Remember that Microsoft does not really have any costs -- once the initial development is paid for, any licenses are pure profit. They have tremendous flexibility (though usually subject to non-disclosure agreements to hinder others in following suit) for the simple reason that any money coming in, minus the sales force time, is pure profit. In other words, they already have caught on, and they have no real reason to call the bluff if the customer has a real chance of succeeding with the transition.
If, on the other hand, they suspect that the transition is likely to fail and the customer will come crawling back, then they may choose to bide their time. I suppose it ultimately depends on whether the campus rep is a gambler.
If she knew she needed her Verizon Online disk (which I doubt) or Microsoft Word (which I don't), why didn't she ask whoever she talked to at Dell?
Would there have been a similar story about a consumer who didn't realize they had no use for a car with a manual transmission, and then let themselves be talked into keeping it by someone who (rightly?) said that manual transmissions have better performance and are not hard to learn?
Purgatory is different than Hell, being a temporary state. "Hell" would stay in the original sentence, regardless of translation, unless you're reading a particularly Bowdlerized edition. (And even then, it would simply be incorrect rather than a difference in translation)
I'm not a fan of nationalizing, but *buying* those patents is an intriguing idea. It would reward those people who've been productive with a lump-sum bonus that they could use to invest in R&D, and would be an excellent way to wipe the slate clean in advance of patent reform.
This would add further incentive to invent and patent, in the hopes not only of licensing the technology, but of possibly being eligible to sell it off and not have to invest energy into marketing.
The major downside, in my view, is that it would reward patent trolls, but at least the free availability of those patents would enable companies to move forward without fear of litigation.
I don't think I'm happy with this, really. What happens if this government agency decides to pump a half million dollars into a FOSS project that competes with the software I write? We have FOSS competition now, but it's not well maintained and doesn't have a very rich featureset -- if all of a sudden it's backed by a serious chunk of money, we just can't compete. Our jobs would be lost, all our customers would have to retrain their people on new software, and once the money goes away, the FOSS project will inevitably stall. Seems to me that everyone loses here in the long term.
I assume you mean the school's endowment by "hoarding large pools of cash" -- in most cases, the schools are not allowed to touch the cash itself, only the interest/dividends off it. And while tuition is going up, most of those same schools are using endowment money to fund scholarships, so that relatively few students are actually paying full tuition. (To some extent, I suspect that this is a shell game. To qualify as a non-profit, they have to spend most of that interest, and the endowment rules frequently are strict about what it can be used for, but paying themselves "tuition" on behalf of a student lets them move money around and spend it on salaries and infrastructure)
Despite your sarcasm tags, if I'm not mistaken, they already pay higher registration fees. In most states, the fees scale according to the value of the car, and high-efficiency cars usually cost more.
Seems simpler to block it with a metallic shield on days you're not intending to gas up, then remove the shield on days you do. Long periods of time with no signal? Why, I don't drive much, it must not get a signal in my garage.
OK, this makes sense -- but as a FairPoint customer who got their mailing announcing this move, it was far from clear that this is what was meant. Reading it on my own, it seemed to me that they were saying that they were going to be intercepting MSN and Yahoo traffic.
I bought it a year or so after it came out, but have since lost the install CDs. For a buck, I'm kinda tempted to pick it up again and play it again on a better computer.
Couldn't they possibly pick a better format than those borderline-idiotic "search the screen for tiny objects" games? It's like they watched people play adventure games and decided that since so many people spent so much time "hunting the pixel", that that was the bit players enjoyed.
Do we? Maybe not. But the folks who are learning computer repair in prison are probably going to poor areas when they get out, where someone who can repair a tossed-out machine and make it usable could make a tidy sum.
Right, but if they've already geared their network toward phone calls, it might be a pain in the ass to have other traffic that needs to be delivered reliably.
I'm not saying it's a GOOD excuse, just a possible partial excuse.
The only thing that makes me wonder is that a dropped packet from a phone call is nothing, but a dropped packet from a text message is the entire messages -- does the need to provide a 0% error rate drive up the difficulty?
Another interesting question: my phone service (through Verizon) has free after-hours calling, but I pay the same rate for text messages and other data services regardless of time of day. Surely if the data from my phone call is cheaper to transmit at 10pm, then the data from my SMS message is too?
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that Microsoft does not really have any costs -- once the initial development is paid for, any licenses are pure profit. They have tremendous flexibility (though usually subject to non-disclosure agreements to hinder others in following suit) for the simple reason that any money coming in, minus the sales force time, is pure profit. In other words, they already have caught on, and they have no real reason to call the bluff if the customer has a real chance of succeeding with the transition.
