A recent statement made by President George W. Bush at a press conference regarding the "digital divide" has drawn sharp criticism and a barrage of cease and desist letters from AOL (with attached AOL cds). The statement in question "We will work to get America online and bridge the digital divide" is said to be a violation of AOL (America On Line) intellectual property. Turd Ferguson, AOL's chief IP lawyer, stated "This is a clear attempt by the president to use AOL's good name to further his own cause" and added "As the world's best and fastest growing ISP we will be the one to get everyone online. Any statement to the contrary is just foolish and could give cause for litigation." When questioned about the issue Steve Case stated "Yeah what he said... Anyway all your friends are on it."
The President has refused any major comment on the issue but was quoted by a reliable inside source as mumbling something about "...modifying the draft, we need more lawyers and 40-something chairman to drop on Iraq".
Unfortunately this has an effect on the bubble by reducing the number of people who initially buy. Hard core gamers willing to part with the cash may not buy based on what they hear around the net about copy protection. Additionally if companies had a software return policy that encouraged not discouraged consumers from returning poorly made product or just something they aren't interested in, they might see their sales increase significantly. As it is right now I'm leary of buying any game until I know at least one person who has it and know's that it works well (isn't laden with bugs) and that it will hold interest for more than a day. Too many times I've gotten burned by $50 games that were either flakey or just trash. In the end the only policy is to return to the manufacturer which people just don't use. People need to be able to make legitimate backups and also need the right to return garbage in a timely manner. Current policies don't facilitate and can significantly hamper these needs.
There's a significant difference between Book Sellers and Record Sellers. You can't just plug in any retail business model into my statement to attempt to prove my statement wrong. Most of the music lovers I know don't step foot in wal-mart or sam goody for music. They go down to vintage vinyl or some other local store. And yes sometimes they have to wait a couple of days to a week to get something really off the wall but then that's what those stores do. Additionally they sell used products. I still see local bookstores doing well all over despite the intrusion of B&N or Borders.
Get this: Bad businesses will continue to fail, not because someone is necessarily cheating them. Record stores and book store closing hasn't been because the retailers drove them out on price wars as much as it's been retailers have become end-all be all places to shop. i.e. barnes and noble - get your coffee, music, kids stuff, and knick-knacks all in one spot. It's more the death of specialty shops that did one job well and giving rise to Jack-of-all-trades shops that do little well.
Still the local shops will survive because people like them, they do a good job. Will they be masively profitable - probably not. But then I don't think that's really the goal.
No the local indy shops will continue to do what they do best sell GOOD and hard to find music, focus on what the customer wants, and build lasting relationships for steady sales. Wal-mart might rake in more at 8 bucks but they'll get no loyalty from their customers. And no love from the real music fans.
We've designed a system similar to what you are thinking about. Where I work we are beginning to use ZOPE for content management. We have some content that needed to be shared between multiple front ends. What we've done is used ZOPE to store static content, and then used ZOPE with a relational DB to store individual field data via a web form. This way the other front ends can pull the individual fields that they need without accessing ZOPE and ZOPE can use the same data to generate XML. It can then be transformed into other XML, XHTML, WML, PDF, TXT, etc. That's one of the main benefits of XML when it's partnered with XSLT.
I agree somewhat with the thought, but it can be twisted.
As an example look at the American Northwest. For several thousand years man existed within the natural ecosystem. When the different anglo cultures arrived the assumption was that they had dominion over everything in site and could shape it to fit their needs. Technology was used as an agent of change. This included almost complete obliteration of several animal species. We justified it by saying "We're the alpha preditor, no other alpha preditors need to exist". Likewise we used the "we're part of nature and our actions are within that scope".
To this day ranchers and the Idaho government say idiotic things like "We killed all the wolves 70 years ago, don't bring back things we got rid of." Similar attitudes prevail with some races of people (indians and other minorities), animals, plants, and insects.
In nature there is a balance. However messy it might be. In human society we work to continually tip this balance in our favor often to the detriment of nature itself. Additionally this tipping of the scales can have serious repercussions on our future.
It's pearl jam and tori amos, the record companies are just admitting that with a walkman that's as good as it's ever going to sound. Plus they're sending a nice little signal that if you listen to such music don't bother the people around you with it (use headphones).:)
Kids first overclocking experience
on
When Users Attack
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I'm at a local computer store and the kid before me is there with his mom seeing if he can get his processor "fixed". The owner of the store opens the case to see the 486dx266 chip laying mangled on top of the socket. All of the pins are bent, the chip is cracked and blackened, and there's still a nice little burnt smell even from a couple of feet away. The shop owner asks the kid what happened. The boy confesses that he and a friend were monkeying about on the computer and the friend decided they should overclock the processor. Surely overclocking must be achieved by putting the processor on in a different direction. The friend puts the processor on backwards. Doesn't work. They try and try to "overclock" the machine and eventually *POP* the processor dies. The kid states that he got mad took the processor out of the machine threw it on the floor and gave it a gentle coaxing by jumping up and down on it. After that they attempted to fix the pins and put it back it the right way. No luck though just more ZZZZT ZZZZT ZZZZT from the processor. This kid must have been 13 or 14 years old standing there with his mom. His mom just had this little smile like "You poor stupid kid, you'll be living with me until your 36" kinda smile both frustrated and amused. It took everything I had to keep from falling down on the floor with laughter.
