Maybe that's the hope: SCO:"You don't want to buy us?" IBM:"No" SCO:"Well then how about a lawsuit over Unix?" IBM:"uh well uh" SCO:"That's what we thought."
Actually the group responsible for collecting those fees stated that they have yet to pay out anything - to anyone. "It's complicated" they said. So since 1998 they've been collecting but have yet to compensate ANY artist.
I think I need to start my own "collection" agency.
Maybe while they're at it they can get that POS Silverstream to run on it and make it (Silverstream) a real enterprise application server. Maybe they've got a blue fairy in a jar somewhere.
How about anytime there's an obviously biased "review" article posted (and misinformed - MIRA is not a TABLET PC it's a remote terminal) that the poster be required to forfeit all Karma if the article is:
1) Not what it says it is 2) not accompanied with a comparison piece on a similar Linux product.
We can all sit around and pick apart MS and their "innovations" all day long but unless there's something comparable or BETTER that someone else is doing then you're not going to get many converts to your point of view. (Damn long sentence).
Easier video conferencing or a tool for the governement (i.e. Big Brother). Or maybe they'll create special TV's just for the neilson families or worse they'll end up like the TV's in Max Headroom - always on sending realtime feedback to the networks about viewers.
Then again with no lense the viewing distance is going to be quite short.
Yeah I'm really eager to take on a company with a stable of lawyers at the ready. Let's see how much would that cost me as an individual? Would the EFF get involved. I don't think $10 is gonna cut it mate.
WE are meant to be guardians of the public interest WE are the public.
That's kind of the whole idea behind the market. People BUY based on others recomendations and others REVIEWS. When more and more negative reviews are being limited how does the market know when/how to react to a product? When you're dissallowed from telling anyone how much a product sucks or why or the factual information you've found about a product then how does anyone in the market know what to do without first buying the product and testing it themselves. By then the company has your money.
Let us think about that for a moment. Suppose that you want to show the success or failure of a product who's maker claims the extraordinary. Back in the good old days you'd go to the store buy the product, test it out, take it apart and find out how it ticks. Most of the time you'd find out that the actual features were at a minimum technically misleading. At the end of your little test you'd post your results out to the web or tell your buddies or let other professionals know.
Now you can't own the product. It's not yours. Not only is it not yours but you can't tinker with it. Tinkering with it is illegal. If the manufacturer says it's the safest product ever devised and you suspect that it's full of holes you aren't allowed to look. If they say it has technology developed by NASA and you suspect code looted from a GPL'd product - you can't check - it's illegal.
If I'm doing a term paper on the effectiveness and accuracy of "filters" and I can't test the product, or publish my findings, how do I progress. When someone else is doing a study on the long term effects of filtering (i.e. what knowledge was lost/missed due to improper filtering) how can one do so without looking at how and what the filters filtered.
Look at some EULA's lately. One EULA I got a couple of years ago said that "reviews can only be published after the written consent of 'COMPANYX'. COMPANYX reserves the right to sole editorship of any published reviews of it's products." This meant that ANY review that you saw on the web or in a magazine they effectively wrote. The problem was trying to find any real data on the product - every review was glowing, no problems, no benchmarks, and no real information.
At the end of the day the product was a piece of crap. But the only way you could find out it was a piece of crap was by purchasing a license at 700+ per seat and doing your own testing. Which the company assured wouldn't be accurate without having a "production" environment to test against.
More and more companies are hiding behind their EULA's, patent law, trademark law, copyright law, and so called "trade secrets" to hide the fact that their products are not of the quality nor even contain the feature sets that they advertise. And the judges and the politicians give them more and more room to maneuver every day. Filtering companies claim "Advanced Artificial Intelligence" and "Intelligent Algorithms" and we can't tell that they aren't just using a handcompiled blacklist updated regularly. And these are the companies that the politicians want EVERY LIBRARY and EVERY SCHOOL SYSTEM to use for filtering. I don't reallistically think that the government is going to make the effort to keep these vendors honest so I think WE should have the ability to do so. The only way to do that is through some ability to reverse engineer their products.
Re:You're not an optimist, you're delusional
on
Farscape Finale Tonight
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Good points and bad points... calling a group of devoted fans assholes was probably the worst point especially when it appears that you are also a devoted fan in another camp and wouldn't appreciate being called asshole by someone else.
