I concede that bullying is too harsh, but the point I am making is why is Microsoft not performing the same sort of effort. I will leave the answer as an exercise to the class.
Perhaps bullying is rhetorical, however you are operating in hindsight mode. The music store was the LAST piece of the puzzle. Apple needed to get devices out in the market including the real key (iTunes) which was a FREE high quality CD-Ripper your grandma could use.
I do not believe the iPod makes it without iTunes, and the store doesn't make it without the iPod although people do buy music to run on their computers (my wife's first purchase of digital music from the store was 2 years before i bought her an ipod)
What Apple did was to tell the industry, hey electronic music is here, people are buying our devices to play it, we have a delivery engine to get them your music and have them pay for it, and you will make money. Even the Beatles are finally sliding into place, which is huge considering the long term adverserial position they have over the Apple trademark.
In any case, the question remains, if Apple can do that, why would Microsoft go backwards and begin the process of paying each label a buck in defensive licensing, when the predominant method of music sharing by this device is a less costly alternative to radio play. I would be surprised if Microsoft didn't get involved in supplying wireless hotspots with technology to squirt Microsoft sponsored 'hotspot artists' to their zunees.
It is repetitive to keep pointing out how Microsoft's moves are consistently anti consumer and typically predatory. Whatever their strategy is, I see no reason to support it.
In the simplest terms, the Zune will not be receiving the best response from the merchants who might be pushing it during this holiday season.
a) These merchants all have 100's of iPod Accessories. The nature of this is that if you sell a 299 dollar IPod, it will also create the sale of some other device, perhaps a speaker system or a nice little protective wallet, or some addon. Even if they would work fine with the Zune, the packaging all says 'iPod'.
b) No impulse upgrade available. Someone comes in for a 30 gig iPod and may be talked up to a 60. The shuffle buyer ends up with a Nano. Maybe the Nano buyer ends up with a video iPod.
c) The Zune is a new product from Microsoft. To most vendors that implies support issues. The worst thing for them would be to have to deal with returns. Microsoft waiting till this close to Christmas is probably to try to get enough of these into the market before the inevitable bug/virus/hardware issue comes up. They would prefer to fix it after Christmas to see big numbers.
d) Grandma buys the Zune for her kid because a salesperson said 'its like the iPod but better!' and the kid returns the Zune for store credit to get their iPod.
Basicly the profit margin can NOT be high enough to sell this at this stage. The question is WHEN. ---
I will not propose any suggestions of how they could improve things. Clearly the fact that they have a wifi and fm radio in the box and an upgradeable firmware/software means they could improve these gradually. But the fact that they came so strongly with DRM that even makes my recording of my sister's karaoke performance self destruct ala mission impossible, does not bode well to the idea of a flexible portable mobile media center.
The fact is that Microsoft should be big enough player to dictate to the RIAA how things are going to be rather than the other way around. Even Apple, substantially smaller, bullied them effectively.
I haven't tried the Zune, but i also didn't buy an iPod until the Nano came out, and since I can fit my Nano in my shirt pocket and forget it is there, I don't see any comparison to Microsoft's offering.
Essentially this will be a big improvement over the Microsoft Vista which is made of cups and string. Very tiny ones. The tubes will be able to move much bigger things. It isn't like trucks though. Tubes...
Remember I said it first.
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Is it possible that what Google already has is a good guideline to where they are going? I mean clearly they have tried to keep things more or less device and os agnostic. They rely on browsers with standardized javascript (ECMAScript) being crossplatform. GoogleEarth is now on Mac and Linux.
I can't see them investing too heavily in replacing the actual operating system. What I can see them doing is leveraging the existing techniques they are using to become more and more ubiquitous so that a user no longer knows where the application is, but is able to run it from everywhere.
Bringing this into the Enterprise Market, maybe requires some sort of proxy appliance and a security model, but by leveraging their own massive storage and processing, they could enable big corporations to have better VPN, with a promise of DR and Business continuity. This can extend into the world of IP Telephony as well. The only question is performance and cost.
Any GoogleOS as perceived by most people comes down to a Thin Client. But the number of diverse apps that are developed for enterprises are so difficult to replace, and if you need to emulate windows to support them, then you may as well be running windows. I expect that the goal is to find ways to make the argument, look how easy it will be to take this ONE thing and move it to GoogleEnterprise, and look, if you already are doing that then adding this is easy. And look you can do THIS and no one else can if you add THIS.
So on and so forth. Which is why Microsoft has worked so hard to make all its apps intergrated, so that it becomes painful to replace any single component.
Anyway we can speculate all we want. If you KNOW what google's next step is then I suggest you start working on it yourself. Maybe they will buy you.
I preface this by noting I have been working in IT and data processing for 18 years now, with an uncountable number of clients at this point, so I have seen a lot.
