Thank you. I've been "politely" shown the way to that article no fewer than 6 times now.
I think the reason for so many people missing it, is that story ran Friday evening, and was scrolled out of the "Older News" slashbox (not to mention the front page) by the time we got back into work on Monday...
Perhaps a Slashback-like "Best of the Weekend" report on Monday morning would alleviate this problem...
Amazingly, I did check the archives...probably should have searched, but I skimmed through the older articles to make sure I hadn't missed it while I was looking for the Importance of Being Debian link...
Now I'm gonna run off to get my eyes checked and cut my belly.
(and I could have sworn I freshened up on the latest headlines Friday evening, too...weird)
Mandrake puts out a beta, and it gets front-page coverage, but Debian Woody finally goes gold, and Rob isn't all over it? I know there was a Debian article last week and all, but I'd think that after almost 2 years this would be a significant cause for cheerleading and celebration!
Well what probably happened was he eavesdropped on some super-l33t high-school kids talking about 0-day warez, and pronouncing it the heavily l33t accented way: WAR-ehz. But he misunderstood them and thought they said 0-day Wormz.
Not at all, but Institutional logic and philosophy assumes that Acts of God are not preventablle, but Acts of Man are. You can't really blame a hurricane on someone the same way you can blame a plane crash. Governmental organizations tend to take the view that if blame can be assigned to a phenomenon, then it can be prevented (by assigning the blame before it happens, I guess). I'm not sure if I agree, but that's the way it is.
Three thousand people dying every week from smoking and car accidents don't generally take 8 billion worth of well-developed downtown Manhattan real-estate with them.
THAT'S the real emergency. Population grows back in a few years...skyscrapers cost a lot of money, and are expected to last hundreds.
Well, in a limited fashion. TWC is rolling out iControl here in Central Florida. It's basically a Video-On-Demand service that allows for pause, rewind, and many other TiVo-like features, but apparently only for Pay-Per-View movies.
I've also noticed an HBO On Demand channel appear in my lineup in the past two weeks, with a "Coming Soon" label on it. The on-screen display for this channel indicates it'll be a repository where HBO subscribers can watch HBO-specific programming On Demand. I'll be interested to see if there's an added premium for this, and how far back they carry the catalog (It would be nice to catch up with the Sopranos or watch the full run of From the Earth to the Moon without having to buy the DVD sets).
At any rate, I had a tech come out to replace my burnt-out cable modem a few weeks ago (plenty of storms here on the Southeast Coast - hence my nickname), and he replaced my cable box with a new model by Scientific Atlanta. He said I'd need this when the iControl went live in the area. I haven't yet, but I guess when I get home I'll bust out the screwdriver and have a look-see what's inside the thing...
We just need to be careful not to set the priority of the self-replication program on the robot probe all the way up to 99, you know, just in case they come across other intelligent life.
"We come in peace. *OVERRIDE* Break target down into component atoms for replication."
Anyone who thinks machining technology isn't sexy has probably never visited a machining plant and seen steel bars being lathed and rolled into transmission gearshafts for motorcycles.
Flying commuter trains are nice and all (I'm all for efficient public transportation), but really, they just hover a few inches, and the novelty of them will wear off soon enough. Good machine tools, however, increase manufacturing output, and allow all kinds of new products to become available on the cheap.
In fact, machining is probably the single most important part of our industrial complex. Without machine tools, we'd have almost none of the technology we have today.
In the days of Napster, I used to search for songs/groups I knew I liked, but hadn't heard in a while (or sometimes even, stuff I really liked and already had), and then download the share listing from a couple prolific hosts that had them. I rightly figured that if someone had 2 complete albumns up for download from 2 different bands I liked, maybe I'd dig some of the other stuff that person was sharing. I found out about a couple good groups like this.
These days of course, I can't really do that anymore, and it's the one killer feature of Napster that I really miss a lot. I once again have to rely on music reviews on other web-sites, word of mouth, and Amazon recommendations to point me at some new acts which I may or may not like.
