Does this deal give Microsoft exclusive rights to publishing online? It sounded to me more like Microsoft gets to put Vista kiosks in the library that show silverlight versions of text (which is good for Microsoft because it gets them in front of a lot of tourists), but as far as online searching and indexing goes, does this completely preclude the possibility of others indexing content?
I honestly think the only expensive part of the project will be the costs of fuel and contracting the production of various parts.
Wrong. In the 60's hardware/development was the big cost, but these days it is ALWAYS insurance and covering your legal butt. That will be the biggest cost, guaranteed. If you rocket screws up and hits a metro area, well, you have to have a pretty big policy to cover that. And some good defense lawyers.
Doesn't Comcast advertise this "SpeedBoost" as a feature - the language in their ads is something like "get massive super speed for the first 10MB of a download, then it will revert to your provisioned line speed"... So, it actually *is* a good thing rather than something to pad bandwidth tests, and it does generally help your general user, right?
Except that I never get more than my apportioned amount. In other words, my SpeedBoost never goes faster than the 6MB I actually pay for. I think that's what the person who wrote the article is saying too: "Goes at the speed they paid for, which is really fast, for a short time period and then drops to something like 1.2 MB, which is clearly slower than most comcast plans."
Of course I'm aware of that. That was just like Star Trek's break between TOS and TNG. And at the end of it, he redid three movies and release three more real movies, which really were pretty good (Jar Jar Binks aside). But now he is starting to do what Star Trek did... he's flooding the market with spinoffs and junk and he's diluting the series. What he needs to do is step back, take another break (like Trek finally appears to be doing again), and then, when he finally has a good idea of how the last three should play out, come back and film them.
This is a very old idea. One of the earliest worm/viruses was actually of the "white-hat" variety. Nothing to see here, move along.
And besides being old, this is also a bad idea for two reasons:
Bandwidth: This becomes a major issue under the worm model. Now, instead of having the machine just check for/request updates once a day or so, you have worms on everyones machines trying to ping everyone elses machine to see who else needs the patch. That's a lot more packets than the current system requires.
Vulnerability: The last thing we need is for Microsoft to start writing worms that exploit its own holes. Think about what could happen here. First, MS releases a worm with code that can patch a system. Hackers, who are always watching, notice a new worm-patch by Microsoft. They grab a copy, analyze the instructions, and strap a new payload onto the propogation code (this saves them a ton of time since MS identifies the vulnerablity, writes the exploit code and creates the worm propogation code for them... all they must do is change what instructions are carried out when the worm gets on the machine). Thirdly, they release this worm into the wild. Fourth: $$PROFIT$$!
Me too. Am I the only one who thinks that Star Wars should do like Star Trek and just take a break for a little while? Look at Star Trek: it started out with the original series in the 1960s which, though it seems campy now, was actually some really good science fiction for its day, and had some extremely imaginitive episodes.
Then Star Trek went off the air, and we had a pretty big break (with a few movies to keep things going) until the next Star Trek series, TNG, in 1988. Most fans agree that TNG was excellent, and of the five Star Trek TV shows, TNG acheived the highest ratings and the best spots on TV. One of the reasons it was so successful, though, was because a break was taken, technology was allowed to progress, ideas were generated, and they didn't make another show until they really had something imaginative that was worth putting on the TV!
Unfortunately, though, before TNG was even done they made a spinoff called Deep Space 9. Then another called Voyager. And then they started a prequel called Enterprise. Within a decade you had three new Star Trek shows coming out and diluting the market. While they weren't horrible (I personally like Voyager reasonably well, for instance), they really weren't ground breaking like TNG because they didn't have nearly enough new content in them. Technology hadn't changed sufficiently enough for people to imagine a new generation of cool starship technologies, so you didn't get that "WOW!" factor you got when you first sat down to watch TNG. Mostly they were just released to milk the franchise as much as they could, and I'm releived to see that Paramount finally seems to be taking a break.
Don't get me wrong, I like Star Trek as much as anyone and would love a new show, but not if it isn't ground breaking and creative. I feel the same way about Star Wars. After releasing the three special editions and the three prequels, just take a break already! Quit cramming in TV shows and animated movies! They might be somewhat good, but I would rather Lucas just sit back, think, and then release the three movies that come after Episode 6 and have them be outstanding. That would be preferable to this very average animated stuff.
Oh, I think it's much, much too late for that. IBM and Microsoft have been at odds since the whole OS/2 joint development agreement fallout. The only thing nobody seems to notice much around here is that IBM has been winning.
Winning???!?! Since when? Microsoft has destroyed IBM in every area they have ever competed in.
Operating Systems? Microsoft. Windows clearly destroyed OS/2.
Office Software? Microsoft. Office has destroyed IBM owned Lotus. And Outlook has clearly crushed the clunky, butt ugly Lotus Notes.
IDEs? Microsoft. Visual Studio owns every IDE in existence, including the IBM spawned Eclipse (which actually isn't half bad, but that has more to do with the product being open source than being involved in IBM), IBM owned Rational products such as rational APEX, etc.
