Now, if I was defending CompUSA et al in the case, I'd argue something like this:
"We would have been HAPPY to show her the EULA, if she had just asked us to open the box before making the purchase. It says clearly on the box [which it probably does] that this is licensed software. Since she obviously made the purchase with full knowledge that a EULA existed, then she clearly decided to accept the license. Alternatively, the EULA is clearly available on the manufacturer's web site, so if she was concerned she should have done her due diligence.
"Your honor, she obviously bought the software WITH THE INTENTION of launching this nuisance lawsuit with no regard for actually doing proper consumer research. We move for dismissal."
"Case dismissed".:)
P.S. Not that I'm *morally* defending this practice, mind you...
So? That doesn't mean they're not really offended. But let's face it, some offenses are worse than others. You want to make it sound like words are completely neutral, but they're not.
Words ARE completely neutral, but intent is not. For example, black people use the word "nigger" between themselves all the time without giving offense. It's the context and intent that gives offense.
But intent is not always conscious, and in fact not always relevant.
But it's *exactly* relevent. The key point that I think you're missing is that being offended is entirely voluntary. Take gay jokes -- some gay people will be offended, and others won't. That means that the people being offended chose to be offended.
It simply is not and should not be my concern whether someone has some sort of mental problems that will misinterpret my intentions. Now, if someone is close to me and I know they are particularly sensitive to something, then I may out of politeness decide to avoid those terms. But it is absolutely not my responsibility to watch my language on the off-chance that someone might choose -- possibly intentionally -- to misinterpret me.
It's an archaic word and is obviously ripe for misinterpretation.
Perhaps, but doesn't it baldly demonstrate that certain people are LOOKING to be offended? Once the word is explained, then why would there be any further controversy?
And where do I stop? Do I not use the word "dastardly" around someone born out of wedlock because it sounds like "bastardly"? Do I never use the word "God" because it might offend an atheist? Do I not mention that I bought some "spic-and-span" around Italian people? And let's not even get into the absolute stupidity of terms like "differently abled" rather than handicapped (and yes, I use the latter word proudly).
The insanity will never stop, and I refuse to be held hostage to people who will take offense at anything I say. I say again, the ONLY measure that has to matter is intent.
I were an intelligent racist (how I wish that were a simple oxymoron), I would realize that I could say a lot of the things I mean without actually saying them.
Exactly. It's the intent that matters. People generally know when someone is trying to insult them. The words are irrelevent. In fact, just a look can insult someone. It's the intent of the look that counts.
it's important to understand that offense is in the eye of the offended, not the offender.
NO NO NO!! Sorry to come off so strongly, but this is completely and TOTALLY wrong.
You cannot define offense by who is offended, because you can ALWAYS find someone who is offended by ANYTHING.
The rational point of view is looking at the intent of what someone is saying. I'm particularly reminded of someone who was fired for using the word "niggardly" in a staff meeting! A black person was offended, even though the word has absolutely nothing to do with the word "nigger", and the person was forced to resign. Is this really the world you want where the idiots who get offended decide who gets lynched (word used intentionally)?
While it is a crash investigation and it is illegal to withhold what you know, if this top secret piece of decryption hardware fell on your lawn, you legal own it as it is on your property and you have salvaged it.
Uh, no. You are totally wrong. It's either your property or it isn't -- it's irrelevent if something happens to land on your lawn. If I accidently drop my hedging shears over the fence to my neighbor, it doesn't automatically belong to my neighbor.
Also note that it's NOT necessarily legal for you to keep something that you find that someone else lost. It's particularly illegal for you to keep stolen goods (like bank robber drops the bag of money and you grab it).
Also contrary to popular belief, if a package is misdelivered to you, you are NOT entitled to keep it. On the other hand, if someone sends you something without your authorization and then bills you, then generally you are allowed to keep it.
We are starting to get the distinct impression that FMC is fucking with us on the peroxide supply situation. We keep doing the things they say (spending thousands of dollars), and they keep coming up with some other reason we still can't buy peroxide (or just not return calls for weeks). They have strung us along for a long time now, and convinced us to stop talking to Degussa, but we still don't have peroxide.
There was some talk about this a while ago, but I was a lot more hopeful about FMC, so I didn't pursue it -- maybe it is time to set up a new company on the scale of X-L Space Systems.