I think you can see Sci-fi's switch though. If you look at what they are playing lately it's no "space" shows and nothing that's even really sci-fi. Mostly it's horror.
Things like House, Species, Psycho, IKWYDLS, are really categorized as horror. I think Farscape is one of the few Science Fiction show's that has a mass appeal. The problem is that 1. it's expensive to produce 2. They could replace it for the cost with several shows that got mediocre ratings and get more people.
Of course they don't count all the people they are losing from no longer being a Sci Fi channel. It's a clusterfuck. When people see Sci-Fi Channel they think space, they think Star Wars (science fantasy), they think Star Trek (space opera), they don't think Psycho (horror/suspense), House II (arguably comedy), or Howling III: Marsupalami (who knows what that was supposed to be), or Ghoulies (horror? comedy? occult?) or 8 hours worth of infomercials.
This is really for all of you replying to this thread! WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Sorry got caught up in all the "no, YOUR wrong" going back and forth.
Everything that I've read about GitS says that it was a simultaneous release for Japan/Brit/USA. Reviewers talked about how ambitious it was to do such a thing given that every other movie in the world does staged releases based on geography.
Oh I forgot the other contributing factor to Java's demise - "JavaScript". How many people still to this day assume that Java and Javascript are the same thing. Meaning that every page, even those without Java, popping up a script error because the developer doesn't care you use IE or NS promoted how crappy "Java" was on the client.
I've been running XP for a few months now sans java. I haven't hit a single site in the thousands and thousands that I've visited that has required or even used java to perform. Why do I need it now?
What killed java (client side)? Well people will argue to death that it was MS? But what killed ActiveX (client side)? Well people will argue to death that it was Java. What really happened.
There are two things I think happened. Java became "popular" because of things it claimed to do (some of which never materialized). Creating a rise in "amateur" programmers who's only creative outlet was applets on the web used for banners and menus etc. Everytime someone would hit SOME of these sites and see the horrible slow downs that occured with the prominently marked "SEE MY NEW JAVA MENU" then people associated "Java" with crappy GUI development. Java might help certain aspects of coding but it doesn't suddenly create automatically efficient code. You can still use all the memory you want even though you're not specifically allocating it like you might in other languages.
This is why Java was better on the server side. Having a server implies that you have more experienced coder doing the work. This typically (not always) means tighter code and better resource use. Hence java client side received boo's and name calling and java server side is quickly replacing other languages.
Now client side it didn't help that even experienced programmers saw performance problems with their client side applets. I would still say it wasn't the code itself that ultimately caused the downfall. I certainly wouldn't say it was MS. Additionally I think this is a shitty way for SUN to try to get market share. SUN already sued MS and got a settlement along with a nice chunk of change, kicking MS out of that market, and killing a couple of MS's initiatives. They could have taken steps back then to take control of their destiny instead of constantly deferring to MS for the success or failure of Java. They failed to do that.
actually there's a 9000 model inbetween. I think the increments are more like 500 depending on the nature of the upgrades to the card 7000, 7500, 8000, 8500, 9000, [[9700]]. Maybe they had a 9500 but decided to tweak it a little more but not to the point where it was a 10000.
You know that's how the AI in the Matrix figured out how to use people as batteries. It all started as an experiment to see how much energy could be created by translating the heat exhaust from geeks reading crappy articles. Then they experimented with how much energy they could collect from the force of all the keystrokes entired in the ensuing flamefest. Eventually they just decided to use everyone as a battery.
Funny I just had to install WinXP/98/Linux Mandrake last night. While XP took the longest it was the most complete and useful when logged in and took the least amount of fidgeting with, with only my digital camera not having at least base drivers. 98 would have been a close second except that it refused to load either my sound or my network card without a hassle. It still came in second because Linux Mandrake was hell to install (and it has one of the better installers). First the install choked half way through. Often the 'focus' caret wouldn't show and since it refused to recognize my logitech mouse either PS/2 or USB then I was often left guessing or unable to choose a button. Once completely loaded KDE ran just fine - good picture, sound, network everything but still no mouse and when I tried to switch to another mouse the system choked when shutting down (USB problems). Oh BTW why does it have to be so difficult to download a plugin. One step - prompt for download! Boolean YES I want - NO I don't. Instead of "Hey let me look and see if I can find a plugin for you! Oh yeah here it is on this page! Click here, then here, then wait, then all your browser windows close... then??? What page was I trying to look at?" All for shockwave?