An Amazon-like recommendation system from a file-share network (users with music selections like yours also have this stuff that you don't) would kick a lot of ass. Good music would pretty much promote itself with such a system. Unfortunately, this only seems to be possible using centralized database servers, which would constitute a single point of legal attack against such a network. But hey, we can dream right?
I suspected this might have been why Friday's recently changed their uniforms. I complained to my waitress that she didn't have a funky hat on, and where did all the buttons go. "Oh, they changed all that a few months ago". Now they wear boring black polo shirts and I don't even want to go there anymore, if I can't be served by a cutie in a funny hat and polka-dot tights.
Culture is not art
on
Built For Use
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Art is a part of culture. A valuable one too, and I don't think anyone is denying that. But the discussion here is whether cutting edge art is appropriate for interactive service.
Something can be beautiful to look at, and if all you ever intend to do is look at it, sure, pull out every stop to make it as awesome in appearance as you can. But sometimes you want to build something that will be used for more than just looking at. A corporate web site is optimally a tool for driving profitability. A good way to drive profitability is to faciliate commercial transactions between the corporation and its customers. A good way to facilitate commerical transactions is to make them quick, easy, inexpensive, and non-frustrating for both parties. Driving those transactions through an interface that is designed solely to look good with little thought on how easy it is to use is not necessarily a good way to accomplish the above.
This is not to say that a functional and easy interface can't look good. Several sites have managed to build easy to use interfaces which are also attractive. But in these cases, designers have carefully planned out the function, and then optimized the form to implement the function in an attractive way.
In order to accomplish this designers may have to constrain their creativity to work within certain parameters. For instance, Putting all the type on your site in a custom font might look great on your screen, but how does it look for someone who doesn't have that font? Forcing customers to download a font in order for a page to look good is a senseless frustration which does nothing to help them give you some money for your goods or services. On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to use fonts that are widely distributed, that can still look pretty good.
Nobody is saying don't use any pictures on your site. Even using sparse graphics in place of ugly grey javascript order buttons isn't a capital sin, but if customers have to load a page full of large-size graphic files to choose an item/service to order, another page full of large-size graphic files to adjust the quantity, another page of large-size graphic files to enter a shipping address, another page of large-size graphic files to enter payment information, and another page of large-size graphic files to confirm the info they have entered and finally place the order, they might not be inclined to complete the whole process, and even if they are, you've paid a web designer a lot of money to waste a lot of people's time (not to mention the extra expense of bandwidth for you as a site owner to serve out all those graphics).
Art doesn't have to be the exclusive realm of museums, but not every store has to be a museum, either. You can design and make things look good, and even a bit artistic, without going completely avant-garde and making your business harder to conduct.
More than just indoctrination, it's a concious act of nationalization. Until the latter part of the 19th century, most Americans held allegiance to their State above allegiance to the Union as a whole. That was a large part of what the Civil War was about. Several states and their citizens felt that if the Federal Government enacted laws which severely impacted the rights of States to govern themselves and their citizens, then those states should be able to secede from the Union. Regardless of my feelings about some of the issues which led to secession, I believe a state should reserve this right. Pride in their statehood, and bristling at the loss of their independence from the Federal Government is what motivates many southern citizens to fly the Confederate Flag even to this day (Many are also racist, and there is an unfortunate mixing of ideals there, which are troublesome to explain, and have kept me from flying a Southern Cross on my own lawn)
Children who have grown up pledging Allegiance to the Stars and Bars think of themselves as Citizens of America rather than Citizens of Michigan, or Tennessee, or Florid or New York. It's a matter of identity, and we're growing from thinking of the United States as a loose confederation of cooperating State governments (the way the Federal Government was originally designed to operate), as a tight unified nation where the individual states are somewhat less important. This has advantages and disadvantages, and it's not clear how far the trend will go, or how reversible it may turn out to be if the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
There are a few places in the country where the identity of statehood is still held more sacred than others. Texas is a good example. That's the only state that has written into its Constitution a provision that the State flag be given equal treatment to the National flag (the treaty which admitted Texas to the Union required this provision to be allowed, as it otherwise is against federal law. In all other states, the state flag cannot be larger or be flown as high as the Stars and Stripes). And when I went there, I couldn't help but notice it. Those Texans can fly a flag, I tell you! I personally believe that as a matter of pride, Texans sew together the largest American flag they possibly can, just so they can fly a Lone Star that big right next to it. Every car dealership in Dallas flies a pair of flags which can be seen for miles away. Somewhere it's probably written that the optimal Texas flag can be seen from space.