I don't want to be in the chemical processing business, but I would probably be willing to be an anchor customer. I want to buy $100,000 worth of peroxide this year.
One of Michael Carden's customers has one of his concentrators, and is willing to do some peroxide production for us, but I would really prefer to work with a company, even a small one, that is devoted to peroxide, and really cares about all the details, not just someone that can feed a machine.
Would any ERPS people be interested in actually running a business to do this? I would be happiest working with a proven production system (one of Michael's), but I could entertain notions of paying for more development work on the ERPS concentrators.
This is sort of a trial balloon here -- if FMC turns around and ships us peroxide, that is still my preferred solution.
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Fortunately, most of the rest of the industry has not "caught up" with Apple's traditionally slow CPU speeds and high prices.
Seriously, where does this myth come from that Apple somehow leads the personal computer industry? It only can come from insulated Apple fans who shun PCs and never see what they can do or know the history.
The last really unique thing Apple did was popularize the GUI (not invent, of course). Their operating system was ANCIENT until OS/X. No preemptive multitasking. No memory protection. Virtual memory so brain damaged that most people turned off. Processing actually STOPPED when you pressed a menu button (this was especially laughable when Macs were used as web servers, and someone accidently leaves a menu item open).
Firewire? Big whoop. Sure, Apple had it first, but was it a big advance over a lot of other similar technologies? Nope.
Almost every significant hardware innovation began on the PC architectures. Proof? The bus, memory, (yes) SCSI, CD-ROM, CD writers, color monitors (Steve didn't like color until much later), even floppies, on and on. There's a reason that almost all of Apple's components are PC components. Hell! The original Mac didn't even ALLOW adding a hard drive. Yes, it was specifically NOT ALLOWED, because steve thought all storage should be removable. I distinctly remember the first company that figured out how to add a hard drive, and it was big news.
Let's not even get into all the software innovations that began on the PC, including the list above (of course, the list above began on mainframes for the most part). Let's also remember that Apple for years was too incompetent to create a modern operating system (*cough*Copland*cough*).
I guess the biggest innovation Apple pioneered was the "boutique computer" marketing scheme using funky designs with funky colors. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not mistake that for actual technical innovation that "everyone had to catch up with".
Have you priced wood lately? It's INCREDIBLY expensive because of all the restrictions on logging.
The water import costs would be prohibitive.
Excellent point, and of course this possibly applies to space-based agriculture in general. We don't really know how many ice asteroids are up there, though, so that's a possible solution.
You "business case" types never cease to amaze me. you wouldn't recognize a long-term benefit if one crawled out of your ass and sang "Auld Lang Syne."
Oh, I see. You're pulling out the old saw about all the technologies that came out of the space program -- 30 years ago. First of all, that NASA does not exist anymore. Second of all, all those benefits cost an ENORMOUS amount of money, far, far, far more than it would have taken private industry to eventually come up with them. Yes, we got them faster than we otherwise would have, but woop-de-doo. It's very arguable whether it was really worth the money.
Did you have a point to make, or are you seriously suggesting that all companies are like those? And of course, are you seriously suggesting that the government is more efficient and completely without corruption? Much less NASA?
I think it would be mighty cool watching GM convert an assembly line into producing cheap rocket ships. Why not? How about launching 100 rockets each with 100 pounds of cargo for 10,000 pound lift capability. A solution like this would NEVER be done by NASA.
Real quick. it costs $10,000/lb to put something in orbit. You weight 100 pounds? It's going to cost $1,000,000. $200 mil? Puh-lease. The shuttle costs darn near close to 450$ mil to launch. NOTHING IS PROFITABLE AT 10,000$/lb shipping COSTS!
No, it costs NASA -- a bloated, unbelievably inefficient organization that has absolutely no vision to radically reduce costs -- that much to launch payloads.
The advantage of having a huge prize is that allows EVERYONE no matter how crackpot the idea to try a lot of different things. NASA will never, ever get us cheap access to space, much less profitable access to space. It simply is not in their mission.
With all due respect, quoting NASA or any government figures as somehow carved on stone tablets is a sign of the problem, not any solutions.
