Why? What's the point of this? The Microsoft Office Student/Teacher edition can be purchased readily from Apple's online store for $149 for the full version of Office. If you can't afford $149 for your productivity either:
A) Your time isn't worth any money and you should reconsider what you're using it for B) You can't afford it, so how can you afford the computer that you're using C) You just have no desire to pay for software and/or hate Microsoft for XYZ reasons.
Or: D) You aren't a student or teacher, and the few times per year that you need an office suite don't justify a $300 expense.
$300 is half the price of the Mac Mini to run it on. The $600 spent on the Mini goes a lot farther in terms of productivity than $300 spent on MS Office.
That's because of your $10 in "taxes", only a couple bucks are actually tax. The others are fees imposed by your carrier to cover their costs of complying with various regulations. Like the "number switching fee" charged by cellphone carriers, it's not actually a tax, it's an arbitrary charge by your carrier to cover the cost of something they have to provide, while avoiding raising your base service charge.
Re:What about captcha-busting software?
on
How Image Spam Works
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I really believe that the first instance of a true AI that passes the Turing test will have grown out of spam filtering...
Linus's comments strike me as indistinguishable from the hundreds of comments we've had on Slashdot on this issue in the last 48 hours.
What distinguishes his comment from all of the ones here on/. is that Microsoft will listen to his comments. Being who he is and what he's done, his comments hold weight in the discussion, whereas/. postings are just background noise (this one included).
If patches have been out for 6 months or a year, there's no reason why there shouldn't be a rollup patch that includes them.
Rollup patches can be optional, and I'm not suggesting them as a replacement to individual patches. But when you setup a new machine, it's a real pain to run through all the patches if you haven't slipstreamed them in. Or if you have to support a machine that hasn't been updated in quite a while, same problem...
"The sheer volume of the patches Microsoft releases each month makes it quite difficult for even the most conscientious IT department to get every patch out to all of the affected systems in a reasonable amount of time."
"
So the sheer volume of daily patches would make this better?
Now, MS should take a clue from Apple and have a lot more "rollup" packages than they currently do.
That's exactly why. They care enough about their work that they don't want it to just go to the highest bidder (read RIAA-pushed top-40 selection). Because if they did, the game would sound 'old' within 5-6 months of release. Or even sooner if the song came out before the game.
Just like RockStar keeps ignoring the ratings board and those that want to censor them. They care about what they produce.
Great... so I assemble a new system with "patchable" hardware... only to find that the hardware is deffective.
Now I'm left in a situation where I need software to patch the hardware. But I can't run the software because the hardware is defective...
This is just an excuse for being lazy. Do we really need more untested products flooding the market? Nothing like shifting the burden of quality control onto the end user to push up your profits...
On the other hand, this could be very useful in systems where physical access to the hardware is nigh impossibles... satellites for example. But this should not be used in consumer devices, and shouldn't be a crutch for faster development.
The Bush aide and District General issue is a special case.
If the committee doing the investigation wants, they can issue a subpoena on their own authority. If the the subpoena is ignored by the Presidential administration, the committee can go back to the entire House of Representatives to vote on whether to hold people in contempt of violating the subpoena.
At that point, they turn it over to the District Attorney of the District of Columbia to arrest the offenders and bring them to trial for disregarding a subpoena. That DA has the privilege of refusing to press the charges.
So, those who would be responsible for bringing the offenders to court, are directly employed by the offenders that should be brought to court. Pressing charges against your own boss is not the kind of thing most politically-appointed officials are wiling to do.
Now, as for the situation at hand. In a civil proceeding like the RIAA has been pushing, any party has the right to appeal or argue against a judge's orders. It's all based on whatever obscure precedents can be dug up to support your position. Whether or not the judge's order is overruled or rescinded is another matter entirely. Remember, this isn't the final outcome of the trial, merely one more movement of a pawn on the chessboard.
And I have 350 anytime minutes... far more than I use in any given month.
All of this is only $57/month when totaled with all the taxes and fees.
So why would I pay $30/month for just local dialing on a land line? And why would I spend $150 for unlimited mobile service when my needs are completely met for 1/3 the price?