Here are a few points: Programming and technology is rarely the primary challenge in any job whether its a short term contract or a fulltime position (and my father who has been in the business for 40 years pointed out that there is no such thing as a short term contract or a fulltime position.) You can make a lot of money very quickly doing stupid work with annoying people. You can work very hard with a great team, and end up with very little to show. Commuting can be exhausting, relocations can be frustrating, and all in all things that start off well can turn bad and vice versa.
That being said, we no longer live in the world of working for the same company for 50 years. Consider it a learning experience one way or the other.
And lets be honest. A few years working in a big iron shop or whatever the equivalent is, using the enterprise standard, within an organizational structure is going to teach you a great deal about the industry, beyond the technical.
There are alot of variables. Flexibility of schedule, telecommuting, whichone is going to leash you with a beeper fulltime, which one is going to get you into new technologies, and force you to think for a living.
I recently got two jobs in the same week, one programming and one heading Network Ops and I had billed out the second one at considerably more, but chose the first one because the reason I had priced the network stuff so high was because I knew it would be more punishing and less rewarding.
Do I think, 'Hey the 100 bucks a day extra might be nice?' Yeah. But I have worked both type of jobs, and I noticed that when I get paid more to work in a miserable situation, it gets harder to save, since I need to spend the money I make on keeping me happy. While if I wake up in the morning and the only thing that bugs me is that it takes too long to get into the office to try out this new idea I woke up with, well.... You get my drift.
Again though, and its been said, there will be other jobs. You never know what happens. My dad became a VP for a bank after years as a consultant and they did an early retirement buyout in 8 months.
I went into my last long term contract as a database analyst and left as an expert in VoIP, having been fired by my new boss after 3 years of big raises, because he wanted to shift in his own staff...
Also, don't worry too much about languages. I have been in shops where they are gungho about.NET and I have been in shops where the last boss was gungho about.NET and everyone pities the 2 programmers who are still forced to work in that environment (and I am not dissing.NET really. I just mean that preferences change.)
Good luck! Congrats on having this as your difficult choices in life.
Hard to take seriously someone who gets confused by a "cel phone plan" but here is my apple experience. Wife has a 350mhz G4 tower she is using for whatever, 5 or 6 years. She goes back to school and as a gift I buy her the recently released and pretty quickly available 'mini'. Its pretty cheap. She moves all her stuff including her apps over to the new box. It runs. No problems. The old machine didn't die. We donated it to a theatre production company. In my basement is a working Apple ][+. Thats a 25 year old PC.
To me, that is Apple. Yes their computers aren't the cheapest, but in 3 years I had to replace my desktop Dell 3 times due to hardware problems. Yes Apple has had hardware problems too, but the quality of hardware IS high, and the Mini is a really nice bit of engineering, as is my Nano.
Basicly Apple does the same thing as most premium manufacturers. They charge more for a product that is better and sexier.
If you are confused with Apple's product lines you have never gone to Dell or HP for computers.
Back when BBS's started becoming popular (with the availability of cheap computers like the Atari 800 and Comodore) the rarity of females meant that any female was automaticaly given special priveleges. Sysops would ask to verify by talking on the phone to make sure the girl was real. Which of course is where your sister comes in handy.
Anyway, I remember getting access to higher level 'g-files' as well as increased quotas using this.
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And lets be honest. They did not design the nightelf to actually bounce up and down shaking her breasts in the character selection screen because they were trying to get girls to play them.
I really always assumed that we would begin to see both advertisement and sorts of sponsorships in online gaming. It might not always work in the most thematic way, but this is not really different than product placement for example.
The Ancient Order of Coca-cola have defeated the Mercedes Barbarians to bring the glory of the gods to America.
I am currently playing WoW and enjoying it. I think they have done a nice job of creating a range of options for character choices that are well balanaced and fun. I am still exploring them. At the same time I understand alot of their work has gone into making the experienced player happy at the high levels, so I am looking forward to what that is like.
Still, I can see alot of things that could make it better, and I have my own visions of what a good MMORPG would include, including more dynamic environment (I do hate the idea that you complete a quest to rescue something or kill something and it is the same quest for every new fighter etc...)
I also would really like to see more potential for creating culture within the game, including some ranking. I know it is alot to ask, but in alot of ways this is everquest with Warcraft style... Not really what I expected in some ways, since part of what made people play Warcraft was the strategy and management of resources and troops. This game discards most of that culture for a pure RPG.
So I think there is alot of room for improvement in the MMORPG. I understand Guildwars will try to challenge some of the ways they are playing and I think that is great. I would love to see WoW develop a little more. I hope it doesnt' remain so static, or it will lose people as folks don't want to replay the same bunch of quests over and over.
We are using the 1TB variety as an experiment in harddrive back ups. We ship the drives offsite. The cost is not that much larger than our tape budget and we are able to back and restore more quickly.