Yes Farscape was typically rebroadcast. Unfortunately after the first year or so it ended up just being rebroadcast on the same night an hour after the first show, not making it easy for a larger audience to get involved. Plus since none of the episodes were available on tape/dvd you couldn't exactly run to the store and get caught up with the story arc.
People gripe and complain about "oh the story arc killed it" "it was too hard to get into if you didn't know the background", etc. You don't hear people saying that about '24' (1st season available at any blockbuster. Released almost immediately after the end of the first season.)
SciFi has moved towards lower budget projects and looking for mass appeal. Dune was a prime example of low budget. While some people threw some money into this thing they skimped on all the wrong parts. Sets and costume design were lackluster and the mix of good actor here horrible actor in the supporting role gave a very unbalanced feel. The mass hype, continual reminder of how bad Lynch's version was, and constant demand that this was going to be THE DUNE - just like the book - left some fans feeling a little betrayed when the show actually aired.
Moves like this give patrons who have watched for years a feeling of abandonment. Especially when SciFi starts running DreamTeam, ScareTactics, BraveHeart, Scream, IKWYDLS/ISKWYDLS, Halloween, etc. ---- not even close to scifi. When you alienate your fan base you lose. Even if you gain a million more viewers you lose because all of those new viewers are transitory. They have no brand loyalty because you produce nothing to be loyal to. They could care less about the merchandise you sell because to them you're filler while the football game is on commercial or because they cancelled tonights ER due to Bush speaking. In essence the channel becomes a parking lot for all the crap not shown elsewhere.
For awhile SciFi seemed to have a good run. They came out with some new and very interesting series - some did well and others stunk. In the end Farscape was the only one left and now it's gone. It got rave reviews and a solid fanbase. Unfortunately they really really dropped the ball on merchandising the product. There were millions to gain by proper merchandising. Quickly released DVD sets for special episodes and seasons, extended box sets, etc. Posters, prints, statuettes, pictures, transcripts, graphic novels. EVENTUALLY they did this. Unfortunately most of it came too late to generate either interest or profit. Timing means alot. And when a customer has to wait two years to get what they want they tend to get absent minded about why they wanted it in the first place.
There was nothing there that said "BY ME", "PAY FOR MORE SHOWS", "WE WANT A PROFIT". They wasted more advertising space pushing their own brand name then promoting product.
The toys at the store were childish (for a show whose fanbase did not consist of children). DVD's were nowhere to be found at local stores/rentals, likewise any other media that might make someone say "HMMMM that looks interesting".
I can't believe with all the money that was spent and all the talent brought to bare that they didn't have some forethought on the merchandising. I mean most of it appeared to be geared towards the 8-13 year old market, which isn't exactly the market watching the show, right?
Somehow they managed to pick up SG1 and they'll retain some of the old viewers from that and maybe keep some of the readers attention by doing specials like Dune, RiverWorld, and Children of Dune. They might keep a few others hanging waiting on Galactica. Unfortunately they're just as likely to alienate even more viewers with those shows as we can see with the mixxed reviews from Dune (I saw almost a 50/50 split on
HOLY SHIT. That appears to be a totally STANDARDS COMPLIANT XML DOCUMENT. It even opened in Mozilla without complaint.
I bet I could create an XSL file that transformed that bad boy to look like just about anything I wanted to. Even, dare I say it, a Word document!
Hmmm I wonder if w:p is paragraph and w:r is for row and w:t is for text, w:b means bold, w:u probably signifies the next text is underlined w:val="Single" probably means a single underline, w:i probably means the next line is italics. Hey what if w:sz had something to do with size. I could be well on my way to violating the DMCA.
Now if I could just decipher things the same way when I'm looking at UNIX commands. I would be a guru.:) LS - Like Searching, Long Scroll, Lop Sided, nope must be "List Shit". Don't even get me started on grep;)
Isn't part of the concept of XML relating DATA and being able to seperate presentation from pure content. Isn't the additional concept of XML it's extensibility and adaptability for one group to use it differently than another? Because if not I've been using XML wrong for about 2 years now.
