What Microsoft did to Netscape (drive their $30 Navigator browser out-of-market) is approximately equivalent to Comcast announcing "we'll give everyone free MP3s" and thereby driving Itunes.com out of business. It's called anti-competitive monopolistic behavior, and it's explicitly forbidden by U.S. Antitrust Laws that were passed ~100 years ago.
Kinda funny, I remember being pretty pissed that Netscape was charging money while Mosaic was free.
The idea that someday I may not be able to backup my CDs or DVDs, due to Windows blocking that action, troubles me.
If that scares you, run Linux or Apple. Seriously, if you want there to be competition for the monopoly you hate, then support that monopoly's competitors.
Not even close to true. He doesn't own ABC, CBS, or NBC. He does own Fox, one of four major networks. On cable, you have Fox News owned by Murdoch (very Republican-oriented, granted), CNN owned by Ted Turner (debatable), but the rest of the news channels aren't close to right-leaning in general. For newspapers, he owns the WSJ, which is the only prominent right-leaning paper, with the Washington Post and New York Times being the two most prominent newspapers in the country. They also happen to be *extremely* left.
So your big Republican conspiracy is 1 out of 4 major networks, one or two major cable news channels, and one major newspaper. That's a lot more than those that are clearly left-leaning. The network news tends to skew left, as do newspapers in major cities.
Correct, Murdoch doesn't own the "most of the mainstream media". He does own a larger percentage than just about any other single entity, (the New York Post too) but he doesn't control the whole picture.
ABC is owned by Disney, CBS is owned by Viacom / National Amusements, Inc., NBC is owned by GE
You could try and say that Disney, Viacom and GE are totally Republican because they're big business, but then you could come back and say they all love Obama so that makes them Democrats.
Fox is about the only one that with a very obvious news slant, typically coming from pundits like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, but they don't speak for the whole corporation.
The whole left/right slant thing is COMPLETE BULLSHIT for most news organizations. The truth is, they're all about ratings and making money, regardless of left or right.
As for newspapers, isn't Google News the most popular?:)
I just watch Jon Stewart anyways, he must be neutral. Oh shit, Comedy Central is owned by Viacom so there goes that!
Honestly this looks like a pretty typical HR "ethical training" type of course.
We've been subjected to similar training where I work, it's pretty much all BS and nobody pays attention to it. Just watch the dumb videos, take the quiz so you get training credit and that chick with the hot ass in HR will stop bugging you to take the sexual harassment training.
So far I think the product tie-ins for Eureka are pretty hilarious and creative, and possibly telling for the future of advertising. They typically even have versions of the advertising on the syfy website too.
Somebody is paying attention and figured out that probably 99% of people that watch shows on syfy use DVRs and fast forward through the commercials.
Hopefully syfy is smart enough to not rely on the Nielsen ratings. I'm so sick of the major networks canceling all the good shows probably based on incorrect viewing reports!
If the world goes the way of Hulu, then the networks won't need Nielsen anyways.
True that people can still ignore the warning, but if we're talking about the common user who is now terrified of viruses, spyware and 1337 h4x0rs, odds are they won't click continue.
The CMS that ran our corporate site got hacked a few months back. Google crawled it and found some hidden links to some malware sites, and my company got on that blacklist.
Customers, suppliers and CEOs were all freaking out, so after we fixed it ASAP we went to Google webmaster tools and requested a recrawl of the site, and that's the ONLY option you have. No phone number to call, no support email, and not even a time frame for when your site will be recrawled.
Meanwhile people are freaking out about the website and we just have to wait a day or more.
I'm not objecting to Google having blacklisted our site, that was LEGIT.
Just that when you are blacklisted, you have no recourse other than to just sit on your ass, wait for Google and hope you don't get fired. If they're going to wield that kind of almighty power over everyone's website, there should be a better option for a way to get off that list.
Google support is pretty crappy, and I can guarantee they're missing out on some big money in paid support options, because I can guarantee my company would have shelled out a few grand just to get the website off the blacklist immediately!
Just strange that they let Yahoo control multiple features (Weather, stocks, search (you can opt for Yahoo instead of Google)) with no concerns for them taking over the device. Plus Yahoo has apps for Y! Messenger, Y! Music, and another app that brings in quite a few other services.
Then on the phone technology, there's Fring which let you make calls through skype and bring in all your IM contacts, and TruPhone which I think also brings in skype and you can make soft phone calls over 3G.