Likewise, as primary network and telephony guru at my firm, my Cisco CallManager based system, despite being primarily LDAP and SQL based as far as configuration is concerned (except of course where we are using H323 at gateways instead of MGCP) the interfaces necessary for the creation and move-add-changes of users is grueling. It makes me what to develop my own front end, ut of course if I start writing to their databases my support would go out of the window.
Its easy to build pretty GUI's over configuration files. It would be nice if by following some sort of reasonable open standard for the backend data storage, we could create flexible and extendable interfaces as well as services.
Does anyone know whether Asterix as any ability to manage MGCP/H323 based hardware such as vg248's or x6608 PRI blades?
It seems like this is an opportunity to someone to, using the somewhat wild and bumpy experience of US companies attempting to properly distribute legal software, to enter the European market. Now I know that atleast part of the issue is differing licensing and copyright legislation in different markets, but isn't part of the purpose of the European Common Market to create a unified set of regulations to allow easier trade?
Now if there is no legal way to digitize music in your country, you don't have a technical issue, you have a legislative issue, one which has to be addressed. I know it can't be purely because American music companies won't allow it because I do not believe we have all that many music companies, what with Sony, Bertelsman and others.
Obviously Apple and others are going to work to tap such a large market. Eventually there will be a solution.
Until then, there might be an opening for some European companies (likewise the rest of the world) to develop their own methods and get their own distribution licenses.
Beyond that, I am surprised about the copy-protected CD issue as I haven't yet bought a CD I couldn't RIP (I don't have an IPod and I don't download music (although my wife does use Apple's ITunes Music Store) but I do rip my entire music collection for convenience.
Perhaps the reason we don't have a problem ripping CD's is that we use Macs. So there is your answer:)
Interestingly enough, no one was or is jumping on said bandwagon. I have found it very interesting to read some of the ways that AC has been used to distract this discussion away from Microsoft/SCO.
I don't think the question here is CA or IBM (another AC posted on how CA is almost as bad as IBM at FUD, which is interesting when the discussion is really on Microsoft and SCO.) but it is certainly good to spread the mud around to make things less clear. I also saw the statement that this was no different than media saying that linux advocates were behind MYDOOM, and that none of the Halloween papers had every been objectively proven as real, despite the fact that both this latest one and many early ones WERE confirmed by Microsoft (and in this case SCO).
Just a warning to everyone, it seems like there is alot of counterattacks on Slashdot. This particular post might be legitimately from someone who has some grudge against CA and isn't really a press representative sent to sow some discord and confusion into a discussiont hat is already hard enough to follow.
Not sure why this got a rating of funny. These are really what they look like. What I don't really understanding is how they initially got past my mail servers forging the mail as being from inside my firm. We don't permit outside servers to send mail to us FROM our domains, but there it was. It looked to me almost like the from header on it had an extra space at the end, but I can't imagine that would be enough to confuse my mail gateways but there you go...
Little bit of FUD analysis here from an amateur. Feel free to discredit me as well but I think this is a sneaky posting that has sneakily been given a higher moderation.
Actually, it's their money. When you pay for gas, "your money" will eventually reach terrorists under that logic.
There is no logic in this response either. By the same mislogic buying American Flags will eventually get into the hands of people who kill babies. Spending money at all means that someone else gets to spend money and so on. The fact that oil->terrorist is a give away that this AC is stuck in some old discussion about the old anti-drug commercials. Probably a conservative shill for hire who has run out of 'gas'(Pun intended)
Anyway, objectively, and using available evidence rather than assumption, none of the "Halloween memos" have ever been confirmed as being real. I am not sure if this is correct or not, but it is good to just say something like this as it is hard to prove whether something has been proven. This same statement can be used almost verbatim about every piece of journalism that has ever dealt with leaks, or witness accounts.
Given that the idea that MS is backing SCO has been a popular conspiracy theory since Groklaw was born, isn't assuming this is true jumping the gun a bit? I don't want to dig around but MS has been an investor in SCO for years. There is no conspiracy theory there, it is financial relationships. Drawing Groklaw into this for no apparent reason is a bit of distraction and an attempt to sully as many targets as possible. The reality is that we aren't questioning whether or not MS has the right to give money to SCO but whether SCO has any product besides harassment law suits, and if it does not, should it's shareholders be supporting this continuous legal effort. If the entire rationale of SCO is as a hired bully for MSoft, then they have no future.
When the non-geek media went ahead and assumed that the Mydoom virus was authored by Linux zealots, without objectivity or evidence, merely because the assumption made sense, everyone cried bloody murder.
This is good. Totally off topic. It is always good to try to require individuals to operate based on no bias when you can't win an argument. Objectivity and evidence are not required in discussing any of this. We are not only allowed to use our experience, and perception, but are encouraged to do so, as that is a useful technique towards investigating matters. Until we are in a court of law we can discuss conjecture, and theories quite healthily.
