Microsoft partnered with Staq to provide doublespace, then broke the partnership, and Microsoft had to change the name to drivespace, but was still forced to pay Staq to implement the code.
If you want to feel less significant, look up at the sky on a clear night.
Most people generally think of what they are looking at as billions of billions of galaxies.
Not true. With the naked eye, you are looking at a few thousand local stars. There are only two galaxies that can be seen with the naked eye (outside of the Milky Way, our own). Andromeda, and Magellenic clouds.
Those billions upon billions of galaxies are not visible to the naked eye, nor even with your average consumer-grade telescope. They're out there. But too far away for you to see.
the problem is, infinite questions (questions about the nature of the universe, beyond measurable time) require infinite patience. Unfortunately, I have finite time to exist in this universe.
If you find out the answer in the next one, look me up and let me know:)
I really do like Battlebots, but maybe that's because I always fast forward through the commentators crap. PVR's and Battlebots are the perfect combo, you can watch a half hour episode in about 10 minutes.
I WOULD like to see a rumble, all the bots vs. the commentators. superheavyweight would be fun.
hey, I've seen fire on at least two occasions on battlebots, and smoke on many other occasions.
My favorite was when Dissector was caught in the championship match, his hammer got stuck in the killsaw slot, and he was immobilized, but he rolled back and got the arm of the hammer across the killsaw, and basically cut off his own appendage to get free - and he ended up winning that match for the championship. That was awesome. You could not have scripted that fight better.
Wedges DO seem to be the direction going in Battlebots, but I don't think we've heard the last word on spinners, considering Ziggo won the middleweight nut. Backlash did great last season, Toro was awesome, with that super powerful flipper bar, Vlad will be back, king of brute force bashing (I loved how he got wasted, flipped over twice, and he righted himself twice, then he got stuck under the hammer which broke off his little piston thing for righting himself). Plus, even though Mechadon and Snake were losers, that guy keeps coming back with these incredibly beautiful designs (which in my opinion, should be granted an asthetics category for a golden nut).
The ones I particularly hate in Battlebots are the two-wheelers that either spin or flip back and forth. They just seem kind of cheesy - and they're totally not at all fun to watch if the driver doesn't know how to.
if you've ever played Core Wars, you'll note that about 90% of games end in a draw.
With mechanical failures, programming oversights, poor sensory technology, I don't think we're at a point where this could get very exiting. Half the time these automated robots just stumble off into a corner, oblivious to eachother.
What would REALLY be nice is if members of congress would post to slashdot in the comments sections, debating issues, or providing information on their stand, what congress is doing about it, what WE could do to help, etc.
what would suck though, is if officials from other countries started doing it too. Gawrsh, that would be disorienting. ..
My company has a software package that was marketed at Enterprise accounts for $450. Our marketing research indicated that IT managers did not take us seriously, because of the low "commodity market" price, and determined a lower threshold of $2000. The price was raised to $1995, and I'm not shitting you, sales skyrocketed.
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt, because I'm not revealing my employer's name for obvious reasons.
Why would they pay for Open Source? Because Microsoft asks for legitimate $$$ for a legitimate license to use the software. Open Source has nothing to do with it. Today, nobody's stoping companies from borrowing someone's Win2k CD and installing it on their machine and entering in a SN they got from Hotline. Microsoft still gets their money, because businesses want to be legitimate. No accountant says, "say, why did we pay for solution B here? We didn't HAVE to." Just because some software's source code is open doesn't mean it's legal for a customer to just violate licensing. That may be possible for the GPL, and I don't care. I'm not saying MS should go GPL, I'm saying that MS should open it's source code, for the obvious benefits it can provide to it's customers.
My point is, if MS truly was oriented to customer needs, they'd do this.
Re:They'll do it anyway, but...
on
CPRM Voted Down
·
· Score: 2
Check out this latest wierdness on my PVR;
My DISH network DISHPlayer got a software update a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, when I was watching a live broadcast (a rarity), I clicked on MUTE during a commercial, and the fucking subtitles for hearing impaired turned on. So even though I turned on MUTE to get the commercial noise out of my ears, those oh-so-thoughtful engineers decided to put the text of the commercial dialog on my screen anyways.
Good thing I still have that 30-second skip forward button. (UNlike TiVo)
no no! Apple's license agreement for iTunes (which you MUST read, and click-agree to prior to downloading iTunes from their site) states that iTunes is NOT to be used for illegal copying copyrighted materials.
So if you're using iTunes to illegally copy copyrighted materials, STOP RIGHT NOW! You are violating Apple's license agreement!
Of course, if you are copying copyrighted works for noncommercial purposes, under your fair-use rights, copy away man. It's your legal, American, Apple-pie right.
Really, let's say Microsoft DOES want to do an Office for Linux. How hard would it be to parallel-develop one for GNOME and KDE? Really.