If, on the other hand, they suspect that the transition is likely to fail and the customer will come crawling back, then they may choose to bide their time. I suppose it ultimately depends on whether the campus rep is a gambler.
And that, my friend, is what we call technological progress.
Sure -- the bill as written will simply not solve the problem is purports to solve.
Or hold your hand over the speaker. But clearly these people are not nearly so technically adept as you or I.
Clearly in addition to a piercing shriek (to alert the merely hard of hearing), the flash should be required at all times.
Oh no! What about the deaf *and* blind?!
The text of the bill is explicitly mobile phones taking photographs.
I'm under the impression that at least one of the expansions is intended specifically to make the space stage more fun.
Heheh. This is Slashdot, where there is no greater reward for pedantry than just pedantry for its own sake ;)
Thanks for the video link, I love that scene.
If she knew she needed her Verizon Online disk (which I doubt) or Microsoft Word (which I don't), why didn't she ask whoever she talked to at Dell?
Would there have been a similar story about a consumer who didn't realize they had no use for a car with a manual transmission, and then let themselves be talked into keeping it by someone who (rightly?) said that manual transmissions have better performance and are not hard to learn?
Purgatory is different than Hell, being a temporary state. "Hell" would stay in the original sentence, regardless of translation, unless you're reading a particularly Bowdlerized edition. (And even then, it would simply be incorrect rather than a difference in translation)
I'm not a fan of nationalizing, but *buying* those patents is an intriguing idea. It would reward those people who've been productive with a lump-sum bonus that they could use to invest in R&D, and would be an excellent way to wipe the slate clean in advance of patent reform.
This would add further incentive to invent and patent, in the hopes not only of licensing the technology, but of possibly being eligible to sell it off and not have to invest energy into marketing.
The major downside, in my view, is that it would reward patent trolls, but at least the free availability of those patents would enable companies to move forward without fear of litigation.
I don't think I'm happy with this, really. What happens if this government agency decides to pump a half million dollars into a FOSS project that competes with the software I write? We have FOSS competition now, but it's not well maintained and doesn't have a very rich featureset -- if all of a sudden it's backed by a serious chunk of money, we just can't compete. Our jobs would be lost, all our customers would have to retrain their people on new software, and once the money goes away, the FOSS project will inevitably stall. Seems to me that everyone loses here in the long term.
I assume you mean the school's endowment by "hoarding large pools of cash" -- in most cases, the schools are not allowed to touch the cash itself, only the interest/dividends off it. And while tuition is going up, most of those same schools are using endowment money to fund scholarships, so that relatively few students are actually paying full tuition. (To some extent, I suspect that this is a shell game. To qualify as a non-profit, they have to spend most of that interest, and the endowment rules frequently are strict about what it can be used for, but paying themselves "tuition" on behalf of a student lets them move money around and spend it on salaries and infrastructure)
Despite your sarcasm tags, if I'm not mistaken, they already pay higher registration fees. In most states, the fees scale according to the value of the car, and high-efficiency cars usually cost more.
Seems simpler to block it with a metallic shield on days you're not intending to gas up, then remove the shield on days you do. Long periods of time with no signal? Why, I don't drive much, it must not get a signal in my garage.
OK, this makes sense -- but as a FairPoint customer who got their mailing announcing this move, it was far from clear that this is what was meant. Reading it on my own, it seemed to me that they were saying that they were going to be intercepting MSN and Yahoo traffic.
Everyone wants an easy job, cops are no exception.
... with a lot less filtering, too.
I bought it a year or so after it came out, but have since lost the install CDs. For a buck, I'm kinda tempted to pick it up again and play it again on a better computer.
Couldn't they possibly pick a better format than those borderline-idiotic "search the screen for tiny objects" games? It's like they watched people play adventure games and decided that since so many people spent so much time "hunting the pixel", that that was the bit players enjoyed.
Do we? Maybe not. But the folks who are learning computer repair in prison are probably going to poor areas when they get out, where someone who can repair a tossed-out machine and make it usable could make a tidy sum.
Right, but if they've already geared their network toward phone calls, it might be a pain in the ass to have other traffic that needs to be delivered reliably.
I'm not saying it's a GOOD excuse, just a possible partial excuse.
The only thing that makes me wonder is that a dropped packet from a phone call is nothing, but a dropped packet from a text message is the entire messages -- does the need to provide a 0% error rate drive up the difficulty?
Another interesting question: my phone service (through Verizon) has free after-hours calling, but I pay the same rate for text messages and other data services regardless of time of day. Surely if the data from my phone call is cheaper to transmit at 10pm, then the data from my SMS message is too?
sorry, bad phrasing there. I meant that rather than being greedy she is instead being petty, etc.