They may be looking solely at distribution costs, so the news reporting and basic editing is handled under separate costs. Capital and maintenance costs for even a very large and busy website are far less than those for printing presses, and I suspect the labor costs are also much lower. In that respect, it's much easier to justify the higher profit margins.
I recently stayed at the Sheraton Gateway Suites in Chicago, and while it (like many other places) has USA Today delivered to the doorstep each weekday morning, it was the free WSJ in the lobby that caught my attention. My girlfriend was amazed that a simple (and pointlessly dry, in her opinion) newspaper could brighten my day so much.
One of these days, I should subscribe. I do enjoy reading the paper.
This is fairly normal for a major overhaul of an OS. Delivery dates change. SP2 fundamentally changed many of the ways that XP operates, and, contrary to some opinions, really did raise the bar on Windows security. Besides, the article to which you link was complaining about the delay of a few days from the release to premium subscribers. That's getting a little pedantic.
Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2 [microsoft.com], including some of Microsoft's own
Many of the apps on the list work fine on 32-bit XP SP2, but have problems on 64-bit. Most of the others have patches available to allow them to work fine with SP2. VirtualPC, for example, works at expected speeds when updated.
It's been known to be [crn.com] unstable [crn.com]
I'd like to be able to comment on this, but the article is expired.
Difficult to install [thechannelinsider.com]
Might be interesting to comment on this one, but it, too, is unavailable.
Additions like the firewall have serious shortcomings [eweek.com]
Wow, this is getting to be a trend. However, the Windows firewall was never intended to be an end-all, be-all solution. It was intended to make attacks more difficult by blocking off certain common ports. A middle ground was struck between home and enterprise users (one that was too open, IMHO) that still left some things somewhat open, but it's better than nothing. Had they come out with a miniature version of ISA, we'd have heard shouts (possibly including some from you, I suspect) that Microsoft was trying to put the security companies out of business.
It messes with settings and permissions [theregister.co.uk]
Of course it changes settings, though I saw little about changes to permissions. But that article, while somewhat correct on a few things, misses wide on others. It calls for Automatic Updates to be disabled because "users should update Windows manually, though regularly, paying attention to the various update options and their relevance to one's system," which we know siginificant portions of the installed userbase do not do, and have no knowledge to do so. It is a mechanism that, while potentially abusable by Microsoft, is by far the lesser evil when compared to worms running rampant because some patch from eight months prior wasn't installed.
Is still vulnerable anyway [eweek.com] in many ways [zdnet.co.uk], and it can take weeks or months to force a repair or even admission.
Microsoft never claimed that SP2 would be vulnerability-free. It claimed that it would be more secure, and generally speaking has been correct in this. Even the patches that have covered both SP1 and SP2 have in many cases had lower severity ratings for SP2.
Doesn't fix or remove MSIE [eweek.com]
Well, they're not going to remove IE, so there's not much point in complaining about that. But whether it fixes it is another question. Are there still vulnerabilities? Sure there are. But while IE still has a good distance to go, IE6 SP2 is far superior to its predecessors in terms of default security and blocking random installations. I have personal clients who were at first annoyed by IE's new features, and in recent months have come to love that it blocks so much (I'm still working on converting some of them to Firefox).
Has DRM features that let spammers 0wn [zdnet.co.uk] the machine
Not sure if this particular issue was ever directly addressed by Microsoft, but since I haven't seen much evidence of this method being used to gather up armies of zombies (most do it by e-mail or open ports), I'm not sure how serious it was to begin with.
Group policy? Maybe distributing a disk with a batch file that sets up the appropriate registry keys?
There are some people who have legitimate reasons to not upgrade to SP2, but they are generally few and far between. Most of the rest are avoiding upgrading due to simple FUD.
I have never installed Flash on Firefox, leaving that to IE. Aside from the lame timesheet program we have to access via IE at work, viewing Weebl and Bob, and the occasional Flash game, I almost never use IE for anything.
There is no answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is, however, an Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The former statement is like asking for the answer to cow. It makes no grammatical sense. Asking for the answer to the question of the cow, though does make grammatical sense.
I work in government, and I can honestly say that there are few things lazier than government programmers. Contractor programmers may be willing to take advantage of government contracts, but they generally don't do so to the extremes that government-employed programmers will. Ten to twenty percent over budget and maybe a little more than that in time for contractors is average in my experience (with the odd group that keeps things on-time and under-budget) compared to years overdue and annual costs exceeding the original entire project estimate.
