That is a good question. Why did they wait? Was there suspicion that it wouldn't work, or were they trying to protect the well so that once they "stopped" the leak they could fix the well without having to redrill it?
1) You have offered zero proof that a pirated copy would have been purchased were a pirated copy not been available. Many people will try or minimally use an expensive application (eg, Photoshop) for free but would never purchase it due to exorbitant cost.
2) While the time spent playing Pac Man was "lost" there's no conclusive proof that the time would have been used productively. A more meaningful measure would have been aggregate lost productivity before and after; the problem of course being that outside objectively measurable piecework, measuring productivity is guesswork at best and a totally misleading micromanager's obsession at worst.
3) I found the game cute, but the controls laggy and the playing field too small for a large screen.
The RIAA/MPAA/SPA make the assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and then complain loudly to government and in the media about their "lost revenue", even though they have no data (that they are willing to share...) that says those people with the pirated copies would have bought a legitimate copy if a pirated copy was not available.
This is the same problem with the Pac Man "lost productivity" argument; it assumes the time spent playing Pac Man would have otherwise been spent productively. At least as insane a judgment as the piracy claimants, if not more so, since it's easily reasonable to assume that people who fuck around, fuck around regardless and that some people may have played Pac Man instead of some other form of fucking off like 20 minute cigarette breaks, long lunches, bullshitting around the coffee maker, etc.
But it's a great publicity stunt on their part; there are a ton of companies out there with obsessive, micromanaging and dictatorial bosses who would love to hire them to help "find" all the unproductive employees and systems that they just know are costing them money.
Is the real enemy here capitalism -- greedy, capitalist technology companies willing to outsource to anyone regardless of the local impact as long as it drives their costs lower?
Or is the real enemy a totalitarian socialist government willing to use its police state powers to suppress politics & labor organization that it doesn't agree with (ie, doesn't dump hard currency into party & party member's pockets)?
Whoops, missed that. Why wouldn't the IRS use normal secure diplomatic/government channels/resources?
Ie, travel to France or whatever country, pickup laptop at the US embassy/consulate with disk image pulled via secure sources, do business, return laptop to embassy/consulate.
That's all well and good over cocktails at the faculty mixer or over a joint at the grad student parties.
Out here in the real world, Australia has whatever authority they can enforce out of a barrel of a gun. Debates over its moral authority and/or philosophical justification really don't matter.
Do explain who you work for that gets special passports but does not have the ability to put their items in a diplomatic pouch immune from customs searches.
I suspect that this is more of an "issue" farther down the food chain.
Large entities and/or especially those with security experience (banks, defense contractors, law enforcement) are probably naturally suspicious of any duplication technology and ask a ton of questions. They're also used to dealing with vendors who have experience selling to this field and understand that a low-level how-it-works transparency is necessary, probably both to win the business AND avoid some kind of Federal investigation in case something slips through the cracks.
Small businesses don't ask these questions. They lack the expertise and they often deal with smaller resellers/lessors who service the small market. My experience as both a customer and a network engineer consultant for the last 5 years is that these smaller resellers generally have very poor IT-type technical support for their devices. They have a lot of guys who can fix mechanical problems with xerography but when it comes to networking features, at best they have "a guy" who understands them and often has to defer to the manufacturer.
I suspect its at the bottom of the food chain (so to speak) where you find the bigger problems.
There is a middle option, those that care, but not enough to hack/jailbreak.
When we were in Disneyworld a couple of months ago the expensive (overpriced?) hotel we stayed in had high speed internet but Disney demanded even MORE money to use it.
Tethering my laptop to my iPhone would have been great, and I run into this kind of situation once every couple of months where local internet access is either hosed, too restrictive or expensive for what I need to get done.
Overall it's a "would be nice" but isn't important or common enough to do anything about. I could always get a wireless data widget if it was important enough. My last experience with tethering using VZW was a mess -- a fairly expensive monthly upcharge, and the service didn't work very well. My phone would spontaneously reboot after about 20 minutes, which made me less likely to use it and thus made it more expensive.
And I know this sounds corny, but with iPhone I have less compelling need for my laptop. I can get a lot of things done without it.
And you don't understand the difference between one state's textbook committee, deciding for their state, and a "standard textbook distributed nationwide."
Yes, Texas' size does influence the publishers of the text book but there is NOTHING preventing school districts/states from contacting their textbook publishers and telling them they will not be buying textbooks with the Texas' standards.
And in this day and age of electronic publishing, the idea that the changes/influences Texas wants in THEIR textbook are manditory for every other school district is silly. I see no reason why states so adamantly opposed to Texas' decisions couldn't band together to demand a different text book and I also see no reason why textbook publishers couldn't easily accommodate them.
I'm sure some publishers would balk because it would cut their profit, but with a PR push and enough noise in the media I'm sure they would find a way to do it and without much loss of profit.