First, take half of NASA's budget, and make it totally devoted to unmanned missions exclusively. NASA suddenly gets 10x more research done for half the money.
Second, take the other half (billions of dollars, BTW) and make a series of prizes to be won by any group willing to take the risks. Prizes could include:
$200M prize for first profitable 100 megawatt power plant space.
$200M prize for first profitable factory that produces at least $1M in sales. $100M bonus if its a product that currently produces a lot of toxic waste.
$500M prize for agriculture pod that produces 1000 tons of food per year. $250M bonus if it's a forest pod that produces wood.
The key is that SPACE HAS TO PAY FOR ITSELF. Right now the risks are too high and expensive to get started.
Note by the way that this is the ideal way to sell space to people. "Think about all the bad, bad stuff that we can put in orbit instead of polluting the earth. Cheap power. Cheap products. Great for the economy.
Too bad this entirely logical, rational, practical and most importantly, extremely likely to succeed scenerio will never happen. NASA will never give up the control.
Assuming anyone wants something to actually HAPPEN, how about a consortium to promote third party developers to port their applications to Linux?
Want a sign that Linux is really moving to the desktop? The sign will be when the major application developers (Quicken, Symantec, etc) care about porting their applications there.
How about this consortium produce a high quality porting kit for Windows applications, with high quality documentation?
It is the only punctuation mark to have absolutely no effect on pronunciation.
Not true, in some cases. I'm having trouble coming up with a non-lame example, but adding an apostrophe as a possessive to a word ending in "s" often adds an extra "es" sound to the end.
Can you substantiate this statement by namming one area in which the current MSWord
better than the current WordPerfect!
I have no idea what the current WordPerfect does. But WordPerfect died, market-share wise, a long time ago and they primarily died because the 6.0 product sucked so badly. I know -- I was a huge WordPerfect guy, and 6.0 was so bad that I switched to Word and never went back.
The big question is whether WordPerfect finally got rid of the "reveal codes" function, which is a complete and total kludge. And yes, I know what it does and understand the attraction. I was dragged kicking and screaming to the Word environment yelling that I didn't want to give up Reveal Codes. But once I was introduced to Styles, I realized what a horrible kludge WordPerfect was that it needed reveal codes. Styles (and I know that WordPerfect finally grafted them on later) are the way things should work at the fundamental level, not embedded codes.
but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.
I have to admit, you've hit on another of my pet peeves.:)
This is the problem with literalist geeks who focus on a tree while ignoring the forest. Intel never claimed that a P4 makes your bandwidth higher. They claimed the Internet was faster -- which it was. The "Internet" is a set of services, not just a stream of bits. Particularly that this claim came in the era of Netscape, which was a horribly slow renderer. A faster CPU made page rendering much, much faster. You can also make the same argument about video over the Internet. More speed == smoother video.
So cut Intel some slack. To the average end user, a faster CPU means a faster Internet. It's completely unlike Apple's baldfaced lying.
And look what happened to all the companies Microsoft saw fit to "work with" in the past.
What, make a huge amount of money? For every one company that Microsoft "crushed", there are probably 100 that made a lot of money (and thousands that make a solid living). It sure doesn't suck to be the Visio guys. Or Norton. Or MacAfee. Or Symantec. Or...
Of course, I could point out that even Microsoft's enemies don't always do badly. Quicken... Oracle...
Most of the ones that died had sucky products that stopped progressing (WordPerfect, Netscape, Borland*, etc).
*Yes, I know Borland still has some backers, and I know that Microsoft hired a lot of their programmers, etc, etc.
This turbocharged Power Mac rips through digital video and 3D projects faster than Pentiums can say "uncle."
I'm not a big fan of Apple in many ways, but this is what just burns me. I will never, ever deal with a company that is this dishonest. Benchmark after benchmark shows that a top of the line Intel KILLS the Macintosh, and is half the price to boot. How can Apple get away with bald-faced lying to the public like this?
Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?
The question: "What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?"
The Response: "He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords."
What was so wrong with the guy's answer? If you're not willing to accept his answers, maybe you should try asking different questions or maybe even send someone else. Your question is basically, "what strategies are you going to use to sell Linux?". His answer was, "we're going to focus on value (i.e. price) and interoperability (i.e., flexibility and technical agnosticism). What the hell was wrong with his answers?