Umm, exactly what's difficult about that? Every japanese bill has it's yen value legibly printed in arabic numerals on the upper corners of the bill's face.
Here's photos of the 1000, 5000 and 10,000 yen bills, and here's photos and information about the 2000 yen bill.
Hmm...my googlebar for mozilla does the exact same thing from the "page info" menu button.
I would be curious to know if Google had any official feelings on the Googlebar project. Do any mozilla-loving Google hackers use this utility for instance? Have any submitted code for it? Will Google be offering any sort of official support for Mozilla in the future?
The thing is, right now, hundreds of companies are being forced to use Microsoft software. Well, not forced, but seriously coerced. For instance, any company which wishes to bid on a contract with the government must submit communications and documentation in MS Word format. You can argue that there are plenty of alternative applications which can output this format, but the fact is, given the competition for these contracts, eye-candy, advanced formatting, and intricate publishing become important considerations in your documentation efforts. 95% of users don't need the advanced features of Word or Excel for their everyday duties, but I'd bet that 95% of Tech Writers submitting documentation for Federal Contracts do. And those Tech Writers also have to share all their advanced documentation with large engineering teams, who also need Word in order to submit changes for final editing. And pretty soon the whole damn team needs Office because supporting two different platforms is an expensive pain in the ass for the I.T. department, and however much us I.T. geeks think we'll be able to save by transitioning the whole team to thin clients running Gnome or KDE desktops with OpenOffice and Evolution, we've got that core group of users who HAS to submit documentation to the customer in Word.
The thing Microsoft really fears is the growing notion that governments should require information transactions and document submissions to be in open, well-documented and non-proprietary formats. If the DoD suddenly came at my team with a new requirement that all documentation needs to be submitted in OpenOffice XML format, I'd happily transition everyone to Linux (well, I'd probably shit a brick, but then I'd roll up my sleeves and get to work). By issuing such a REQUIREMENT that documentation was NOT to be submitted in Word format, Microsoft would have to build in compatibility with the new standard format, or they'd be locked out of the lucrative market of federal contractor customers (not to mention Uncle Sam himself).
Yeah, they'd have to adapt or die alright. But realistically, there's not going to be such a hard turnaround in the very near future. Especially when the U.S. has a war to fight. The government shouldn't centrally manage information transactions though. New projects at new departments should be free to adopt their own requirements for bid and documentation submission. By allowing submissions in OOXML, for instance, a project on a tight budget could probably get a few better bids, from small or young companies that aren't entrenched in a Microsoft addiction, and therefore don't pay out a significant portion of their overhead costs to Redmond. New projects sometimes grow, old projects sometimes die, and by gradual turns, the ecology of the market would change. This is better for everyone than a sudden forced rollover to an unfamiliar platform.
But Microsoft doesn't want to lose its guaranteed income. They would rather Uncle Sam insist that to do business with America, you have to do business with Microsoft first. A pretty arrogant position to take, but who ever thought Microsoft was humble?
Microsoft's FUD rings true, though...this transition would cost a lot in terms of time and resources (It would probably take me 6 months to a year to painlessly move my 70 users, although I could accelerate that with a few minor aches). What they don't say is that this is because everyone's dug themselves deep into a hole with Microsoft, and will have to dig themselves back out. Once out though, the overhead charges go way down, and the long term benefits are legion.