Language design? Microsoft. The.Net architecture has set a standard that IBM has certainly never matched, even in their Java collaboration.
Treatment of their employees? Microsoft. IBM just slashed the salaries of 8,000 engineers by 15% because those engineers wanted to be paid for all the overtime IBM was making them work. So IBM said, "Forget these lawsuits, you are all overtime eligible, and your base salaries are all going down 15%". Any worker there making 80,000 would be looking at a 12,000 dollar paycut. So, Microsoft clearly wins this one, and alienating all it's employees will cement IBMs downward spiral.
So in conclusion, the reason people don't notice IBM winning is because they aren't. Nor are they close, or even trending towards winning. They put out one overpriced, under featured, ugly software product after another, and they are now alienating all their engineers. If it weren't for consulting and patent revenues IBM would have already collapsed.
So who wants to be the one to test this hypothesis?
On another note, how can you say for sure if this even works? Usually whenever an AIDS vaccine is tried in humans, it is given to a population of people at high risk of getting HIV(usually gay men). How can you tell if something like this stops people from spreading it, when their partners are interacting with other, infectious people? They are likely to get HIV regardless, if not from the non-infectious person, then from someone else. How do you figure out which partner gave who what?
So seriously, am I the only one that thinks the NFL sucks more than any other entity, including the RIAA? These tactics are heavy handed, but not unprecedented for them. In fact, this TV thing is minor compared to what they might start doing next. They might actually start coming after people just for uttering the word "Super Bowl" and sue them! I'm not kidding, they've actually trademarked the word, and unless you pay the NFL, you may not use the word superbowl. I work for General Mills (the makers of Chex Mix), and they've opted not to pay the NFL when running advertising on/around the superbowl. Therefore, their ads can do nothing more than refer to "The Big Game." They may not, under any circumstances, utter the words "Super Bowl" without paying for it (and of course that goes for everybody).
So if the NFL is starting to tell people they can't watch the superbowl in groups around a 56 inch TV, when nothing would be lost (this is broadcast on one of the major networks for free, not pay per view, and everyone would just watch it individually regardless), then I honestly wouldn't be suprised if they started suing, say, news anchors for using the word Super Bowl in newscasts covering the weekend.
Side Note: Advertisers should sue the NFL for breach of contract in limiting their advertising exposure. They pay 2.5 million for ad spots, expecting that massive amounts of people will be gathering to watch in groups, and here goes the NFL breaking up groups of viewers. How is that even good for the NFL, let alone the advertisers funding the game?
Will the new Perl or the new Python be the first to shoot itself in the foot with incompatibility?
You know, sometimes a little backward incompatibility can be good. You can shoot yourself in the foot more by not breaking things when something needs fixing. As an example I point to VB.Net.
Back in the days of VB 6 and prior, VB was an entry sort of language that was designed with novice programmers in mind, and strayed quite a bit from normal programming constructs. With the advent of the.Net platform looming, Microsoft wanted to move VB to.Net, but didn't want to break existing code out in businesses. So they opted instead for kludges and workarounds in the language, and that's the reason I can't wait to get done with VB.Net project I am currently writing. If you are an experienced programmer in other languages such as Java, C++, etc, VB.Net can drive you mad. Here are just a couple examples:
Arrays. VB did not originally have 0 based arrays. Its arrays started at 1. In order to get VB to work with.Net, Microsoft really turned arrays into a kludge that is very difficult to remember (I almost always have to pull out an O'Reilly reference) and easy to get wrong. In a normal language, you declare an array of five integers and you get five slots numbered 0 through 4, right? Well not VB.NET! You declare an array of five integers, and you get SIX slots, numbered 0 through 5. And where most languages you would see "something - 1" when referencing array locations, in VB you often see "something - 2"! That really makes things annoying, especially if you've worked in.NET before with C#, because when you come over to VB you are almost guaranteed to biff things up.
Logical operators. In the original VB, "And" and "Or" operators did NOT do short circuit evaluation. To avoid breaking code, Microsoft introduced even more operators, "AndAlso" and "OrElse". Those two operators are just like "And" and "Or" except that they do do short circuit evaluation, but good luck trying to remember to use them when coding quickly. I know when I code and want to "And" things together, I think "X And Y", not "X AndAlso Y". Therefore, these new kludge operators certainly aren't the default operators most people think to use, so most end up using "And" and "Or" in the heat of coding, and VB code suffers and unecessary performance hit all over because short circuit evaluation isn't often used.
There are many other examples in VB like this, so I say this to the Python developers: If you have a good reason to break backwards compatibility with the language, then do it. Keep backwards compatibility whenever reasonably possible, but break it before accepting a kludge into your language. Your future coders will thank you, and will not run away screaming to the other, newer languages that will inevitably follow.
Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, they pointed out that a disproportionate share of engineers seem to have a mindset that makes them open to the quintessential right-wing features of "monism" (why argue where there is one best solution) and by "simplism" (if only people were rational, remedies would be simple).
