Look, I realize Intel has a bad rep for firing people who get too expensive (ie, anyone over 30 something, with stock options about to vest), but the guy's 72. Seeing as the usual retirement age is 55-65, a mandatory limit of 72 is not that bad, especially in the tech industry.
It's just whois data. It's MS marketing through and through, it's hosted on a superfast connection, hasn't been shut down yet... just look at the graphics, the copy, it's all perfect down to the pixel. If you think otherwise you're just being taken for a ride. And to quote the news.com article 'The campaign and a companion Web site...' where 'Web site' is linked to officeclippy.com. The site is profesionally designed, and is reminiscent of the varous movie 'grassroots fan' sites you see every so often.
Makes you wonder who exactly was supporting and pushing clippy. There is obvious and wide-spread dislike of this 'feature', with many people not using it and turning it off outright. Someone high up over there wanted clippy in, and that someone is either gone now, or has come up with this 'xp is so easy it doesn't need clippy' marketing scheme, and is probably seen as a genius about now.
Nice to see someone at MS has a sense of homour. It's actually a pretty funny web site overall, and the Clippy quotes and quips are and fairly amusing.
Huh? What about it? Are you implying renting software is the same as renting appartments? Well, let me count the ways...
Software is a service. Software is very proprietary. You can get locked into software. You have saved documents, work flow, support, integration, contracts. Ever tried switching from major software packages? Office comes to mind immediately. As do development environments. Pretty much anything high end, or high performance or high reliability. Despite all the noise about software modularity and OO and standards and so on, the truth is software is not plug and play, it's not interchangable, and it rarely co-operates with others.
Compare this to changing appartments, where all it takes is 2 weeks notice and a possible penalty (0 notice if you're month to month) and setting up a postal mail forward.
So,
changing appartments is easy, changing software is not
finding a suitable replacement for an appartment is usually easy, replacing software is not
you can buy your shelter lease it or build your own, it's really hard with software
consequences of changing appartments are very negligible and accepted as part of everyday order, changing software is not quite so painless
if your appartment has problems you can get them fixed, with software you're at vendor's mercy, don't piss them off
if you're stuck you can always sublet your appartment, tried selling your software recently?
I'm sure you can come up with many others as to why renting an appartment is very unlike renting software.
Wow, that's a lot of moderation points that went into that troll, a most admirable example for trolls far and wide to follow.
Your argument, well, ok, 'argument', is rather flawed. You're either trolling, or arguing from emotion, trying to support your position with various opinions. This is obvious from the fact that throughout you equate pornography with holocaust and televised executions. These are not in the same class, not even in the same school. You're talking completely different things, and equating the production of pornography with events we now call the Holocaust, is an insult to anyone who still remembers and who survived, and is a mistake made by many in an effort to support their position. There is very little you can compare to how and what happened to people from all walks of life in concentration camps and not come out looking like an ignorant, insensitive, hypcritical idiot.
Second, there is no 'thou shalt not rape' commandment. You may be able to derive that from other passages in the Bible which condemn rape and violence, but it's not in the commandments, you just can't read that into them, hmm, except maybe 'thou shalt not covet...' if you try really hard. Except, it has been shown time and time again, rape is rarely about sex, it's about power and domination, not about coveting someone's body.
Third, pornography is not criminal. In the US it has been explicitely protected by the Supreme Court under free speech multiple times. It may be immoral in the sense that even men appearing in porn media are doing it for the money, sometimes from necessity, sometimes because that's where a lot of 'easy' money is (insert a quote by everyone's favourite porn star Asia Carrera), and, sadly, sometimes because they're forced to. But not illegal (except in the last case). In this light, pornography is about as immoral as McDondals jobs, where the vast majority of low level employees are there just for the money, because they have to, and are thus exploited for their labor. But again, not illegal.
So as much as anyone may agree with your point, that pornography should be purged or even classified as rape, you can surely come up with much better arguments than this.
This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion and out of context. MS will not support USB 2 in the same was Linus dislikes OS X because of some quip he made about Mach kernels. That is to say, neither statement is accurate.