Not that I expect you to believe any of this, since this is exactly what you'd expect a paid Microsoft flog to say, isn't it?
What the hell? I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Look, you started with (reasonably) trying to state that you aren't paid by Microsoft. OK, fine, point accepted. But then you went off on this tangent about somehow that making a low enough amount of money somehow shields you from taking money from Microsoft (seems like the opposite would be true to me, but moving on...). My point is that the amount of money you make has nothing to do with your ethics, and bringing that into the discussion to prove something proves nothing. Ethics is the question, not income.
I'm just tired of the idjit "You must be getting paid off by Microsoft!!!" accusations we get every time we so much as mention that company's name.
Everyone who matters with an ounce of sense knows that it's absurd that you would be getting paid by Microsoft. They are saying that basically to troll. In any case, ethics can only be proved by past actions, so personally I wouldn't waste time trying to "prove" it.
Anyway, I accept that perhaps I misinterpreted what you wrote, but I think my point is valid.
We don't need mansions or yachts to feel good about ourselves. Maybe one reason we don't need money as much as some people is that we save a bunch by using Free and/or Open Source software...
On the other hand, I don't need a vow of poverty to feel good about myself. Man, overcompensating a little about your apparently humble existence? Nothing wrong with that, of course, but throwing your "less rich than thou" attitude in people's faces is just as bad as throwing financial success in people's face.
Just for the record, the amount of money you earn -- either a huge amount or a small amount -- is absolutely no direct measurement of one's character. Apparently Miller believes it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if I was defending CompUSA et al in the case, I'd argue something like this:
"We would have been HAPPY to show her the EULA, if she had just asked us to open the box before making the purchase. It says clearly on the box [which it probably does] that this is licensed software. Since she obviously made the purchase with full knowledge that a EULA existed, then she clearly decided to accept the license. Alternatively, the EULA is clearly available on the manufacturer's web site, so if she was concerned she should have done her due diligence.
"Your honor, she obviously bought the software WITH THE INTENTION of launching this nuisance lawsuit with no regard for actually doing proper consumer research. We move for dismissal."
"Case dismissed". :)
P.S. Not that I'm *morally* defending this practice, mind you...
So? That doesn't mean they're not really offended. But let's face it, some offenses are worse than others. You want to make it sound like words are completely neutral, but they're not.
Words ARE completely neutral, but intent is not. For example, black people use the word "nigger" between themselves all the time without giving offense. It's the context and intent that gives offense.
But intent is not always conscious, and in fact not always relevant.
But it's *exactly* relevent. The key point that I think you're missing is that being offended is entirely voluntary. Take gay jokes -- some gay people will be offended, and others won't. That means that the people being offended chose to be offended.
It simply is not and should not be my concern whether someone has some sort of mental problems that will misinterpret my intentions. Now, if someone is close to me and I know they are particularly sensitive to something, then I may out of politeness decide to avoid those terms. But it is absolutely not my responsibility to watch my language on the off-chance that someone might choose -- possibly intentionally -- to misinterpret me.
It's an archaic word and is obviously ripe for misinterpretation.
Perhaps, but doesn't it baldly demonstrate that certain people are LOOKING to be offended? Once the word is explained, then why would there be any further controversy?
And where do I stop? Do I not use the word "dastardly" around someone born out of wedlock because it sounds like "bastardly"? Do I never use the word "God" because it might offend an atheist? Do I not mention that I bought some "spic-and-span" around Italian people? And let's not even get into the absolute stupidity of terms like "differently abled" rather than handicapped (and yes, I use the latter word proudly).
The insanity will never stop, and I refuse to be held hostage to people who will take offense at anything I say. I say again, the ONLY measure that has to matter is intent.
I were an intelligent racist (how I wish that were a simple oxymoron), I would realize that I could say a lot of the things I mean without actually saying them.
Exactly. It's the intent that matters. People generally know when someone is trying to insult them. The words are irrelevent. In fact, just a look can insult someone. It's the intent of the look that counts.
it's important to understand that offense is in the eye of the offended, not the offender.
NO NO NO!! Sorry to come off so strongly, but this is completely and TOTALLY wrong.
