> What I've always hated about these types of games, is that the central idea is that you win by paying more money to the 'judge' in the game.
If you work it right, you can end up making money. I don't mean endless bot farming. Buy your stuff, play your game, have fun. When you get bored, sell it all off on eBay, and move on with your life. So the real question is, do they allow buying and selling of goods for real money, or is there a clause in the agreement saying they will delete you if you try to do this?
> Somehow I highly doubt that those kids in the poor countries could engage in any financial relationship with anyone abroad.
Maybe not, but: 1 - It's ripe pickings for an entrepreneur with a load of cash and truck to buy all the computers off of the folks for $20 each and sell the slew on eBay for $200 each. 2 - How many are going to "fall off of the truck," as we say here in the US. You may see whole pallets for sale on eBay.
> That's no big deal. Well-maintained military aircraft last a long time. The newest B-52 > in the US Air Force's inventory is 44 years old, and the Air Force plans to keep flying > them until 2050! That's right: when they retire them, the newest one will be 88 years old.
And how much of that plane is original parts? Let's see, new engines, new electronics, new tires, probably new windows, seats, and even paint jobs. That plane has been paid for again and again and again. The only thing original is the frame.
>...hiring a patent attorney to investigate his liability or patent suit...
With 30,000 patents per year, that means that a patent attorney has to read more than approximately 150 new patents every work day to stay current. That's ignoring the, what, 100,000+ patents already in existance. There is no way that a single attorney can be of any help any more. You need to hire the services of a large patent law firm. Since only big companies can afford that, where does this leave the small developer? Hung out to dry.
> But don't bother reading my post, because the/. moderators will come by and mod it down anyways > because it has no actual proof or scientific data, just right-wing common sense.
"I do not understand it. I am not going to try to understand it. That would take effort. It is much easier to deny it and ridicule it." If common sense means sticking your head in the sand, then yeah, the right wingers are sure full of it. Meanwhile, the scientists have nothing but hard earned data.
I believe you mean to say "Series of Tubes is a popular expression." Meme is not a "cool" way of saying "idea." Please quit misusing this term.
From dictionary.com: meme n : a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"
> If they are wise (Personal Opinion) I would scrap the entire codebase of IE and > start with an entireley new one for VISTA and change the name so the product gets > a new start at life.
Microsoft's bread and butter is third party coders. Any radical change to the code base would break existing apps, especially those that are locked into using extensions or "features" that make them IE only (e.g. non-standards-compliant, do not work on Firefox). And many of those features are the ones with exploits. Each one has to be carefully coded around.
> Full price of DVD, except you don't get the box nor the DVD (and most likely none of the DVD extra features), > and you can't even burn the DVD from the DRM-infected file you spent ages to download. > Sure, this is going to be a HUGE hit. > Not.
Then you are not the target audience. I bet you never order pay-per-view movies on cable either. Well a lot of people do. They want it now, and they don't want to go out to the store to get it. This will be a great hit, because they can download the movie as soon as they get the "hey let's watch movie X" bug. And the long download? Not a big deal at all. You watch it WHILE it is downloading.
This will be a big hit. Much bigger than music downloads.
> Middle management is a great waste of skin. Plus they often take a fairly large salary while not generating revenue or a product.
Middle management should be second, after 90% of the executives, and do NOT give them parachutes. With executives and middle management gone, you'd be surprised how much work gets done by conscientious, motivated staff. Of course, I also believe that Marxism could work too.:-)
>> Not to mention that you have a hardware lock-in because Apple probably won't support you if you use hardware other than what they sell. > >There's no "probably" to it. Why would Apple support something they didn't sell? They don't qualify MacOS X to run on > anything but their own hardware. This is not to desparage Apple - it is their business model.
It's called Darwin folks. If you want to run anything on an embedded system, it would be Darwin, not OSX. You don't need the Aqua gui on a widget. Although the developers would probably use Macs.
> Are you saying the shareholders should try and vote a woman onto the board just because there aren't > any women in there at the moment? That's real discrimination (positive or negative, it's all bad).
You would be correct in an idealized world with an equal playing field. But the fact is that it is called the old "boys" network for a reason.
> This is actually a good sign - microsoft aren't stupid. If they thought > they were a total monopoly they'd have just said "fuck off" - so > they're actually trying to avoid an all-out war which could damage them.
Microsoft *IS* owns the monopoly of desktop computer operating systems. They do not have a monopoly on all DVD players.
>>> "The media companies asked us to do this..... so we had to do this." >>> Interesting - after all, thats precisely the line Apple uses about >>> the DRM in ITMS songs.
> At least we know who their real customers are.
