seriously though, I do research before I go to the doctor with symptoms; being informed helps me ask the right questions, and know if the doctor asks the right questions. Doctors aren't infallible, and I believe in being part of my treatment.
that said, I went to a new doctor recently, and the first question he asked was if I needed viagra. I was there for consultation on specific symptoms that had nothing to do with impotence.
Gotta put in my 2 cents on Thomas Distributing. I've been using 3 sets of four AAs from Thomas for over four years now, and they work as well as the day I got them. Add up what I would have spent on Duracells and this was a bargain.
"The biggest problem facing the U.S. isn't the wage gap, but the surge of regulations that prevent the poor from becoming rich (and prevents small companies from becoming large one). "
That seems to me to be a misguided Rush Limbaugh conclusion. I would say the problem is the laws and regulations that keep the rich rich. Forcing seniors into private prescription plans, a tax system that penalizes those who work for wages and rewards those who have enough capital to invest and make more capital and the like are increasing the divide.
"I'd rather have the opportunity to work hard and become wealthy than coast through life with a lower-middle class income after taxes."
That is an ever bigger problem, the worship of monetary wealth. I thought we had outgrown Ayn Rand.
I think it serves as a great tech demo. Features that work will start showing up elsewhere, patents or no patents. Phones are a commodity business, the iPhone is a boutique product. Too expensive for wide adoption, but maybe a portent of things to come.
I feel for you, but I don't see any way that this could be true. Fifteen years ago I paid Compuserve 6 dollars an hour for 2400bps online access. Ten years ago it was a local dialup ISP getting $29.95 a month for "offpeak" access at 56k. Today it's 29.95 a month for 3Mbps access.
My local phone service today includes all the long distance I can eat, voice mail, more call handling options than I'll ever use, and costs 60 bucks a month. My parents paid a base fee for service, had to buy "message blocks" for local calls, and paid anywhere from 45 cents to a buck and half for long distance minutes.
Ten years ago I got my first cell phone, and paid $1 a minute for the first 20 minutes of usage, then 69 cents after that. Today I pay 10 cents a minute for the first 700 minutes (on two lines even) and something for going over, which we never have. I can make calls anywhere I go, never pay for roaming, and the only time calls drop is when I'm driving.
I don't usually think of TV as "tech" in this context, but ten years ago our cable bill with HBO ran something like $75(?). Today Dish costs us $80, with HBO and a DVR.
Your excerpt from the linked article describes the TRACKING lasers - if one continues to read:
"Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction chain is analog."
this kind of behavior most likely violates the terms of whatever merchant processing service they use. tacking on a charge to use credit is definitely not allowed, and as most debit cards get processed through the same system I'd bet that one is not allowed either.
Ballblazer was my favorite. early 3d, quick games, fast paced play, and you could sneak looks at the other half of the screen to check out your opponent.
you are also correct. however, the downside here is that if users, especially businesses, feel a need to take advantage of this "protection" then Novell has succeeded in delegitimizing other distributions. i'm no GPL geek, so I don't know specifically what the license has to say on this, but if programmers or vendors are forced to question their rights to code or distribute then we've lost something.
"First, Novell isn't making deals on behalf of others."
well, yes, they did. the deal was done on behalf of Novell's customers. the deal is specifically designed to indemnify Novell's customers from patent lawsuits brought by Microsoft. thus, Microsoft can pursue a patent suit against Samba, but if you bought a Microsoft approved distribution you won't be penalized.
I would gladly buy CDs at my local store, if they didn't charge $15 and up for just about everything. I'll pay $15 to buy a CD directly from a musician, online or at a club, but not from a retail store.
not to mention that the linked article, and articles linked from that, are pretty much incomprehensible. Microsoft and Novell agree to work together to make Linux and Windows work together, Microsoft agrees to support SUSE for Novell customers, therefore Microsoft owns Linux? Sloppy reasoning, sloppy writing, sloppy discussion.