Seems like their decision was based more on the corporation they were competing with than the technology conflicting on the iPhone.
The patent clearly states that it is for A word document in A SINGLE XML file. ODF is a zip file with many XML and binary files inside so is outside the scope of this patent by a long shot.
OOXML files (.docx, etc) are also zip files with multiple XML files. If you take a.docx file and rename it.docx.zip you can unzip it and check it out. I just made a simple test.docx, and there were 7 files in the zip.
So, since the patent CLEARLY states that it is for a single document, does that mean this patent is for vaporware, or is Office 2010 going to change their OOXML implementation to be a single XML file instead of a bunch of them zipped up?
Or did MS screw up and somebody filed the wrong verbiage?
Oh, come on - really? Then how come many websites don't work with Opera, or Safari or sometimes even Firefox or Chrome.
Yes really. Until IE6 usage drops off, people will still develop for it.
According to these guys IE6's market share is still way higher than Chrome, Safari or Opera.
Trust me, it's a pain in the butt. Here at work we test with IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. Started some testing with Chrome, but most of our websites are for business users in the manufacturing sector, and we haven't seen a lot of adoption there.
It really really sucks, but you have to play to the browsers with the market share or people will go to a competitor. (Or they'll send a nasty email that gets routed to the president of the company. Not that that's happened or anything)
Honestly if we actually had a customer using Opera and they complained about it, we'd have to start running through our test matrix with that too.
I think people using search engines (or decision engines) really just expect them to do some magic and return the right pages. Way back in the day you could get high on a search engine just by putting a specific word a million times on your page, or cramming a bunch of stuff in your meta tags. Then PageRank came along and screwed all that up, and now Google goes beyond that and changes it's search on the fly based on "interesting" trends it finds.
The search algorithms are just programs that try their best to guess what results to show based on a massive pile of millions of records in a database. Microsoft may have a weighted keyword thesaurus or something, but I doubt it just because messing with that can REALLY backfire on you.
If you start messing with the control knobs for the tubes, you never know what kind of crab is going to come out!
Totally agree that people should upgrade, but... they just don't. And websites don't want to chance losing business because a potential customer hit their site and it didn't work.
It's amazing how far people will go to NOT upgrade. I remember going to a Ford plant once setting up favorites on a few people's machines pointing to an old IIS3 ASP app we wrote. They sent me over to one dark corner of the plant where the engineer had a PC running Windows 3.1 and an ancient version of Netscape.
If your website can survive without the IE6 consumers, you can get rid of them: http://www.ie6nomore.com/
Another geek marriage here, my wife and I are both CS IT professionals.
Good stuff: - You have someone to talk to about similar subjects - You don't fight over what TV and movies to watch (SCI-FI) - A LOT less drama and fighting over stupid stuff
Not awesome stuff: - You have to take turns on the computer or game system since your wife knows how to use it too - After work if your spouse has the same job, he/she can ask you for help - She doesn't read cosmo so she's not constantly trying to figure out what kind of sex you want
There really hasn't been any really "BAD" stuff, and funny how life works we have started to fall into more macho and girly roles over the years, especially after having kids.
Seriously talk about side discussions! 900+ posts about global economics and the merits or waste of college. I'm guessing I'm the first person (including the poster) who actually read the whole article??
She is specifically suing the office of career advancement, she is not suing because they didn't educate her well enough.
She is only saying that the office actively works to employ graduates with higher GPAs, and basically ignores those with lower GPAs.
I still think the lawsuit is ridiculous, and will probably be thrown out since discrimination based on your GPA is not illegal.
It could be that the career office is a bunch of jerks who laugh and throw away any resume they get that is under 3.9, but that doesn't make it illegal.
The user wants to see the dancing bunnies, so they click there. It doesn't matter how much you try to disuade them, if they want to see the dancing bunnies, then by gum, they're going to see the dancing bunnies. It doesn't matter how many technical hurdles you put in their way, if they stop the user from seeing the dancing bunny, then they're going to go and see the dancing bunny.
But did the original research follow the 3 second rule? And did it take into account what happens with rude drivers and the 3 second rule?
People might follow the rule and leave some space between them and the car in front of them, but if there is another car trying to pass, they'll probably speed up and tailgate so that person can't get in, right?