MS does not _currently_ support USB 2, mainly because, wait for it, it's not ready yet! That's right, (to the best of my knowledge) USB 2 spec is not finalized yet. Which means building USB 2 devices is pointless right now, as is writing low level code to support them. Rest assured, USB 2 support will be ready when the spec is ready, and I'm betting MS has code in development right now just waiting for final tweaks and testing.
Saying we don't support USB 2 right now because it's not ready is not nearly the same thing as saying we will never do USB 2 because we think FireWire is just oh so wonderful, like most posts here would have you believe.
Look, who cares if FireWire has been out longer than USB 2? Whatever happened to the 'may the technically superior solution win' mentality here on/.? Is it just a convinient excuse to bash Microsoft with whenever one of their obviously technically inferior products does well in the marketplace, but when the shoe's on the other foot (we all know here Apple can do no wrong) it's suddenly incumbent's advantage regardless of merit? What's that I smell here? Could it be... hypocrisy?
I think (FWIW) USB 2 will do just as well, or better, than USB 1.1, for the same reason USB 1 beat out FireWire originally (cheaper, easier, and industry supported). If you build USB 2 devices they will come, Windows XP support in place or not, never stopped anyone before.
P.S. Wow, I actually used my Aerospace Engineering degree today!
You didn't really have to. It is a fairly well known fact that sound carries much better over water, and especially when there's heavy fog... seems like you can hear little creaks and bumps from miles around. And anyone who ever read basic undersea explorer books or warm & fuzzy stuff about the lives of dolphins probably knows that sound goes even faster _under_ water, where the carrier matter is denser.
Well, actually 'Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days' (yeah, so sue me!) book has as a first code example a Hello World applet, which, you guessed it, doesn't compile.
The game really has nothing to offer in terms of a challenge... click until they're dead, and the faster you click (this also includes multiplayer, which has the additional suckiness factor of lag) the better you do. Really. I've played through the Normal mode, got bored really quickly in Nightmare, but dutifully finished it, and played Hell mode just for the, uh, hell of it, and was extremely disappointed (I mean, I've had peons drop way better items than I got from Diablo after killing him...). The only thing you'll find different after the first episode in Normal is somewhat different monsters, more of them, and a larger variety of weapons.
Plain and simple, it's an action game, an iso-shooter. And to add insult to injury, it's still very much a find-key-and-open-doors type of game. You run around completing straight-forward quests, and progress to the next one in an extremely predictable, linear manner. Anyone who thinks Diablo is an RPG would be sorely mistaken and does great injustice to the genre.
Something is definitely wrong... there are way more than 1,100 pay sex sites... I mean, if I can name almost half as many off the top of my head (and I haven't even paid for porn online)... And like you said, if there really are 280,000 free sex sites out there I'd like to know where they are. The numbers just don't add up, are they made up? You know you have some issues when you have to make up numbers to show that sex sells.
Uh, ok, so you sent this message to the entire company... and what did you expect? The least of the problems here is that not everyone shares your sense of humour, and some people will find it deeply offensive (aren't all jokes made at _someone's_ expense?). The issue here is one of tact... you don't just fire off a message to everyone you know and don't know written in the same tome you'd use with a close friend. As much as you may hate protocol and etiquette it is quite required to effectively communicate with other people.
Insurance is simply betting- I bet that I might get sick and require expensive care.
How this ever got from bestiality to insurance no one will ever know... but I doubt very much anyone buying insurance is betting on getting sick and requireing expensive care. I mean, such things are very easily arranged, and a bet of this nature would be trivial to win. If you ever bought insurance you'd know that you're betting on _not_ getting sick, and buy the thing _in case_ you do, not _hoping_ to; it's not like it's all fun and games laying in a hospital bed with all your bones broken and tunes sticking out every which way, insurance funded or not.
Wow, I was working on this stuff about 6 months ago.. the best resource I found (quite overbearing actually) was a set of data files to some unix time utility (converted between time zones, so had to account for daylight savings, and seemed fairly standard). If you keep searching with various keywords you'll stumble on it eventually.
Wow... if this is true, then right here we have the answer to the major activation key issue: what happens when your hardware changes (which the key is based on) and you need to re-activate. I guess the short one is, it won't happen. This combined with the wild rumours that XP may not be user installable on custom built machines (at least the consumer versions) and we have a problem on our hands.