This really is an inane comment. I have done a whole lot of windows installs, and the number of times one has to reinstall an ENTIRE machine from scratch because you misconfigured a server is absurd. As far as why BILL wins is that whatever OS comes on the Machine is the One people use. No one installs Windows anymore as a newbie user. They use the machine, and when they buy a new machine they get a new OS unless they have some friend tell them they just NEED to upgrade in which case usually it involves them losing applications or whatnot because their friend doesn't follow some simple instruction.
In the end the reason Bill has the marketshare is that as a dominant monopoly player you have a lot of leverage to force your product onto consumer machines.
That is what the anti-trust battle is about, forcing users to pay for windows EVEN when they didn't want the OS, so that it was cheaper for a computer company to ship with the OS installed than without.
Any bullshit flaming about how it is easier to installw indows on a machien than it is to compile the kernel of Linux is just flame nothing more.
In a real comparison you would compare the instructions to compile the WinNT kernel with the Linux Kernel. How many of us have compiled Windows versus Linux? I think the numbers speak for themselves in terms of ease of compiling.
I personally HAVE been blacklisted (by ordb.org) and once I cleared up the problem (some ability to relay) I was let out. This took 2 hours total, so I feel comfortable USING ordb.org myself, now that I am responsible for protecting a large network from spam. I also use spamassassin, quarantining and a number of other methods to prevent false positives, and we do notify once you get past spamassassin.
If I did not use SOME rbl though, I would be sending out 6000 spam blocking notification messages a day mostly to people who aren't there or are not the real sender. Since I block things prior to getting through postfix, I am able to send them back a clear informative message on the blockage, DURING the transmission.
In any case, I have heard of lots of bad stuff about SPEWS and all but my experience with spamhaus and ordb are that both help block alot of mail, and are responsible with their efforts.
In any case, it is my business (and my company's business of course) how we handle our incoming stream. If we choose to use a blacklist that is our right. As it waspointed out, we could always create our own (It is pretty easy to create a dnsbased one even to share with a few friends or whatnot)...
No one is going to be able to stop ALL blacklists, but by attacking the large centralized ones, it does not IMPROVE the ability to get taken off an RBL. It just makes it harder really.
I actually believe it was as early as MacPaint that the Apple UI Standard got broken. The initial concept was that all things were menu based and Macpaint had a palette on screen. The obvious virtue of that interface despite it going against the initial guideline kept the product from being 'fixed'.
I would say there are two reasons that come to mind.
#1. iTunes is a very good way of delivering the music. My wife downloaded an album (Mr. Heartbreak by Laurie Anderson) and in about a minute it started playing while downloading the rest. It downloaded FASTER than it would have taken to rip the music ourself. As my wife said, if you need to get an album for some reason quickly (going to a dance party and you want to bring it) you can download an album and be out the door in 10 minutes (if you have an ipod)...
#2. Steve Jobs. His ability to get the labels and artists in line to make this work from the first moment is a real testimony to his ability as a salesman. Obviously the idea of internet music distribution wasn't invented by Apple. Yes the hype helped as well. People were waiting for the music store. While the first week Million song release is exciting I am curious to see if it expands. Will we see a million a week as the basic? Will it be like movies with drop off? Or will it be 2 million a week by next month. I note that both Warner Bros and Universal were quoted in that press release, so it is clear that they are tightly tied into this venture.
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It seems strange that something that has existed for so many years and had commercial ventures already (distribution of music) might be the killer app for the digital hub concept.
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I do know that as long as record stores are selling albums that weren't even digitally mastered for 15 bucks, 9.99 per album is gonna be a real seller. I also assume that Apple will find ways to create promotions that will even improve that price point.
My understanding on this is that it has more to do with licensing of the music. It is a different matter to get US distribution rights than worldwide. I do not doubt that Apple is working to extend their rights, as the European market is significant to Apple's hardware sales, but you can't really blame them for not waiting. A big part of their leverage to get better worldwide rights as well as an increased catalog will be the success of their first steps.
Obviously they aren't having a bad start of it, and they have recieved really great press. I know people who are considering buying macs and ipods based on this.
The idea that one could tax email per letter (not per bandwidth) is inane at best. It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email, the kind that really improves the ability to quickly communicate and respond to communications, and beyond that an effort will be made to economize on a business scale, by getting the most value for your 1 cent (video clips being emailed).
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I concede that bullying is too harsh, but the point I am making is why is Microsoft not performing the same sort of effort. I will leave the answer as an exercise to the class.
Perhaps bullying is rhetorical, however you are operating in hindsight mode. The music store was the LAST piece of the puzzle. Apple needed to get devices out in the market including the real key (iTunes) which was a FREE high quality CD-Ripper your grandma could use.
I do not believe the iPod makes it without iTunes, and the store doesn't make it without the iPod although people do buy music to run on their computers (my wife's first purchase of digital music from the store was 2 years before i bought her an ipod)
What Apple did was to tell the industry, hey electronic music is here, people are buying our devices to play it, we have a delivery engine to get them your music and have them pay for it, and you will make money. Even the Beatles are finally sliding into place, which is huge considering the long term adverserial position they have over the Apple trademark.