I'm not a subscriber to APS and I'm not paying $25 for the article so I can't really look, but it sounds like they had specific rules about interaction between agents: An agent steps to the right with probability q or to the left with 1-q when encountering other agents.... traffic-rule abiders (q=1) and traffic-rule ignorers (q=1/2)
Odds are they didn't take into account the change in behavior of a rule abider when a rule ignorer comes around?
FTA: The Mississipi delta, where the freshwater river pours into the salty Gulf of Mexico, would be an enormous source of energy if we could tap it.
It would be a HUGE bad idea to try to tap into the Great Lakes and try to cart all that water over to the ocean or something. Tons of water is already being diverted to dry states like Arizona, and being used on farms and bottled water.
Seriously though, even though the Mississippi dumps a bunch of freshwater into the gulf, you've gotta think that changing the chemical balance has got to have repercussions.
Seriously though, we shell out almost a trillion in bailout TARP money in 2008 to save the banks and everybody says "whew!" We shell out less than 10% of that and everybody spits on the auto industry.
GM's filing ($82b) was not even close to the record for the largest bankruptcy filing. Last year Lehman Brothers and WaMu declared bankruptcy for $649 billion and $333 billion.
I'm not trying to say that GM wasn't mismanaged, any company that goes bankrupt obviously wasn't run right.
I'm just getting sick of everybody spitting on the auto companies, pretending like they are the only reason we are in this mess of an economy.
Part of the reason GM had to get bankruptcy protection from the government was because the banks wouldn't loan them any of the TARP money they were given. Too busy giving bonuses to their executives I guess!
Slashdot Mirror
When some news comes out about Obama's administration and some are condemning it but others are defending it...
It's only a matter of time before you get the posters saying:
"If GWB did this, the liberals would be screaming!"
etc..
Similar to the "In Soviet Russia" meme. :)
What Microsoft did to Netscape (drive their $30 Navigator browser out-of-market) is approximately equivalent to Comcast announcing "we'll give everyone free MP3s" and thereby driving Itunes.com out of business. It's called anti-competitive monopolistic behavior, and it's explicitly forbidden by U.S. Antitrust Laws that were passed ~100 years ago.
Kinda funny, I remember being pretty pissed that Netscape was charging money while Mosaic was free.
The idea that someday I may not be able to backup my CDs or DVDs, due to Windows blocking that action, troubles me.
If that scares you, run Linux or Apple.
Seriously, if you want there to be competition for the monopoly you hate, then support that monopoly's competitors.
Not even close to true. He doesn't own ABC, CBS, or NBC. He does own Fox, one of four major networks. On cable, you have Fox News owned by Murdoch (very Republican-oriented, granted), CNN owned by Ted Turner (debatable), but the rest of the news channels aren't close to right-leaning in general. For newspapers, he owns the WSJ, which is the only prominent right-leaning paper, with the Washington Post and New York Times being the two most prominent newspapers in the country. They also happen to be *extremely* left.
So your big Republican conspiracy is 1 out of 4 major networks, one or two major cable news channels, and one major newspaper. That's a lot more than those that are clearly left-leaning. The network news tends to skew left, as do newspapers in major cities.
Correct, Murdoch doesn't own the "most of the mainstream media".
He does own a larger percentage than just about any other single entity, (the New York Post too) but he doesn't control the whole picture.
ABC is owned by Disney, CBS is owned by Viacom / National Amusements, Inc., NBC is owned by GE
You could try and say that Disney, Viacom and GE are totally Republican because they're big business, but then you could come back and say they all love Obama so that makes them Democrats.
Fox is about the only one that with a very obvious news slant, typically coming from pundits like Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, but they don't speak for the whole corporation.
The whole left/right slant thing is COMPLETE BULLSHIT for most news organizations.
The truth is, they're all about ratings and making money, regardless of left or right.
As for newspapers, isn't Google News the most popular? :)
I just watch Jon Stewart anyways, he must be neutral. Oh shit, Comedy Central is owned by Viacom so there goes that!
Honestly this looks like a pretty typical HR "ethical training" type of course.
We've been subjected to similar training where I work, it's pretty much all BS and nobody pays attention to it.
Just watch the dumb videos, take the quiz so you get training credit and that chick with the hot ass in HR will stop bugging you to take the sexual harassment training.
So far I think the product tie-ins for Eureka are pretty hilarious and creative, and possibly telling for the future of advertising.
They typically even have versions of the advertising on the syfy website too.
Somebody is paying attention and figured out that probably 99% of people that watch shows on syfy use DVRs and fast forward through the commercials.
Hopefully syfy is smart enough to not rely on the Nielsen ratings.