Of course, long term benefits are great, but when you have to report your earnings and expenses to the public quarterly to keep your capital flowing, and have to renew your contracts with the government annually, there's just no time when it's comfortable to take that hit...and the longer you're entrenched in MS, the harder that hit is going to impact you. It's just a lot easier to pay the tax to Redmond, add it to your contract bidding costs (and thus increasing your absolute profits, anyway, even if margins stay the same), and wait for the checks to come.
Change will come...it's here now...but change doesn't have to be dramatic and sudden (in fact that's sometimes hurtful). Like Rome wasn't built (and didn't fall) in one day (or even a fiscal year), Microsoft didn't get to where it is, and won't dissolve, in such a short time, either. However much they freak out in their press-reports about This restriction will cause us to withdraw Windows from the market, or that license requirement from the government will vaporize a 300 billion dollar industry, they're not going to just vanish anytime soon. They'll keep doing business, like any other company, and while they may evolve into something entirely new, I doubt we'll see them totally killed.
Argument still holds. Netscape adapted. It was a bit painful, and they ended up selling out to AOL, but that's better than dissolving entirely. As for their browser code, it's also been evolving nicely to meet the environmental challenges, and should start eating back IE's market share in large bites soon, as various ISPs (AOL, Compuserve) integrate it into their product offerings, OEMs bundle it with new systems, and developers target it for new applications.
There's a few very good reasons this won't work
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
Just from reading the rest of the paragraph you quoted:
On the AM side, Clear Channel's three area stations -- WRC, WTEM and WTNT -- rely heavily on syndicated fare...The daily three-hour "Money Talk" program on WRC (1260) is one such "brokered" show.
In other words, that $1200/hour rate is for airtime on the AM band, which by nature is definitely NOT large-market. Your chances of getting kids to tune into AM after school are just about zero. How many kids even realize there are still stations on AM. How many of those ever tune into those stations to see what's on them? How many of THOSE are trend-setting types?
I bet the 3-5 pm slot on the local large-market FM station will probably run you $12,000/hour, if you can get it that cheap (The commercials can go for upwards of $400/minute).
Re:Anybody ever think about..
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, they're pretty careful about their stations competing against each other. Those several stations, however, are almost assuredly guaranteed to play the same thing that their several stations play in all the other markets they're in.
Without knowing what city you're in, I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack), a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station, playing "hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s", a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal (Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Styx, Van Halen...and 50-50 says they have a "Two-fer Tuesdays program), A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd (Britney, N-Sync, O-Town, Enrique, etc), a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd (They might even spice things up with an all 80s lunch or something), and/or a "Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
And like it says in the article, almost all their stations probably air 16-20 minutes of commercials per hour during peak times.
The AP article quoted a high-level Army recruitment officer saying that if they get 300 recruits out of this campaign, it will pay for itself.
That means the Army spends $25k in marketing and advertising for *each* recruit they get.
I wonder what would happen to enlistment if they gave up the high-profile dramatic ads in lieu of a much more simple campaign, modestly marketed in 5-10 second spots and in simple type in newspapers, magazines, and high-school posters:
I'm not an AOL subscriber, but my ex-roommate was. He used to get TONS of sex-spam IMs (like more than I do over ICQ), so this is a problem already. I've also gotten a few over AIM (and GAIM), when I've been logged onto AOL Community Chat rooms. Spammers have bots that mine the chat-rooms for screen-names already and blast out IMs to them. They also have bots that log into chat-rooms with porn links in the user-profiles, or who repeatedly spam the channel with porn links in the chat window. Fortunately, all the relevant clients include an ignore button.
The GPL doesn't give you the right to control what I do with your software anyway. It denies me the right to control what others may do with your software (plus my modifications if any), once I share it with them. It further denies those others the right to exert control over anyone else.
Otherwise, I'm free to use your knowledge (as embodied in the licensed code) to my fullest benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. I've been "politely" shown the way to that article no fewer than 6 times now.
I think the reason for so many people missing it, is that story ran Friday evening, and was scrolled out of the "Older News" slashbox (not to mention the front page) by the time we got back into work on Monday...