But a better question is why has it taken the mobile industry so long to figure out what it took the ISP industry a very short time to do?
both are connected to our ISP through the same hub
That probably means they're on the same local network (unless you have a mess of firewalls/routers in between them).
Windows is probably doing a NetBIOS check for the serial number. This isn't anything particularly new or exciting. Apps on Apple operating systems have been doing this same thing for years (even predating OSX by quite some time) through the AppleTalk protocol.
That's a very good point and spot-on. A classic example is "gimp"... how seriously are companies going to take a product that shares its name with the very politically incorrect slang word for a cripple?
Although it holds true for closed-source projects as well... Shake and Combustion (owned by Apple and Autodesk respectively) are names you wouldn't associate with compositing package unless you already know about them. Basic names such as "AntiVirus" usually only work as branded with their corporate entity and then only for well-known types of tools (office products, utilities, email clients, etc.)
That and open source projects usually don't have the budget, time, or knowledge to research branding and identity.
By the way, I agree with Dynedain about PDFCreator too, but I'm not sure why s/he thinks it's hard to find
What I meant is that if you don't explicitly already know about PDFCreator, and know where to find it, it's very difficult to locate. Sometimes when installing I forget what it's called, and sourceforge's search leaves much to be desired. The biggest problem is that people generally don't even know it's possible to install a PDF printer and instead rely on whatever their applications have support for in terms of exporting stand-alone documents. And on our corporate network, the accounting people have 4 different PDF printers installed as part of different accounting packages. Some of which do not even come close to working on XP64bit. If they could all just be redirected to work with one already-installed virtual printer like PDFCreator, I'd be much much happier.
Aside from the obvious big winners (ie. Firefox/Apache/MySQL/PHP/FreeBSD/Linux) here are some of the lesser-known winners that I like:
Cyberduck - Very clean OSX FTP client Joomla! - Content Management System SmoothWall - Router/Firewall Linux distro VNC - remote desktop PDFCreator - Great PDF printer for Windows, but really hard to find VLC - all in one media player for OSX XMMS - WinAMP-like media player for X11 systems MythTV - even though it doesn't work for me (yet!)
Some that I think are losers:
Mambo - The project Joomla! forked from when the devs split with the corporation owning the copyright.
OpenDarwin - since Apple seems to be intent on not giving back whatever it doesn't have to.
Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow gets in the way and only enthusiasts really use it (like gimp, but with a much much smaller install base)
Sunbird - the calendar component of Mozilla's offerings... Firefox development has been blasting along, even Thunderbird is doing great, but Sunbird (both the standalone and plugin version) seem to have stagnated... very very unfortunate since the iCal standard is going to explode with the iCal server in OSX Server 10.5 and there are very few Windows clients that utilize it. Mozilla could capture a huge market share here.
PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).
Some of my winners may ultimately be losers. For example, SmoothWall hasn't had a major update in several years, PDFCreator is difficult to find, and would disappear if Adobe included a PDF printer with Acrobat Reader or Microsoft included one in Windows. Likewise, some of my losers could easily become winners if they could pull their acts together.
You can see my bias (as a web developer) but "loser" open source projects seem to just fade away. So I don't think there are many memorable examples as there are of winners. And of course every winner can easily be eclipsed and made a loser if they don't stay on the ball just like closed-source projects.
As a web designer and developer who works alongside several designers, I can assure you that understanding CSS is not a designer's role, but a developer's role. Once you are involved in coding (whether it's a Turing-complete language or simply a markup language) you are a developer. Now, I point my designer coworkers to various tools that will auto generate CSS, but purely for making it easier for me to interpret their intent (instead of relying on things like Photoshop values for text paragraph formatting which do not match CSS), and also so that they know what fonts and settings are viewable by the site's end users.
Here's a rule of thumb:
If you are defining things like this, you're in the designer role:
For over 2 years I had exactly 4 songs in my iTunes shopping cart... songs that I really liked, but I couldn't bring myself to hand over my credit card for the DRM inhibited music. I usually buy CDs.
So, for Christmas I received a couple of iTunes gift cards. I figured, what the heck... I'll buy the songs now and attempt to find something to strip the DRM.