Anyway I digress... I personally would like to see a comparison between a desktop install of RH, WinXP on say 5 different configurations of computers. The scoring would be based on all the basics a user needs to get started 1)Video 2) input (mouse/keyboard) 3) audio 4) network/connectivity 5) E-mail/browsing 6) Setup time. This would be an out of the box test - no additional downloads or penalties for "Oh he doesn't have the latest driver". Get both installs off the shelf at Best Buy - yeah I know it kinda of knocks RH for a loss when you can't just download the latest distro repleat with updates, but it's "fair". Face it each system is going to need some patching and a check for latest drivers and probably a security review to be safe. Time how long it takes for each system and the ease in which it can be done - then score. Then go down the list of "useful" apps that each distribution has "bundled" and where they rank and how they compare and what it would take to get a comparable product should the "bundle" not have it included - then score.
A few itterations of that procedure and you'll find all of the gaps in the competition and be able to make some serious improvements.
My understanding was that they already pitched it to the private market and got no takers. This meant that in essence they were going to sit on it until someone made an offer which Ton did. While it might not have been the most lucrative offer it did open up the possibility of future returns to the shareholders above and beyond the initial 100,000 and a way for the company to come back.
While we assume that investors always make smart choices I think we can see from other investments *cough*AOL*cough*T/W*cough* that they don't. Often investors pull out just at the moment a company starts pulling it together or keep throwing money into a company that's gasping it's last breath.
Now there are some savy VC's out there but they usually know when to put more in and when to cut their losses. Other VC's would rather sit on something worth a little, holding out for the big payoff, and in the end getting nothing.
The Blender community has been begging for as long as I know to open source the software not so that it will be free but so that they can contribute to making it better. There are people there willing to put time and effort into the product for free because they love the product and most are more than willing to then see that product sold commercially to fund further success. Open source and commercial success are not necessarily seperate goals.
The "trade" idea is somewhat paradoxical. When you start talking about generalities and what-if statements it gets really bad. For instance you don't take into account human potential and consequence into your scenarios.
Lets say that peasant A is in poor health due to a brain tumor which he cannot afford to treat or for which no treatment is available. On his own he dies his good organs are harvested and save or improve the quality of 3 to 4 people. His brain is sent away for research and during the course of that research one new treatment is found for cancer and leads are provided for several more.
Lets say that blind peasant A is going to be hit by a train tommorow. A witness on the train happens to also be an engineer, because of his experience in witnessing the death he invents a new railing system and early warning system that keeps people and cattle off the tracks and correctly warns the train of obstructions. Another person a million miles away hears of this accident on from a coworker taking the same train and comes up with an invention that gives the unsighted better ability to navigate potentially dangerous areas.
Lets say that peasant A is dying and on his deathbed he implores his only son to do something better with his life, go to school, become something that he didn't. After his fathers death his son heeds those words and becomes a chemist, physician, psychiatrist, engineer, president, community leader, policeman, etc effecting any number of lives.
To say that it's "okay" to trade one life for many lives assumes that you KNOW exactly what that life might have the potential to become or affect. In reality we don't know the potential or what/who that person might change that might be significant. We might be trading 1 single life to save 5 lives and then missing out on the 1000 or 1000000 lives that the first life might have affected having been left alone.
It's quick, easy, and a relatively thoughtless process to say "I'd trade one life to save twenty" when that life is not your own.
Your sorta right. There's still a flaw though. Lets assume that I go to searchX for all my search needs. Soon I start to notice that the first link I click on never really deals with the issue that I'm searching for but is usually just pushing a product. After repeating this process a few times I begin to learn that if I go to the second page of the result set I actually get closer to the things I'm looking for. Soon I'm no longer even glancing at the first page I'm going directly to the second or third page. Websites and search engines would do well to learn from the failures of their material counterparts the magazines and broadcasting industries. Most people pick up a magazine and flip directly to the article they're interested in bypassing 90% of the advertisements. This has caused magazines to start intermingle half a page of content with half page ads to get the user drawn to the ad. The saturation of ads in the market place has caused the consumer to become desensitized causing ads to become less effective until a "new medium" of ad space can be found and then saturated. We've already seen that the web has reached it's saturation point. Unfortunately noone is learning. The marketing companies and companies funding them continue to put so much revenue in to ad streams that they could fund most small countries. The drug companies put more money into the stream than Nike and Budweiser and yet the primary way that consumers come to know their product is still via word of mouth or person to person representation. If a stock had such low returns most people would dump it and the company would go bust. But the marketing just keeps going up and up.
Sales slump, more money into marketing, price goes up to cover sales loss and new marketing funding - sales slump. It's a circle usually only broken by upswings in the economy or by product advancement.
I think that the government should focus on making sure that the college educated marketing firms have legitimate diplomas. I'm sure there's a little guy in a back room churning those things out by the thousands.