Perhaps a Slashback-like "Best of the Weekend" report on Monday morning would alleviate this problem...
Well would you look at that...
Amazingly, I did check the archives...probably should have searched, but I skimmed through the older articles to make sure I hadn't missed it while I was looking for the Importance of Being Debian link...
Now I'm gonna run off to get my eyes checked and cut my belly.
(and I could have sworn I freshened up on the latest headlines Friday evening, too...weird)
Mandrake puts out a beta, and it gets front-page coverage, but Debian Woody finally goes gold, and Rob isn't all over it? I know there was a Debian article last week and all, but I'd think that after almost 2 years this would be a significant cause for cheerleading and celebration!
Well what probably happened was he eavesdropped on some super-l33t high-school kids talking about 0-day warez, and pronouncing it the heavily l33t accented way: WAR-ehz. But he misunderstood them and thought they said 0-day Wormz.
"I'm gonna download me some killa 0-day wormz!"
Not at all, but Institutional logic and philosophy assumes that Acts of God are not preventablle, but Acts of Man are. You can't really blame a hurricane on someone the same way you can blame a plane crash. Governmental organizations tend to take the view that if blame can be assigned to a phenomenon, then it can be prevented (by assigning the blame before it happens, I guess). I'm not sure if I agree, but that's the way it is.
Three thousand people dying every week from smoking and car accidents don't generally take 8 billion worth of well-developed downtown Manhattan real-estate with them.
THAT'S the real emergency. Population grows back in a few years...skyscrapers cost a lot of money, and are expected to last hundreds.
Well, in a limited fashion. TWC is rolling out iControl here in Central Florida. It's basically a Video-On-Demand service that allows for pause, rewind, and many other TiVo-like features, but apparently only for Pay-Per-View movies.
I've also noticed an HBO On Demand channel appear in my lineup in the past two weeks, with a "Coming Soon" label on it. The on-screen display for this channel indicates it'll be a repository where HBO subscribers can watch HBO-specific programming On Demand. I'll be interested to see if there's an added premium for this, and how far back they carry the catalog (It would be nice to catch up with the Sopranos or watch the full run of From the Earth to the Moon without having to buy the DVD sets).
At any rate, I had a tech come out to replace my burnt-out cable modem a few weeks ago (plenty of storms here on the Southeast Coast - hence my nickname), and he replaced my cable box with a new model by Scientific Atlanta. He said I'd need this when the iControl went live in the area. I haven't yet, but I guess when I get home I'll bust out the screwdriver and have a look-see what's inside the thing...
We just need to be careful not to set the priority of the self-replication program on the robot probe all the way up to 99, you know, just in case they come across other intelligent life.
"We come in peace. *OVERRIDE* Break target down into component atoms for replication."
Testify!
Anyone who thinks machining technology isn't sexy has probably never visited a machining plant and seen steel bars being lathed and rolled into transmission gearshafts for motorcycles.
Flying commuter trains are nice and all (I'm all for efficient public transportation), but really, they just hover a few inches, and the novelty of them will wear off soon enough. Good machine tools, however, increase manufacturing output, and allow all kinds of new products to become available on the cheap.
In fact, machining is probably the single most important part of our industrial complex. Without machine tools, we'd have almost none of the technology we have today.
Machining: The gift that keeps on giving!
In the days of Napster, I used to search for songs/groups I knew I liked, but hadn't heard in a while (or sometimes even, stuff I really liked and already had), and then download the share listing from a couple prolific hosts that had them. I rightly figured that if someone had 2 complete albumns up for download from 2 different bands I liked, maybe I'd dig some of the other stuff that person was sharing. I found out about a couple good groups like this.
These days of course, I can't really do that anymore, and it's the one killer feature of Napster that I really miss a lot. I once again have to rely on music reviews on other web-sites, word of mouth, and Amazon recommendations to point me at some new acts which I may or may not like.
