was the superior performance of Windows drivers written (and tweaked) by the chip manufacturers vs drivers for the same chips shipping 6-12 monthsl later on Linux and designed by reverse-engineering the chips over a coal fire.
Nowadays, however, it's looking like the fastest solution (or, at least, a reasonably fast solution) might be to put your game on a Ubuntu live-CD and/or encourage the average gamer to move from Windows to Linux.
Given that gaming and photoshop are two of the big apps holding many people back from Linux, this is a big deal.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I'll be rushing to buy tickets to on this boat.
Notice how this report is released 1 week after Obama was sworn in and Bush and his censoring cronies left town. I don't think that that timing is accidental.
You don't know the power of the lecture circuit :)
Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?
You mean the shills paid for by big oil and other industrial entities? Some of them seem to be the same people who got paid to tell people that the jury was still out on tobacco causing cancer and lung disease -- until a lawsuit resulted in the release of thousands of pages that indicated that the tobacco companies were fully aware that tobacco and cancer were pretty clearly linked..
..... it's CLEARLY more useful than a brick.
Yeppers, I can make my system usable again. I'll just boot my computer and download the.....
oh, crap.
Metaphors break down, but they rarely get bricked.
Bricks break, but they rarely get bricked.
Seagate drives get bricked, and they can also be un-bricked.
You, on the other hand are simply 'thick as a brick'.
(( Yes, I know, you're physically thicker than your average brick, but it's just a metaphor. ))
At that point, you can test most (if not all) of the peripherals to see if they work nicely.
Microsoft is a special case. They've got a monopoly and there are so many people who think that there is no other choice. If they were to repackage windows 3.1 as windows 7.5 and put as much effort into selling it as they did Vista, they'd probably still be able to browbeat 50M people, worldwide into buying it.
Perhaps Google raised questions about the constitutionality of the no-warrant data searches while MS simply rolled over and asked for some really hefty 'administrative fees'.
This would seem to suggest that all efforts to make software easier to use will hurt the company's bottom line.
Only in the short term. If you insist in making the software difficult to use, then one of 2 things will happen:
and the possibility of #2 is precisely why some companies are now turning to Open Source. (not that they really want to, but the capability is important).
then there's the fact that companies are more likely to be willing to pay big bucks for support of a good project than a crappy one.
The plan was done by Microsoft's vampire core. When it was exposed to the light of day (and media stories), the deal evaporated. The deal was actually exposed some number of months ago Microsoft doesn't like such deals being exposed. Deals like this being illegal doesn't help the situation.
Well, given that Wally's the one effectively breaking something that they sold to their customers, I'd say that they'd be liable for a refund. It's not like they can claim 'wear and tear', or 'customer mistreatment', or even 'bit rot'. (which are the usual reasons why time diminishes the value of a product). Wallmart is breaking my product -- so now they're responsible for fixing it.
Now, whether or not a customer is going to get anything back on their ~$2.00 purchase, short of a class-action lawsuit, is an entirely different question.
and you should notice that the direct part of the quote ends after 'light'. The 'and whoof, there was a universe' comes from big bang theory, but it's not that different than 'and there was light' in genesis.
You have to remember, too, that the bible was written for people for whom the closest thing to quantum theory was "there's nothing smaller than a penny" (well, whatever the equivalent was back then), and it wasn't intended as a science text.
Both of those points can be scientifically proven, and thus, 'admitting' them is science, and attempting to gloss over, or ignore, those facts is antiscientific.
Taking this approach could also open to door to discussing how the biblical descriptions of creation are not necessarily at odds with creation.
for example:
Saying that God's days are 24 human hours long is creating God in man's image, not the other way 'round.
Once you acknowledge the creationist's world view, and address them from within it, you actually have some hope of getting them to seriously look at the scientific world view. At the very least, it gets them to acknowledge their creationist view as non-scientific.
Science and religion have very different purposes.
Everywhere else, Windows nukes you forever.