This article makes it sound as if MS is doing something completely improper with XML (i.e. changing it's "standard"). But it seems to me that MS is simply separating content from presentation and relying on ????(something proprietary, xsl, more xml) to provide presentation. Just because they don't use the standard the same way you want them to doesn't mean that they are breaking the standard. I'm sure if you look at the XML that they output it's all standard XML. It also sounds as if they are not using any of the "tricks" that others have complained about (i.e. storing binary data in an xml tag).
Instead of bitching about the problem maybe we should 1) provide feedback if we are a beta tester 2) wait for it to be released 3) ready some tools to provide interoperability 4) work harder on creating tools better than MS
Does this remind anyone of the torture from Hitchhikers? Put a person in a chair and show him the universe and how he compares to the vastness there and effectively kill his ego. Straight past humbling and directly to "why shouldn't I shoot myself".
I saw a show once where they left a camera down on the oceans floor, well away from the vents. The idea was to capture images of some kind of material, an algae I think, that got pushed around on the currents. To the scientists surprise at those depths and low temperatures there were many signs of life in the sand. Timelapse photography showed multiple organisms leaving trails on and under the sand.
Additionally there are lichen that grow in freezing conditions and bacteria that live in the salt underneath iceflows.
But the mining the moon might have direct effect on the population of the Earth. Negative effect in that the moon acts as a shield for the earth as well as has some influence on our environment, ala tides and weather. As more and more of the mass of the moon is exhausted there's a higher likely hood of it shifting, breaking apart, falling into our atmosphere or drifting away.
" I love the enviroment like the next fella and I'm all for saving it. But... "
With morons like you deciding policy we'd soon all run out of resources.
Not mine but I built a friend's parents a new computer after their basement flooded. The computer was "always on" and the people came home to find a burst pipe had gotten the whole refinished basement.
I got the old computer with a waterline halfway up the mainboard (stunk - wastewater). The CD and harddrive got salvaged into the new PC - no apparent damage. The mainboard, processor, soundcard and modem all got tossed into the junk bin for a couple of months.
I decided one day to see what would happen if I tried hooking it up (would it pop and smoke). To my amazement it all started up fine. The modem was fried - no dial tone. But the P166 CPU and board were fine and the shitty old PacBell sound card worked as well as a PacBell 16 bit sound card could work.
RF tags are tiny. Not something that you'd just rip out unless they regulated where tags were placed (ie RF tags place only on the clothing tag, or on the UPC area). Un/fortunately part of the security of using RF tags is the ability to incorporate them into any part of the product so that they cannot be removed and therefore make shoplifting nearly impossible.
The funny thing is that I can see some people out there sitting around all day with a pair of tweasers removing RF tags from their products, just like they stripped out the nylon strips from US paper money.
It was a joke... absolutely nothing to do with the current "war" situation.
If we want a war discussion my thoughts are everyone involved has a bad position. The American Government has little significant proof or backing and too cavalier an attitude about how well this will go. The French want to stay out of fighting altogether and don't want to get the ire up of an already upset muslim population in their country. The Arab nations do little within their own area but complain about what the other is doing to shift blame often from their own poor treatment of their people. The Germans have significant monitary considerations to think about in regards to the number of companies and nature of business that they do with Iraq. Likewise the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans stand to lose significant amounts of money in regards to a possible take over of Iraq (BILLIONS). Turkey wants northern Iraq and the oil fields. Isreal wants everyone to focus on the Americans so they can keep killing Palestinians. The Palestinians want someone (anyone) to see the terrorism that's being perpretrated on them. And the Brits... hmmm... where are the Brits in all this... Well I think brits will do pretty much anything to the direct opposite of the French. Plus I'm sure there's some back end dealing in regards to trade or some other compensations taking place.
Over all it's a crap war. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't problem. If we do then we HAVE to start thinking about where we go next. N. Korea, Iran, Saudi, Isreal, Syria, Africa, Phillipines, etc. If we don't we're weak, wishy washy, we need to but out of everyone elses business, let people die, it's all okay.
I honestly don't know where I stand on invading Iraq. I don't like not doing something and to this point (12 years of policing, negotiations, and posturing) I don't see anything changing without some other kind of pressure. Then again I don't want the Iraqi people to suffer even another day of the hardships they have or have anything worse (the natural things that come with war).