An Amazon-like recommendation system from a file-share network (users with music selections like yours also have this stuff that you don't) would kick a lot of ass. Good music would pretty much promote itself with such a system. Unfortunately, this only seems to be possible using centralized database servers, which would constitute a single point of legal attack against such a network. But hey, we can dream right?
I suspected this might have been why Friday's recently changed their uniforms. I complained to my waitress that she didn't have a funky hat on, and where did all the buttons go. "Oh, they changed all that a few months ago". Now they wear boring black polo shirts and I don't even want to go there anymore, if I can't be served by a cutie in a funny hat and polka-dot tights.
Art is a part of culture. A valuable one too, and I don't think anyone is denying that. But the discussion here is whether cutting edge art is appropriate for interactive service.
Something can be beautiful to look at, and if all you ever intend to do is look at it, sure, pull out every stop to make it as awesome in appearance as you can. But sometimes you want to build something that will be used for more than just looking at. A corporate web site is optimally a tool for driving profitability. A good way to drive profitability is to faciliate commercial transactions between the corporation and its customers. A good way to facilitate commerical transactions is to make them quick, easy, inexpensive, and non-frustrating for both parties. Driving those transactions through an interface that is designed solely to look good with little thought on how easy it is to use is not necessarily a good way to accomplish the above.
This is not to say that a functional and easy interface can't look good. Several sites have managed to build easy to use interfaces which are also attractive. But in these cases, designers have carefully planned out the function, and then optimized the form to implement the function in an attractive way.
In order to accomplish this designers may have to constrain their creativity to work within certain parameters. For instance, Putting all the type on your site in a custom font might look great on your screen, but how does it look for someone who doesn't have that font? Forcing customers to download a font in order for a page to look good is a senseless frustration which does nothing to help them give you some money for your goods or services. On the other hand, there are plenty of ways to use fonts that are widely distributed, that can still look pretty good.
Nobody is saying don't use any pictures on your site. Even using sparse graphics in place of ugly grey javascript order buttons isn't a capital sin, but if customers have to load a page full of large-size graphic files to choose an item/service to order, another page full of large-size graphic files to adjust the quantity, another page of large-size graphic files to enter a shipping address, another page of large-size graphic files to enter payment information, and another page of large-size graphic files to confirm the info they have entered and finally place the order, they might not be inclined to complete the whole process, and even if they are, you've paid a web designer a lot of money to waste a lot of people's time (not to mention the extra expense of bandwidth for you as a site owner to serve out all those graphics).
Art doesn't have to be the exclusive realm of museums, but not every store has to be a museum, either. You can design and make things look good, and even a bit artistic, without going completely avant-garde and making your business harder to conduct.
More than just indoctrination, it's a concious act of nationalization. Until the latter part of the 19th century, most Americans held allegiance to their State above allegiance to the Union as a whole. That was a large part of what the Civil War was about. Several states and their citizens felt that if the Federal Government enacted laws which severely impacted the rights of States to govern themselves and their citizens, then those states should be able to secede from the Union. Regardless of my feelings about some of the issues which led to secession, I believe a state should reserve this right. Pride in their statehood, and bristling at the loss of their independence from the Federal Government is what motivates many southern citizens to fly the Confederate Flag even to this day (Many are also racist, and there is an unfortunate mixing of ideals there, which are troublesome to explain, and have kept me from flying a Southern Cross on my own lawn)
Children who have grown up pledging Allegiance to the Stars and Bars think of themselves as Citizens of America rather than Citizens of Michigan, or Tennessee, or Florid or New York. It's a matter of identity, and we're growing from thinking of the United States as a loose confederation of cooperating State governments (the way the Federal Government was originally designed to operate), as a tight unified nation where the individual states are somewhat less important. This has advantages and disadvantages, and it's not clear how far the trend will go, or how reversible it may turn out to be if the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
There are a few places in the country where the identity of statehood is still held more sacred than others. Texas is a good example. That's the only state that has written into its Constitution a provision that the State flag be given equal treatment to the National flag (the treaty which admitted Texas to the Union required this provision to be allowed, as it otherwise is against federal law. In all other states, the state flag cannot be larger or be flown as high as the Stars and Stripes). And when I went there, I couldn't help but notice it. Those Texans can fly a flag, I tell you! I personally believe that as a matter of pride, Texans sew together the largest American flag they possibly can, just so they can fly a Lone Star that big right next to it. Every car dealership in Dallas flies a pair of flags which can be seen for miles away. Somewhere it's probably written that the optimal Texas flag can be seen from space.