Leave it to a sociologist to claim there is no such thing as one solution being better than others. Let's take their claims one at a time...
Monism. I could hardly believe my eyes when they looked down their nose at believing one solution is better than others. Let me throw out a counter-example that I actually SAW in college:
My partner wrote this code:
i = 0;
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
... 26 times total...
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
I replaced his code with this code that I wrote:
i = 0;
while (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
Did both solution work? Yes. Can we not say that one (mine) was better than others? Yes. Can this be quantified? Yes. Clearly their rejection of Monism is retarded.
Simplism. I'm not going to waste a lot of time with this. Would the world not be a better place if, instead of doing the sort of stupid stuff we see every day on the TV show "Cops", people acted rationally and led normal lives rather than acting like rednecks? I rest my case.
I'm guessing this article was supposed to be released April 1, but someone jumped the gun. That said, it's not even a very funny joke.
I think the more likely explanation is that this is an attempt by sociologists to get revenge for all the times they were told in college that sociology isn't a real major, sociology isn't a true or hard science, etc. Being an engineer myself, I happen to agree with that assessment, but perhaps the sociologists are getting the last laugh.:p
...... Unless of course we all really do have a terrorist mindset. In that case, publishing such an offensive article was a gross miscalculation on their part!:D <sarcastic news flash> Everywhere across the nation, engineers begin to dust off their bomb building kits, preparing to take on the evil forces of sociology</sarcasm>:D
This actually sounds like a good argument for bringing battleships out of retirement again. They've been largely retired since WWII (with a few sporadic usages since, such as the last one in Iraq during the first Gulf War). They are probably the only ships currently big enough to carry the powerplants and other electrical gear needed to make this work.
Other forms of ships either need their space for other things (aircraft carriers need the space for hangering planes) or are too small (I would have to think a destroyer isn't going to be able to handle this kind of weaponry).
Now that's democracy. If the majority wants free music sharing, then it gets to happen.
No, that's not democracy in action, that's stupidity in action. I can think of a whole host of problems with this.
What if I'm a programmer who needs an Internet connection, and I don't care that much about having a ton of songs. Why should I have to pay 5 dollars? Why should other people get to vote money out of my pocket to subsidize something they want?
What about when this precendent is carried forward, and the movie industry wants 10 bucks per month per connection, and TV wants 10 bucks, and suddenly photographers want 10 bucks, etc? Do I have to pay a 120 dollar surcharge on my 60 dollar Internet connection just to get online? This destroys capitalism because it doesn't allow people to vote for what sort of products they want by using their dollars. If I want no frills Internet, I can't have it unless I move to another country. If I don't like the movies being produced by Hollywood these days and I think they're all stupid and unrealistic, I can't choose to not buy them. They get paid either way, so what incentive is there for them to make better movies?
Carrying the last point forward, how do you decide how much each artist gets paid? Surely an artist regularly cranking out #1 hits should not get the same pay as some loser who doesn't want to work, releases a bunch of out of tune files to net and applies for a free paycheck (and you'll no doubt have a lot of that stuff, with many untalented artists clamoring for a piece of the pie since you just short circuited capitalism). In order to correctly distribute these funds, you'd have to set up an infrastructure to track what people listen to (which is bad for a number of reasons, because there are cost, complexity, and privacy issues with that) so that you can give the popular artists more money. And if you can track what people listen to, why not just charge the ones who listen to music the fee and let those who don't want the fee just pay for their Internet connection? And that brings us back to square one, which is: Why not let people buy the music they like, which ensures that the artists get paid in proportion to talent and that people don't have to pay for a service they don't use? Hmmm... sounds a lot like capitalism... maybe we put that system in place centuries ago (and have kept it for centuries) because it actually works? If this law passes, Canadians prove more than ever that they are morons whose brains got frozen out in the cold.
Let me start by saying that I am a very strong Republican conservative, and I normally hate labor unions, especially since most of them don't do much but collect money from workers and use it to buy politicians. That said, in this instance I absolutely think those workers should immediately unionize and walk off the job. IT workers are already treated as slaves just about everywhere, and it's about time they got paid for their overtime AND STILL recieved a salary commensurate with the difficulty of their jobs and the level of their education.
Furthermore, this move by IBM is complete garbage. Google spends a heck of a lot more money on its employees than this, and it doesn't have any trouble with the "competitive pressures" cited by IBM. The reason it doesn't have any trouble is twofold:
By treating its employees fairly, it attracts much of the best IT talent around, and this talent in turn is very productive. Their employees probably produce more per hour than the employees most anywhere else through raw skill alone.
The really big reason Google doesn't have these competitive pressures forcing them to pay their workers nothing is because Google has good management and actually produces worthwhile, marketable products. When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy? PCs? Gone... IBM completely lost out in that market. Operating Systems? OS/2 is dead. Lotus Notes/other office software? Horribly ugly, clunky, and not even close to as good as Microsoft products. IDEs? They have some, but they are horribly overpriced things like Rational Apex (an ADA IDE) that cost 30,000 dollars a license and are vastly inferior to Microsoft's Visual Studio. And while IBM helped birth Eclipse and still funds it to some degree, that is an OSS IDE, and a lot of it (plus a lot of the add-ons) were built by volunteers.