Grow up. I understand exactly what the article is about but the general premise coincided with a question I had recently "asked slashdot" on. I'm not quite so egotistical to think that everyone in the world knows me. The point was that the discussions that I get into within certain community sites quickly get me labeled as an MS shill. While the article might deal with reputation on a more national level there are is still the matter of what reputation an individual makes within a community and even within a small group of people. That's where my question was.
See and that right there is how I wanted the other conversations to conclude. My opinion was that the discussions about MS "targeting" should be one of "MS poor design choices" and how to constructively get them to create better pages. I think constructive criticism is really the best way to go for any group. Unfortunately the only way most of the community can think of "constructively" getting companies to change is through constructing lawsuits or verbally abusing said companies.
So then the suggestion is that I should give up on being trusted? That seems like a poor answer (no insult to you). While I understand what you are saying about MS and their behavior I always try to present information not in a PRO-MS way but in an ANTI-LIE way. I can't be responsible for the fact that MS has made poor business decisions, lied cheated or stolen. The only thing I can do is when I see it happen point a finger. But then I have to do the same with every other company.
The unfortunate part is that when I hold other companies to the same standard that MS should be held to I get bashed for it.
I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.
Unfortunately a reputation is not as much made by what you post but by how people respond.
For example I have the reputation of "a microsoft shill" or for the simple people "stupid". I have this reputation in spite of the fact that I use and like *nix products and often advocate using *nix depending on the task. My reputation came about when I started to question some of the assumptions and comments made by others. These assumptions and comments were "popular" and usually followed any discussion that included MS. By questioning the popular I became a "shill".
It strikes me as funny that in a community of "non-comformists" you can be ostracized for not conforming.
Recently I have been rebuked by some people for my opinion that Hakon Wium Lie's testing methodology and following conclusions about MS targeting opera 7 were incorrect. It was popular to say that MS is evil and it must all somehow be a conspiracy. Commentary continues to be that I am a MS apologist or mistaken, even though noone can disprove the facts I've presented.
So recently I asked the question "how does one turn the tide of public opinion". I mean if I'm labeled a MS shill because I believe (not in Microsoft but) in telling the truth. Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation? Or can I? Should I just keep quiet when anyone who is mistaken or repeats a lie about large unpopular companies.
That movie you rented from the adult video store and "lost" might just come back to haunt you. Plus the $400 bucks worth of 900 number calls that your gay roommate made and you refused to pay. It's all there plain to see on your credit report. After all it all points at your "character" and "trustworthiness". Bah!
I'm sure that someone looking at my credit report would assume that I'm an abusive father/husband for all the emergency room collection bills out there.
I don't think that there's any proof/correlation between credit risk and any other issues. I know people who are majorly screwed up drunk bastards with racist tendencies that have exemplary credit. Show us the proof. Even the insurance companies have gotten in the habit of checking your credit. What a crock.
I noticed that my Opera6 version screen shot looks nothing like Opera's Opera6 screen shot. What's the difference. Additionally there appears to be some significant differences in the screen shots between Opera 6 and Opera 7. If you just look at the screen shots it appears to show that Opera 6 renders the page more accurately than Opera 7. Why such a big difference there? I mean from what I read both versions are using the same document, but rendering it in significantly different ways. Maybe this is what MS saw and tried to fix. Unfortunately some developers have a tendency to "try things out" in production or make 'minor' changes AFTER testing/qa - after all "how many people will it really effect if it's wrong?"
I think it's premature to lambaste MS yet again for 1 css entry the entry could have just as easily been "margin:-2px 0px 0px -3px" or "margin:-2px 0px -3px 0px". Typo? I've done it MANY times cutting and pasting code around.
Heinlein also pointed out how cheap life was considered especially the life of a soldier. To me that's one thing that stuck out in the book each soldier was individually disposable, with another able to come in right along behind and fill the void. The drop capsules were like nice shrinkwrapped little coffins, dropping thousands on a planet hoping just enough would make it through to accomplish the mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's the hope:
SCO:"You don't want to buy us?"
IBM:"No"
SCO:"Well then how about a lawsuit over Unix?"