Re:Ground telescopes 40x better than hubble (link)
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
Something is not obsolete unless and until something is in place that will outperform it. Even then, it may have some capabilities (like not being affected by cloud cover) that make it useful.
Ack. You'd have to grind a new primary mirror. I knew that sounded off.
Re:Personally I think it would be worth repair
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We can lose human life over the ISS, and yet there are no plans to scrap that. Hubble produces science. The ISS produces a moving light in the sky every so often and props up the Russian space program. Unless and until a heavy lift booster is used to kick things into orbit so that the shuttle is used more like a contractor's pickup (hauling crew and tools to the site) than a cargo truck (hauling parts to the site), the shuttle is going to continue to be a drag on the station's construction.
Then again, a simple replacement for the shuttle would be nice, too.
Re:Symbolic, Of Course
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You'd have to gring a new primary lens, which would take a long time to do (though it could be done the right way this time) and cost a small fortune. We have a known-good unit in place now, with upgrades to boost its primary capabilities by an order of magnitude. Better to go that route instead of adding in a bunch of new variables.
I say give it about ten years, then bring in top sci-fi writers to create a background story that uses TOS and maybe TNG/DS9 as the untouched cores. Ignore Voyager and Enterprise, and start showing us the true histories. Look at the models used in TNG to see how the first starship Enterprise looked, and craft it from there. Allow an evolution. Create a smart series, and not one that simply expects Trek fans to blindly follow where every other series has gone before.
Hell, make one about the Romulan War, and let the actors sign per-episode contracts and iron-clad NDAs so that we never know who will survive from one episode to the next. That could eat up a couple of seasons, and would be an interesting experiment.
I did see that, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I was thinking of a major auditing firm getting access to all of the books for the involved associations and their members and figuring out what the real losses are. It will probably never happen, but the results would still be interesting, no matter which side they came down on.
As for the courts, a cautious decision is more easily overturned than a hard-core, fire and brimstone ruling. By "cautious" I meant one meant to see how things go under it, which occasionally happen when the courts are doubtful about both sides.
Would those not be hypotheses, since they are based on short-term observations and have not as yet been tested in empirical studies by two or more experimental teams?
They might be able to say that to the courts, but the courts are likely to give a raised eyebrow in return, and provide a cautious decision in their favor at best. Congress may give them more time, but even there, certain members with significant pro-technology and pro-consumer leanings are coming into seniority who are questioning the trade groups' representations of things.
I'd like to see some outside group come in and audit the research done by the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, among others, to see how well it stands up to scrutiny.
NSA sends their drives (and plenty of other equipment) through something like this, munching stuff to tiny fragments for recycling. Not sure how much of the recycling process happens on-site, but IIRC the final processing is done off-site.
Because the routing software is usually loaded from a drive instead of a ROM chip. Generally speaking, routers built from PCs/servers are considered software routers.
He was about 80% finished with it when he left. I began to get worried when the guy they brought in to finish it said that he wanted to capture the spirit of what Adams intended, since he could not duplicate what was intended.
I have friends that are so far into denial on this they've reached Lake Victoria.
Both countries are somewhat equal in their technology, and so is the rest of the world.
If you're referring to North and South Korea, the technology gap is actually enormous. North Korea makes up in numbers what it cannot do in technology. For example, the best fighters that the North can muster is about 20 or so MiG-29s. There are perhaps 350 or so other fighters, but those are largely MiG-17, -19, and -21, with a few -23s thrown in for good measure. These would face off against a couple dozen F-15K and about 150 KF-15 fighters, which would probably wipe most of the NK air force out of the skies. The same thing happens with their tanks and artillery (which will probably be wiped out in counter-battery fire within minutes of any opening salvo).
It is this disparity that pushes Pyongyang to pursue nuclear weapons. They know they can't win a conventional war, so they have to make it suicidal to attack (not that anyone actually does want to). The robots just make it so that many fewer South Korean soldiers would go down in the opening of any attack from the North.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. That's just where M.C. Escher grew up.
They may be looking solely at distribution costs, so the news reporting and basic editing is handled under separate costs. Capital and maintenance costs for even a very large and busy website are far less than those for printing presses, and I suspect the labor costs are also much lower. In that respect, it's much easier to justify the higher profit margins.