I can't speak for other countries' money, but in Japan, at least, all coins except the 5-yen have arabic numerals.
Umm, exactly what's difficult about that? Every japanese bill has it's yen value legibly printed in arabic numerals on the upper corners of the bill's face.
Here's photos of the 1000, 5000 and 10,000 yen bills, and here's photos and information about the 2000 yen bill.
or HIBT?
Hmm...my googlebar for mozilla does the exact same thing from the "page info" menu button.
I would be curious to know if Google had any official feelings on the Googlebar project. Do any mozilla-loving Google hackers use this utility for instance? Have any submitted code for it? Will Google be offering any sort of official support for Mozilla in the future?
How would the Emporer have gotten the plans for his Death Star delivered, without anyone finding out about it?
The thing is, right now, hundreds of companies are being forced to use Microsoft software. Well, not forced, but seriously coerced. For instance, any company which wishes to bid on a contract with the government must submit communications and documentation in MS Word format. You can argue that there are plenty of alternative applications which can output this format, but the fact is, given the competition for these contracts, eye-candy, advanced formatting, and intricate publishing become important considerations in your documentation efforts. 95% of users don't need the advanced features of Word or Excel for their everyday duties, but I'd bet that 95% of Tech Writers submitting documentation for Federal Contracts do. And those Tech Writers also have to share all their advanced documentation with large engineering teams, who also need Word in order to submit changes for final editing. And pretty soon the whole damn team needs Office because supporting two different platforms is an expensive pain in the ass for the I.T. department, and however much us I.T. geeks think we'll be able to save by transitioning the whole team to thin clients running Gnome or KDE desktops with OpenOffice and Evolution, we've got that core group of users who HAS to submit documentation to the customer in Word.
The thing Microsoft really fears is the growing notion that governments should require information transactions and document submissions to be in open, well-documented and non-proprietary formats. If the DoD suddenly came at my team with a new requirement that all documentation needs to be submitted in OpenOffice XML format, I'd happily transition everyone to Linux (well, I'd probably shit a brick, but then I'd roll up my sleeves and get to work). By issuing such a REQUIREMENT that documentation was NOT to be submitted in Word format, Microsoft would have to build in compatibility with the new standard format, or they'd be locked out of the lucrative market of federal contractor customers (not to mention Uncle Sam himself).
Yeah, they'd have to adapt or die alright. But realistically, there's not going to be such a hard turnaround in the very near future. Especially when the U.S. has a war to fight. The government shouldn't centrally manage information transactions though. New projects at new departments should be free to adopt their own requirements for bid and documentation submission. By allowing submissions in OOXML, for instance, a project on a tight budget could probably get a few better bids, from small or young companies that aren't entrenched in a Microsoft addiction, and therefore don't pay out a significant portion of their overhead costs to Redmond. New projects sometimes grow, old projects sometimes die, and by gradual turns, the ecology of the market would change. This is better for everyone than a sudden forced rollover to an unfamiliar platform.
But Microsoft doesn't want to lose its guaranteed income. They would rather Uncle Sam insist that to do business with America, you have to do business with Microsoft first. A pretty arrogant position to take, but who ever thought Microsoft was humble?
Microsoft's FUD rings true, though...this transition would cost a lot in terms of time and resources (It would probably take me 6 months to a year to painlessly move my 70 users, although I could accelerate that with a few minor aches). What they don't say is that this is because everyone's dug themselves deep into a hole with Microsoft, and will have to dig themselves back out. Once out though, the overhead charges go way down, and the long term benefits are legion.