Here's the crap part of the whole deal. Way back when record companies paid radio stations to play content. The government said "No, no" and the radio stations stopped paying the radio stations directly. In comes the "indie", a supposedly dissinterested third party paid by the record company to "promote" their music. In turn the "indie" pays the radio station for the "privilage" of just getting to "talk" about the music. Then it's up to the radio station to decide whether or not to play the music. The funny thing is that I hear no mention of what the fees are associated with the privilage of "talking" to the radio stations and from the sound of it it depends on the music and who pays the "indie". The other problem here is that the record company continues to pay the indie for as long as that music plays within the given market. They then turn around and charge the radio station for use of their "product".
To top it all of Hillary Rosen attempts to play the victim to it all stating "What can I do" as if she's being held hostage by the indies. "That's just the way it is" she says while she circumvents the letter of the law. The radio stations pretend that they aren't doing anything wrong, the indies just laugh while they rake in 500,000 here and 600,000 there. It's a nice tidy little cycle that the webcasters won't be included in. Can you see any of the indies going after webcasters? They work for the record companies and the record companies already have all the channels of distribution that they want, therefore there's no need for indies to go out on a limb and provide a service that noone wants to pay for. To top it off that means that the webcasters won't make the same capital that the radio stations will and therefore won't be able to come up with the cash to pay "royalties" easily.
It's a sad sad suck-ass system when the record companies can so easily play the victim in all this.
While I'm not going to argue Microsoft's innocence I will say that Sun shares significant amount of blame for the situation at hand. They are easily guilty of many of the things that MS has done as far as predatory business practices and yet they are the first to condemn MS.
The original issue with Sun vs. MS and Java was that MS was shipping the VM with proprietary code. By itself a controllable issue but the secondary problem arose when MS began to ship IDE's that leveraged that proprietary code making it easy for developers to create java apps that could be dependent on MS and their VM to run properly (NOTE: NOT ABSOLUTELY but COULD BE, just like with VC++ you could write MS independent and standard code). Sun then sued based on breach of contract and misuse of the Java trademark. It eventually won but majorly screwed that up. The end agreement stated that MS "COULD" ship the Java VM but that that VM had to conform to Java's compatibility checks. It barred MS from using the Java trademark (to infinity and beyond!) hence the reason you see Microsoft(tm) VM instead of Java(tm) VM, MS cannot legally use Java in the product name. The end agreement said nothing about MS being FORCED to ship the Sun JVM nor did it state that the VM had to keep up with the updates to the changes in the language, nor did it state that MS had to ship any VM at all. The agreement simply stated that if MS CHOSE to ship a JVM that it had to conform to the compatability tests for the JRE it supported. MS decided to take it's ball and go home. It stopped keeping up with the updates to the language and resigned to keeping the JVM to the compatability set at the time of the original agreement (all nice and legal). Eventually they realized that the people really making use of the JVM were developers who in the end downloaded the JVM and JDK from SUN or from IBM and that sending a JVM out to support 5% of their user base plus having to field the additional support calls was just not financially feasible. They announced well before hand that Windows would be losing the JVM because of the lack of updates and incompatability with current Java version. This would have been the prime opportunity for SUN to step forward and play "let's make a deal" by buying a place for Java in Windows, like so many other software makers do. The truth is though that for the most part Java on the clientside is DEAD. SUN's profits come from the developers developing server side code that helps SUN to get a foot in to sell high priced servers, license products, and write out lucrative service contracts. So instead of shelling out some cash and looking like a hypocrit considering their stance with the anti-trust allegations, they decided to go the "easy" route and claim yet another breach of contract by stating that MS was not living up to the original agreement previously set. They claimed that the agreement forced MS to include the VM (the outdated one). It was a win win situation for SUN - they knew most people would be too lazy or ignorant to check the facts of the original case and others would be so blinded by their hate for all things MS that it wouldn't matter. They also knew that MS wanted to avoid any further legal entanglements no matter how frivolous and so threatening MS would get them to reintroduce the tired old VM into Windows. In the end having the VM does little for SUN except in the fact that it sticks it to MS just a little more. Most people falsely assume that MS is making the move to thwart SUN and Java - that's the other part of the win for SUN in that they make MS look like the ogre again - "shipping an outdated VM, HOW DARE THEY! Come on over to java.sun.com we'll set you straight. Everything will be alright."
So there you have a long summation of MS's crimes against Java. I consider them SUN's crimes but oh well.
last I remember reading most of the machines being taken by script kiddies were Linux/Unix machines that admins had left open to attack because of bad security implementations. Being on a *nix based OS does not in anyway free you from being hacked. Additionally what were FBI and whitehouse running prior to the last time you checked? Just because they are running *nix now doesn't mean they were running NT at some point in the past.
Wouldn't the thought then still stand that a majority of users are using DDR? Therefore wouldn't the comparison be slightly biased if the reviewer knows that the majority of people are using DDR and yet chooses otherwise for the competing test box?