And then the catch hit me. The songs, while still in my shopping cart and still had playable samples were "no longer for sale in the iTunes US store". The songs and the albumn that they made up were no longer listed in the store by any means of searching.
Here's the real kicker that pissed me off. These songs were only ever sold through the iTunes store. No physical store sales, no other online music stores, and I was never able to find them on any p2p services.
Hopefully I'll now be able to purchase them. This is another perfect example of why DRM is a bad bad thing. If the company holding the keys to the DRM infected information decides to revoke them, the content can be completely lost to society.
I do touchtype on the Treo. It's thumb-based instead of 10 finger. But there is a nice little nib on the F key to help you find "home row" and anyways touch typing is impossible on a virtual keyboard like the iPhone. When I say I touch-dial, I mean I can find and press the appropriate button to speed dial (for instance P maps to my girlfriend, A to a friend, W to work, etc.) without ever looking at the Treo itself.
Mine does. Missing Sync lets me create a playlist in iTunes that copies over to my Treo whenever I do a sync. Sure I have to strip the DRM off of any iTunes purchases, but that's true for any non-Apple product.
Treo doesn't have video
My 650 did, and so does my 700p. I have full-length movies on it that I watch when I go to the gym.
Treo doesn't have cover flow
Proprietary Apple-only UI. I'm sure someone could develop something similar for the PalmOS. (The lack of Palm developers as the company circles the drain is another story entirely.) And probably something similar already exists for WinCE phones.
Treo doesn't have core animation.
Again, proprietary Apple-only UI feature. Probably won't really be used much in iPhone apps because of video hardware requirements and battery life. Not really a device "feature" unless you're a developer for apps on the device.
While it has a qwerty keyboard, the keyboard is a piece of shit. It does not support touch typing
Works fine for me. I can touch type, and touch-dial with mine (speed dial) all the time. I have huge hands and the physical buttons are barely enough to be usable by me. Any smaller, or god forbid, virtual buttons, would be completely unusable because I would hit more than one every time I push. In fact that's the biggest reason why I went with a Treo when I moved away from my Samsung i330 (Palm graffiti device) instead of one of the other smartphones on the market.
If you wanted to point out the functionality that the iPhone will have, that no other device (including the Treo) currently can do (aside from UI implementations):
point out the video voicemail (which required Cingular to completely revamp their network)
the auto-sensing screen shutoff when holding it to your ear
the auto-sensing orientation for landscape vs. portrait mode
the auto-sensiing screen brightness
the GPS placement within Google Maps (something there's no reason why current phones don't do other than carrier restrictions and lazy developers)
It seems your biggest complaint is that the Treo (an already available and much cheaper product) doesn't have the iPhone's functionality (6 months away and no-one has handled it yet beyond Steve's preplanned demo) because it's not an Apple product. No-one is saying that there is another device out there that can match the iPhone feature for feature.
My complaint is 3-fold.
No removable memory (4GB SD cards are much cheaper than the price difference between a Treo and an iPhone, even cheaper than the difference in price between the iPhone models themselves)
Cingular and their inane data plan pricing.
The on-screen keyboard and lack of a stylus (big fingers and greasy or makeup covered screens)
I like that the iPhone does everything the Treo does, and in most cases does it better. I've been waiting for someone to do a good phone + pda convergence for years (ever since I yearned for the first Palm + Phone device that Qualcomm made where it was literally just a Palm and a cellphone mashed into one box - complete with two different screens and no shared address book). If the iPhone was available on other US carriers, I would certainly switch to it. But the combined Cingular screwover and the virtual keypad makes me think I'll wait for the 2nd version and wider availability. From the keynote, something tells me that viewing webpages and other apps will be very difficult without a stylus. How do you hit a link in a webpage if the link is smaller than your fingertip (because of the high-rez screen) and listed along a bunch of others? I would love to test the iPhone when it's available. And if you can install regular OSX apps on it (without Cingular/Apple lock-in) then even better! This device has a lot of potential and refinement that makes it great. But if the potential doesn't pan out... say goodbye...
The sad thing is that Apple was the reason why everyone started adding i to everything...
So a trademark aquired in 1996 is because Apple decided to trademark the iMac in 1998? That's some interesting time traveling device that Jobs & Co. has. Where can I get an iTimeMachine?