IBM:"uh well uh"
SCO:"That's what we thought."
who for the vast majority do not see anything
Actually the group responsible for collecting those fees stated that they have yet to pay out anything - to anyone. "It's complicated" they said. So since 1998 they've been collecting but have yet to compensate ANY artist.
I think I need to start my own "collection" agency.
Maybe while they're at it they can get that POS Silverstream to run on it and make it (Silverstream) a real enterprise application server. Maybe they've got a blue fairy in a jar somewhere.
How about anytime there's an obviously biased "review" article posted (and misinformed - MIRA is not a TABLET PC it's a remote terminal) that the poster be required to forfeit all Karma if the article is:
1) Not what it says it is
2) not accompanied with a comparison piece on a similar Linux product.
We can all sit around and pick apart MS and their "innovations" all day long but unless there's something comparable or BETTER that someone else is doing then you're not going to get many converts to your point of view. (Damn long sentence).
Easier video conferencing or a tool for the governement (i.e. Big Brother). Or maybe they'll create special TV's just for the neilson families or worse they'll end up like the TV's in Max Headroom - always on sending realtime feedback to the networks about viewers.
Then again with no lense the viewing distance is going to be quite short.
Yeah I'm really eager to take on a company with a stable of lawyers at the ready. Let's see how much would that cost me as an individual? Would the EFF get involved. I don't think $10 is gonna cut it mate.
WE are meant to be guardians of the public interest WE are the public.
That's kind of the whole idea behind the market. People BUY based on others recomendations and others REVIEWS. When more and more negative reviews are being limited how does the market know when/how to react to a product? When you're dissallowed from telling anyone how much a product sucks or why or the factual information you've found about a product then how does anyone in the market know what to do without first buying the product and testing it themselves. By then the company has your money.
Let us think about that for a moment. Suppose that you want to show the success or failure of a product who's maker claims the extraordinary. Back in the good old days you'd go to the store buy the product, test it out, take it apart and find out how it ticks. Most of the time you'd find out that the actual features were at a minimum technically misleading. At the end of your little test you'd post your results out to the web or tell your buddies or let other professionals know.
Now you can't own the product. It's not yours. Not only is it not yours but you can't tinker with it. Tinkering with it is illegal. If the manufacturer says it's the safest product ever devised and you suspect that it's full of holes you aren't allowed to look. If they say it has technology developed by NASA and you suspect code looted from a GPL'd product - you can't check - it's illegal.
If I'm doing a term paper on the effectiveness and accuracy of "filters" and I can't test the product, or publish my findings, how do I progress. When someone else is doing a study on the long term effects of filtering (i.e. what knowledge was lost/missed due to improper filtering) how can one do so without looking at how and what the filters filtered.
Look at some EULA's lately. One EULA I got a couple of years ago said that "reviews can only be published after the written consent of 'COMPANYX'. COMPANYX reserves the right to sole editorship of any published reviews of it's products." This meant that ANY review that you saw on the web or in a magazine they effectively wrote. The problem was trying to find any real data on the product - every review was glowing, no problems, no benchmarks, and no real information.
At the end of the day the product was a piece of crap. But the only way you could find out it was a piece of crap was by purchasing a license at 700+ per seat and doing your own testing. Which the company assured wouldn't be accurate without having a "production" environment to test against.
More and more companies are hiding behind their EULA's, patent law, trademark law, copyright law, and so called "trade secrets" to hide the fact that their products are not of the quality nor even contain the feature sets that they advertise. And the judges and the politicians give them more and more room to maneuver every day. Filtering companies claim "Advanced Artificial Intelligence" and "Intelligent Algorithms" and we can't tell that they aren't just using a handcompiled blacklist updated regularly. And these are the companies that the politicians want EVERY LIBRARY and EVERY SCHOOL SYSTEM to use for filtering. I don't reallistically think that the government is going to make the effort to keep these vendors honest so I think WE should have the ability to do so. The only way to do that is through some ability to reverse engineer their products.
Good points and bad points... calling a group of devoted fans assholes was probably the worst point especially when it appears that you are also a devoted fan in another camp and wouldn't appreciate being called asshole by someone else.