I'm so sick of the major networks canceling all the good shows probably based on incorrect viewing reports!
If the world goes the way of Hulu, then the networks won't need Nielsen anyways.
True that people can still ignore the warning, but if we're talking about the common user who is now terrified of viruses, spyware and 1337 h4x0rs, odds are they won't click continue.
The CMS that ran our corporate site got hacked a few months back.
Google crawled it and found some hidden links to some malware sites, and my company got on that blacklist.
Customers, suppliers and CEOs were all freaking out, so after we fixed it ASAP we went to Google webmaster tools and requested a recrawl of the site, and that's the ONLY option you have. No phone number to call, no support email, and not even a time frame for when your site will be recrawled.
Meanwhile people are freaking out about the website and we just have to wait a day or more.
I'm not objecting to Google having blacklisted our site, that was LEGIT.
Just that when you are blacklisted, you have no recourse other than to just sit on your ass, wait for Google and hope you don't get fired.
If they're going to wield that kind of almighty power over everyone's website, there should be a better option for a way to get off that list.
Google support is pretty crappy, and I can guarantee they're missing out on some big money in paid support options,
because I can guarantee my company would have shelled out a few grand just to get the website off the blacklist immediately!
They already have VOIP apps for the iPhone / iPod Touch:
TruPhone and Fring
iPod Touch doesn't have a microphone, so unless you get a bluetooth or peripheral one it doesn't make a great phone.
Just strange that they let Yahoo control multiple features (Weather, stocks, search (you can opt for Yahoo instead of Google)) with no concerns for them taking over the device.
Plus Yahoo has apps for Y! Messenger, Y! Music, and another app that brings in quite a few other services.
Then on the phone technology, there's Fring which let you make calls through skype and bring in all your IM contacts, and TruPhone which I think also brings in skype and you can make soft phone calls over 3G.
Seems like their decision was based more on the corporation they were competing with than the technology conflicting on the iPhone.
The patent clearly states that it is for A word document in A SINGLE XML file. ODF is a zip file with many XML and binary files inside so is outside the scope of this patent by a long shot.
OOXML files (.docx, etc) are also zip files with multiple XML files. If you take a .docx file and rename it .docx.zip you can unzip it and check it out.
I just made a simple test.docx, and there were 7 files in the zip.
So, since the patent CLEARLY states that it is for a single document, does that mean this patent is for vaporware, or is Office 2010 going to change their OOXML implementation to be a single XML file instead of a bunch of them zipped up?
Or did MS screw up and somebody filed the wrong verbiage?
Oh, come on - really? Then how come many websites don't work with Opera, or Safari or sometimes even Firefox or Chrome.
Yes really. Until IE6 usage drops off, people will still develop for it.
According to these guys IE6's market share is still way higher than Chrome, Safari or Opera.
Trust me, it's a pain in the butt. Here at work we test with IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. Started some testing with Chrome, but most of our websites are for business users in the manufacturing sector, and we haven't seen a lot of adoption there.
It really really sucks, but you have to play to the browsers with the market share or people will go to a competitor.
(Or they'll send a nasty email that gets routed to the president of the company. Not that that's happened or anything)
Honestly if we actually had a customer using Opera and they complained about it, we'd have to start running through our test matrix with that too.
Really, that's it EXACTLY.
I think people using search engines (or decision engines) really just expect them to do some magic and return the right pages.
Way back in the day you could get high on a search engine just by putting a specific word a million times on your page, or cramming a bunch of stuff in your meta tags.
Then PageRank came along and screwed all that up, and now Google goes beyond that and changes it's search on the fly based on "interesting" trends it finds.
The search algorithms are just programs that try their best to guess what results to show based on a massive pile of millions of records in a database.
Microsoft may have a weighted keyword thesaurus or something, but I doubt it just because messing with that can REALLY backfire on you.
If you start messing with the control knobs for the tubes, you never know what kind of crab is going to come out!
Totally agree that people should upgrade, but... they just don't.
And websites don't want to chance losing business because a potential customer hit their site and it didn't work.
It's amazing how far people will go to NOT upgrade. I remember going to a Ford plant once setting up favorites on a few people's machines pointing to an old IIS3 ASP app we wrote. They sent me over to one dark corner of the plant where the engineer had a PC running Windows 3.1 and an ancient version of Netscape.
If your website can survive without the IE6 consumers, you can get rid of them:
http://www.ie6nomore.com/
Must have been an old school side scrolling adventure.