In any case, the question remains, if Apple can do that, why would Microsoft go backwards and begin the process of paying each label a buck in defensive licensing, when the predominant method of music sharing by this device is a less costly alternative to radio play. I would be surprised if Microsoft didn't get involved in supplying wireless hotspots with technology to squirt Microsoft sponsored 'hotspot artists' to their zunees.
It is repetitive to keep pointing out how Microsoft's moves are consistently anti consumer and typically predatory. Whatever their strategy is, I see no reason to support it.
In the simplest terms, the Zune will not be receiving the best response from the merchants who might be pushing it during this holiday season.
a) These merchants all have 100's of iPod Accessories. The nature of this is that if you sell a 299 dollar IPod, it will also create the sale of some other device, perhaps a speaker system or a nice little protective wallet, or some addon. Even if they would work fine with the Zune, the packaging all says 'iPod'.
b) No impulse upgrade available. Someone comes in for a 30 gig iPod and may be talked up to a 60. The shuffle buyer ends up with a Nano. Maybe the Nano buyer ends up with a video iPod.
c) The Zune is a new product from Microsoft. To most vendors that implies support issues. The worst thing for them would be to have to deal with returns. Microsoft waiting till this close to Christmas is probably to try to get enough of these into the market before the inevitable bug/virus/hardware issue comes up. They would prefer to fix it after Christmas to see big numbers.
d) Grandma buys the Zune for her kid because a salesperson said 'its like the iPod but better!' and the kid returns the Zune for store credit to get their iPod.
Basicly the profit margin can NOT be high enough to sell this at this stage. The question is WHEN.
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I will not propose any suggestions of how they could improve things. Clearly the fact that they have a wifi and fm radio in the box and an upgradeable firmware/software means they could improve these gradually. But the fact that they came so strongly with DRM that even makes my recording of my sister's karaoke performance self destruct ala mission impossible, does not bode well to the idea of a flexible portable mobile media center.
The fact is that Microsoft should be big enough player to dictate to the RIAA how things are going to be rather than the other way around. Even Apple, substantially smaller, bullied them effectively.
I haven't tried the Zune, but i also didn't buy an iPod until the Nano came out, and since I can fit my Nano in my shirt pocket and forget it is there, I don't see any comparison to Microsoft's offering.
GoogleOS is going to be made of tubes.
Essentially this will be a big improvement over the Microsoft Vista which is made of cups and string. Very tiny ones. The tubes will be able to move much bigger things. It isn't like trucks though. Tubes...
Remember I said it first.
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Is it possible that what Google already has is a good guideline to where they are going? I mean clearly they have tried to keep things more or less device and os agnostic. They rely on browsers with standardized javascript (ECMAScript) being crossplatform. GoogleEarth is now on Mac and Linux.
I can't see them investing too heavily in replacing the actual operating system. What I can see them doing is leveraging the existing techniques they are using to become more and more ubiquitous so that a user no longer knows where the application is, but is able to run it from everywhere.
Bringing this into the Enterprise Market, maybe requires some sort of proxy appliance and a security model, but by leveraging their own massive storage and processing, they could enable big corporations to have better VPN, with a promise of DR and Business continuity. This can extend into the world of IP Telephony as well. The only question is performance and cost.
Any GoogleOS as perceived by most people comes down to a Thin Client. But the number of diverse apps that are developed for enterprises are so difficult to replace, and if you need to emulate windows to support them, then you may as well be running windows. I expect that the goal is to find ways to make the argument, look how easy it will be to take this ONE thing and move it to GoogleEnterprise, and look, if you already are doing that then adding this is easy. And look you can do THIS and no one else can if you add THIS.
So on and so forth. Which is why Microsoft has worked so hard to make all its apps intergrated, so that it becomes painful to replace any single component.
Anyway we can speculate all we want. If you KNOW what google's next step is then I suggest you start working on it yourself. Maybe they will buy you.
I preface this by noting I have been working in IT and data processing for 18 years now, with an uncountable number of clients at this point, so I have seen a lot.
.NET and I have been in shops where the last boss was gungho about .NET and everyone pities the 2 programmers who are still forced to work in that environment (and I am not dissing .NET really. I just mean that preferences change.)
Here are a few points:
Programming and technology is rarely the primary challenge in any job whether its a short term contract or a fulltime position (and my father who has been in the business for 40 years pointed out that there is no such thing as a short term contract or a fulltime position.) You can make a lot of money very quickly doing stupid work with annoying people. You can work very hard with a great team, and end up with very little to show. Commuting can be exhausting, relocations can be frustrating, and all in all things that start off well can turn bad and vice versa.
That being said, we no longer live in the world of working for the same company for 50 years. Consider it a learning experience one way or the other.