Network storage is easy. It's not hard to build a NAS solution with 6-20 TB of storage. The cost keeps going down, the software smarter.
The question is, how do you do apparently online access without paying to spin 10-20 hard disks 24x7? The green side of it interests me more than the tons of storage side. At the end of the day the energy cost to keep them running is worse than the cost of the storage.
What OS will spin down the disks but somehow keep enough info cached to make access only a question of disk spin up for final data access?
The solution I'm thinking of keeps a segment of every file buffered and only those disks with the buffers are kept spinning; the disks with the whole file are spun down until needed. The buffer is big enough to allow access to the data until the disk with the data spins up, mitigating the access delay. The whole storage system is automatic, determining the appropriate buffer size based upon disk spinup delay and creating buffered segments and maintaining the smallest possible buffer disk count possible.
Bonus points for a RAID-like parity system that keeps the smallest possible parity sets to minimize the number of disk spinups required.
The final solution is of course solid state storage, but it'll be another 5-10 years before SSDs are cheap enough and dense enough to consider.
A friend who is a college professor finds that most students, even those at the junior/senior level, have an extremely poor written English skills. He's shown me papers and bluebooks (the most telling, since it requires thinking & writing on the fly and without the aid of spell/grammar check) and the quality of writing is shockingly poor. The quality of the thinking nearly so.
He's been teaching for a while and he thinks that in the last 10-15 years he's really noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of students. He attributes a lot of it to high schools but a lot of it also to the schools' need to let anyone in to keep enrollment numbers up (and thus money rolling in).
Is it true, as in backed by data taken from many non-profits and shown to be statistically valid, or is it one of those taken-for-granted truths that everyone THINKS is true, with just enough sporadic validation to make everyone believe it?
I get the odds when it comes to fund raising via mass-mailing -- blather about a good cause and mail enough envelopes and you might make a profit, get half-assed careful about your target audience (ie, no pro-gay mailings to rural Oklahoma, etc) and you are kind of guaranteed a profit.
But I wonder about one-time giving. We've given money to a few charities on a one-time basis before and its amazing the volume of crap you get, over time, without ever re-donating. Years later. I know the per-piece costs are lower than it might seem, but for a $25 donation I'd swear they've wrung a lot of the profit out two years later.
Why wouldn't you just keep the money? The bad guys are half a world a way and have no way to call the cops as if they would to begin with.
Whenever I've heard of these kinds of scams (including a related one involving physical goods they send you and you ship overseas) I always wondered why people were so honest and actually went through with it instead of just keeping the money.
It'd be like Bernie Madoff walking up to you with a suitcase of cash, asking you to go deposit it at some bank across town. Yeah, sure, Bernie. I'll call you when I'm done.
Can you run OS X in VMware Fusion ON A MAC? At the time I was involved in the beta version the answer was no, and I lost some of the point of the exercise if it was just about running non-Mac software; virtualizing OS X on OS X seems entirely useful.
Sort of like how they've gotten out of the desktop PC business, considering that specs are increasing, prices are dropping and there's a saturation point for those devices.
Except that they aren't a software company, they are a hardware company, as the licensing for OS X shows. There's no reason to believe that this will change in the iPad/iPhone space. These devices are in the infant stage now in their historical lifecyles, as are the wireless networks that support them.
The smartphone market is just beginning and assuming that it's all about faster CPUs and more megapixels in the cameras ignores what they may become in the future from an additional hardware perspective (picoprojection?) and availability of faster networks (4G and beyond). Apple has probably a decade or two left, easy, in the hardware department and plenty of ways to enhance the hardware to keep people coming back.
Plus, my guess is that Apple iPhone users aren't the kind of people shopping on CPU clock/pixels-per-inch/megapixels, so the fact that some HTC phone may have a better camera or faster CPU doesn't matter to them. And a phone, if you use it every day and carry it eveywhere, is kind of a wear item that people need replacing due to broken bits, scratches or other issues associated with carrying something around all the time.
A client and I were discussing the story. He wondered how sincere the apology was.
My guess is after the third or fourth swing of that baton the beating victim was really and truly sincere about being sorry, about waking up that day, about taking a job at the TSA, about every sin he'd ever committed.
They don't even have to give it to reelection campaigns. The added revenue simply becomes spending for constituencies or given to developers (and then kicked back).
Slashdot Mirror
That is a good question. Why did they wait? Was there suspicion that it wouldn't work, or were they trying to protect the well so that once they "stopped" the leak they could fix the well without having to redrill it?
1) You have offered zero proof that a pirated copy would have been purchased were a pirated copy not been available. Many people will try or minimally use an expensive application (eg, Photoshop) for free but would never purchase it due to exorbitant cost.