But seriously, the dot com boom and rise of general internet awareness sparked a lot of i-names. e-names were more popular initially, but when people couldn't register e-device, the next thing they'd try was i-device. While Apple's uses may be the most memorable (because of success and their incredible ability to get free marketing from every news source on the planet), it wasn't the first and wasn't the trend setter either.
*** File this myth along side of Apple being the first to have USB or 64bit desktop machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Or:
D) You aren't a student or teacher, and the few times per year that you need an office suite don't justify a $300 expense.
$300 is half the price of the Mac Mini to run it on. The $600 spent on the Mini goes a lot farther in terms of productivity than $300 spent on MS Office.
That's because of your $10 in "taxes", only a couple bucks are actually tax. The others are fees imposed by your carrier to cover their costs of complying with various regulations. Like the "number switching fee" charged by cellphone carriers, it's not actually a tax, it's an arbitrary charge by your carrier to cover the cost of something they have to provide, while avoiding raising your base service charge.
I really believe that the first instance of a true AI that passes the Turing test will have grown out of spam filtering...
Linus's comments strike me as indistinguishable from the hundreds of comments we've had on Slashdot on this issue in the last 48 hours.
/. is that Microsoft will listen to his comments. Being who he is and what he's done, his comments hold weight in the discussion, whereas /. postings are just background noise (this one included).
What distinguishes his comment from all of the ones here on
If patches have been out for 6 months or a year, there's no reason why there shouldn't be a rollup patch that includes them.
Rollup patches can be optional, and I'm not suggesting them as a replacement to individual patches. But when you setup a new machine, it's a real pain to run through all the patches if you haven't slipstreamed them in. Or if you have to support a machine that hasn't been updated in quite a while, same problem...
So the sheer volume of daily patches would make this better?
Now, MS should take a clue from Apple and have a lot more "rollup" packages than they currently do.
I don't think you understand.... that was a person offering real sex (advertised through craigs list) in exchange for items in a virtual world.
That's exactly why. They care enough about their work that they don't want it to just go to the highest bidder (read RIAA-pushed top-40 selection). Because if they did, the game would sound 'old' within 5-6 months of release. Or even sooner if the song came out before the game.
Just like RockStar keeps ignoring the ratings board and those that want to censor them. They care about what they produce.
Great... so I assemble a new system with "patchable" hardware... only to find that the hardware is deffective.
Now I'm left in a situation where I need software to patch the hardware. But I can't run the software because the hardware is defective...
This is just an excuse for being lazy. Do we really need more untested products flooding the market? Nothing like shifting the burden of quality control onto the end user to push up your profits...
On the other hand, this could be very useful in systems where physical access to the hardware is nigh impossibles... satellites for example. But this should not be used in consumer devices, and shouldn't be a crutch for faster development.
There is absolutely no way that a laptop carried on a plane can simulate the sound of a real shotgun or rocket.
Have you even heard a real gun before? I guarantee you that the air marshals have.
Of course they can, just look at Apple.
They have an uncanny ability to enter an established market with a "cool" product and trample over the competition.
The Bush aide and District General issue is a special case.
If the committee doing the investigation wants, they can issue a subpoena on their own authority. If the the subpoena is ignored by the Presidential administration, the committee can go back to the entire House of Representatives to vote on whether to hold people in contempt of violating the subpoena.
At that point, they turn it over to the District Attorney of the District of Columbia to arrest the offenders and bring them to trial for disregarding a subpoena. That DA has the privilege of refusing to press the charges.
So, those who would be responsible for bringing the offenders to court, are directly employed by the offenders that should be brought to court. Pressing charges against your own boss is not the kind of thing most politically-appointed officials are wiling to do.
Now, as for the situation at hand. In a civil proceeding like the RIAA has been pushing, any party has the right to appeal or argue against a judge's orders. It's all based on whatever obscure precedents can be dug up to support your position. Whether or not the judge's order is overruled or rescinded is another matter entirely. Remember, this isn't the final outcome of the trial, merely one more movement of a pawn on the chessboard.
I have Sprint mobile, and no land line at home.
I have unlimited data on their EDVO network.
I have unlimited nights and weekends.