..... five seconds later, steel spikes shoot up from between the keys and impale your hands. The spikes may be tipped with a poison of your choice if so desired.... Right: Slashdot.... Nevermind.However, DHS bureaucracy being what it is, they won't arrive until sometime next month.
Unless the process of inserting the ad capability into the game threatens to cost more than the ads will pay, I see it as something of a no-loss proposition for the games maker. If a player doesn't mind, then you've got an extra revenue stream ... and if they do then they can just turn it off. It's something kinda hard to knock from my (somewhat cynical) point of view.
What Realid also does, is force states to combine all of their records together where the federal government can access them, and allows the federal government to join that data with private and government data for whatever purpose it wants.
All of that data in one place is a really big prize for somebody wanting to mess with somebody's life -- especially when you consider that DHS has consistently failed security audits for it's computer networks.
First you attack him claiming that he's not really a lawyer. Then, when that point is blunted, you attack him because he is a lawyer. If you balance the equation, it becomes clear that his being a lawyer has nothing to do with it. This is now clearly an ad persona attack -- presumably because you don't like (or were paid to dislike) the conclusion that his group came to.
Like any other proposed violation of people's rights -- this is only a good idea when it's somebody else who's affected. That's exactly why racism and prejudice is able to take hold... It's really easy to verify that you're not a member of the 'them' that is being negatively impacted by it.
I saw a lot of queries, last year, on the EXT3-users mailing list from people who put ext[23] on an embedded flash application and found problems a lot sooner than they expected.
Where Flash drives are in their glory is with read-mostly applications. MP3 players are a perfect example of this. You write a song once, and then play it back dozens or hundreds of times with no further modification. Computer applications where some blocks of data are continuously written to are a flash engineer's nightmare. Intel may have solved this problem, or they may just hope that the drive will last long enough to make the people who buy this solution happy.
Remember that people who pay $4000 just for a hard drive are generally also the kind of people who will probably replace their machine every year or too, anyways. Those people will probably give away their flash-drive laptop before the drive is likely to fail.
-
SFLC is real lawyers. Eben Moglen is a real and practicing lawyer... Yeah, he moonlights as a law professor, he also spent time helping the the most respected judge on the Supreme Court of the USA write the court's decisions000000000000. I'd say that he's a far better lawyer than 90% of the hacks that you'll find in the yellow pages.
-
What MS is doing to the ISO process is a problem in, and of itself. Think of turning the SCOTUS into a profit-driven enterprise, and you'll get a sense of what they're doing. They're turning what had been (until last year) a respected and reasonably neutral technical committee and turning it into a corporate lapdog. Unless what they do is reversed, people will no longer have strong trust of what comes out of the ISO. What the ISO fast-track process in designed to do is, is vet standards that comes from other bodies and only pass them if they're up to ISO standards. The normal track is designed to either generate a standard, or work on a almost-OK standard until it's up to ISO standards. To the extent to which MSDOC (aka OOXML) could be considered an almost-OK standard, it should have been put into the standard track, not fast-tracked far before it's time.
-
Microsoft has been pushing MSDOC by saying that it's an open standard -- that's one of their selling points. If the open promise is garbage, then that's like selling a 'car' with balsa-wood wheels. It doesn't do what it looks like it's designed to do... It won't even get you safely home.
-
It's not a 20 year old format. It's a 20 year old format in an XML wrapper being touted as XML. Once again, it doesn't do what it looks like (and has been advertised as) it was designed to do -- which is provide the benefits of XML. The binary blobs inside the format make it XML-opaque.
Troll?It's like putting a layer of mud in between two panes of glass, and selling the result as a 'transparent solution'. The glass is transparent, but the mud layer makes it useless as a window). People who buy into the 'transparent' PR will be hosed, but they won't know that they're hosed until the so-called transparent solution is installed.
Nowadays, however, it's looking like the fastest solution (or, at least, a reasonably fast solution) might be to put your game on a Ubuntu live-CD and/or encourage the average gamer to move from Windows to Linux.
Given that gaming and photoshop are two of the big apps holding many people back from Linux, this is a big deal.