Slashdot Mirror
A recent statement made by President George W. Bush at a press conference regarding the "digital divide" has drawn sharp criticism and a barrage of cease and desist letters from AOL (with attached AOL cds). The statement in question "We will work to get America online and bridge the digital divide" is said to be a violation of AOL (America On Line) intellectual property. Turd Ferguson, AOL's chief IP lawyer, stated "This is a clear attempt by the president to use AOL's good name to further his own cause" and added "As the world's best and fastest growing ISP we will be the one to get everyone online. Any statement to the contrary is just foolish and could give cause for litigation." When questioned about the issue Steve Case stated "Yeah what he said... Anyway all your friends are on it."
The President has refused any major comment on the issue but was quoted by a reliable inside source as mumbling something about "...modifying the draft, we need more lawyers and 40-something chairman to drop on Iraq".
Unfortunately this has an effect on the bubble by reducing the number of people who initially buy. Hard core gamers willing to part with the cash may not buy based on what they hear around the net about copy protection. Additionally if companies had a software return policy that encouraged not discouraged consumers from returning poorly made product or just something they aren't interested in, they might see their sales increase significantly. As it is right now I'm leary of buying any game until I know at least one person who has it and know's that it works well (isn't laden with bugs) and that it will hold interest for more than a day. Too many times I've gotten burned by $50 games that were either flakey or just trash. In the end the only policy is to return to the manufacturer which people just don't use. People need to be able to make legitimate backups and also need the right to return garbage in a timely manner. Current policies don't facilitate and can significantly hamper these needs.
There's a significant difference between Book Sellers and Record Sellers. You can't just plug in any retail business model into my statement to attempt to prove my statement wrong. Most of the music lovers I know don't step foot in wal-mart or sam goody for music. They go down to vintage vinyl or some other local store. And yes sometimes they have to wait a couple of days to a week to get something really off the wall but then that's what those stores do. Additionally they sell used products. I still see local bookstores doing well all over despite the intrusion of B&N or Borders.
Get this: Bad businesses will continue to fail, not because someone is necessarily cheating them. Record stores and book store closing hasn't been because the retailers drove them out on price wars as much as it's been retailers have become end-all be all places to shop. i.e. barnes and noble - get your coffee, music, kids stuff, and knick-knacks all in one spot. It's more the death of specialty shops that did one job well and giving rise to Jack-of-all-trades shops that do little well.
Still the local shops will survive because people like them, they do a good job. Will they be masively profitable - probably not. But then I don't think that's really the goal.
No the local indy shops will continue to do what they do best sell GOOD and hard to find music, focus on what the customer wants, and build lasting relationships for steady sales. Wal-mart might rake in more at 8 bucks but they'll get no loyalty from their customers. And no love from the real music fans.
That to me is the true definition of interoperability.
We've designed a system similar to what you are thinking about. Where I work we are beginning to use ZOPE for content management. We have some content that needed to be shared between multiple front ends. What we've done is used ZOPE to store static content, and then used ZOPE with a relational DB to store individual field data via a web form. This way the other front ends can pull the individual fields that they need without accessing ZOPE and ZOPE can use the same data to generate XML. It can then be transformed into other XML, XHTML, WML, PDF, TXT, etc. That's one of the main benefits of XML when it's partnered with XSLT.
I agree somewhat with the thought, but it can be twisted.
As an example look at the American Northwest. For several thousand years man existed within the natural ecosystem. When the different anglo cultures arrived the assumption was that they had dominion over everything in site and could shape it to fit their needs. Technology was used as an agent of change. This included almost complete obliteration of several animal species. We justified it by saying "We're the alpha preditor, no other alpha preditors need to exist". Likewise we used the "we're part of nature and our actions are within that scope".
To this day ranchers and the Idaho government say idiotic things like "We killed all the wolves 70 years ago, don't bring back things we got rid of." Similar attitudes prevail with some races of people (indians and other minorities), animals, plants, and insects.
In nature there is a balance. However messy it might be. In human society we work to continually tip this balance in our favor often to the detriment of nature itself. Additionally this tipping of the scales can have serious repercussions on our future.
It's pearl jam and tori amos, the record companies are just admitting that with a walkman that's as good as it's ever going to sound. Plus they're sending a nice little signal that if you listen to such music don't bother the people around you with it (use headphones). :)
I'm at a local computer store and the kid before me is there with his mom seeing if he can get his processor "fixed". The owner of the store opens the case to see the 486dx266 chip laying mangled on top of the socket. All of the pins are bent, the chip is cracked and blackened, and there's still a nice little burnt smell even from a couple of feet away.
The shop owner asks the kid what happened. The boy confesses that he and a friend were monkeying about on the computer and the friend decided they should overclock the processor. Surely overclocking must be achieved by putting the processor on in a different direction. The friend puts the processor on backwards. Doesn't work. They try and try to "overclock" the machine and eventually *POP* the processor dies. The kid states that he got mad took the processor out of the machine threw it on the floor and gave it a gentle coaxing by jumping up and down on it. After that they attempted to fix the pins and put it back it the right way. No luck though just more ZZZZT ZZZZT ZZZZT from the processor.