I've found this to be the case as well. I don't know what the author of the parent post was looking for (porn perhaps?) but everything I've searched for so far has turned up plenty of free resources in the first few pages of hits. In fact, looking to buy something (looking for a supplier) is pretty tough, and sites like Yahoo are more useful in this area.
Many politicians (democrat, republican, even independents) would have simply tried to create a response appropriate for the target audience.
To be the devil's advocate here... one could say that his answer was appropriate for the target audience. One could say he just picked the most controversial question, or question where his opinion clashes with the audience's, and said, in effect, instead of appearing to bullshit I'll say I don't know, when I'm really bullshitting you. Haha, ain't I clever!;)
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And of course having to lug around a pound of copper pretty much eliminates the P4 as a candidate for LAN parties...
Look, I realize Intel has a bad rep for firing people who get too expensive (ie, anyone over 30 something, with stock options about to vest), but the guy's 72. Seeing as the usual retirement age is 55-65, a mandatory limit of 72 is not that bad, especially in the tech industry.
It's just whois data. It's MS marketing through and through, it's hosted on a superfast connection, hasn't been shut down yet... just look at the graphics, the copy, it's all perfect down to the pixel. If you think otherwise you're just being taken for a ride. And to quote the news.com article 'The campaign and a companion Web site...' where 'Web site' is linked to officeclippy.com. The site is profesionally designed, and is reminiscent of the varous movie 'grassroots fan' sites you see every so often.
Makes you wonder who exactly was supporting and pushing clippy. There is obvious and wide-spread dislike of this 'feature', with many people not using it and turning it off outright. Someone high up over there wanted clippy in, and that someone is either gone now, or has come up with this 'xp is so easy it doesn't need clippy' marketing scheme, and is probably seen as a genius about now.
Nice to see someone at MS has a sense of homour. It's actually a pretty funny web site overall, and the Clippy quotes and quips are and fairly amusing.
Huh? What about it? Are you implying renting software is the same as renting appartments? Well, let me count the ways...
Software is a service. Software is very proprietary. You can get locked into software. You have saved documents, work flow, support, integration, contracts. Ever tried switching from major software packages? Office comes to mind immediately. As do development environments. Pretty much anything high end, or high performance or high reliability. Despite all the noise about software modularity and OO and standards and so on, the truth is software is not plug and play, it's not interchangable, and it rarely co-operates with others.
Compare this to changing appartments, where all it takes is 2 weeks notice and a possible penalty (0 notice if you're month to month) and setting up a postal mail forward.
So,
I'm sure you can come up with many others as to why renting an appartment is very unlike renting software.
Your argument, well, ok, 'argument', is rather flawed. You're either trolling, or arguing from emotion, trying to support your position with various opinions. This is obvious from the fact that throughout you equate pornography with holocaust and televised executions. These are not in the same class, not even in the same school. You're talking completely different things, and equating the production of pornography with events we now call the Holocaust, is an insult to anyone who still remembers and who survived, and is a mistake made by many in an effort to support their position. There is very little you can compare to how and what happened to people from all walks of life in concentration camps and not come out looking like an ignorant, insensitive, hypcritical idiot.
Second, there is no 'thou shalt not rape' commandment. You may be able to derive that from other passages in the Bible which condemn rape and violence, but it's not in the commandments, you just can't read that into them, hmm, except maybe 'thou shalt not covet...' if you try really hard. Except, it has been shown time and time again, rape is rarely about sex, it's about power and domination, not about coveting someone's body.
Third, pornography is not criminal. In the US it has been explicitely protected by the Supreme Court under free speech multiple times. It may be immoral in the sense that even men appearing in porn media are doing it for the money, sometimes from necessity, sometimes because that's where a lot of 'easy' money is (insert a quote by everyone's favourite porn star Asia Carrera), and, sadly, sometimes because they're forced to. But not illegal (except in the last case). In this light, pornography is about as immoral as McDondals jobs, where the vast majority of low level employees are there just for the money, because they have to, and are thus exploited for their labor. But again, not illegal.
So as much as anyone may agree with your point, that pornography should be purged or even classified as rape, you can surely come up with much better arguments than this.
iBill being the most popular choice, appears on your statement as the Internet Billing Company.