You cannot define offense by who is offended, because you can ALWAYS find someone who is offended by ANYTHING.
The rational point of view is looking at the intent of what someone is saying. I'm particularly reminded of someone who was fired for using the word "niggardly" in a staff meeting! A black person was offended, even though the word has absolutely nothing to do with the word "nigger", and the person was forced to resign. Is this really the world you want where the idiots who get offended decide who gets lynched (word used intentionally)?
While it is a crash investigation and it is illegal to withhold what you know, if this top secret piece of decryption hardware fell on your lawn, you legal own it as it is on your property and you have salvaged it.
Uh, no. You are totally wrong. It's either your property or it isn't -- it's irrelevent if something happens to land on your lawn. If I accidently drop my hedging shears over the fence to my neighbor, it doesn't automatically belong to my neighbor.
Also note that it's NOT necessarily legal for you to keep something that you find that someone else lost. It's particularly illegal for you to keep stolen goods (like bank robber drops the bag of money and you grab it).
Also contrary to popular belief, if a package is misdelivered to you, you are NOT entitled to keep it. On the other hand, if someone sends you something without your authorization and then bills you, then generally you are allowed to keep it.
Local details may vary, of course.
We are starting to get the distinct impression that FMC is fucking with us on the peroxide supply situation. We keep doing the things they say (spending thousands of dollars), and they keep coming up with some other reason we still can't buy peroxide (or just not return calls for weeks). They have strung us along for a long time now, and convinced us to stop talking to Degussa, but we still don't have peroxide.
There was some talk about this a while ago, but I was a lot more hopeful about FMC, so I didn't pursue it -- maybe it is time to set up a new company on the scale of X-L Space Systems.
I don't want to be in the chemical processing business, but I would probably be willing to be an anchor customer. I want to buy $100,000 worth of peroxide this year.
One of Michael Carden's customers has one of his concentrators, and is willing to do some peroxide production for us, but I would really prefer to work with a company, even a small one, that is devoted to peroxide, and really cares about all the details, not just someone that can feed a machine.
Would any ERPS people be interested in actually running a business to do this? I would be happiest working with a proven production system (one of Michael's), but I could entertain notions of paying for more development work on the ERPS concentrators.
This is sort of a trial balloon here -- if FMC turns around and ships us peroxide, that is still my preferred solution.
John Carmack
Did you really think no computers had memory before the PC? Come on!
Well, my point was that newer memory architectures typically appear on PCs before Macs.
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Fortunately, most of the rest of the industry has not "caught up" with Apple's traditionally slow CPU speeds and high prices.
Seriously, where does this myth come from that Apple somehow leads the personal computer industry? It only can come from insulated Apple fans who shun PCs and never see what they can do or know the history.
The last really unique thing Apple did was popularize the GUI (not invent, of course). Their operating system was ANCIENT until OS/X. No preemptive multitasking. No memory protection. Virtual memory so brain damaged that most people turned off. Processing actually STOPPED when you pressed a menu button (this was especially laughable when Macs were used as web servers, and someone accidently leaves a menu item open).
Firewire? Big whoop. Sure, Apple had it first, but was it a big advance over a lot of other similar technologies? Nope.
Almost every significant hardware innovation began on the PC architectures. Proof? The bus, memory, (yes) SCSI, CD-ROM, CD writers, color monitors (Steve didn't like color until much later), even floppies, on and on. There's a reason that almost all of Apple's components are PC components. Hell! The original Mac didn't even ALLOW adding a hard drive. Yes, it was specifically NOT ALLOWED, because steve thought all storage should be removable. I distinctly remember the first company that figured out how to add a hard drive, and it was big news.
Let's not even get into all the software innovations that began on the PC, including the list above (of course, the list above began on mainframes for the most part). Let's also remember that Apple for years was too incompetent to create a modern operating system (*cough*Copland*cough*).
I guess the biggest innovation Apple pioneered was the "boutique computer" marketing scheme using funky designs with funky colors. Nothing wrong with that, but let's not mistake that for actual technical innovation that "everyone had to catch up with".
/RM101 braces for the wrath of the Macolytes
Why would you want to grow wood in in space?
Have you priced wood lately? It's INCREDIBLY expensive because of all the restrictions on logging.
The water import costs would be prohibitive.