This kid must have been 13 or 14 years old standing there with his mom. His mom just had this little smile like "You poor stupid kid, you'll be living with me until your 36" kinda smile both frustrated and amused.
It took everything I had to keep from falling down on the floor with laughter.
I think you can see Sci-fi's switch though. If you look at what they are playing lately it's no "space" shows and nothing that's even really sci-fi. Mostly it's horror.
Things like House, Species, Psycho, IKWYDLS, are really categorized as horror. I think Farscape is one of the few Science Fiction show's that has a mass appeal. The problem is that 1. it's expensive to produce 2. They could replace it for the cost with several shows that got mediocre ratings and get more people.
Of course they don't count all the people they are losing from no longer being a Sci Fi channel. It's a clusterfuck. When people see Sci-Fi Channel they think space, they think Star Wars (science fantasy), they think Star Trek (space opera), they don't think Psycho (horror/suspense), House II (arguably comedy), or Howling III: Marsupalami (who knows what that was supposed to be), or Ghoulies (horror? comedy? occult?) or 8 hours worth of infomercials.
Just my 2 cents.
This is really for all of you replying to this thread! WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Sorry got caught up in all the "no, YOUR wrong" going back and forth.
Everything that I've read about GitS says that it was a simultaneous release for Japan/Brit/USA. Reviewers talked about how ambitious it was to do such a thing given that every other movie in the world does staged releases based on geography.
Oh I forgot the other contributing factor to Java's demise - "JavaScript". How many people still to this day assume that Java and Javascript are the same thing. Meaning that every page, even those without Java, popping up a script error because the developer doesn't care you use IE or NS promoted how crappy "Java" was on the client.
I've been running XP for a few months now sans java. I haven't hit a single site in the thousands and thousands that I've visited that has required or even used java to perform. Why do I need it now?
What killed java (client side)? Well people will argue to death that it was MS? But what killed ActiveX (client side)? Well people will argue to death that it was Java. What really happened.
There are two things I think happened. Java became "popular" because of things it claimed to do (some of which never materialized). Creating a rise in "amateur" programmers who's only creative outlet was applets on the web used for banners and menus etc. Everytime someone would hit SOME of these sites and see the horrible slow downs that occured with the prominently marked "SEE MY NEW JAVA MENU" then people associated "Java" with crappy GUI development. Java might help certain aspects of coding but it doesn't suddenly create automatically efficient code. You can still use all the memory you want even though you're not specifically allocating it like you might in other languages.
This is why Java was better on the server side. Having a server implies that you have more experienced coder doing the work. This typically (not always) means tighter code and better resource use. Hence java client side received boo's and name calling and java server side is quickly replacing other languages.
Now client side it didn't help that even experienced programmers saw performance problems with their client side applets. I would still say it wasn't the code itself that ultimately caused the downfall. I certainly wouldn't say it was MS. Additionally I think this is a shitty way for SUN to try to get market share. SUN already sued MS and got a settlement along with a nice chunk of change, kicking MS out of that market, and killing a couple of MS's initiatives. They could have taken steps back then to take control of their destiny instead of constantly deferring to MS for the success or failure of Java. They failed to do that.
So then they're backfilling the product line. Build out the high end product then go back and fill in blank spots in the market coverage.
actually there's a 9000 model inbetween. I think the increments are more like 500 depending on the nature of the upgrades to the card 7000, 7500, 8000, 8500, 9000, [[9700]]. Maybe they had a 9500 but decided to tweak it a little more but not to the point where it was a 10000.
You know that's how the AI in the Matrix figured out how to use people as batteries. It all started as an experiment to see how much energy could be created by translating the heat exhaust from geeks reading crappy articles. Then they experimented with how much energy they could collect from the force of all the keystrokes entired in the ensuing flamefest. Eventually they just decided to use everyone as a battery.
Funny I just had to install WinXP/98/Linux Mandrake last night. While XP took the longest it was the most complete and useful when logged in and took the least amount of fidgeting with, with only my digital camera not having at least base drivers. 98 would have been a close second except that it refused to load either my sound or my network card without a hassle. It still came in second because Linux Mandrake was hell to install (and it has one of the better installers). First the install choked half way through. Often the 'focus' caret wouldn't show and since it refused to recognize my logitech mouse either PS/2 or USB then I was often left guessing or unable to choose a button. Once completely loaded KDE ran just fine - good picture, sound, network everything but still no mouse and when I tried to switch to another mouse the system choked when shutting down (USB problems). Oh BTW why does it have to be so difficult to download a plugin. One step - prompt for download! Boolean YES I want - NO I don't. Instead of "Hey let me look and see if I can find a plugin for you! Oh yeah here it is on this page! Click here, then here, then wait, then all your browser windows close... then??? What page was I trying to look at?" All for shockwave?