Yes Farscape was typically rebroadcast. Unfortunately after the first year or so it ended up just being rebroadcast on the same night an hour after the first show, not making it easy for a larger audience to get involved. Plus since none of the episodes were available on tape/dvd you couldn't exactly run to the store and get caught up with the story arc.
People gripe and complain about "oh the story arc killed it" "it was too hard to get into if you didn't know the background", etc. You don't hear people saying that about '24' (1st season available at any blockbuster. Released almost immediately after the end of the first season.)
SciFi has moved towards lower budget projects and looking for mass appeal. Dune was a prime example of low budget. While some people threw some money into this thing they skimped on all the wrong parts. Sets and costume design were lackluster and the mix of good actor here horrible actor in the supporting role gave a very unbalanced feel. The mass hype, continual reminder of how bad Lynch's version was, and constant demand that this was going to be THE DUNE - just like the book - left some fans feeling a little betrayed when the show actually aired.
Moves like this give patrons who have watched for years a feeling of abandonment. Especially when SciFi starts running DreamTeam, ScareTactics, BraveHeart, Scream, IKWYDLS/ISKWYDLS, Halloween, etc. ---- not even close to scifi. When you alienate your fan base you lose. Even if you gain a million more viewers you lose because all of those new viewers are transitory. They have no brand loyalty because you produce nothing to be loyal to. They could care less about the merchandise you sell because to them you're filler while the football game is on commercial or because they cancelled tonights ER due to Bush speaking. In essence the channel becomes a parking lot for all the crap not shown elsewhere.
For awhile SciFi seemed to have a good run. They came out with some new and very interesting series - some did well and others stunk. In the end Farscape was the only one left and now it's gone. It got rave reviews and a solid fanbase. Unfortunately they really really dropped the ball on merchandising the product. There were millions to gain by proper merchandising. Quickly released DVD sets for special episodes and seasons, extended box sets, etc. Posters, prints, statuettes, pictures, transcripts, graphic novels. EVENTUALLY they did this. Unfortunately most of it came too late to generate either interest or profit. Timing means alot. And when a customer has to wait two years to get what they want they tend to get absent minded about why they wanted it in the first place.
There was nothing there that said "BY ME", "PAY FOR MORE SHOWS", "WE WANT A PROFIT". They wasted more advertising space pushing their own brand name then promoting product.
The toys at the store were childish (for a show whose fanbase did not consist of children). DVD's were nowhere to be found at local stores/rentals, likewise any other media that might make someone say "HMMMM that looks interesting".
I can't believe with all the money that was spent and all the talent brought to bare that they didn't have some forethought on the merchandising. I mean most of it appeared to be geared towards the 8-13 year old market, which isn't exactly the market watching the show, right?
Somehow they managed to pick up SG1 and they'll retain some of the old viewers from that and maybe keep some of the readers attention by doing specials like Dune, RiverWorld, and Children of Dune. They might keep a few others hanging waiting on Galactica. Unfortunately they're just as likely to alienate even more viewers with those shows as we can see with the mixxed reviews from Dune (I saw almost a 50/50 split on
HOLY SHIT. That appears to be a totally STANDARDS COMPLIANT XML DOCUMENT. It even opened in Mozilla without complaint.
:) LS - Like Searching, Long Scroll, Lop Sided, nope must be "List Shit". Don't even get me started on grep ;)
I bet I could create an XSL file that transformed that bad boy to look like just about anything I wanted to. Even, dare I say it, a Word document!
Hmmm I wonder if w:p is paragraph and w:r is for row and w:t is for text, w:b means bold, w:u probably signifies the next text is underlined w:val="Single" probably means a single underline, w:i probably means the next line is italics. Hey what if w:sz had something to do with size. I could be well on my way to violating the DMCA.
Now if I could just decipher things the same way when I'm looking at UNIX commands. I would be a guru.
(yes I know g/re/p from ed)
Isn't part of the concept of XML relating DATA and being able to seperate presentation from pure content. Isn't the additional concept of XML it's extensibility and adaptability for one group to use it differently than another? Because if not I've been using XML wrong for about 2 years now.