Excellent point, and of course this possibly applies to space-based agriculture in general. We don't really know how many ice asteroids are up there, though, so that's a possible solution.
Also the same folks who converted car assembly lines into fighter plane assembly lines in WW/II.
It does, dumbass.
Oh? Exactly what was NASA's profit last year?
You "business case" types never cease to amaze me. you wouldn't recognize a long-term benefit if one crawled out of your ass and sang "Auld Lang Syne."
Oh, I see. You're pulling out the old saw about all the technologies that came out of the space program -- 30 years ago. First of all, that NASA does not exist anymore. Second of all, all those benefits cost an ENORMOUS amount of money, far, far, far more than it would have taken private industry to eventually come up with them. Yes, we got them faster than we otherwise would have, but woop-de-doo. It's very arguable whether it was really worth the money.
That's because everyone is using the same solutions, rather than finding innovative, new solutions.
Did you have a point to make, or are you seriously suggesting that all companies are like those? And of course, are you seriously suggesting that the government is more efficient and completely without corruption? Much less NASA?
I think it would be mighty cool watching GM convert an assembly line into producing cheap rocket ships. Why not? How about launching 100 rockets each with 100 pounds of cargo for 10,000 pound lift capability. A solution like this would NEVER be done by NASA.
Real quick. it costs $10,000/lb to put something in orbit. You weight 100 pounds? It's going to cost $1,000,000. $200 mil? Puh-lease. The shuttle costs darn near close to 450$ mil to launch. NOTHING IS PROFITABLE AT 10,000$/lb shipping COSTS!
No, it costs NASA -- a bloated, unbelievably inefficient organization that has absolutely no vision to radically reduce costs -- that much to launch payloads.
The advantage of having a huge prize is that allows EVERYONE no matter how crackpot the idea to try a lot of different things. NASA will never, ever get us cheap access to space, much less profitable access to space. It simply is not in their mission.
With all due respect, quoting NASA or any government figures as somehow carved on stone tablets is a sign of the problem, not any solutions.
First, take half of NASA's budget, and make it totally devoted to unmanned missions exclusively. NASA suddenly gets 10x more research done for half the money.
Second, take the other half (billions of dollars, BTW) and make a series of prizes to be won by any group willing to take the risks. Prizes could include:
$200M prize for first profitable 100 megawatt power plant space.
$200M prize for first profitable factory that produces at least $1M in sales. $100M bonus if its a product that currently produces a lot of toxic waste.
$500M prize for agriculture pod that produces 1000 tons of food per year. $250M bonus if it's a forest pod that produces wood.
The key is that SPACE HAS TO PAY FOR ITSELF. Right now the risks are too high and expensive to get started.
Note by the way that this is the ideal way to sell space to people. "Think about all the bad, bad stuff that we can put in orbit instead of polluting the earth. Cheap power. Cheap products. Great for the economy.
Too bad this entirely logical, rational, practical and most importantly, extremely likely to succeed scenerio will never happen. NASA will never give up the control.
Assuming anyone wants something to actually HAPPEN, how about a consortium to promote third party developers to port their applications to Linux?
Want a sign that Linux is really moving to the desktop? The sign will be when the major application developers (Quicken, Symantec, etc) care about porting their applications there.
How about this consortium produce a high quality porting kit for Windows applications, with high quality documentation?
It is the only punctuation mark to have absolutely no effect on pronunciation.
Not true, in some cases. I'm having trouble coming up with a non-lame example, but adding an apostrophe as a possessive to a word ending in "s" often adds an extra "es" sound to the end.
The explorer who introduced the raincoat to England was executed for possessing "Devil's Fabric".
ehhh, this one sounds pretty urban-legendish. Any references?
Urban Legend
Can you substantiate this statement by namming one area in which the current MSWord better than the current WordPerfect!
I have no idea what the current WordPerfect does. But WordPerfect died, market-share wise, a long time ago and they primarily died because the 6.0 product sucked so badly. I know -- I was a huge WordPerfect guy, and 6.0 was so bad that I switched to Word and never went back.