Anyway I digress... I personally would like to see a comparison between a desktop install of RH, WinXP on say 5 different configurations of computers. The scoring would be based on all the basics a user needs to get started 1)Video 2) input (mouse/keyboard) 3) audio 4) network/connectivity 5) E-mail/browsing 6) Setup time. This would be an out of the box test - no additional downloads or penalties for "Oh he doesn't have the latest driver". Get both installs off the shelf at Best Buy - yeah I know it kinda of knocks RH for a loss when you can't just download the latest distro repleat with updates, but it's "fair".
Face it each system is going to need some patching and a check for latest drivers and probably a security review to be safe. Time how long it takes for each system and the ease in which it can be done - then score. Then go down the list of "useful" apps that each distribution has "bundled" and where they rank and how they compare and what it would take to get a comparable product should the "bundle" not have it included - then score.
A few itterations of that procedure and you'll find all of the gaps in the competition and be able to make some serious improvements.
My understanding was that they already pitched it to the private market and got no takers. This meant that in essence they were going to sit on it until someone made an offer which Ton did. While it might not have been the most lucrative offer it did open up the possibility of future returns to the shareholders above and beyond the initial 100,000 and a way for the company to come back.
While we assume that investors always make smart choices I think we can see from other investments *cough*AOL*cough*T/W*cough* that they don't. Often investors pull out just at the moment a company starts pulling it together or keep throwing money into a company that's gasping it's last breath.
Now there are some savy VC's out there but they usually know when to put more in and when to cut their losses. Other VC's would rather sit on something worth a little, holding out for the big payoff, and in the end getting nothing.
The Blender community has been begging for as long as I know to open source the software not so that it will be free but so that they can contribute to making it better. There are people there willing to put time and effort into the product for free because they love the product and most are more than willing to then see that product sold commercially to fund further success. Open source and commercial success are not necessarily seperate goals.
The "trade" idea is somewhat paradoxical. When you start talking about generalities and what-if statements it gets really bad. For instance you don't take into account human potential and consequence into your scenarios.
Lets say that peasant A is in poor health due to a brain tumor which he cannot afford to treat or for which no treatment is available. On his own he dies his good organs are harvested and save or improve the quality of 3 to 4 people. His brain is sent away for research and during the course of that research one new treatment is found for cancer and leads are provided for several more.
Lets say that blind peasant A is going to be hit by a train tommorow. A witness on the train happens to also be an engineer, because of his experience in witnessing the death he invents a new railing system and early warning system that keeps people and cattle off the tracks and correctly warns the train of obstructions. Another person a million miles away hears of this accident on from a coworker taking the same train and comes up with an invention that gives the unsighted better ability to navigate potentially dangerous areas.
Lets say that peasant A is dying and on his deathbed he implores his only son to do something better with his life, go to school, become something that he didn't. After his fathers death his son heeds those words and becomes a chemist, physician, psychiatrist, engineer, president, community leader, policeman, etc effecting any number of lives.
To say that it's "okay" to trade one life for many lives assumes that you KNOW exactly what that life might have the potential to become or affect. In reality we don't know the potential or what/who that person might change that might be significant. We might be trading 1 single life to save 5 lives and then missing out on the 1000 or 1000000 lives that the first life might have affected having been left alone.
It's quick, easy, and a relatively thoughtless process to say "I'd trade one life to save twenty" when that life is not your own.
Your sorta right. There's still a flaw though. Lets assume that I go to searchX for all my search needs. Soon I start to notice that the first link I click on never really deals with the issue that I'm searching for but is usually just pushing a product. After repeating this process a few times I begin to learn that if I go to the second page of the result set I actually get closer to the things I'm looking for. Soon I'm no longer even glancing at the first page I'm going directly to the second or third page. Websites and search engines would do well to learn from the failures of their material counterparts the magazines and broadcasting industries.
Most people pick up a magazine and flip directly to the article they're interested in bypassing 90% of the advertisements. This has caused magazines to start intermingle half a page of content with half page ads to get the user drawn to the ad. The saturation of ads in the market place has caused the consumer to become desensitized causing ads to become less effective until a "new medium" of ad space can be found and then saturated. We've already seen that the web has reached it's saturation point. Unfortunately noone is learning. The marketing companies and companies funding them continue to put so much revenue in to ad streams that they could fund most small countries. The drug companies put more money into the stream than Nike and Budweiser and yet the primary way that consumers come to know their product is still via word of mouth or person to person representation. If a stock had such low returns most people would dump it and the company would go bust. But the marketing just keeps going up and up.
Sales slump, more money into marketing, price goes up to cover sales loss and new marketing funding - sales slump. It's a circle usually only broken by upswings in the economy or by product advancement.