2) While the time spent playing Pac Man was "lost" there's no conclusive proof that the time would have been used productively. A more meaningful measure would have been aggregate lost productivity before and after; the problem of course being that outside objectively measurable piecework, measuring productivity is guesswork at best and a totally misleading micromanager's obsession at worst.
3) I found the game cute, but the controls laggy and the playing field too small for a large screen.
The RIAA/MPAA/SPA make the assumption that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and then complain loudly to government and in the media about their "lost revenue", even though they have no data (that they are willing to share...) that says those people with the pirated copies would have bought a legitimate copy if a pirated copy was not available.
This is the same problem with the Pac Man "lost productivity" argument; it assumes the time spent playing Pac Man would have otherwise been spent productively. At least as insane a judgment as the piracy claimants, if not more so, since it's easily reasonable to assume that people who fuck around, fuck around regardless and that some people may have played Pac Man instead of some other form of fucking off like 20 minute cigarette breaks, long lunches, bullshitting around the coffee maker, etc.
But it's a great publicity stunt on their part; there are a ton of companies out there with obsessive, micromanaging and dictatorial bosses who would love to hire them to help "find" all the unproductive employees and systems that they just know are costing them money.
Is the real enemy here capitalism -- greedy, capitalist technology companies willing to outsource to anyone regardless of the local impact as long as it drives their costs lower?
Or is the real enemy a totalitarian socialist government willing to use its police state powers to suppress politics & labor organization that it doesn't agree with (ie, doesn't dump hard currency into party & party member's pockets)?
Don't egg anyone on. It raises you to "willful participant" status.
Had it escalated to a physical confrontation you may have had trouble claiming self defense.
You always want to remain a "reluctant participant".
Whoops, missed that. Why wouldn't the IRS use normal secure diplomatic/government channels/resources?
Ie, travel to France or whatever country, pickup laptop at the US embassy/consulate with disk image pulled via secure sources, do business, return laptop to embassy/consulate.
That's all well and good over cocktails at the faculty mixer or over a joint at the grad student parties.
Out here in the real world, Australia has whatever authority they can enforce out of a barrel of a gun. Debates over its moral authority and/or philosophical justification really don't matter.
Do explain who you work for that gets special passports but does not have the ability to put their items in a diplomatic pouch immune from customs searches.
Thanks for the movie tip! Looks hilarious and is now in my Netflix queue!
I suspect that this is more of an "issue" farther down the food chain.
Large entities and/or especially those with security experience (banks, defense contractors, law enforcement) are probably naturally suspicious of any duplication technology and ask a ton of questions. They're also used to dealing with vendors who have experience selling to this field and understand that a low-level how-it-works transparency is necessary, probably both to win the business AND avoid some kind of Federal investigation in case something slips through the cracks.
Small businesses don't ask these questions. They lack the expertise and they often deal with smaller resellers/lessors who service the small market. My experience as both a customer and a network engineer consultant for the last 5 years is that these smaller resellers generally have very poor IT-type technical support for their devices. They have a lot of guys who can fix mechanical problems with xerography but when it comes to networking features, at best they have "a guy" who understands them and often has to defer to the manufacturer.
I suspect its at the bottom of the food chain (so to speak) where you find the bigger problems.
There is a middle option, those that care, but not enough to hack/jailbreak.
When we were in Disneyworld a couple of months ago the expensive (overpriced?) hotel we stayed in had high speed internet but Disney demanded even MORE money to use it.
Tethering my laptop to my iPhone would have been great, and I run into this kind of situation once every couple of months where local internet access is either hosed, too restrictive or expensive for what I need to get done.
Overall it's a "would be nice" but isn't important or common enough to do anything about. I could always get a wireless data widget if it was important enough. My last experience with tethering using VZW was a mess -- a fairly expensive monthly upcharge, and the service didn't work very well. My phone would spontaneously reboot after about 20 minutes, which made me less likely to use it and thus made it more expensive.
And I know this sounds corny, but with iPhone I have less compelling need for my laptop. I can get a lot of things done without it.
A conversation about what they want?
The vendor wants what everyone *wants* -- a new Mercedes every 2 years, not flying coach, a boob job for his wife AND mistress, and you to pay for it.
How hard is that to understand?
Then they lose the opportunity to charge you $1500 for a 20 gig hard disk.
Only probably nationwide if school districts/states sit on their hands and do nothing.
And you don't understand the difference between one state's textbook committee, deciding for their state, and a "standard textbook distributed nationwide."
Yes, Texas' size does influence the publishers of the text book but there is NOTHING preventing school districts/states from contacting their textbook publishers and telling them they will not be buying textbooks with the Texas' standards.