And lets be honest. A few years working in a big iron shop or whatever the equivalent is, using the enterprise standard, within an organizational structure is going to teach you a great deal about the industry, beyond the technical.
There are alot of variables. Flexibility of schedule, telecommuting, whichone is going to leash you with a beeper fulltime, which one is going to get you into new technologies, and force you to think for a living.
I recently got two jobs in the same week, one programming and one heading Network Ops and I had billed out the second one at considerably more, but chose the first one because the reason I had priced the network stuff so high was because I knew it would be more punishing and less rewarding.
Do I think, 'Hey the 100 bucks a day extra might be nice?' Yeah. But I have worked both type of jobs, and I noticed that when I get paid more to work in a miserable situation, it gets harder to save, since I need to spend the money I make on keeping me happy. While if I wake up in the morning and the only thing that bugs me is that it takes too long to get into the office to try out this new idea I woke up with, well.... You get my drift.
Again though, and its been said, there will be other jobs. You never know what happens. My dad became a VP for a bank after years as a consultant and they did an early retirement buyout in 8 months.
I went into my last long term contract as a database analyst and left as an expert in VoIP, having been fired by my new boss after 3 years of big raises, because he wanted to shift in his own staff...
Also, don't worry too much about languages. I have been in shops where they are gungho about
Good luck! Congrats on having this as your difficult choices in life.
Hard to take seriously someone who gets confused by a "cel phone plan" but here is my apple experience. Wife has a 350mhz G4 tower she is using for whatever, 5 or 6 years. She goes back to school and as a gift I buy her the recently released and pretty quickly available 'mini'. Its pretty cheap. She moves all her stuff including her apps over to the new box. It runs. No problems. The old machine didn't die. We donated it to a theatre production company. In my basement is a working Apple ][+. Thats a 25 year old PC.
To me, that is Apple. Yes their computers aren't the cheapest, but in 3 years I had to replace my desktop Dell 3 times due to hardware problems. Yes Apple has had hardware problems too, but the quality of hardware IS high, and the Mini is a really nice bit of engineering, as is my Nano.
Basicly Apple does the same thing as most premium manufacturers. They charge more for a product that is better and sexier.
If you are confused with Apple's product lines you have never gone to Dell or HP for computers.
I call you troll:)
Likewise saw it while watching CNN in the NYC market.
Back when BBS's started becoming popular (with the availability of cheap computers like the Atari 800 and Comodore) the rarity of females meant that any female was automaticaly given special priveleges. Sysops would ask to verify by talking on the phone to make sure the girl was real. Which of course is where your sister comes in handy.
Anyway, I remember getting access to higher level 'g-files' as well as increased quotas using this.
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And lets be honest. They did not design the nightelf to actually bounce up and down shaking her breasts in the character selection screen because they were trying to get girls to play them.
I wonder what other things people don't buy because they are too busy playing WoW.
Hint: Condoms.
I really always assumed that we would begin to see both advertisement and sorts of sponsorships in online gaming. It might not always work in the most thematic way, but this is not really different than product placement for example.
The Ancient Order of Coca-cola have defeated the Mercedes Barbarians to bring the glory of the gods to America.
I am currently playing WoW and enjoying it. I think they have done a nice job of creating a range of options for character choices that are well balanaced and fun. I am still exploring them. At the same time I understand alot of their work has gone into making the experienced player happy at the high levels, so I am looking forward to what that is like.
Still, I can see alot of things that could make it better, and I have my own visions of what a good MMORPG would include, including more dynamic environment (I do hate the idea that you complete a quest to rescue something or kill something and it is the same quest for every new fighter etc...)
I also would really like to see more potential for creating culture within the game, including some ranking. I know it is alot to ask, but in alot of ways this is everquest with Warcraft style... Not really what I expected in some ways, since part of what made people play Warcraft was the strategy and management of resources and troops. This game discards most of that culture for a pure RPG.
So I think there is alot of room for improvement in the MMORPG. I understand Guildwars will try to challenge some of the ways they are playing and I think that is great. I would love to see WoW develop a little more. I hope it doesnt' remain so static, or it will lose people as folks don't want to replay the same bunch of quests over and over.
This is what we need. For everyone to check both sites to see which is faster. That surely will help Penny Arcade reduce their bandwidth.
Actually you should test it on all your browsers at the same time with both sites..
10 times.
So that you can get a good normalized result.
Then shutdown and do it fresh.
If you can, do it from all your computer.
Anyone want to build a test harness to really acomplish the goal?
We are using the 1TB variety as an experiment in harddrive back ups. We ship the drives offsite. The cost is not that much larger than our tape budget and we are able to back and restore more quickly.
They are firewire 800 so they go pretty fast.
Likewise, as primary network and telephony guru at my firm, my Cisco CallManager based system, despite being primarily LDAP and SQL based as far as configuration is concerned (except of course where we are using H323 at gateways instead of MGCP) the interfaces necessary for the creation and move-add-changes of users is grueling. It makes me what to develop my own front end, ut of course if I start writing to their databases my support would go out of the window.