This article makes it sound as if MS is doing something completely improper with XML (i.e. changing it's "standard"). But it seems to me that MS is simply separating content from presentation and relying on ????(something proprietary, xsl, more xml) to provide presentation. Just because they don't use the standard the same way you want them to doesn't mean that they are breaking the standard. I'm sure if you look at the XML that they output it's all standard XML. It also sounds as if they are not using any of the "tricks" that others have complained about (i.e. storing binary data in an xml tag).
Instead of bitching about the problem maybe we should
1) provide feedback if we are a beta tester
2) wait for it to be released
3) ready some tools to provide interoperability
4) work harder on creating tools better than MS
Does this remind anyone of the torture from Hitchhikers? Put a person in a chair and show him the universe and how he compares to the vastness there and effectively kill his ego. Straight past humbling and directly to "why shouldn't I shoot myself".
Great post!
I saw a show once where they left a camera down on the oceans floor, well away from the vents. The idea was to capture images of some kind of material, an algae I think, that got pushed around on the currents. To the scientists surprise at those depths and low temperatures there were many signs of life in the sand. Timelapse photography showed multiple organisms leaving trails on and under the sand.
Additionally there are lichen that grow in freezing conditions and bacteria that live in the salt underneath iceflows.
But the mining the moon might have direct effect on the population of the Earth. Negative effect in that the moon acts as a shield for the earth as well as has some influence on our environment, ala tides and weather. As more and more of the mass of the moon is exhausted there's a higher likely hood of it shifting, breaking apart, falling into our atmosphere or drifting away.
" I love the enviroment like the next fella and I'm all for saving it. But... "
With morons like you deciding policy we'd soon all run out of resources.
Not mine but I built a friend's parents a new computer after their basement flooded. The computer was "always on" and the people came home to find a burst pipe had gotten the whole refinished basement.
I got the old computer with a waterline halfway up the mainboard (stunk - wastewater). The CD and harddrive got salvaged into the new PC - no apparent damage. The mainboard, processor, soundcard and modem all got tossed into the junk bin for a couple of months.
I decided one day to see what would happen if I tried hooking it up (would it pop and smoke). To my amazement it all started up fine. The modem was fried - no dial tone. But the P166 CPU and board were fine and the shitty old PacBell sound card worked as well as a PacBell 16 bit sound card could work.
"Rip out those tags when you are out of there."
RF tags are tiny. Not something that you'd just rip out unless they regulated where tags were placed (ie RF tags place only on the clothing tag, or on the UPC area). Un/fortunately part of the security of using RF tags is the ability to incorporate them into any part of the product so that they cannot be removed and therefore make shoplifting nearly impossible.
The funny thing is that I can see some people out there sitting around all day with a pair of tweasers removing RF tags from their products, just like they stripped out the nylon strips from US paper money.
It was a joke... absolutely nothing to do with the current "war" situation.
If we want a war discussion my thoughts are everyone involved has a bad position. The American Government has little significant proof or backing and too cavalier an attitude about how well this will go. The French want to stay out of fighting altogether and don't want to get the ire up of an already upset muslim population in their country. The Arab nations do little within their own area but complain about what the other is doing to shift blame often from their own poor treatment of their people. The Germans have significant monitary considerations to think about in regards to the number of companies and nature of business that they do with Iraq. Likewise the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans stand to lose significant amounts of money in regards to a possible take over of Iraq (BILLIONS). Turkey wants northern Iraq and the oil fields. Isreal wants everyone to focus on the Americans so they can keep killing Palestinians. The Palestinians want someone (anyone) to see the terrorism that's being perpretrated on them. And the Brits... hmmm... where are the Brits in all this... Well I think brits will do pretty much anything to the direct opposite of the French. Plus I'm sure there's some back end dealing in regards to trade or some other compensations taking place.
Over all it's a crap war. It's a damned if you do damned if you don't problem. If we do then we HAVE to start thinking about where we go next. N. Korea, Iran, Saudi, Isreal, Syria, Africa, Phillipines, etc. If we don't we're weak, wishy washy, we need to but out of everyone elses business, let people die, it's all okay.
I honestly don't know where I stand on invading Iraq. I don't like not doing something and to this point (12 years of policing, negotiations, and posturing) I don't see anything changing without some other kind of pressure. Then again I don't want the Iraqi people to suffer even another day of the hardships they have or have anything worse (the natural things that come with war).
french, dutch, german we hate them all, what does it matter. We're not racist, we hate everyone.