Honestly, the only things they seem to produce anymore are a few supercomputers (and the market for those is clearly limited), some mainframes (again, limited and shrinking market), and some stupid "software development processes" like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (News Flash for IBM: a process isn't a product. I can go out and make my own process that suits my work (which is what most people do), or use one of many free and well known process like Agile or UP). IBM also produces a lot of marketing speak and vague references to "services" that they can offer to companies (not sure what those actually are or why I would want them), they produce a lot of commercials about servers spiraling out of control, and they spend a lot of time on clearly stupid strategies like building a corporate office in Second Life and having a director of Internet and Virtual Worlds.
With all that sort of vaporware and garbage products, it's no wonder that they are facing big competitive price pressures. They deserve the problems they are having. But the regular employees shouldn't be the ones penalized. The problems (and pay cuts) should be directly placed in the laps of their management, especially their top executives. IBM has repeatedly had the chance to conquer the world, and they blow it on stupid ideas every time.
IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it. Parts were developed by Microsoft, and are owned by Microsoft.
Like Microsoft is really going to stand in the way of open sourcing OS/2, even if they do own part of it. OS/2 was primarilly IBMs work at this stage of the game, and if Microsoft was actually given a chance to schmooze the OSS camp by giving away it's 1% code stake in an obsolete product it worked on 20 years ago, I think it would jump at the chance (and hype it quite a bit).
And besides that, I think OS/2 has LONG fallen off Microsoft's list of possible threats, as well it should. If it were a Unix like OS, such as OpenSolaris, it might makes sense to keep it on the list (because a lot of people have Unix skills and could be persuaded to switch to it if it suddenly became super awesome), but OS/2? It would be starting many years behind established OS's, AND never had many users who learned how to use it anyway.
Microsoft isn't the reason this isn't getting open sourced... the real reason is our OSS frind, IBM [rolls eyes].
I think you may be right. The vomeronasal organ is vestigial or nonexistant in humans, and there don't appear to be any connections between even vestigial vomeronasal organs and the brain.
All that may be true, but it's secondary to the fact that as beings with a higher level of intelligence, we are not subject whatsoever to pheremones. We can and do make our own decisions regardless of any of that. We have self consciousness, and are not slaves to our instincts as lifeforms with lower intelligence are. We often choose to do the opposite of what our emotions or instincts tell us. When people run out of burning buildings, firefighters take their lives into their hands and rush in to put it out, despite fear and anxiety. When we get bored at work, we don't just wander off to eat fruit or pick bugs out of each others hair. We keep at it, despite our personal feelings and desires. And on the battlefield, what soldier isn't scared spitless with grenades going off next to them and bullets flying everywhere? Yet they go in anyway, in spite of the fear. What are fear pheremones next to bombs when it comes to scariness? And even if fear pheremones really worked, why would they be any more likely to cause a soldier to give in to instinct and forsake duty than a bomb? I think, in the case of humans, fear pheremone research is a complete waste of taxpayer money. Committed humans are not deterred by fear.
curious are they going to search every MP3 player, every Thumb drive, every floppy disc, or cd that enter's the country?
No, they won't. Just like they won't inspect every laptop entering either, or every crate, or every suitcase, or every car, or every person. They don't have the resources for that. It will be like every other kind of inspection; random, and just enough of them to keep people on their toes and discourage them from breaking the law. The idea is to provide a chance that people might get caught; providing that chance provides risk, and that will turn most people off from illegal activity.
I doubt it. Joe Bloggs is in my opinion one of these people
Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys whatever the salesman wants to sell him, assuming the price-range is right.
Doesn't know anything. Doesn't care. Buys the one with a colour she likes (which suprisingly often is a pretty good strategy;-)
Doesn't know anything. Asks his fourteen year old cousin. Ends up with a monster PC for gaming that is just as outdated in three years as the cheap one the salesman wanted to sell him
I doubt any of them will reflect much upon the choice of Vista or XP (or mac or linux). Given that the average PC-buyer doesn't know the difference between Gigabytes and Megahertz, they are not going to reflect much upon number of copies of this or that. Vista is newer, and therefore better. Those who complain about Vista are PC enthusiasts or corporate buyers.
Actually, I think Joe Bloggs will attempt to buy XP given the choice. I state this because I have run into no end of clueless end users with no Vista experience who have told me, "Man, Vista sucks! You shouldn't get that on your new PC." I ask them if they've ever used it. "Well, no..." Can you tell me why it's bad? "Well, not exactly..." Have you ever even seen more than a screenshot of Vista? "Well, no..." Do you know anything at all about computers, and do you have any experience more than just basic usage? At this point they usually attempt to give some answer to justify themselves, but it's always really "No." And then you ask them why, having no experience and having not used the OS, they think Vista sucks, and they always site some relative or random thirdhand source like their brothers friend who told them it sucked. From what I have seen, I believe that most of the anti-Vista sentiment today is actually being generated by ignorant users posting 3rd hand rumors on sites and passing stories around from person to person. Whether or not Vista is terrible is an argument for another day, but I think low sales and persistent complaining have more to do with ignorant rumor mongering in the masses than actual product flaws.