Its easy to build pretty GUI's over configuration files. It would be nice if by following some sort of reasonable open standard for the backend data storage, we could create flexible and extendable interfaces as well as services.
Does anyone know whether Asterix as any ability to manage MGCP/H323 based hardware such as vg248's or x6608 PRI blades?
It seems like this is an opportunity to someone to, using the somewhat wild and bumpy experience of US companies attempting to properly distribute legal software, to enter the European market. Now I know that atleast part of the issue is differing licensing and copyright legislation in different markets, but isn't part of the purpose of the European Common Market to create a unified set of regulations to allow easier trade?
Now if there is no legal way to digitize music in your country, you don't have a technical issue, you have a legislative issue, one which has to be addressed. I know it can't be purely because American music companies won't allow it because I do not believe we have all that many music companies, what with Sony, Bertelsman and others.
Obviously Apple and others are going to work to tap such a large market. Eventually there will be a solution.
Until then, there might be an opening for some European companies (likewise the rest of the world) to develop their own methods and get their own distribution licenses.
Beyond that, I am surprised about the copy-protected CD issue as I haven't yet bought a CD I couldn't RIP (I don't have an IPod and I don't download music (although my wife does use Apple's ITunes Music Store) but I do rip my entire music collection for convenience.
Perhaps the reason we don't have a problem ripping CD's is that we use Macs. So there is your answer:)
Interestingly enough, no one was or is jumping on said bandwagon. I have found it very interesting to read some of the ways that AC has been used to distract this discussion away from Microsoft/SCO.
I don't think the question here is CA or IBM (another AC posted on how CA is almost as bad as IBM at FUD, which is interesting when the discussion is really on Microsoft and SCO.) but it is certainly good to spread the mud around to make things less clear. I also saw the statement that this was no different than media saying that linux advocates were behind MYDOOM, and that none of the Halloween papers had every been objectively proven as real, despite the fact that both this latest one and many early ones WERE confirmed by Microsoft (and in this case SCO).
Just a warning to everyone, it seems like there is alot of counterattacks on Slashdot. This particular post might be legitimately from someone who has some grudge against CA and isn't really a press representative sent to sow some discord and confusion into a discussiont hat is already hard enough to follow.
Not sure why this got a rating of funny. These are really what they look like. What I don't really understanding is how they initially got past my mail servers forging the mail as being from inside my firm. We don't permit outside servers to send mail to us FROM our domains, but there it was. It looked to me almost like the from header on it had an extra space at the end, but I can't imagine that would be enough to confuse my mail gateways but there you go...
Little bit of FUD analysis here from an amateur. Feel free to discredit me as well but I think this is a sneaky posting that has sneakily been given a higher moderation.
Actually, it's their money. When you pay for gas, "your money" will eventually reach terrorists under that logic.
There is no logic in this response either. By the same mislogic buying American Flags will eventually get into the hands of people who kill babies. Spending money at all means that someone else gets to spend money and so on. The fact that oil->terrorist is a give away that this AC is stuck in some old discussion about the old anti-drug commercials. Probably a conservative shill for hire who has run out of 'gas'(Pun intended)
Anyway, objectively, and using available evidence rather than assumption, none of the "Halloween memos" have ever been confirmed as being real.
I am not sure if this is correct or not, but it is good to just say something like this as it is hard to prove whether something has been proven. This same statement can be used almost verbatim about every piece of journalism that has ever dealt with leaks, or witness accounts.
Given that the idea that MS is backing SCO has been a popular conspiracy theory since Groklaw was born, isn't assuming this is true jumping the gun a bit?
I don't want to dig around but MS has been an investor in SCO for years. There is no conspiracy theory there, it is financial relationships. Drawing Groklaw into this for no apparent reason is a bit of distraction and an attempt to sully as many targets as possible. The reality is that we aren't questioning whether or not MS has the right to give money to SCO but whether SCO has any product besides harassment law suits, and if it does not, should it's shareholders be supporting this continuous legal effort. If the entire rationale of SCO is as a hired bully for MSoft, then they have no future.
When the non-geek media went ahead and assumed that the Mydoom virus was authored by Linux zealots, without objectivity or evidence, merely because the assumption made sense, everyone cried bloody murder.
This is good. Totally off topic. It is always good to try to require individuals to operate based on no bias when you can't win an argument. Objectivity and evidence are not required in discussing any of this. We are not only allowed to use our experience, and perception, but are encouraged to do so, as that is a useful technique towards investigating matters. Until we are in a court of law we can discuss conjecture, and theories quite healthily.
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This really is an inane comment. I have done a whole lot of windows installs, and the number of times one has to reinstall an ENTIRE machine from scratch because you misconfigured a server is absurd. As far as why BILL wins is that whatever OS comes on the Machine is the One people use. No one installs Windows anymore as a newbie user. They use the machine, and when they buy a new machine they get a new OS unless they have some friend tell them they just NEED to upgrade in which case usually it involves them losing applications or whatnot because their friend doesn't follow some simple instruction.