They can USE the fact that there are a lot of very vocal opponents to Microsoft on slashdot as a means of justification for NOT writing a Linux port. We all know the REAL reasons.
We also all know that there are at least as many, if not more, Linux users who still require the use of MS Office, and would glady pay for and buy a Linux version. In fact, I would say that they could probably ignore GNOME, for philosophical reasons that people running GNOME are probably doing so because they are rabidly anti-closed-source, and therefore less likely to pay for a close-source MS Office.
How hard would it be?
Has Microsoft done any marketing research to find out whether they could make any money off of a KDE LInux port?
I'm sure they haven't bothered, because would just weaken their OS monopoly. What's the point?
Well, the point would be, if they DID do a Linux port, they could also support an implementation on Solaris, and Mac OS 10, and BSD. Stuff in the Unix world ports around VERY easily. Sure, they may have to hack it in as an XFree86 interface on Mac OS, but obscene hacks have never stopped them on the Mac side before. . . (or Solaris, for that matter, as anyone who has used the abomination called IE for Solaris knows.)
"We also develop software that is not based on an established standard - either no standard exists or the standard that exists does not meet our customer requirements. Should we be required to publish the source code or underlying designs of all our software so that anyone can copy it? I would hope not - much the same that companies in other industries have the right to build products and retain the intellectual property rights associated with those products."
In response to his answer, NO, you shouldn't be REQUIRED (by law) to publish the source code or underlying designs of all your software (so that anyone can copy it). You should be REQUIRED by a strong sense of wanting to fulfill customer desires, to publish source code and underlying designs of all of your software. Not "so anyone can copy it" but so anyone can fix it, extend it, understand and trust it. Hard-coded binary-only software is useful in the limited set of features and functions that were designed into it. But if it's broken, doesn't perform as advertised, or cannot be extended or ported, to fulfil customer requirements, how is that good? It's not! It's shit! All because you're terrified of people freely copying and pirating your software, you can't accept the FACT that most legitimate businesses WILL pay for software, even if it's freely available. You thow chains on the advance of the software, it advances at the pace YOUR dev budget says it can, bugs get fixed at the pace set by Marketing's drive for shiny new features of questionalbe technical merit. Security is an afterthought.
You should be REQUIRED by a sense of honesty, and commitment to the customer to open your software. Keeping it closed leads to no accountability, and skewed requirements based on internal corporate politics, rather than what the user truly needs.
If you close your source, your customers lose a great deal of flexibility, and only the gullible ones feel truly secure. I guess that's taking advantage of the PT Barnum business ethic "sucker born every minute". What a proud corporate legacy.
fuck, there's a lot of very GOOD reasons to have the same OS on every platform.
Scalability, being one.
Sure, you want an OS that runs on high-end server platforms, midrange desktops (that doesn't force you into a yearly hardware upgrade due to software bloat), and perhaps even handheld devices. Then you can write your apps more easily to port across the various devices in your enterprise, your support people don't have to learn different tools and standards and document formats and protocol implementations.
It's a dream. Why can't it be a reality? Because of capitalism. The vendors can't screw down the standards and suck optimal profits out of their IP monopoly if systems were that open. Only the customer would benefit from a system like that. The customer, and their customers.
Re:It's definitely NOT MacOS.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
uh, yeah. Until you start doing things like moving stuff into and out of the Application folder, then suddenly permissions break for no explainable reason, and your average Mac user is out buying Unix for Dummies so they can figure out how to use terminal.app, man, su, sudo, chmod, hacking netinfo to enable the root account, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Having unix superhero powers is very cool.
Having to use them for simple everyday tasks that weren't necessary on the old OS is very uncool (expecially when it's because of buggy behavior as described above).
OS X has changed a simple drag-n-drop file move operation into a major educational ordeal involving many steps.
IMHO, this is *not* the highly touted, much promised "Macintosh ease of use on a powerful Unix OS".
Re:It's definitely NOT MacOS.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
I doubt there's any technical reason we can't have the apple menu the way it used to be. Heck, how long did it take for a shareware hack to make it out for PB? two weeks?
How long did it take for similar apple menu functionality to show up in the Dock? two months?
I'm 100% certain that it was a stubborn, political, Steve ass-kissing decision. Had they put configurability back into apple menu, it would have diminished the necessity for the Dock - rumored to be one of Steve's special favorite features (mainly because of the Genie effect when minimizing, because it's a super-cool thing that makes Windows look WEAK).
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft partnered with Staq to provide doublespace, then broke the partnership, and Microsoft had to change the name to drivespace, but was still forced to pay Staq to implement the code.
It's turtles, all the way down man!
-
If you want to feel less significant, look up at the sky on a clear night.
Most people generally think of what they are looking at as billions of billions of galaxies.