No charges for calling anywhere in the US.
And I have 350 anytime minutes... far more than I use in any given month.
All of this is only $57/month when totaled with all the taxes and fees.
So why would I pay $30/month for just local dialing on a land line? And why would I spend $150 for unlimited mobile service when my needs are completely met for 1/3 the price?
But a better question is why has it taken the mobile industry so long to figure out what it took the ISP industry a very short time to do?
both are connected to our ISP through the same hub
That probably means they're on the same local network (unless you have a mess of firewalls/routers in between them).
Windows is probably doing a NetBIOS check for the serial number. This isn't anything particularly new or exciting. Apps on Apple operating systems have been doing this same thing for years (even predating OSX by quite some time) through the AppleTalk protocol.
And if you call now, we'll throw in this knife set absolutely free! That's a $400 value!
This offer won't last long, so call now!
Too bad the Department of Homeland Security doesn't have a neocortex.
That's a very good point and spot-on. A classic example is "gimp"... how seriously are companies going to take a product that shares its name with the very politically incorrect slang word for a cripple?
Although it holds true for closed-source projects as well... Shake and Combustion (owned by Apple and Autodesk respectively) are names you wouldn't associate with compositing package unless you already know about them. Basic names such as "AntiVirus" usually only work as branded with their corporate entity and then only for well-known types of tools (office products, utilities, email clients, etc.)
That and open source projects usually don't have the budget, time, or knowledge to research branding and identity.
Aside from the obvious big winners (ie. Firefox/Apache/MySQL/PHP/FreeBSD/Linux) here are some of the lesser-known winners that I like:
Cyberduck - Very clean OSX FTP client
Joomla! - Content Management System
SmoothWall - Router/Firewall Linux distro
VNC - remote desktop
PDFCreator - Great PDF printer for Windows, but really hard to find
VLC - all in one media player for OSX
XMMS - WinAMP-like media player for X11 systems
MythTV - even though it doesn't work for me (yet!)
Some that I think are losers:
Mambo - The project Joomla! forked from when the devs split with the corporation owning the copyright.
OpenDarwin - since Apple seems to be intent on not giving back whatever it doesn't have to.
Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow gets in the way and only enthusiasts really use it (like gimp, but with a much much smaller install base)
Sunbird - the calendar component of Mozilla's offerings... Firefox development has been blasting along, even Thunderbird is doing great, but Sunbird (both the standalone and plugin version) seem to have stagnated... very very unfortunate since the iCal standard is going to explode with the iCal server in OSX Server 10.5 and there are very few Windows clients that utilize it. Mozilla could capture a huge market share here.
PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).
Some of my winners may ultimately be losers. For example, SmoothWall hasn't had a major update in several years, PDFCreator is difficult to find, and would disappear if Adobe included a PDF printer with Acrobat Reader or Microsoft included one in Windows. Likewise, some of my losers could easily become winners if they could pull their acts together.
You can see my bias (as a web developer) but "loser" open source projects seem to just fade away. So I don't think there are many memorable examples as there are of winners. And of course every winner can easily be eclipsed and made a loser if they don't stay on the ball just like closed-source projects.
As a web designer and developer who works alongside several designers, I can assure you that understanding CSS is not a designer's role, but a developer's role. Once you are involved in coding (whether it's a Turing-complete language or simply a markup language) you are a developer. Now, I point my designer coworkers to various tools that will auto generate CSS, but purely for making it easier for me to interpret their intent (instead of relying on things like Photoshop values for text paragraph formatting which do not match CSS), and also so that they know what fonts and settings are viewable by the site's end users.
Here's a rule of thumb:
If you are defining things like this, you're in the designer role:
Font: Gill Sans
Size: 12.5pt
Leading: 20pt
Tracking: 30
Color: Pantone 420C
Whereas if you are defining things like this, you're in the developer role:
h3 {
font-family: "Gill Sans", verdana, arial, helvettica, sans;
font-size: 1.25em;
line-height: 1.33em;
letter-spacing: 0;
color: #CCCCCC;
}
I am going to try this immediately.
For over 2 years I had exactly 4 songs in my iTunes shopping cart... songs that I really liked, but I couldn't bring myself to hand over my credit card for the DRM inhibited music. I usually buy CDs.