You know, this whole Vista thing is probably a Microsoft strategy, assuming the premise that "MS coders read/. is true." See, it works like this: MS readers see repeated predictions that 2008 (or 2009 or 2010) will be the "year of the Linux desktop." After seeing all this, they create the following battle plan, as revealed by these "confidential email snippets":
Email 1: "Hey, this open source thing seems to be gaining momentum... momentum is very important in everything from sports to elections, so how do we get the momentum back?" Email 2: "We release a bloated, resource hog of an OS to the masses, and as currently nothing but a few Dell laptops are sold with anything but Windows, adoption of this OS is going to be certain, as people will have no choice. OSS/Linux will continue to gain ground and momentum, but then, in 2010, we will shift momentum so dramatically that they will be buried forever! We simply release a new version of Windows in 2010 that combines all the features originally promised for Vista that were later dropped (we'll claim time constraints were the issue and hope people forget this version of Windows had more development time than any other) with a massive performance boost that we will get by replacing the bloated core of the OS with the new MinWin. AND we will do all of this in an amazing three years... just half the development time of Vista (most people won't remember that other huge MS OS advances, like Windows 95, were done in similar amounts time). People will be so astonished and relieved at the creation of this OS that they will all move from Vista to Windows 7 (the 2010 version) in ONE WEEK, thus destroying all OSS momentum and killing Linux forever. 2010 will be the year of teh Windows, and Microsoft will reign supreme!!!!!!"
The really scary part here is that all of this sounds halfway plausible...
The annoyances with Vista can at least be fixed with unchecking a few boxes.
You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.
My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...
My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...
That article is a paranoid conspiracy theory. It contains little fact and is chalk full of FUD, bizarre ideas and many alleged links to Nazi and Third Reich Eugenics scientists. Apparently those forces have much to do with Bill Gates and others funding this bank [rolls eyes]. Why was this article even posted on/.? Let me post an exerpt:
Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world's major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?
The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920's, has embodied what they termed 'negative eugenics,' the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, 'we want to exterminate the Negro population.'
That stuff about Sanger may actually be true, but still, conspiracy theories are often arrived at by taking true facts, twisting them and putting them together in ways that should never happen. This article is supposed to be informing us about the seed vault, not spinning up bizarre stories the relate the Svalbard seed bank to Rockefeller, the Nazis, etc. Why did the admins post this drivel?
Ok, I get it now. I've been trying to figure out why a company that is so closed and so anti-consumer most of the time (I happen to be a current subscriber and hate them, especially after they automatically extended my contract when I got married and wanted to consolidate cell phone plans with my wife, who was also a Verizon customer) would be suddenly opening up their network, not restricting software, etc. After reading these quotes from the article, though, I do get it now.
When Verizon Wireless was founded in 2000, it ran 27 call centers to provide customer service. The company cut back to as few as 17 centers at one point, but the count is now back to 25, each with about a thousand employees. The company's 2,300 stores, staffed by 20,000 employees, are also costly. While workers in those stores used to spend nearly the entire day signing up new customers, now only a tenth of their time is consumed by new subscribers. Instead, the bulk of their energy goes to helping current subscribers with questions and problems. McAdam & Co. decided the business model was not sustainable. "If we get to 150 million customers, boy, that's a lot of overhead," says McAdam.
In an open-access model, though, Verizon Wireless won't offer the same level of customer service as it does for the roughly 50 phone models featured in its handset lineup. Though the company will insist on testing all phones developed to run on its network in the open-access program, Verizon plans only to ensure the wireless connection is working for customers who buy those devices. "They have to talk to their handset provider or their application provider if they have particular issues," McAdam says.
Reading between the lines, you can tell they don't like the fact that they have to support their customers. Things were great when they were just signing up customers right and left and didn't have to do much support, but now that they have to actually support their subscribers they don't like it. So basically, this "opening" is just a way for them to support their customers even less, and dump as much of the support on the handset providers as possible. The company strategy is still about helping the consumer as little as possible and screwing them over as much as possible; it just happens that that is now most easily done with an open network.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this deal give Microsoft exclusive rights to publishing online? It sounded to me more like Microsoft gets to put Vista kiosks in the library that show silverlight versions of text (which is good for Microsoft because it gets them in front of a lot of tourists), but as far as online searching and indexing goes, does this completely preclude the possibility of others indexing content?
Wrong. In the 60's hardware/development was the big cost, but these days it is ALWAYS insurance and covering your legal butt. That will be the biggest cost, guaranteed. If you rocket screws up and hits a metro area, well, you have to have a pretty big policy to cover that. And some good defense lawyers.