Or litigate their way back into profit.
I recently stayed at the Sheraton Gateway Suites in Chicago, and while it (like many other places) has USA Today delivered to the doorstep each weekday morning, it was the free WSJ in the lobby that caught my attention. My girlfriend was amazed that a simple (and pointlessly dry, in her opinion) newspaper could brighten my day so much.
One of these days, I should subscribe. I do enjoy reading the paper.
It was late [vnunet.com]
This is fairly normal for a major overhaul of an OS. Delivery dates change. SP2 fundamentally changed many of the ways that XP operates, and, contrary to some opinions, really did raise the bar on Windows security. Besides, the article to which you link was complaining about the delay of a few days from the release to premium subscribers. That's getting a little pedantic.
Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2 [microsoft.com], including some of Microsoft's own
Many of the apps on the list work fine on 32-bit XP SP2, but have problems on 64-bit. Most of the others have patches available to allow them to work fine with SP2. VirtualPC, for example, works at expected speeds when updated.
It's been known to be [crn.com] unstable [crn.com]
I'd like to be able to comment on this, but the article is expired.
Difficult to install [thechannelinsider.com]
Might be interesting to comment on this one, but it, too, is unavailable.
Additions like the firewall have serious shortcomings [eweek.com]
Wow, this is getting to be a trend. However, the Windows firewall was never intended to be an end-all, be-all solution. It was intended to make attacks more difficult by blocking off certain common ports. A middle ground was struck between home and enterprise users (one that was too open, IMHO) that still left some things somewhat open, but it's better than nothing. Had they come out with a miniature version of ISA, we'd have heard shouts (possibly including some from you, I suspect) that Microsoft was trying to put the security companies out of business.
It messes with settings and permissions [theregister.co.uk]
Of course it changes settings, though I saw little about changes to permissions. But that article, while somewhat correct on a few things, misses wide on others. It calls for Automatic Updates to be disabled because "users should update Windows manually, though regularly, paying attention to the various update options and their relevance to one's system," which we know siginificant portions of the installed userbase do not do, and have no knowledge to do so. It is a mechanism that, while potentially abusable by Microsoft, is by far the lesser evil when compared to worms running rampant because some patch from eight months prior wasn't installed.
Is still vulnerable anyway [eweek.com] in many ways [zdnet.co.uk], and it can take weeks or months to force a repair or even admission.
Microsoft never claimed that SP2 would be vulnerability-free. It claimed that it would be more secure, and generally speaking has been correct in this. Even the patches that have covered both SP1 and SP2 have in many cases had lower severity ratings for SP2.
Doesn't fix or remove MSIE [eweek.com]
Well, they're not going to remove IE, so there's not much point in complaining about that. But whether it fixes it is another question. Are there still vulnerabilities? Sure there are. But while IE still has a good distance to go, IE6 SP2 is far superior to its predecessors in terms of default security and blocking random installations. I have personal clients who were at first annoyed by IE's new features, and in recent months have come to love that it blocks so much (I'm still working on converting some of them to Firefox).
Has DRM features that let spammers 0wn [zdnet.co.uk] the machine
Not sure if this particular issue was ever directly addressed by Microsoft, but since I haven't seen much evidence of this method being used to gather up armies of zombies (most do it by e-mail or open ports), I'm not sure how serious it was to begin with.
Group policy? Maybe distributing a disk with a batch file that sets up the appropriate registry keys?
There are some people who have legitimate reasons to not upgrade to SP2, but they are generally few and far between. Most of the rest are avoiding upgrading due to simple FUD.
I have never installed Flash on Firefox, leaving that to IE. Aside from the lame timesheet program we have to access via IE at work, viewing Weebl and Bob, and the occasional Flash game, I almost never use IE for anything.
It runs open-source Windows instead. (Hey, it explains Eddie.)
There is no answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. There is, however, an Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The former statement is like asking for the answer to cow. It makes no grammatical sense. Asking for the answer to the question of the cow, though does make grammatical sense.
But no bicycle does even get close to the speed of light (or even sound, for that matter).
You just need to eat more Krispy Kremes followed by a few cans of Rock Star. That should solve the energy gap.