"After it downloads the IE7 update, regardless of how many other updates you install, it pops up a window. So, in this instance, the article or wherever you got that is correct."
"The user will see a large window advising that IE7 is available to install, and the user will have three choices; install, don't Install, or install later."
I installed XP tonight and when I checked for updates there was, in the midst of 60 or so others, an IE7 entry. I unchecked it and was told that I had disabled a "critical update" and was advised to reenable it. I didn't, so I don't know if there would have been this other option he mentioned.
"When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month."
You can keep Safari up for a month? Seriously, I find it crashing pretty consistently; every couple of days at best. The tough part is that there is no predictability or consistency to the crashes so we can't even avoid offensive sites. In fact, reopening Safari to the exact site it crashed at usually results in an error free session.
Firefox on the other hand, on OS X, NEVER crashes. It's a most well behaved application. On XP my experience is not as good. Firefox, I find, will often remain as a running task, even when a user exits the app properly. Memory usage in that scenario climbs and climbs.
And on the OTHER hand, there is rarely a reason to keep my browsers open for days at a time.
GPL 1 and 2 were developed far from the public eye. V3 is being debated and written under intense scrutiny. It would be hard to avoid the controversy being generated now.
The Linux kernel may not switch, but that will not doom V3, nor will it doom the FSF or Stallman. There is much that has happened since V2, and the attempts to address things like DRM and patents have and will continue to shed light on the ugly underbelly of modern software licensing. This, I think, is good.
"Free software" means something different now. It's not just being able to tweak a text editing program, or encourage community development and review. It's about who will control the millions of PCs in the world. The more that Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA continue to try to lock down the PC, turning it into nothing more than a delivery system for DRMed content, the more relevant the FSF becomes.
I switched to Ask.com for searches about six months ago. Their first results page generally contains:
First: either a WIkipedia link or a link to the "official" site, depending on what you searched for. Ask is good at identifying the nature of the search. Second: about 10 relevant links, with no junk, no ad site, no sales sites.
The downside is that Ask's advertising links are rather obtrusive; they put them at the top and bottom of the page, with a subtly different background color.
My switch from Google was based on a combination of performance and politics: I don't really miss it.
Since you mentioned Asterisk I assume you're open to a PBX solution. If not, you can leave now.
We use Altigen as our PBX and it does what you ask. I can give it a list of numbers to try me at when someone calls, and the caller will have the option to do so, or to leave me a message. It can be set to this "One Number Access" according to a schedule. It can email your voice messages, call you with voice messages or serve your voice messages through its client software or a web interface.
Plus all the usual PBX stuff. It ain't cheap, but it's not as expensive as a traditional system. I would imagine that Asterisk can do most of this, but I have no experience with it.
While I agree with your No Bloat argument, you neglected an oft overlooked reason that IE contains all these "features", and it's not web developers. It's application developers. There are a slew of vertical market applications that many small to midsize companies are using, where the developer has dropped, or maybe never had, its own user interface, in favor of using IE and ActiveX controls. Insurance brokerages, medical practices, law firms and more, all of them have large, commercial, expensive applications available to them for running their businesses, and many of them are IE based. IE in these cases is just the front end to data stores running on everything from SQL Server on Intel to AIX on Power to whatever. Many times with no Internet connectivity at all.
MSFT can't just disable, drop or change these features, because doing so could break an enter business. So they just pile up more and more code into an already chaotic program.
Slashdot Mirror
I WISH that worked.
seriously though, I do research before I go to the doctor with symptoms; being informed helps me ask the right questions, and know if the doctor asks the right questions. Doctors aren't infallible, and I believe in being part of my treatment.
that said, I went to a new doctor recently, and the first question he asked was if I needed viagra. I was there for consultation on specific symptoms that had nothing to do with impotence.
Gotta put in my 2 cents on Thomas Distributing. I've been using 3 sets of four AAs from Thomas for over four years now, and they work as well as the day I got them. Add up what I would have spent on Duracells and this was a bargain.