Except that I never get more than my apportioned amount. In other words, my SpeedBoost never goes faster than the 6MB I actually pay for. I think that's what the person who wrote the article is saying too: "Goes at the speed they paid for, which is really fast, for a short time period and then drops to something like 1.2 MB, which is clearly slower than most comcast plans."
Chris Date is far more of an authority on databases than Jim Gray is. To call Jim gray the leading authority is very misleading.
Of course I'm aware of that. That was just like Star Trek's break between TOS and TNG. And at the end of it, he redid three movies and release three more real movies, which really were pretty good (Jar Jar Binks aside). But now he is starting to do what Star Trek did... he's flooding the market with spinoffs and junk and he's diluting the series. What he needs to do is step back, take another break (like Trek finally appears to be doing again), and then, when he finally has a good idea of how the last three should play out, come back and film them.
And besides being old, this is also a bad idea for two reasons:
Me too. Am I the only one who thinks that Star Wars should do like Star Trek and just take a break for a little while? Look at Star Trek: it started out with the original series in the 1960s which, though it seems campy now, was actually some really good science fiction for its day, and had some extremely imaginitive episodes.
Then Star Trek went off the air, and we had a pretty big break (with a few movies to keep things going) until the next Star Trek series, TNG, in 1988. Most fans agree that TNG was excellent, and of the five Star Trek TV shows, TNG acheived the highest ratings and the best spots on TV. One of the reasons it was so successful, though, was because a break was taken, technology was allowed to progress, ideas were generated, and they didn't make another show until they really had something imaginative that was worth putting on the TV!
Unfortunately, though, before TNG was even done they made a spinoff called Deep Space 9. Then another called Voyager. And then they started a prequel called Enterprise. Within a decade you had three new Star Trek shows coming out and diluting the market. While they weren't horrible (I personally like Voyager reasonably well, for instance), they really weren't ground breaking like TNG because they didn't have nearly enough new content in them. Technology hadn't changed sufficiently enough for people to imagine a new generation of cool starship technologies, so you didn't get that "WOW!" factor you got when you first sat down to watch TNG. Mostly they were just released to milk the franchise as much as they could, and I'm releived to see that Paramount finally seems to be taking a break.
Don't get me wrong, I like Star Trek as much as anyone and would love a new show, but not if it isn't ground breaking and creative. I feel the same way about Star Wars. After releasing the three special editions and the three prequels, just take a break already! Quit cramming in TV shows and animated movies! They might be somewhat good, but I would rather Lucas just sit back, think, and then release the three movies that come after Episode 6 and have them be outstanding. That would be preferable to this very average animated stuff.
So in conclusion, the reason people don't notice IBM winning is because they aren't. Nor are they close, or even trending towards winning. They put out one overpriced, under featured, ugly software product after another, and they are now alienating all their engineers. If it weren't for consulting and patent revenues IBM would have already collapsed.
So who wants to be the one to test this hypothesis?
On another note, how can you say for sure if this even works? Usually whenever an AIDS vaccine is tried in humans, it is given to a population of people at high risk of getting HIV(usually gay men). How can you tell if something like this stops people from spreading it, when their partners are interacting with other, infectious people? They are likely to get HIV regardless, if not from the non-infectious person, then from someone else. How do you figure out which partner gave who what?
So seriously, am I the only one that thinks the NFL sucks more than any other entity, including the RIAA? These tactics are heavy handed, but not unprecedented for them. In fact, this TV thing is minor compared to what they might start doing next. They might actually start coming after people just for uttering the word "Super Bowl" and sue them! I'm not kidding, they've actually trademarked the word, and unless you pay the NFL, you may not use the word superbowl. I work for General Mills (the makers of Chex Mix), and they've opted not to pay the NFL when running advertising on/around the superbowl. Therefore, their ads can do nothing more than refer to "The Big Game." They may not, under any circumstances, utter the words "Super Bowl" without paying for it (and of course that goes for everybody).
So if the NFL is starting to tell people they can't watch the superbowl in groups around a 56 inch TV, when nothing would be lost (this is broadcast on one of the major networks for free, not pay per view, and everyone would just watch it individually regardless), then I honestly wouldn't be suprised if they started suing, say, news anchors for using the word Super Bowl in newscasts covering the weekend.
Side Note: Advertisers should sue the NFL for breach of contract in limiting their advertising exposure. They pay 2.5 million for ad spots, expecting that massive amounts of people will be gathering to watch in groups, and here goes the NFL breaking up groups of viewers. How is that even good for the NFL, let alone the advertisers funding the game?
You know, sometimes a little backward incompatibility can be good. You can shoot yourself in the foot more by not breaking things when something needs fixing. As an example I point to VB.Net.