The big question is whether WordPerfect finally got rid of the "reveal codes" function, which is a complete and total kludge. And yes, I know what it does and understand the attraction. I was dragged kicking and screaming to the Word environment yelling that I didn't want to give up Reveal Codes. But once I was introduced to Styles, I realized what a horrible kludge WordPerfect was that it needed reveal codes. Styles (and I know that WordPerfect finally grafted them on later) are the way things should work at the fundamental level, not embedded codes.
but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.
I have to admit, you've hit on another of my pet peeves. :)
This is the problem with literalist geeks who focus on a tree while ignoring the forest. Intel never claimed that a P4 makes your bandwidth higher. They claimed the Internet was faster -- which it was. The "Internet" is a set of services, not just a stream of bits. Particularly that this claim came in the era of Netscape, which was a horribly slow renderer. A faster CPU made page rendering much, much faster. You can also make the same argument about video over the Internet. More speed == smoother video.
So cut Intel some slack. To the average end user, a faster CPU means a faster Internet. It's completely unlike Apple's baldfaced lying.
And look what happened to all the companies Microsoft saw fit to "work with" in the past.
What, make a huge amount of money? For every one company that Microsoft "crushed", there are probably 100 that made a lot of money (and thousands that make a solid living). It sure doesn't suck to be the Visio guys. Or Norton. Or MacAfee. Or Symantec. Or...
Of course, I could point out that even Microsoft's enemies don't always do badly. Quicken... Oracle...
Most of the ones that died had sucky products that stopped progressing (WordPerfect, Netscape, Borland*, etc).
*Yes, I know Borland still has some backers, and I know that Microsoft hired a lot of their programmers, etc, etc.
This turbocharged Power Mac rips through digital video and 3D projects faster than Pentiums can say "uncle."
I'm not a big fan of Apple in many ways, but this is what just burns me. I will never, ever deal with a company that is this dishonest. Benchmark after benchmark shows that a top of the line Intel KILLS the Macintosh, and is half the price to boot. How can Apple get away with bald-faced lying to the public like this?
Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?
The question: "What basic strategies are you employing to better penetrate the server/appliance market with Linux systems?"
The Response: "He said, "High-performance, low-cost clusters on commodity servers, specifically that work with InfiniBand." Okay, fine. He then launched into a spiel about InfiniCon products that had words like "value" and "interoperability" in it but didn't answer my question. I asked again, and got another sales pitch. Okay. Fine. This company's strategy to better penetrate the appliance/server market with Linux is to use a lot of marketing buzzwords."
What was so wrong with the guy's answer? If you're not willing to accept his answers, maybe you should try asking different questions or maybe even send someone else. Your question is basically, "what strategies are you going to use to sell Linux?". His answer was, "we're going to focus on value (i.e. price) and interoperability (i.e., flexibility and technical agnosticism). What the hell was wrong with his answers?
Exactly what answer were you looking for?
Not that I expect you to believe any of this, since this is exactly what you'd expect a paid Microsoft flog to say, isn't it?
What the hell? I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Look, you started with (reasonably) trying to state that you aren't paid by Microsoft. OK, fine, point accepted. But then you went off on this tangent about somehow that making a low enough amount of money somehow shields you from taking money from Microsoft (seems like the opposite would be true to me, but moving on...). My point is that the amount of money you make has nothing to do with your ethics, and bringing that into the discussion to prove something proves nothing. Ethics is the question, not income.
I'm just tired of the idjit "You must be getting paid off by Microsoft!!!" accusations we get every time we so much as mention that company's name.
Everyone who matters with an ounce of sense knows that it's absurd that you would be getting paid by Microsoft. They are saying that basically to troll. In any case, ethics can only be proved by past actions, so personally I wouldn't waste time trying to "prove" it.
Anyway, I accept that perhaps I misinterpreted what you wrote, but I think my point is valid.
We don't need mansions or yachts to feel good about ourselves. Maybe one reason we don't need money as much as some people is that we save a bunch by using Free and/or Open Source software...
On the other hand, I don't need a vow of poverty to feel good about myself. Man, overcompensating a little about your apparently humble existence? Nothing wrong with that, of course, but throwing your "less rich than thou" attitude in people's faces is just as bad as throwing financial success in people's face.
Just for the record, the amount of money you earn -- either a huge amount or a small amount -- is absolutely no direct measurement of one's character. Apparently Miller believes it is.