I work in government, and I can honestly say that there are few things lazier than government programmers. Contractor programmers may be willing to take advantage of government contracts, but they generally don't do so to the extremes that government-employed programmers will. Ten to twenty percent over budget and maybe a little more than that in time for contractors is average in my experience (with the odd group that keeps things on-time and under-budget) compared to years overdue and annual costs exceeding the original entire project estimate.
Something is not obsolete unless and until something is in place that will outperform it. Even then, it may have some capabilities (like not being affected by cloud cover) that make it useful.
Ack. You'd have to grind a new primary mirror. I knew that sounded off.
We can lose human life over the ISS, and yet there are no plans to scrap that. Hubble produces science. The ISS produces a moving light in the sky every so often and props up the Russian space program. Unless and until a heavy lift booster is used to kick things into orbit so that the shuttle is used more like a contractor's pickup (hauling crew and tools to the site) than a cargo truck (hauling parts to the site), the shuttle is going to continue to be a drag on the station's construction.
Then again, a simple replacement for the shuttle would be nice, too.
You'd have to gring a new primary lens, which would take a long time to do (though it could be done the right way this time) and cost a small fortune. We have a known-good unit in place now, with upgrades to boost its primary capabilities by an order of magnitude. Better to go that route instead of adding in a bunch of new variables.
I say give it about ten years, then bring in top sci-fi writers to create a background story that uses TOS and maybe TNG/DS9 as the untouched cores. Ignore Voyager and Enterprise, and start showing us the true histories. Look at the models used in TNG to see how the first starship Enterprise looked, and craft it from there. Allow an evolution. Create a smart series, and not one that simply expects Trek fans to blindly follow where every other series has gone before.
Hell, make one about the Romulan War, and let the actors sign per-episode contracts and iron-clad NDAs so that we never know who will survive from one episode to the next. That could eat up a couple of seasons, and would be an interesting experiment.
Yes, but the first since TOS, meaning in all series which followed TOS.
Why is there such difficulty with this?
I did see that, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I was thinking of a major auditing firm getting access to all of the books for the involved associations and their members and figuring out what the real losses are. It will probably never happen, but the results would still be interesting, no matter which side they came down on.
As for the courts, a cautious decision is more easily overturned than a hard-core, fire and brimstone ruling. By "cautious" I meant one meant to see how things go under it, which occasionally happen when the courts are doubtful about both sides.
Would those not be hypotheses, since they are based on short-term observations and have not as yet been tested in empirical studies by two or more experimental teams?
They might be able to say that to the courts, but the courts are likely to give a raised eyebrow in return, and provide a cautious decision in their favor at best. Congress may give them more time, but even there, certain members with significant pro-technology and pro-consumer leanings are coming into seniority who are questioning the trade groups' representations of things.
I'd like to see some outside group come in and audit the research done by the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, among others, to see how well it stands up to scrutiny.
Make SURE this disk is properly labeled, or you know EXACTLY which one it is.
Bad things can happen otherwise if you think you're reaching for your network boot floppy...
NSA sends their drives (and plenty of other equipment) through something like this, munching stuff to tiny fragments for recycling. Not sure how much of the recycling process happens on-site, but IIRC the final processing is done off-site.
Because the routing software is usually loaded from a drive instead of a ROM chip. Generally speaking, routers built from PCs/servers are considered software routers.
He was about 80% finished with it when he left. I began to get worried when the guy they brought in to finish it said that he wanted to capture the spirit of what Adams intended, since he could not duplicate what was intended.
I have friends that are so far into denial on this they've reached Lake Victoria.
Both countries are somewhat equal in their technology, and so is the rest of the world.
If you're referring to North and South Korea, the technology gap is actually enormous. North Korea makes up in numbers what it cannot do in technology. For example, the best fighters that the North can muster is about 20 or so MiG-29s. There are perhaps 350 or so other fighters, but those are largely MiG-17, -19, and -21, with a few -23s thrown in for good measure. These would face off against a couple dozen F-15K and about 150 KF-15 fighters, which would probably wipe most of the NK air force out of the skies. The same thing happens with their tanks and artillery (which will probably be wiped out in counter-battery fire within minutes of any opening salvo).
It is this disparity that pushes Pyongyang to pursue nuclear weapons. They know they can't win a conventional war, so they have to make it suicidal to attack (not that anyone actually does want to). The robots just make it so that many fewer South Korean soldiers would go down in the opening of any attack from the North.