Back in the days of VB 6 and prior, VB was an entry sort of language that was designed with novice programmers in mind, and strayed quite a bit from normal programming constructs. With the advent of the .Net platform looming, Microsoft wanted to move VB to .Net, but didn't want to break existing code out in businesses. So they opted instead for kludges and workarounds in the language, and that's the reason I can't wait to get done with VB .Net project I am currently writing. If you are an experienced programmer in other languages such as Java, C++, etc, VB .Net can drive you mad. Here are just a couple examples:
There are many other examples in VB like this, so I say this to the Python developers: If you have a good reason to break backwards compatibility with the language, then do it. Keep backwards compatibility whenever reasonably possible, but break it before accepting a kludge into your language. Your future coders will thank you, and will not run away screaming to the other, newer languages that will inevitably follow.
From the article:
Leave it to a sociologist to claim there is no such thing as one solution being better than others. Let's take their claims one at a time...
Monism. I could hardly believe my eyes when they looked down their nose at believing one solution is better than others. Let me throw out a counter-example that I actually SAW in college:
My partner wrote this code:
i = 0;
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
... 26 times total...
if (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
I replaced his code with this code that I wrote:
i = 0;
while (i < 26) {
code;
i++; }
Did both solution work? Yes. Can we not say that one (mine) was better than others? Yes. Can this be quantified? Yes. Clearly their rejection of Monism is retarded.
Simplism. I'm not going to waste a lot of time with this. Would the world not be a better place if, instead of doing the sort of stupid stuff we see every day on the TV show "Cops", people acted rationally and led normal lives rather than acting like rednecks? I rest my case.
I think the more likely explanation is that this is an attempt by sociologists to get revenge for all the times they were told in college that sociology isn't a real major, sociology isn't a true or hard science, etc. Being an engineer myself, I happen to agree with that assessment, but perhaps the sociologists are getting the last laugh. :p
...... Unless of course we all really do have a terrorist mindset. In that case, publishing such an offensive article was a gross miscalculation on their part! :D <sarcastic news flash> Everywhere across the nation, engineers begin to dust off their bomb building kits, preparing to take on the evil forces of sociology</sarcasm> :D
This actually sounds like a good argument for bringing battleships out of retirement again. They've been largely retired since WWII (with a few sporadic usages since, such as the last one in Iraq during the first Gulf War). They are probably the only ships currently big enough to carry the powerplants and other electrical gear needed to make this work.
Other forms of ships either need their space for other things (aircraft carriers need the space for hangering planes) or are too small (I would have to think a destroyer isn't going to be able to handle this kind of weaponry).
No, that's not democracy in action, that's stupidity in action. I can think of a whole host of problems with this.
Let me start by saying that I am a very strong Republican conservative, and I normally hate labor unions, especially since most of them don't do much but collect money from workers and use it to buy politicians. That said, in this instance I absolutely think those workers should immediately unionize and walk off the job. IT workers are already treated as slaves just about everywhere, and it's about time they got paid for their overtime AND STILL recieved a salary commensurate with the difficulty of their jobs and the level of their education.
Furthermore, this move by IBM is complete garbage. Google spends a heck of a lot more money on its employees than this, and it doesn't have any trouble with the "competitive pressures" cited by IBM. The reason it doesn't have any trouble is twofold:
Honestly, the only things they seem to produce anymore are a few supercomputers (and the market for those is clearly limited), some mainframes (again, limited and shrinking market), and some stupid "software development processes" like the Rational Unified Process (RUP). (News Flash for IBM: a process isn't a product. I can go out and make my own process that suits my work (which is what most people do), or use one of many free and well known process like Agile or UP). IBM also produces a lot of marketing speak and vague references to "services" that they can offer to companies (not sure what those actually are or why I would want them), they produce a lot of commercials about servers spiraling out of control, and they spend a lot of time on clearly stupid strategies like building a corporate office in Second Life and having a director of Internet and Virtual Worlds.
With all that sort of vaporware and garbage products, it's no wonder that they are facing big competitive price pressures. They deserve the problems they are having. But the regular employees shouldn't be the ones penalized. The problems (and pay cuts) should be directly placed in the laps of their management, especially their top executives. IBM has repeatedly had the chance to conquer the world, and they blow it on stupid ideas every time.
Like Microsoft is really going to stand in the way of open sourcing OS/2, even if they do own part of it. OS/2 was primarilly IBMs work at this stage of the game, and if Microsoft was actually given a chance to schmooze the OSS camp by giving away it's 1% code stake in an obsolete product it worked on 20 years ago, I think it would jump at the chance (and hype it quite a bit).
And besides that, I think OS/2 has LONG fallen off Microsoft's list of possible threats, as well it should. If it were a Unix like OS, such as OpenSolaris, it might makes sense to keep it on the list (because a lot of people have Unix skills and could be persuaded to switch to it if it suddenly became super awesome), but OS/2? It would be starting many years behind established OS's, AND never had many users who learned how to use it anyway.
Microsoft isn't the reason this isn't getting open sourced... the real reason is our OSS frind, IBM [rolls eyes].