"The biggest problem facing the U.S. isn't the wage gap, but the surge of regulations that prevent the poor from becoming rich (and prevents small companies from becoming large one). "
That seems to me to be a misguided Rush Limbaugh conclusion. I would say the problem is the laws and regulations that keep the rich rich. Forcing seniors into private prescription plans, a tax system that penalizes those who work for wages and rewards those who have enough capital to invest and make more capital and the like are increasing the divide.
"I'd rather have the opportunity to work hard and become wealthy than coast through life with a lower-middle class income after taxes."
That is an ever bigger problem, the worship of monetary wealth. I thought we had outgrown Ayn Rand.
I think it serves as a great tech demo. Features that work will start showing up elsewhere, patents or no patents. Phones are a commodity business, the iPhone is a boutique product. Too expensive for wide adoption, but maybe a portent of things to come.
wow, a new hard drive that's bigger than last year's model. Innovation is dripping off of this one.
I assume others will speak to the inclusion of Office.
I feel for you, but I don't see any way that this could be true. Fifteen years ago I paid Compuserve 6 dollars an hour for 2400bps online access. Ten years ago it was a local dialup ISP getting $29.95 a month for "offpeak" access at 56k. Today it's 29.95 a month for 3Mbps access.
My local phone service today includes all the long distance I can eat, voice mail, more call handling options than I'll ever use, and costs 60 bucks a month. My parents paid a base fee for service, had to buy "message blocks" for local calls, and paid anywhere from 45 cents to a buck and half for long distance minutes.
Ten years ago I got my first cell phone, and paid $1 a minute for the first 20 minutes of usage, then 69 cents after that. Today I pay 10 cents a minute for the first 700 minutes (on two lines even) and something for going over, which we never have. I can make calls anywhere I go, never pay for roaming, and the only time calls drop is when I'm driving.
I don't usually think of TV as "tech" in this context, but ten years ago our cable bill with HBO ran something like $75(?). Today Dish costs us $80, with HBO and a DVR.
Your excerpt from the linked article describes the TRACKING lasers - if one continues to read:
"Two additional laser beams are directed at the left groove wall and the right groove wall just below the tracking beams. Modulation on the individual grooves is reflected to scanner mirrors and onto left and right photo optical sensors. The variations of the modulated light cause the audio sensors to develop an electrical representation of the mechanical modulation of the grooves. The entire sound reproduction chain is analog."
this kind of behavior most likely violates the terms of whatever merchant processing service they use. tacking on a charge to use credit is definitely not allowed, and as most debit cards get processed through the same system I'd bet that one is not allowed either.
Ballblazer was my favorite. early 3d, quick games, fast paced play, and you could sneak looks at the other half of the screen to check out your opponent.
you are also correct. however, the downside here is that if users, especially businesses, feel a need to take advantage of this "protection" then Novell has succeeded in delegitimizing other distributions. i'm no GPL geek, so I don't know specifically what the license has to say on this, but if programmers or vendors are forced to question their rights to code or distribute then we've lost something.
"First, Novell isn't making deals on behalf of others."
well, yes, they did. the deal was done on behalf of Novell's customers. the deal is specifically designed to indemnify Novell's customers from patent lawsuits brought by Microsoft. thus, Microsoft can pursue a patent suit against Samba, but if you bought a Microsoft approved distribution you won't be penalized.
maybe now people will stop laughing at my suit against Pfizer over those little blue pills.
I would gladly buy CDs at my local store, if they didn't charge $15 and up for just about everything. I'll pay $15 to buy a CD directly from a musician, online or at a club, but not from a retail store.
Hell, the guy wrote one good book and 20 pieces of shit. Who cares what he thinks?
not to mention that the linked article, and articles linked from that, are pretty much incomprehensible. Microsoft and Novell agree to work together to make Linux and Windows work together, Microsoft agrees to support SUSE for Novell customers, therefore Microsoft owns Linux? Sloppy reasoning, sloppy writing, sloppy discussion.