I think that the government should focus on making sure that the college educated marketing firms have legitimate diplomas. I'm sure there's a little guy in a back room churning those things out by the thousands.
it denies the atheists their right to deny God in a public manner :)
Here's the crap part of the whole deal. Way back when record companies paid radio stations to play content. The government said "No, no" and the radio stations stopped paying the radio stations directly. In comes the "indie", a supposedly dissinterested third party paid by the record company to "promote" their music. In turn the "indie" pays the radio station for the "privilage" of just getting to "talk" about the music. Then it's up to the radio station to decide whether or not to play the music. The funny thing is that I hear no mention of what the fees are associated with the privilage of "talking" to the radio stations and from the sound of it it depends on the music and who pays the "indie". The other problem here is that the record company continues to pay the indie for as long as that music plays within the given market. They then turn around and charge the radio station for use of their "product".
To top it all of Hillary Rosen attempts to play the victim to it all stating "What can I do" as if she's being held hostage by the indies. "That's just the way it is" she says while she circumvents the letter of the law. The radio stations pretend that they aren't doing anything wrong, the indies just laugh while they rake in 500,000 here and 600,000 there. It's a nice tidy little cycle that the webcasters won't be included in. Can you see any of the indies going after webcasters? They work for the record companies and the record companies already have all the channels of distribution that they want, therefore there's no need for indies to go out on a limb and provide a service that noone wants to pay for. To top it off that means that the webcasters won't make the same capital that the radio stations will and therefore won't be able to come up with the cash to pay "royalties" easily.
It's a sad sad suck-ass system when the record companies can so easily play the victim in all this.
While I'm not going to argue Microsoft's innocence I will say that Sun shares significant amount of blame for the situation at hand. They are easily guilty of many of the things that MS has done as far as predatory business practices and yet they are the first to condemn MS.
The original issue with Sun vs. MS and Java was that MS was shipping the VM with proprietary code. By itself a controllable issue but the secondary problem arose when MS began to ship IDE's that leveraged that proprietary code making it easy for developers to create java apps that could be dependent on MS and their VM to run properly (NOTE: NOT ABSOLUTELY but COULD BE, just like with VC++ you could write MS independent and standard code).
Sun then sued based on breach of contract and misuse of the Java trademark. It eventually won but majorly screwed that up.
The end agreement stated that MS "COULD" ship the Java VM but that that VM had to conform to Java's compatibility checks. It barred MS from using the Java trademark (to infinity and beyond!) hence the reason you see Microsoft(tm) VM instead of Java(tm) VM, MS cannot legally use Java in the product name. The end agreement said nothing about MS being FORCED to ship the Sun JVM nor did it state that the VM had to keep up with the updates to the changes in the language, nor did it state that MS had to ship any VM at all. The agreement simply stated that if MS CHOSE to ship a JVM that it had to conform to the compatability tests for the JRE it supported.
MS decided to take it's ball and go home. It stopped keeping up with the updates to the language and resigned to keeping the JVM to the compatability set at the time of the original agreement (all nice and legal). Eventually they realized that the people really making use of the JVM were developers who in the end downloaded the JVM and JDK from SUN or from IBM and that sending a JVM out to support 5% of their user base plus having to field the additional support calls was just not financially feasible. They announced well before hand that Windows would be losing the JVM because of the lack of updates and incompatability with current Java version.
This would have been the prime opportunity for SUN to step forward and play "let's make a deal" by buying a place for Java in Windows, like so many other software makers do. The truth is though that for the most part Java on the clientside is DEAD. SUN's profits come from the developers developing server side code that helps SUN to get a foot in to sell high priced servers, license products, and write out lucrative service contracts.
So instead of shelling out some cash and looking like a hypocrit considering their stance with the anti-trust allegations, they decided to go the "easy" route and claim yet another breach of contract by stating that MS was not living up to the original agreement previously set. They claimed that the agreement forced MS to include the VM (the outdated one). It was a win win situation for SUN - they knew most people would be too lazy or ignorant to check the facts of the original case and others would be so blinded by their hate for all things MS that it wouldn't matter. They also knew that MS wanted to avoid any further legal entanglements no matter how frivolous and so threatening MS would get them to reintroduce the tired old VM into Windows. In the end having the VM does little for SUN except in the fact that it sticks it to MS just a little more. Most people falsely assume that MS is making the move to thwart SUN and Java - that's the other part of the win for SUN in that they make MS look like the ogre again - "shipping an outdated VM, HOW DARE THEY! Come on over to java.sun.com we'll set you straight. Everything will be alright."
So there you have a long summation of MS's crimes against Java. I consider them SUN's crimes but oh well.
last I remember reading most of the machines being taken by script kiddies were Linux/Unix machines that admins had left open to attack because of bad security implementations. Being on a *nix based OS does not in anyway free you from being hacked.
Additionally what were FBI and whitehouse running prior to the last time you checked? Just because they are running *nix now doesn't mean they were running NT at some point in the past.
Wouldn't the thought then still stand that a majority of users are using DDR? Therefore wouldn't the comparison be slightly biased if the reviewer knows that the majority of people are using DDR and yet chooses otherwise for the competing test box?