So, for Christmas I received a couple of iTunes gift cards. I figured, what the heck... I'll buy the songs now and attempt to find something to strip the DRM.
And then the catch hit me. The songs, while still in my shopping cart and still had playable samples were "no longer for sale in the iTunes US store". The songs and the albumn that they made up were no longer listed in the store by any means of searching.
Here's the real kicker that pissed me off. These songs were only ever sold through the iTunes store. No physical store sales, no other online music stores, and I was never able to find them on any p2p services.
Hopefully I'll now be able to purchase them. This is another perfect example of why DRM is a bad bad thing. If the company holding the keys to the DRM infected information decides to revoke them, the content can be completely lost to society.
On this planet we use an analogue clock. We've avoided destruction by just forgetting to wind it.
Ummm... ok, interesting troll, but I'll bite.
I do touchtype on the Treo. It's thumb-based instead of 10 finger. But there is a nice little nib on the F key to help you find "home row" and anyways touch typing is impossible on a virtual keyboard like the iPhone. When I say I touch-dial, I mean I can find and press the appropriate button to speed dial (for instance P maps to my girlfriend, A to a friend, W to work, etc.) without ever looking at the Treo itself.
Mine does. Missing Sync lets me create a playlist in iTunes that copies over to my Treo whenever I do a sync. Sure I have to strip the DRM off of any iTunes purchases, but that's true for any non-Apple product.
My 650 did, and so does my 700p. I have full-length movies on it that I watch when I go to the gym.
Proprietary Apple-only UI. I'm sure someone could develop something similar for the PalmOS. (The lack of Palm developers as the company circles the drain is another story entirely.) And probably something similar already exists for WinCE phones.
Again, proprietary Apple-only UI feature. Probably won't really be used much in iPhone apps because of video hardware requirements and battery life. Not really a device "feature" unless you're a developer for apps on the device.
Works fine for me. I can touch type, and touch-dial with mine (speed dial) all the time. I have huge hands and the physical buttons are barely enough to be usable by me. Any smaller, or god forbid, virtual buttons, would be completely unusable because I would hit more than one every time I push. In fact that's the biggest reason why I went with a Treo when I moved away from my Samsung i330 (Palm graffiti device) instead of one of the other smartphones on the market.
If you wanted to point out the functionality that the iPhone will have, that no other device (including the Treo) currently can do (aside from UI implementations):
It seems your biggest complaint is that the Treo (an already available and much cheaper product) doesn't have the iPhone's functionality (6 months away and no-one has handled it yet beyond Steve's preplanned demo) because it's not an Apple product. No-one is saying that there is another device out there that can match the iPhone feature for feature.
My complaint is 3-fold.
I like that the iPhone does everything the Treo does, and in most cases does it better. I've been waiting for someone to do a good phone + pda convergence for years (ever since I yearned for the first Palm + Phone device that Qualcomm made where it was literally just a Palm and a cellphone mashed into one box - complete with two different screens and no shared address book). If the iPhone was available on other US carriers, I would certainly switch to it. But the combined Cingular screwover and the virtual keypad makes me think I'll wait for the 2nd version and wider availability. From the keynote, something tells me that viewing webpages and other apps will be very difficult without a stylus. How do you hit a link in a webpage if the link is smaller than your fingertip (because of the high-rez screen) and listed along a bunch of others? I would love to test the iPhone when it's available. And if you can install regular OSX apps on it (without Cingular/Apple lock-in) then even better! This device has a lot of potential and refinement that makes it great. But if the potential doesn't pan out... say goodbye...
So a trademark aquired in 1996 is because Apple decided to trademark the iMac in 1998? That's some interesting time traveling device that Jobs & Co. has. Where can I get an iTimeMachine?
But seriously, the dot com boom and rise of general internet awareness sparked a lot of i-names. e-names were more popular initially, but when people couldn't register e-device, the next thing they'd try was i-device. While Apple's uses may be the most memorable (because of success and their incredible ability to get free marketing from every news source on the planet), it wasn't the first and wasn't the trend setter either.
*** File this myth along side of Apple being the first to have USB or 64bit desktop machines.