Not true. With the naked eye, you are looking at a few thousand local stars. There are only two galaxies that can be seen with the naked eye (outside of the Milky Way, our own). Andromeda, and Magellenic clouds.
Those billions upon billions of galaxies are not visible to the naked eye, nor even with your average consumer-grade telescope. They're out there. But too far away for you to see.
Birth
School
Work
Death
the problem is, infinite questions (questions about the nature of the universe, beyond measurable time) require infinite patience. Unfortunately, I have finite time to exist in this universe.
:)
If you find out the answer in the next one, look me up and let me know
I really do like Battlebots, but maybe that's because I always fast forward through the commentators crap. PVR's and Battlebots are the perfect combo, you can watch a half hour episode in about 10 minutes.
I WOULD like to see a rumble, all the bots vs. the commentators. superheavyweight would be fun.
hey, I've seen fire on at least two occasions on battlebots, and smoke on many other occasions.
My favorite was when Dissector was caught in the championship match, his hammer got stuck in the killsaw slot, and he was immobilized, but he rolled back and got the arm of the hammer across the killsaw, and basically cut off his own appendage to get free - and he ended up winning that match for the championship. That was awesome. You could not have scripted that fight better.
Wedges DO seem to be the direction going in Battlebots, but I don't think we've heard the last word on spinners, considering Ziggo won the middleweight nut. Backlash did great last season, Toro was awesome, with that super powerful flipper bar, Vlad will be back, king of brute force bashing (I loved how he got wasted, flipped over twice, and he righted himself twice, then he got stuck under the hammer which broke off his little piston thing for righting himself). Plus, even though Mechadon and Snake were losers, that guy keeps coming back with these incredibly beautiful designs (which in my opinion, should be granted an asthetics category for a golden nut).
The ones I particularly hate in Battlebots are the two-wheelers that either spin or flip back and forth. They just seem kind of cheesy - and they're totally not at all fun to watch if the driver doesn't know how to.
hey man, fuck you. Elton John ROCKS.
if you've ever played Core Wars, you'll note that about 90% of games end in a draw.
With mechanical failures, programming oversights, poor sensory technology, I don't think we're at a point where this could get very exiting. Half the time these automated robots just stumble off into a corner, oblivious to eachother.
What would REALLY be nice is if members of congress would post to slashdot in the comments sections, debating issues, or providing information on their stand, what congress is doing about it, what WE could do to help, etc.
.
what would suck though, is if officials from other countries started doing it too. Gawrsh, that would be disorienting. .
My company has a software package that was marketed at Enterprise accounts for $450. Our marketing research indicated that IT managers did not take us seriously, because of the low "commodity market" price, and determined a lower threshold of $2000. The price was raised to $1995, and I'm not shitting you, sales skyrocketed.
Of course, take this all with a grain of salt, because I'm not revealing my employer's name for obvious reasons.
Why would they pay for Open Source? Because Microsoft asks for legitimate $$$ for a legitimate license to use the software. Open Source has nothing to do with it. Today, nobody's stoping companies from borrowing someone's Win2k CD and installing it on their machine and entering in a SN they got from Hotline. Microsoft still gets their money, because businesses want to be legitimate. No accountant says, "say, why did we pay for solution B here? We didn't HAVE to." Just because some software's source code is open doesn't mean it's legal for a customer to just violate licensing. That may be possible for the GPL, and I don't care. I'm not saying MS should go GPL, I'm saying that MS should open it's source code, for the obvious benefits it can provide to it's customers.
My point is, if MS truly was oriented to customer needs, they'd do this.
Check out this latest wierdness on my PVR;
My DISH network DISHPlayer got a software update a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, when I was watching a live broadcast (a rarity), I clicked on MUTE during a commercial, and the fucking subtitles for hearing impaired turned on. So even though I turned on MUTE to get the commercial noise out of my ears, those oh-so-thoughtful engineers decided to put the text of the commercial dialog on my screen anyways.
Good thing I still have that 30-second skip forward button. (UNlike TiVo)
that may have been an issue before Apple's stock plummeted from $125 to $15 last year. Probably not a big deal anymore
Microsoft is rabidly opposed to HARDWARE copy protection (because it makes it a pain in the ass to use hardware).
Microsoft is all for SOFTWARE-based copy protection, of course.
Neither are going to be 100% effective even in Hilary Rosen's wildest and wettest lezbo dreams.
download a spine you twit.
you're british, aren't you?
pantywaist.
you probably believe in gun control too.
no no! Apple's license agreement for iTunes (which you MUST read, and click-agree to prior to downloading iTunes from their site) states that iTunes is NOT to be used for illegal copying copyrighted materials.
So if you're using iTunes to illegally copy copyrighted materials, STOP RIGHT NOW! You are violating Apple's license agreement!