Stupid forced scrolling.
Another geek marriage here, my wife and I are both CS IT professionals.
Good stuff:
- You have someone to talk to about similar subjects
- You don't fight over what TV and movies to watch (SCI-FI)
- A LOT less drama and fighting over stupid stuff
Not awesome stuff:
- You have to take turns on the computer or game system since your wife knows how to use it too
- After work if your spouse has the same job, he/she can ask you for help
- She doesn't read cosmo so she's not constantly trying to figure out what kind of sex you want
There really hasn't been any really "BAD" stuff, and funny how life works we have started to fall into more macho and girly roles over the years, especially after having kids.
Seriously talk about side discussions!
900+ posts about global economics and the merits or waste of college.
I'm guessing I'm the first person (including the poster) who actually read the whole article??
She is specifically suing the office of career advancement, she is not suing because they didn't educate her well enough.
She is only saying that the office actively works to employ graduates with higher GPAs, and basically ignores those with lower GPAs.
I still think the lawsuit is ridiculous, and will probably be thrown out since discrimination based on your GPA is not illegal.
It could be that the career office is a bunch of jerks who laugh and throw away any resume they get that is under 3.9, but that doesn't make it illegal.
That's similar to some of the key points my AI instructor had.
- Has Parts
(Knowledge that objects can be broken down into smaller parts)
- Classification to predict
(i.e. I know that lions are dangerous. That tiger looks sort of like a lion, it must be dangerous.)
Very basic concepts that could be applied to a tiger or a human.
Seriously, when I was a kid all the books said by the year 2000 we'd all be flying around in jet packs and be living on the moon.
It'd be nice if ISS wasn't the only space station out there, maybe we could set up a trailer park on the moon?
Sounds like the old Dancing Bunnies problem.
The user wants to see the dancing bunnies, so they click there. It doesn't matter how much you try to disuade them, if they want to see the dancing bunnies, then by gum, they're going to see the dancing bunnies. It doesn't matter how many technical hurdles you put in their way, if they stop the user from seeing the dancing bunny, then they're going to go and see the dancing bunny.
But did the original research follow the 3 second rule? And did it take into account what happens with rude drivers and the 3 second rule?
People might follow the rule and leave some space between them and the car in front of them,
but if there is another car trying to pass, they'll probably speed up and tailgate so that person can't get in, right?
I'm not a subscriber to APS and I'm not paying $25 for the article so I can't really look, ...
but it sounds like they had specific rules about interaction between agents:
An agent steps to the right with probability q or to the left with 1-q when encountering other agents.
traffic-rule abiders (q=1) and traffic-rule ignorers (q=1/2)
Odds are they didn't take into account the change in behavior of a rule abider when a rule ignorer comes around?
FTA: The Mississipi delta, where the freshwater river pours into the salty Gulf of Mexico, would be an enormous source of energy if we could tap it.
It would be a HUGE bad idea to try to tap into the Great Lakes and try to cart all that water over to the ocean or something.
Tons of water is already being diverted to dry states like Arizona, and being used on farms and bottled water.
Seriously though, even though the Mississippi dumps a bunch of freshwater into the gulf, you've gotta think that changing the chemical balance has got to have repercussions.
Day After Tomorrow anyone?
Seriously, people forget so soon...
The "bailouts" were the free money given to banks who screwed themselves.
$20 billion to Bank of America
$45 billion to Citigroup
Overall, $700 billion in TARP money set aside for banks who are in trouble, with no restructuring.
GM got a few billion in federal loans, the government is buying about $50 billion in shares, and they have to restructure their organization.
GM Chapter 11 Reorg
Seriously though, we shell out almost a trillion in bailout TARP money in 2008 to save the banks and everybody says "whew!"
We shell out less than 10% of that and everybody spits on the auto industry.
GM's filing ($82b) was not even close to the record for the largest bankruptcy filing.
Last year Lehman Brothers and WaMu declared bankruptcy for $649 billion and $333 billion.
Chapter 11 bankruptcies
I'm not trying to say that GM wasn't mismanaged, any company that goes bankrupt obviously wasn't run right.
I'm just getting sick of everybody spitting on the auto companies, pretending like they are the only reason we are in this mess of an economy.
Part of the reason GM had to get bankruptcy protection from the government was because the banks wouldn't loan them any of the TARP money they were given. Too busy giving bonuses to their executives I guess!