Grow up. I understand exactly what the article is about but the general premise coincided with a question I had recently "asked slashdot" on. I'm not quite so egotistical to think that everyone in the world knows me. The point was that the discussions that I get into within certain community sites quickly get me labeled as an MS shill. While the article might deal with reputation on a more national level there are is still the matter of what reputation an individual makes within a community and even within a small group of people. That's where my question was.
See and that right there is how I wanted the other conversations to conclude. My opinion was that the discussions about MS "targeting" should be one of "MS poor design choices" and how to constructively get them to create better pages. I think constructive criticism is really the best way to go for any group. Unfortunately the only way most of the community can think of "constructively" getting companies to change is through constructing lawsuits or verbally abusing said companies.
I agree wholeheartedly with your points.
So then the suggestion is that I should give up on being trusted? That seems like a poor answer (no insult to you). While I understand what you are saying about MS and their behavior I always try to present information not in a PRO-MS way but in an ANTI-LIE way. I can't be responsible for the fact that MS has made poor business decisions, lied cheated or stolen. The only thing I can do is when I see it happen point a finger. But then I have to do the same with every other company.
The unfortunate part is that when I hold other companies to the same standard that MS should be held to I get bashed for it.
I guess it's damned if you do damned if you don't.
Unfortunately a reputation is not as much made by what you post but by how people respond.
For example I have the reputation of "a microsoft shill" or for the simple people "stupid". I have this reputation in spite of the fact that I use and like *nix products and often advocate using *nix depending on the task. My reputation came about when I started to question some of the assumptions and comments made by others. These assumptions and comments were "popular" and usually followed any discussion that included MS. By questioning the popular I became a "shill".
It strikes me as funny that in a community of "non-comformists" you can be ostracized for not conforming.
Recently I have been rebuked by some people for my opinion that Hakon Wium Lie's testing methodology and following conclusions about MS targeting opera 7 were incorrect. It was popular to say that MS is evil and it must all somehow be a conspiracy. Commentary continues to be that I am a MS apologist or mistaken, even though noone can disprove the facts I've presented.
So recently I asked the question "how does one turn the tide of public opinion". I mean if I'm labeled a MS shill because I believe (not in Microsoft but) in telling the truth. Then how do I keep telling the truth in such a way that I keep clear of the MS shill reputation? Or can I? Should I just keep quiet when anyone who is mistaken or repeats a lie about large unpopular companies.
That movie you rented from the adult video store and "lost" might just come back to haunt you. Plus the $400 bucks worth of 900 number calls that your gay roommate made and you refused to pay. It's all there plain to see on your credit report. After all it all points at your "character" and "trustworthiness". Bah!
I'm sure that someone looking at my credit report would assume that I'm an abusive father/husband for all the emergency room collection bills out there.
I don't think that there's any proof/correlation between credit risk and any other issues. I know people who are majorly screwed up drunk bastards with racist tendencies that have exemplary credit. Show us the proof. Even the insurance companies have gotten in the habit of checking your credit. What a crock.
I noticed that my Opera6 version screen shot looks nothing like Opera's Opera6 screen shot. What's the difference. Additionally there appears to be some significant differences in the screen shots between Opera 6 and Opera 7. If you just look at the screen shots it appears to show that Opera 6 renders the page more accurately than Opera 7. Why such a big difference there? I mean from what I read both versions are using the same document, but rendering it in significantly different ways. Maybe this is what MS saw and tried to fix. Unfortunately some developers have a tendency to "try things out" in production or make 'minor' changes AFTER testing/qa - after all "how many people will it really effect if it's wrong?"
I think it's premature to lambaste MS yet again for 1 css entry the entry could have just as easily been "margin:-2px 0px 0px -3px" or "margin:-2px 0px -3px 0px". Typo? I've done it MANY times cutting and pasting code around.
Heinlein also pointed out how cheap life was considered especially the life of a soldier. To me that's one thing that stuck out in the book each soldier was individually disposable, with another able to come in right along behind and fill the void. The drop capsules were like nice shrinkwrapped little coffins, dropping thousands on a planet hoping just enough would make it through to accomplish the mission.