Apples and oranges again. We're not talking about a new distribution model, i.e. iTunes. We're talking about being able to play your already purchased BlueRay/HDDVD on your PC instead of your DVD player.
> Seriously, who friggin' cares about HD. I'm certainly not excited. I > see it as something that people use to show off to their friends - > "look at me, I have a 42 inch HD display!!!" I know HD content looks a > little more stunning, crisp, and vivid, but standard definition is just > fine for most people. It's not like there's distortion or noise like in > the analog days. The little compressions artifacts you can see in DVDs > are tolerable, even when displayed on a large screen.
Yeah, and why do we need these color TV's anyway? B&W was fine when I was a kid. And cable? Who needs more than a dozen broadcast channels? That was fine for me.
> I can already here the meme coming up, "oh, 32-bit isn't enough for HD, you need 64-bit to do HD!".
Please quit misusing the term meme. I'm really tired of every concept, joke, or fad being called a meme. From dictionary.com:
meme n : a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"
> Is there anyone who think eBay's feedback system is truly useful or even fair? I > get slammed when people don't pay and think they are funny. People ignore terms of > auctions and think I'm unprofessional for not bending over backward. People don't > ship my stuff because they found out the postage is way higher than they thought > and decide to just keep my money. It's a sin how bad it is.
I have several hundred sales and purchases on eBay, and I have NEVER, let me repeat that, NEVER had that experience. There are sellers with thousands of sales 99.9% positive response. I smell a rat somewhere.
> Well that is interesting. I thought most IT people shun religion and mysticism. > Goes along with being scientific-minded.
Newton, Einstein, Kepler, Oppenheimer, and many others were heavily influenced by mysticism.
Here are some Einstein quotes: "The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men."
Folks, electron spin is NOT like the spinning of a ball in "the real world." The electron is not "rotating" per se. From wiki:
"Such particles and the spin of quantum mechanical systems ("particle spin") possesses several unusual or non-classical features, and for such systems, spin angular momentum cannot be associated with rotation but instead refers only to the presence of angular momentum."
> Now's it's back to 50-50. There's gonna be a civil war > in the U.S., sooner or later, and it will come out as three > nations: liberal left coast, dopey, backward "heartland" > full of violent, inbred simpletons, and liberal right coast.
Let's see. Central has Illinois and Minnosota, amongst other blue states. Right coast has North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Geb Bush land Florida. If you are calling South Carolina liberal, then I need some of what you're smoking.
> If you're trying to argue that the hardware market is somehow more > profitable than the software one I think you're sadly mistaken. > If Apple were smart (which they are) they would rather sell you > $350-$1000 dollar software and make TONS of ROI rather than try > to compete in the tight hardware market which is currently on a downward trend.
> No one will believe me, just as no one believed me when I said as soon > as Apple releases OSX intel, it'll run on commodity hardware -- > but it'll happen. Because Steve is smart dude.
Please do a google on NeXT computers, and you will understand why Apple wants to remain a hardware company. If you had used NeXTStep on x86, you would realize that the biggest stumbling block to becoming a commodity OS vender is driver support. Right now Apple controls the hardware, so they only have to support a limited amount of hardware. If they tried to support even a small percentage of all possible PC hardware, they would be swamped with additional development and testing. M$ gets away with it because they are monopoly; they rely on the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers themselves. Everyone is forced to support Windows. To do otherwise would be suicide. They have no reason to support a niche OS. The Linux (BSD, etc.) community gets by with their reverse engineering efforts and the odd vender that supplies APIs, but it is hard for Linux to support the latest and greatest, which is Apple's bread and butter.
A single license of NeXTStep cost onwards of $4000, in 1995 dollars. Apple could not license OSX to Dell at a price that would keep them in business.
> I administer an Exchange email server for a small company. On average 60% of all our mail is spam > and it adds up to several MB of spam per user per week.
Sure, the number of emails, but not the size. One excel spreadsheet emailed to all the executives probably uses up a lot more than all the tiny text messages you get in one day combined. For anyone who's ever run an email system, attachments are the killer.
Slashdot Mirror
> What I've always hated about these types of games, is that the central idea is that you win by paying more money to the 'judge' in the game.
If you work it right, you can end up making money. I don't mean endless bot farming. Buy your stuff, play your game, have fun. When you get bored, sell it all off on eBay, and move on with your life. So the real question is, do they allow buying and selling of goods for real money, or is there a clause in the agreement saying they will delete you if you try to do this?
PoC
> Stephen Hawking I can understand but why is Larry King included. What makes him worthy of having his genomes sequenced.