All that may be true, but it's secondary to the fact that as beings with a higher level of intelligence, we are not subject whatsoever to pheremones. We can and do make our own decisions regardless of any of that. We have self consciousness, and are not slaves to our instincts as lifeforms with lower intelligence are. We often choose to do the opposite of what our emotions or instincts tell us. When people run out of burning buildings, firefighters take their lives into their hands and rush in to put it out, despite fear and anxiety. When we get bored at work, we don't just wander off to eat fruit or pick bugs out of each others hair. We keep at it, despite our personal feelings and desires. And on the battlefield, what soldier isn't scared spitless with grenades going off next to them and bullets flying everywhere? Yet they go in anyway, in spite of the fear. What are fear pheremones next to bombs when it comes to scariness? And even if fear pheremones really worked, why would they be any more likely to cause a soldier to give in to instinct and forsake duty than a bomb? I think, in the case of humans, fear pheremone research is a complete waste of taxpayer money. Committed humans are not deterred by fear.
No, they won't. Just like they won't inspect every laptop entering either, or every crate, or every suitcase, or every car, or every person. They don't have the resources for that. It will be like every other kind of inspection; random, and just enough of them to keep people on their toes and discourage them from breaking the law. The idea is to provide a chance that people might get caught; providing that chance provides risk, and that will turn most people off from illegal activity.
Actually, I think Joe Bloggs will attempt to buy XP given the choice. I state this because I have run into no end of clueless end users with no Vista experience who have told me, "Man, Vista sucks! You shouldn't get that on your new PC." I ask them if they've ever used it. "Well, no..." Can you tell me why it's bad? "Well, not exactly..." Have you ever even seen more than a screenshot of Vista? "Well, no..." Do you know anything at all about computers, and do you have any experience more than just basic usage? At this point they usually attempt to give some answer to justify themselves, but it's always really "No." And then you ask them why, having no experience and having not used the OS, they think Vista sucks, and they always site some relative or random thirdhand source like their brothers friend who told them it sucked. From what I have seen, I believe that most of the anti-Vista sentiment today is actually being generated by ignorant users posting 3rd hand rumors on sites and passing stories around from person to person. Whether or not Vista is terrible is an argument for another day, but I think low sales and persistent complaining have more to do with ignorant rumor mongering in the masses than actual product flaws.
You know, this whole Vista thing is probably a Microsoft strategy, assuming the premise that "MS coders read /. is true." See, it works like this: MS readers see repeated predictions that 2008 (or 2009 or 2010) will be the "year of the Linux desktop." After seeing all this, they create the following battle plan, as revealed by these "confidential email snippets":
Email 1: "Hey, this open source thing seems to be gaining momentum... momentum is very important in everything from sports to elections, so how do we get the momentum back?" Email 2: "We release a bloated, resource hog of an OS to the masses, and as currently nothing but a few Dell laptops are sold with anything but Windows, adoption of this OS is going to be certain, as people will have no choice. OSS/Linux will continue to gain ground and momentum, but then, in 2010, we will shift momentum so dramatically that they will be buried forever! We simply release a new version of Windows in 2010 that combines all the features originally promised for Vista that were later dropped (we'll claim time constraints were the issue and hope people forget this version of Windows had more development time than any other) with a massive performance boost that we will get by replacing the bloated core of the OS with the new MinWin. AND we will do all of this in an amazing three years... just half the development time of Vista (most people won't remember that other huge MS OS advances, like Windows 95, were done in similar amounts time). People will be so astonished and relieved at the creation of this OS that they will all move from Vista to Windows 7 (the 2010 version) in ONE WEEK, thus destroying all OSS momentum and killing Linux forever. 2010 will be the year of teh Windows, and Microsoft will reign supreme!!!!!!"
The really scary part here is that all of this sounds halfway plausible...
You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.
My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...
My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...
That article is a paranoid conspiracy theory. It contains little fact and is chalk full of FUD, bizarre ideas and many alleged links to Nazi and Third Reich Eugenics scientists. Apparently those forces have much to do with Bill Gates and others funding this bank [rolls eyes]. Why was this article even posted on /.? Let me post an exerpt:
That stuff about Sanger may actually be true, but still, conspiracy theories are often arrived at by taking true facts, twisting them and putting them together in ways that should never happen. This article is supposed to be informing us about the seed vault, not spinning up bizarre stories the relate the Svalbard seed bank to Rockefeller, the Nazis, etc. Why did the admins post this drivel?
Ok, I get it now. I've been trying to figure out why a company that is so closed and so anti-consumer most of the time (I happen to be a current subscriber and hate them, especially after they automatically extended my contract when I got married and wanted to consolidate cell phone plans with my wife, who was also a Verizon customer) would be suddenly opening up their network, not restricting software, etc. After reading these quotes from the article, though, I do get it now.
Reading between the lines, you can tell they don't like the fact that they have to support their customers. Things were great when they were just signing up customers right and left and didn't have to do much support, but now that they have to actually support their subscribers they don't like it. So basically, this "opening" is just a way for them to support their customers even less, and dump as much of the support on the handset providers as possible. The company strategy is still about helping the consumer as little as possible and screwing them over as much as possible; it just happens that that is now most easily done with an open network.