And in this day and age of electronic publishing, the idea that the changes/influences Texas wants in THEIR textbook are manditory for every other school district is silly. I see no reason why states so adamantly opposed to Texas' decisions couldn't band together to demand a different text book and I also see no reason why textbook publishers couldn't easily accommodate them.
I'm sure some publishers would balk because it would cut their profit, but with a PR push and enough noise in the media I'm sure they would find a way to do it and without much loss of profit.
Many cars now come with touchscreens for navigation and other system control.
How about a docking station for your iPhone in your car? A bigger screen, better oriented for driving, access to music, apps..
Network storage is easy. It's not hard to build a NAS solution with 6-20 TB of storage. The cost keeps going down, the software smarter.
The question is, how do you do apparently online access without paying to spin 10-20 hard disks 24x7? The green side of it interests me more than the tons of storage side. At the end of the day the energy cost to keep them running is worse than the cost of the storage.
What OS will spin down the disks but somehow keep enough info cached to make access only a question of disk spin up for final data access?
The solution I'm thinking of keeps a segment of every file buffered and only those disks with the buffers are kept spinning; the disks with the whole file are spun down until needed. The buffer is big enough to allow access to the data until the disk with the data spins up, mitigating the access delay. The whole storage system is automatic, determining the appropriate buffer size based upon disk spinup delay and creating buffered segments and maintaining the smallest possible buffer disk count possible.
Bonus points for a RAID-like parity system that keeps the smallest possible parity sets to minimize the number of disk spinups required.
The final solution is of course solid state storage, but it'll be another 5-10 years before SSDs are cheap enough and dense enough to consider.
A friend who is a college professor finds that most students, even those at the junior/senior level, have an extremely poor written English skills. He's shown me papers and bluebooks (the most telling, since it requires thinking & writing on the fly and without the aid of spell/grammar check) and the quality of writing is shockingly poor. The quality of the thinking nearly so.
He's been teaching for a while and he thinks that in the last 10-15 years he's really noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of students. He attributes a lot of it to high schools but a lot of it also to the schools' need to let anyone in to keep enrollment numbers up (and thus money rolling in).
Is it true, as in backed by data taken from many non-profits and shown to be statistically valid, or is it one of those taken-for-granted truths that everyone THINKS is true, with just enough sporadic validation to make everyone believe it?
I get the odds when it comes to fund raising via mass-mailing -- blather about a good cause and mail enough envelopes and you might make a profit, get half-assed careful about your target audience (ie, no pro-gay mailings to rural Oklahoma, etc) and you are kind of guaranteed a profit.
But I wonder about one-time giving. We've given money to a few charities on a one-time basis before and its amazing the volume of crap you get, over time, without ever re-donating. Years later. I know the per-piece costs are lower than it might seem, but for a $25 donation I'd swear they've wrung a lot of the profit out two years later.
Why wouldn't you just keep the money? The bad guys are half a world a way and have no way to call the cops as if they would to begin with.
Whenever I've heard of these kinds of scams (including a related one involving physical goods they send you and you ship overseas) I always wondered why people were so honest and actually went through with it instead of just keeping the money.
It'd be like Bernie Madoff walking up to you with a suitcase of cash, asking you to go deposit it at some bank across town. Yeah, sure, Bernie. I'll call you when I'm done.
Can you run OS X in VMware Fusion ON A MAC? At the time I was involved in the beta version the answer was no, and I lost some of the point of the exercise if it was just about running non-Mac software; virtualizing OS X on OS X seems entirely useful.
And you may kill her if you open her mouth!
Sort of like how they've gotten out of the desktop PC business, considering that specs are increasing, prices are dropping and there's a saturation point for those devices.
Except that they aren't a software company, they are a hardware company, as the licensing for OS X shows. There's no reason to believe that this will change in the iPad/iPhone space. These devices are in the infant stage now in their historical lifecyles, as are the wireless networks that support them.
The smartphone market is just beginning and assuming that it's all about faster CPUs and more megapixels in the cameras ignores what they may become in the future from an additional hardware perspective (picoprojection?) and availability of faster networks (4G and beyond). Apple has probably a decade or two left, easy, in the hardware department and plenty of ways to enhance the hardware to keep people coming back.
Plus, my guess is that Apple iPhone users aren't the kind of people shopping on CPU clock/pixels-per-inch/megapixels, so the fact that some HTC phone may have a better camera or faster CPU doesn't matter to them. And a phone, if you use it every day and carry it eveywhere, is kind of a wear item that people need replacing due to broken bits, scratches or other issues associated with carrying something around all the time.
A client and I were discussing the story. He wondered how sincere the apology was.
My guess is after the third or fourth swing of that baton the beating victim was really and truly sincere about being sorry, about waking up that day, about taking a job at the TSA, about every sin he'd ever committed.
They don't even have to give it to reelection campaigns. The added revenue simply becomes spending for constituencies or given to developers (and then kicked back).