I would assume to get lots of TV exposure.
jfs
> Somehow I highly doubt that those kids in the poor countries could engage in any financial relationship with anyone abroad.
Maybe not, but:
1 - It's ripe pickings for an entrepreneur with a load of cash and truck to buy all the computers off of the folks for $20 each and sell the slew on eBay for $200 each.
2 - How many are going to "fall off of the truck," as we say here in the US. You may see whole pallets for sale on eBay.
jfs
> That's no big deal. Well-maintained military aircraft last a long time. The newest B-52
> in the US Air Force's inventory is 44 years old, and the Air Force plans to keep flying
> them until 2050! That's right: when they retire them, the newest one will be 88 years old.
And how much of that plane is original parts? Let's see, new engines, new electronics, new tires, probably new windows, seats, and even paint jobs. That plane has been paid for again and again and again. The only thing original is the frame.
jfs
> ...hiring a patent attorney to investigate his liability or patent suit...
With 30,000 patents per year, that means that a patent attorney has to read more than approximately 150 new patents every work day to stay current. That's ignoring the, what, 100,000+ patents already in existance. There is no way that a single attorney can be of any help any more. You need to hire the services of a large patent law firm. Since only big companies can afford that, where does this leave the small developer? Hung out to dry.
jfs
> But don't bother reading my post, because the /. moderators will come by and mod it down anyways
> because it has no actual proof or scientific data, just right-wing common sense.
"I do not understand it. I am not going to try to understand it. That would take effort. It is much easier to deny it and ridicule it." If common sense means sticking your head in the sand, then yeah, the right wingers are sure full of it. Meanwhile, the scientists have nothing but hard earned data.
jfs
> Series of Tubes is becoming a meme.
I believe you mean to say "Series of Tubes is a popular expression." Meme is not a "cool" way of saying "idea." Please quit misusing this term.
From dictionary.com:
meme
n : a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"
jfs
> If they are wise (Personal Opinion) I would scrap the entire codebase of IE and
> start with an entireley new one for VISTA and change the name so the product gets
> a new start at life.
Microsoft's bread and butter is third party coders. Any radical change to the code base would break existing apps, especially those that are locked into using extensions or "features" that make them IE only (e.g. non-standards-compliant, do not work on Firefox). And many of those features are the ones with exploits. Each one has to be carefully coded around.
jfs
> Full price of DVD, except you don't get the box nor the DVD (and most likely none of the DVD extra features),
> and you can't even burn the DVD from the DRM-infected file you spent ages to download.
> Sure, this is going to be a HUGE hit.
> Not.
Then you are not the target audience. I bet you never order pay-per-view movies on cable either. Well a lot of people do. They want it now, and they don't want to go out to the store to get it. This will be a great hit, because they can download the movie as soon as they get the "hey let's watch movie X" bug. And the long download? Not a big deal at all. You watch it WHILE it is downloading.
This will be a big hit. Much bigger than music downloads.
jfs
> Middle management is a great waste of skin. Plus they often take a fairly large salary while not generating revenue or a product.
:-)
Middle management should be second, after 90% of the executives, and do NOT give them parachutes. With executives and middle management gone, you'd be surprised how much work gets done by conscientious, motivated staff. Of course, I also believe that Marxism could work too.
jfs
>> Not to mention that you have a hardware lock-in because Apple probably won't support you if you use hardware other than what they sell.
>
>There's no "probably" to it. Why would Apple support something they didn't sell? They don't qualify MacOS X to run on
> anything but their own hardware. This is not to desparage Apple - it is their business model.
It's called Darwin folks. If you want to run anything on an embedded system, it would be Darwin, not OSX. You don't need the Aqua gui on a widget. Although the developers would probably use Macs.
jfs
> Are you saying the shareholders should try and vote a woman onto the board just because there aren't
> any women in there at the moment? That's real discrimination (positive or negative, it's all bad).
You would be correct in an idealized world with an equal playing field. But the fact is that it is called the old "boys" network for a reason.
jfs
> (oh - and anyone else having the quicktime plugin for ff crash ff when trying to play these?)
Yes, using my Win2k PC at work. I upgraded to the latest quicktime, and all is good now.
jfs
> This is actually a good sign - microsoft aren't stupid. If they thought
> they were a total monopoly they'd have just said "fuck off" - so
> they're actually trying to avoid an all-out war which could damage them.
Microsoft *IS* owns the monopoly of desktop computer operating systems. They do not have a monopoly on all DVD players.
jfs
>>> "The media companies asked us to do this ..... so we had to do this."
>>> Interesting - after all, thats precisely the line Apple uses about
>>> the DRM in ITMS songs.