In the end the reason Bill has the marketshare is that as a dominant monopoly player you have a lot of leverage to force your product onto consumer machines.
That is what the anti-trust battle is about, forcing users to pay for windows EVEN when they didn't want the OS, so that it was cheaper for a computer company to ship with the OS installed than without.
Any bullshit flaming about how it is easier to installw indows on a machien than it is to compile the kernel of Linux is just flame nothing more.
In a real comparison you would compare the instructions to compile the WinNT kernel with the Linux Kernel. How many of us have compiled Windows versus Linux? I think the numbers speak for themselves in terms of ease of compiling.
I personally HAVE been blacklisted (by ordb.org) and once I cleared up the problem (some ability to relay) I was let out. This took 2 hours total, so I feel comfortable USING ordb.org myself, now that I am responsible for protecting a large network from spam. I also use spamassassin, quarantining and a number of other methods to prevent false positives, and we do notify once you get past spamassassin.
If I did not use SOME rbl though, I would be sending out 6000 spam blocking notification messages a day mostly to people who aren't there or are not the real sender. Since I block things prior to getting through postfix, I am able to send them back a clear informative message on the blockage, DURING the transmission.
In any case, I have heard of lots of bad stuff about SPEWS and all but my experience with spamhaus and ordb are that both help block alot of mail, and are responsible with their efforts.
In any case, it is my business (and my company's business of course) how we handle our incoming stream. If we choose to use a blacklist that is our right. As it waspointed out, we could always create our own (It is pretty easy to create a dnsbased one even to share with a few friends or whatnot)...
No one is going to be able to stop ALL blacklists, but by attacking the large centralized ones, it does not IMPROVE the ability to get taken off an RBL. It just makes it harder really.
I actually believe it was as early as MacPaint that the Apple UI Standard got broken. The initial concept was that all things were menu based and Macpaint had a palette on screen. The obvious virtue of that interface despite it going against the initial guideline kept the product from being 'fixed'.
I would say there are two reasons that come to mind.
#1. iTunes is a very good way of delivering the music. My wife downloaded an album (Mr. Heartbreak by Laurie Anderson) and in about a minute it started playing while downloading the rest. It downloaded FASTER than it would have taken to rip the music ourself. As my wife said, if you need to get an album for some reason quickly (going to a dance party and you want to bring it) you can download an album and be out the door in 10 minutes (if you have an ipod)...
#2. Steve Jobs. His ability to get the labels and artists in line to make this work from the first moment is a real testimony to his ability as a salesman. Obviously the idea of internet music distribution wasn't invented by Apple. Yes the hype helped as well. People were waiting for the music store. While the first week Million song release is exciting I am curious to see if it expands. Will we see a million a week as the basic? Will it be like movies with drop off? Or will it be 2 million a week by next month. I note that both Warner Bros and Universal were quoted in that press release, so it is clear that they are tightly tied into this venture.
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It seems strange that something that has existed for so many years and had commercial ventures already (distribution of music) might be the killer app for the digital hub concept.
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I do know that as long as record stores are selling albums that weren't even digitally mastered for 15 bucks, 9.99 per album is gonna be a real seller. I also assume that Apple will find ways to create promotions that will even improve that price point.
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My understanding on this is that it has more to do with licensing of the music. It is a different matter to get US distribution rights than worldwide. I do not doubt that Apple is working to extend their rights, as the European market is significant to Apple's hardware sales, but you can't really blame them for not waiting. A big part of their leverage to get better worldwide rights as well as an increased catalog will be the success of their first steps.
Obviously they aren't having a bad start of it, and they have recieved really great press. I know people who are considering buying macs and ipods based on this.
The idea that one could tax email per letter (not per bandwidth) is inane at best. It means that people will actually stop sending smaller email, the kind that really improves the ability to quickly communicate and respond to communications, and beyond that an effort will be made to economize on a business scale, by getting the most value for your 1 cent (video clips being emailed).
As a second issue, how does the government tax foreign entities for email? And who do you tax, when spam is notoriously made difficult to trace?
And beyond that, I can imagine the dozens, if not thousands, of hackers, just waiting to have this sort of incentive to develop a better SMTP, one that solves many of the problems and loopholes that SMTP currently causes.
Also the article suggests that the federal government should be creating an Federal sales tax on internet purchases. Perhaps I am wrong, but I thought I already paid state tax. Atleast I do with any company that is doing business properly. This doesn't seem different than the old style catalog sales, where you order something out of state to avoid tax. I know Apple charges state tax in NY.
Really for a publication called the financial times, this is not a very financially sensible or reality based article. it seems to be written by someone whose only experience in the internet is reading about it.
Right. It is much better to use far more buggy and security unwise code that is entirely not fun to write.