"After it downloads the IE7 update, regardless of how many other updates you install, it pops up a window. So, in this instance, the article or wherever you got that is correct."
thank you
"The user will see a large window advising that IE7 is available to install, and the user will have three choices; install, don't Install, or install later."
I installed XP tonight and when I checked for updates there was, in the midst of 60 or so others, an IE7 entry. I unchecked it and was told that I had disabled a "critical update" and was advised to reenable it. I didn't, so I don't know if there would have been this other option he mentioned.
Sorry, all it does is stop IE7 from being downloaded and installed by Windows Update. You'll still have IE6 installed.
"Dude, WGA is not required for high-priority updates."
But, amusingly, it IS required to run Microsoft's IE7 blocker.
how would they get to Mars? do they have an extremophile space program?
"When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month."
You can keep Safari up for a month? Seriously, I find it crashing pretty consistently; every couple of days at best. The tough part is that there is no predictability or consistency to the crashes so we can't even avoid offensive sites. In fact, reopening Safari to the exact site it crashed at usually results in an error free session.
Firefox on the other hand, on OS X, NEVER crashes. It's a most well behaved application. On XP my experience is not as good. Firefox, I find, will often remain as a running task, even when a user exits the app properly. Memory usage in that scenario climbs and climbs.
And on the OTHER hand, there is rarely a reason to keep my browsers open for days at a time.
GPL 1 and 2 were developed far from the public eye. V3 is being debated and written under intense scrutiny. It would be hard to avoid the controversy being generated now.
The Linux kernel may not switch, but that will not doom V3, nor will it doom the FSF or Stallman. There is much that has happened since V2, and the attempts to address things like DRM and patents have and will continue to shed light on the ugly underbelly of modern software licensing. This, I think, is good.
"Free software" means something different now. It's not just being able to tweak a text editing program, or encourage community development and review. It's about who will control the millions of PCs in the world. The more that Microsoft and the RIAA/MPAA continue to try to lock down the PC, turning it into nothing more than a delivery system for DRMed content, the more relevant the FSF becomes.
I switched to Ask.com for searches about six months ago. Their first results page generally contains:
First: either a WIkipedia link or a link to the "official" site, depending on what you searched for. Ask is good at identifying the nature of the search.
Second: about 10 relevant links, with no junk, no ad site, no sales sites.
The downside is that Ask's advertising links are rather obtrusive; they put them at the top and bottom of the page, with a subtly different background color.
My switch from Google was based on a combination of performance and politics: I don't really miss it.
Since you mentioned Asterisk I assume you're open to a PBX solution. If not, you can leave now.
We use Altigen as our PBX and it does what you ask. I can give it a list of numbers to try me at when someone calls, and the caller will have the option to do so, or to leave me a message. It can be set to this "One Number Access" according to a schedule. It can email your voice messages, call you with voice messages or serve your voice messages through its client software or a web interface.
Plus all the usual PBX stuff. It ain't cheap, but it's not as expensive as a traditional system. I would imagine that Asterisk can do most of this, but I have no experience with it.
While I agree with your No Bloat argument, you neglected an oft overlooked reason that IE contains all these "features", and it's not web developers. It's application developers. There are a slew of vertical market applications that many small to midsize companies are using, where the developer has dropped, or maybe never had, its own user interface, in favor of using IE and ActiveX controls. Insurance brokerages, medical practices, law firms and more, all of them have large, commercial, expensive applications available to them for running their businesses, and many of them are IE based. IE in these cases is just the front end to data stores running on everything from SQL Server on Intel to AIX on Power to whatever. Many times with no Internet connectivity at all.
MSFT can't just disable, drop or change these features, because doing so could break an enter business. So they just pile up more and more code into an already chaotic program.