Of course, long term benefits are great, but when you have to report your earnings and expenses to the public quarterly to keep your capital flowing, and have to renew your contracts with the government annually, there's just no time when it's comfortable to take that hit...and the longer you're entrenched in MS, the harder that hit is going to impact you. It's just a lot easier to pay the tax to Redmond, add it to your contract bidding costs (and thus increasing your absolute profits, anyway, even if margins stay the same), and wait for the checks to come.
Change will come...it's here now...but change doesn't have to be dramatic and sudden (in fact that's sometimes hurtful). Like Rome wasn't built (and didn't fall) in one day (or even a fiscal year), Microsoft didn't get to where it is, and won't dissolve, in such a short time, either. However much they freak out in their press-reports about This restriction will cause us to withdraw Windows from the market, or that license requirement from the government will vaporize a 300 billion dollar industry, they're not going to just vanish anytime soon. They'll keep doing business, like any other company, and while they may evolve into something entirely new, I doubt we'll see them totally killed.
And that's just fine with me.
Argument still holds. Netscape adapted. It was a bit painful, and they ended up selling out to AOL, but that's better than dissolving entirely. As for their browser code, it's also been evolving nicely to meet the environmental challenges, and should start eating back IE's market share in large bites soon, as various ISPs (AOL, Compuserve) integrate it into their product offerings, OEMs bundle it with new systems, and developers target it for new applications.
Just from reading the rest of the paragraph you quoted:
On the AM side, Clear Channel's three area stations -- WRC, WTEM and WTNT -- rely heavily on syndicated fare...The daily three-hour "Money Talk" program on WRC (1260) is one such "brokered" show.
In other words, that $1200/hour rate is for airtime on the AM band, which by nature is definitely NOT large-market. Your chances of getting kids to tune into AM after school are just about zero. How many kids even realize there are still stations on AM. How many of those ever tune into those stations to see what's on them? How many of THOSE are trend-setting types?
I bet the 3-5 pm slot on the local large-market FM station will probably run you $12,000/hour, if you can get it that cheap (The commercials can go for upwards of $400/minute).
No, they're pretty careful about their stations competing against each other. Those several stations, however, are almost assuredly guaranteed to play the same thing that their several stations play in all the other markets they're in.
Without knowing what city you're in, I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack), a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station, playing "hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s", a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal (Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Styx, Van Halen...and 50-50 says they have a "Two-fer Tuesdays program), A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd (Britney, N-Sync, O-Town, Enrique, etc), a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd (They might even spice things up with an all 80s lunch or something), and/or a "Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
And like it says in the article, almost all their stations probably air 16-20 minutes of commercials per hour during peak times.
2016 - 1776 = 250
Who would have thunk it!
The AP article quoted a high-level Army recruitment officer saying that if they get 300 recruits out of this campaign, it will pay for itself.
That means the Army spends $25k in marketing and advertising for *each* recruit they get.
I wonder what would happen to enlistment if they gave up the high-profile dramatic ads in lieu of a much more simple campaign, modestly marketed in 5-10 second spots and in simple type in newspapers, magazines, and high-school posters:
"Join the Army. $20,000 signing bonus. Paid cash"
I'm not an AOL subscriber, but my ex-roommate was. He used to get TONS of sex-spam IMs (like more than I do over ICQ), so this is a problem already. I've also gotten a few over AIM (and GAIM), when I've been logged onto AOL Community Chat rooms. Spammers have bots that mine the chat-rooms for screen-names already and blast out IMs to them. They also have bots that log into chat-rooms with porn links in the user-profiles, or who repeatedly spam the channel with porn links in the chat window. Fortunately, all the relevant clients include an ignore button.
I should add to my previous reply...
The GPL doesn't give you the right to control what I do with your software anyway. It denies me the right to control what others may do with your software (plus my modifications if any), once I share it with them. It further denies those others the right to exert control over anyone else.
Otherwise, I'm free to use your knowledge (as embodied in the licensed code) to my fullest benefit.