MS does not _currently_ support USB 2, mainly because, wait for it, it's not ready yet! That's right, (to the best of my knowledge) USB 2 spec is not finalized yet. Which means building USB 2 devices is pointless right now, as is writing low level code to support them. Rest assured, USB 2 support will be ready when the spec is ready, and I'm betting MS has code in development right now just waiting for final tweaks and testing.
Saying we don't support USB 2 right now because it's not ready is not nearly the same thing as saying we will never do USB 2 because we think FireWire is just oh so wonderful, like most posts here would have you believe.
I think (FWIW) USB 2 will do just as well, or better, than USB 1.1, for the same reason USB 1 beat out FireWire originally (cheaper, easier, and industry supported). If you build USB 2 devices they will come, Windows XP support in place or not, never stopped anyone before.
You didn't really have to. It is a fairly well known fact that sound carries much better over water, and especially when there's heavy fog... seems like you can hear little creaks and bumps from miles around. And anyone who ever read basic undersea explorer books or warm & fuzzy stuff about the lives of dolphins probably knows that sound goes even faster _under_ water, where the carrier matter is denser.
Well, actually 'Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days' (yeah, so sue me!) book has as a first code example a Hello World applet, which, you guessed it, doesn't compile.
Plain and simple, it's an action game, an iso-shooter. And to add insult to injury, it's still very much a find-key-and-open-doors type of game. You run around completing straight-forward quests, and progress to the next one in an extremely predictable, linear manner. Anyone who thinks Diablo is an RPG would be sorely mistaken and does great injustice to the genre.
Something is definitely wrong... there are way more than 1,100 pay sex sites... I mean, if I can name almost half as many off the top of my head (and I haven't even paid for porn online)... And like you said, if there really are 280,000 free sex sites out there I'd like to know where they are. The numbers just don't add up, are they made up? You know you have some issues when you have to make up numbers to show that sex sells.
Uhm, because Microsoft is a business and that's what businesses do to their competitors?
Uh, ok, so you sent this message to the entire company... and what did you expect? The least of the problems here is that not everyone shares your sense of humour, and some people will find it deeply offensive (aren't all jokes made at _someone's_ expense?). The issue here is one of tact... you don't just fire off a message to everyone you know and don't know written in the same tome you'd use with a close friend. As much as you may hate protocol and etiquette it is quite required to effectively communicate with other people.
How this ever got from bestiality to insurance no one will ever know... but I doubt very much anyone buying insurance is betting on getting sick and requireing expensive care. I mean, such things are very easily arranged, and a bet of this nature would be trivial to win. If you ever bought insurance you'd know that you're betting on _not_ getting sick, and buy the thing _in case_ you do, not _hoping_ to; it's not like it's all fun and games laying in a hospital bed with all your bones broken and tunes sticking out every which way, insurance funded or not.
Wow, I was working on this stuff about 6 months ago.. the best resource I found (quite overbearing actually) was a set of data files to some unix time utility (converted between time zones, so had to account for daylight savings, and seemed fairly standard). If you keep searching with various keywords you'll stumble on it eventually.
Slashdot speak!
Read this as: Well, I _think_ I know what I'm talking about, but just in case I'm full of shit here's my disclaimer anyways©
Actually, in the US it does. Don't you ever watch Law & Order?
Wow... if this is true, then right here we have the answer to the major activation key issue: what happens when your hardware changes (which the key is based on) and you need to re-activate. I guess the short one is, it won't happen. This combined with the wild rumours that XP may not be user installable on custom built machines (at least the consumer versions) and we have a problem on our hands.
I suppose you could call your honey 'boss'.
I've found this to be the case as well. I don't know what the author of the parent post was looking for (porn perhaps?) but everything I've searched for so far has turned up plenty of free resources in the first few pages of hits. In fact, looking to buy something (looking for a supplier) is pretty tough, and sites like Yahoo are more useful in this area.
Then people would be... wait for it... web surfing! Tada!
To be the devil's advocate here... one could say that his answer was appropriate for the target audience. One could say he just picked the most controversial question, or question where his opinion clashes with the audience's, and said, in effect, instead of appearing to bullshit I'll say I don't know, when I'm really bullshitting you. Haha, ain't I clever! ;)