Of course, if you are copying copyrighted works for noncommercial purposes, under your fair-use rights, copy away man. It's your legal, American, Apple-pie right.
lies, damn lies, and statistics.
I'm not biased anti-microsoft. They really do, empirically suck.
TiVo *is* kind of hard to use.
no. it takes 5 minutes to figure out how to drive a car. The long training and practice comes with learning to drive a car IN TRAFFIC.
Really, let's say Microsoft DOES want to do an Office for Linux. How hard would it be to parallel-develop one for GNOME and KDE? Really.
They can USE the fact that there are a lot of very vocal opponents to Microsoft on slashdot as a means of justification for NOT writing a Linux port. We all know the REAL reasons.
We also all know that there are at least as many, if not more, Linux users who still require the use of MS Office, and would glady pay for and buy a Linux version. In fact, I would say that they could probably ignore GNOME, for philosophical reasons that people running GNOME are probably doing so because they are rabidly anti-closed-source, and therefore less likely to pay for a close-source MS Office.
How hard would it be?
Has Microsoft done any marketing research to find out whether they could make any money off of a KDE LInux port?
I'm sure they haven't bothered, because would just weaken their OS monopoly. What's the point?
Well, the point would be, if they DID do a Linux port, they could also support an implementation on Solaris, and Mac OS 10, and BSD. Stuff in the Unix world ports around VERY easily. Sure, they may have to hack it in as an XFree86 interface on Mac OS, but obscene hacks have never stopped them on the Mac side before. . . (or Solaris, for that matter, as anyone who has used the abomination called IE for Solaris knows.)
"We also develop software that is not based on an established standard - either no standard exists or the standard that exists does not meet our customer requirements. Should we be required to publish the source code or underlying designs of all our software so that anyone can copy it? I would hope not - much the same that companies in other industries have the right to build products and retain the intellectual property rights associated with those products."
In response to his answer, NO, you shouldn't be REQUIRED (by law) to publish the source code or underlying designs of all your software (so that anyone can copy it). You should be REQUIRED by a strong sense of wanting to fulfill customer desires, to publish source code and underlying designs of all of your software. Not "so anyone can copy it" but so anyone can fix it, extend it, understand and trust it. Hard-coded binary-only software is useful in the limited set of features and functions that were designed into it. But if it's broken, doesn't perform as advertised, or cannot be extended or ported, to fulfil customer requirements, how is that good? It's not! It's shit! All because you're terrified of people freely copying and pirating your software, you can't accept the FACT that most legitimate businesses WILL pay for software, even if it's freely available. You thow chains on the advance of the software, it advances at the pace YOUR dev budget says it can, bugs get fixed at the pace set by Marketing's drive for shiny new features of questionalbe technical merit. Security is an afterthought.
You should be REQUIRED by a sense of honesty, and commitment to the customer to open your software. Keeping it closed leads to no accountability, and skewed requirements based on internal corporate politics, rather than what the user truly needs.
If you close your source, your customers lose a great deal of flexibility, and only the gullible ones feel truly secure. I guess that's taking advantage of the PT Barnum business ethic "sucker born every minute". What a proud corporate legacy.
fuck, there's a lot of very GOOD reasons to have the same OS on every platform.
Scalability, being one.
Sure, you want an OS that runs on high-end server platforms, midrange desktops (that doesn't force you into a yearly hardware upgrade due to software bloat), and perhaps even handheld devices. Then you can write your apps more easily to port across the various devices in your enterprise, your support people don't have to learn different tools and standards and document formats and protocol implementations.
It's a dream. Why can't it be a reality? Because of capitalism. The vendors can't screw down the standards and suck optimal profits out of their IP monopoly if systems were that open. Only the customer would benefit from a system like that. The customer, and their customers.
uh, yeah. Until you start doing things like moving stuff into and out of the Application folder, then suddenly permissions break for no explainable reason, and your average Mac user is out buying Unix for Dummies so they can figure out how to use terminal.app, man, su, sudo, chmod, hacking netinfo to enable the root account, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Having unix superhero powers is very cool.
Having to use them for simple everyday tasks that weren't necessary on the old OS is very uncool (expecially when it's because of buggy behavior as described above).
OS X has changed a simple drag-n-drop file move operation into a major educational ordeal involving many steps.
IMHO, this is *not* the highly touted, much promised "Macintosh ease of use on a powerful Unix OS".
I doubt there's any technical reason we can't have the apple menu the way it used to be. Heck, how long did it take for a shareware hack to make it out for PB? two weeks?
How long did it take for similar apple menu functionality to show up in the Dock? two months?
I'm 100% certain that it was a stubborn, political, Steve ass-kissing decision. Had they put configurability back into apple menu, it would have diminished the necessity for the Dock - rumored to be one of Steve's special favorite features (mainly because of the Genie effect when minimizing, because it's a super-cool thing that makes Windows look WEAK).