> At least we know who their real customers are.
Apples and oranges again. We're not talking about a new distribution model, i.e. iTunes. We're talking about being able to play your already purchased BlueRay/HDDVD on your PC instead of your DVD player.
jfs
> Seriously, who friggin' cares about HD. I'm certainly not excited. I
> see it as something that people use to show off to their friends -
> "look at me, I have a 42 inch HD display!!!" I know HD content looks a
> little more stunning, crisp, and vivid, but standard definition is just
> fine for most people. It's not like there's distortion or noise like in
> the analog days. The little compressions artifacts you can see in DVDs
> are tolerable, even when displayed on a large screen.
Yeah, and why do we need these color TV's anyway? B&W was fine when I was a kid. And cable? Who needs more than a dozen broadcast channels? That was fine for me.
jfs
> I can already here the meme coming up, "oh, 32-bit isn't enough for HD, you need 64-bit to do HD!".
Please quit misusing the term meme. I'm really tired of every concept, joke, or fad being called a meme. From dictionary.com:
meme
n : a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"
jfs
> Is there anyone who think eBay's feedback system is truly useful or even fair? I
> get slammed when people don't pay and think they are funny. People ignore terms of
> auctions and think I'm unprofessional for not bending over backward. People don't
> ship my stuff because they found out the postage is way higher than they thought
> and decide to just keep my money. It's a sin how bad it is.
I have several hundred sales and purchases on eBay, and I have NEVER, let me repeat that, NEVER had that experience. There are sellers with thousands of sales 99.9% positive response. I smell a rat somewhere.
jfs
> The hysteria this has caused is mind boggling.
And we all know that anthrax is a white powder commonly found in envelopes. Nothing new about that.
jfs
> Well that is interesting. I thought most IT people shun religion and mysticism.
> Goes along with being scientific-minded.
Newton, Einstein, Kepler, Oppenheimer, and many others were heavily influenced by mysticism.
Here are some Einstein quotes:
"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.
Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science.
Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man.
To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling
In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men."
jfs
Folks, electron spin is NOT like the spinning of a ball in "the real world." The electron is not "rotating" per se. From wiki:
"Such particles and the spin of quantum mechanical systems ("particle spin") possesses several unusual or non-classical features, and for such systems, spin angular momentum cannot be associated with rotation but instead refers only to the presence of angular momentum."
jfs
> It was the Clinton administration in the 90s that expanded the
> FISA law to easily allow warrantless searches and wiretaps.
Please read my sig.
jfs
> Now's it's back to 50-50. There's gonna be a civil war
> in the U.S., sooner or later, and it will come out as three
> nations: liberal left coast, dopey, backward "heartland"
> full of violent, inbred simpletons, and liberal right coast.
Let's see. Central has Illinois and Minnosota, amongst other blue states. Right coast has North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Geb Bush land Florida. If you are calling South Carolina liberal, then I need some of what you're smoking.
jfs
> If you're trying to argue that the hardware market is somehow more
> profitable than the software one I think you're sadly mistaken.
> If Apple were smart (which they are) they would rather sell you
> $350-$1000 dollar software and make TONS of ROI rather than try
> to compete in the tight hardware market which is currently on a downward trend.
> No one will believe me, just as no one believed me when I said as soon
> as Apple releases OSX intel, it'll run on commodity hardware --
> but it'll happen. Because Steve is smart dude.
Please do a google on NeXT computers, and you will understand why Apple wants to remain a hardware company. If you had used NeXTStep on x86, you would realize that the biggest stumbling block to becoming a commodity OS vender is driver support. Right now Apple controls the hardware, so they only have to support a limited amount of hardware. If they tried to support even a small percentage of all possible PC hardware, they would be swamped with additional development and testing. M$ gets away with it because they are monopoly; they rely on the hardware manufacturers to write the drivers themselves. Everyone is forced to support Windows. To do otherwise would be suicide. They have no reason to support a niche OS. The Linux (BSD, etc.) community gets by with their reverse engineering efforts and the odd vender that supplies APIs, but it is hard for Linux to support the latest and greatest, which is Apple's bread and butter.
A single license of NeXTStep cost onwards of $4000, in 1995 dollars. Apple could not license OSX to Dell at a price that would keep them in business.
jfs
> I administer an Exchange email server for a small company. On average 60% of all our mail is spam
> and it adds up to several MB of spam per user per week.
Sure, the number of emails, but not the size. One excel spreadsheet emailed to all the executives probably uses up a lot more than all the tiny text messages you get in one day combined. For anyone who's ever run an email system, attachments are the killer.
jfs