A study by Guernsey Research shows that enterprises on a two-year upgrade cycle will save 19 percent in licensing costs, but that enterprises on a three-year cycle will see a 40 percent increase in costs.
So with companies wanting to push to a three year cycle, and Microsoft wanting everyone on a two year cycle, there is a little truth to both sides of the argument.
But Microsoft's argument requires you overlook the facts for an awful lot of companies. How convenient.
on My windows boxen I use CookieCop Plus, which not only allows blocking of cookies, but also allows you to block the content from entire sites. And the Source Code is Included!
Of course, almost any proxy server, firewall, etc. could likely be set up that way.
But it is nice to see the popup try to launch, and then watch it go away.
Zelazny had a on going series of novel with the ever present theme of man developing or imbued with supernatural powers via technology.
This is his best work in this vein, although Creatures of Light And Darkness is also excellent.
It is certainly entertaining with the thousand and one details that come to mind to make a coherent world.
I recall with amusement the prayo-mats (think arcade like devices with flashing lights, etc. that send your prayers to heaven for a few coins), and someone filling a bunch of them with slugs.
Using a computer model that "explodes" a single particle into an infinite
regress of quantum waves, University of Arkansas physics professor William Harter has
demonstrated a new approach to quantum computation. "Our model reveals a fractal interference pattern emerging from quantum waves -- after what we are calling a tiny big bang -- that can perform useful calculations, such as calculating all the prime factors of any size integer," said Harter.
Like I said, this could be difficult to manufacture into a chip.
The only serious problem besides finances and space for the film crew and the objections of morality groups would be the excess body fluids getting into equipment where it might cause damage or something.
Then of course, there is the space fungus.
But seriously, who wants to make a bet that one of the best selling early flicks actually shot in space would be a porn flick? There might be enough money in it to finance non governmental space flight. I guess it depends on who are the most appropriate stars.
I am waiting for someone to start a class action suite against Microsoft, especially since they claim no responsibility for any damaghe done buy their software. With a monopoly, they may very well need to start tasking responsibility for their software.
And as a monopoly, they may wind up under regulation similar to how public utilities are regulated.
I can see this as an acceptable solution to the Microsoft problem.
Microsoft under the control of a panel of tech savvy bureaucrats (say, a panel of 25 or 30 Non-Microsoft Technology Experts) who have to approve every tweak and change in the software in advance of deployment, with public hearings and all the rest. And who could force a recall at any time.
Given the failures among the small time players, and some larger ones as well, I can seen AOL wanting to make sure that you do not have companies with a poor performance record providing the DSL for AOL.
The treasury DOES redeem money, new for old, even if it has been severly damaged. I remeeber a PBS program where they even redeemed money that had been burned. They used sophisticated technology to ID the bills from the fragile layers of ashes.
Given this, the problem of processing money with a small hole seems mute.
Also, The US Treasury is the most conservative in the world when it comes to adopting new fangled features. They seem to let the rest of the planet beta test it first.
Somehow I think that a few seconds in a Microwave oven might do nasty things to the electronics. Or maybe ironing the bills. If they are small enough, you could get a grass roots movement to take out the chips with a paper punch.
heck, the government will even go to lengths to replace money destroyed in a fire, so mildly damaged bills that are legit should not be an issue.
Apparently the original idea of a Copyright was that is was a state sanctioned/enforced monopoly on a particular product (Beaver skins in North America for the British market, for example). The idea that someone could have a monopoly on an entire industry in the way we now see it would have probably horrified them.
Jefferson proposed specific language for an amendment that would have allowed copyrights and patents, despite his doubts, but forbidden any other type of commercial monopoly. "For instance," Jefferson wrote, "the following alterations and additions would have pleased me: Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding _____ years, but for no longer term, and no other purpose."
There are advantadges to having broad market controls, but there is a price as well. Take a look at a history of the Oil industry before Rockerfeller took it over. The PBS film (transcript here) on the Rockerfellers is enlightening.
As the oil gushed skyward, fantastic stories appeared of instant fortunes. Among the Cleveland businessmen lured to the region was John D. Rockefeller. He was no wildcatter. He saw that
drilling for oil was a very risky business. Refining, not drilling, he decided, was where the steady money was to be made. Soon, a new rail line linked Cleveland with the oil region. Rockefeller
built his refinery right beside it.
Rockefeller's future, however, was harnessed to an industry in trouble. "So many wells were flowing," he lamented, "that the price of oil kept falling, yet they went right on drilling." He saw an industry plagued by over-production, and his own success threatened by what he described as "ruinous, cutthroat competition."
John D. was shrewd enough and he was analytical enough that he realized that in order to figure out a way to save his own firm and his own newly-won fortune, that he had to figure out a solution for the entire industry. It was at that point that John D. began to conceive of the oil industry as one big interrelated mechanism. And you couldn't just change one component, you had to control the entire machine.
In a move that would transform the American economy, Rockefeller set out to replace a world of independent oilmen with a giant company controlled by him. In l870, begging bankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio. The next year, he quietly put what he called "our plan" -- his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry - into devastating effect.
Jefferson would have been alarmed by this is the extreme. and it is something that far surpasses what they had experienced with industries in there day.
Ever screamed in frustration because you've been trying to wrap your mind around something for an hour, and can't? That's not attention - its attention defecit, unless you're really incapable of understanding the concept. "Bright adults" can suffer from the same problem if they are experiencing pressure to stay ahead of the curve.
This is not always true.
You also run into the phenomena of Thing X that you are trying to understand is based on ten other things. If you do not have those other things nailed down properly, this sabotages you down the road. This leads to clueless MSCE techs who cannot apply what they know.
For Example, a network tech who has never even built a machine or spliced a wire. Or has never once done basic hexadecimal math
If you are jammed up trying to understand something, you need to be able to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle.
You do have alot of folks who try to skim over things skimp on things skip things that are not important. And every once in a while, you get bit in the ass by this.
The screaming in frustration you describe is a perfect symptom of this. It is not attention deficit, unless the attention deficit is the fact that you did not pay attention in the first place.
Of course being able to spot your own blind spots in technology or whatever is a difficult task, because alot of folks won't own up to it. This is a bit foolish of course, it is what makes you or breaks you.
Please, Mr. Katz, don't use so many buzzwords. Write in plain english, and you might get some more readers
Strangely, I had no problem reading it.
Although the writing style is more complex than you typically find in tech journals. Note that it is not the content that is more complicated, but the style is.
For Example, instead of writing this:
Attention
Consciousness is the growing realization that the new economy depends as much on gathering attention as it does on selling particular services, because if the first isn't done, the second becomes irrelevant.
he could have written this:
Attention Consciousness comes about because business people are starting to notice that people have their limits. People have only so much time to spend online, or watch TV, or whatever. People have limited bandwidth. The New Economy depends on getting control of that bandwidth. The New Economy depends on getting control of this limited commodity, the amount of time that people have to spend looking and gawking at stuff. If people are not even looking at your stuff, then you never have the chance to make a sale. You never have a chance.
Now I understood the firsat passage just fine. I rewrote the second passage by taking some of the background ideas and making sure they were more easily understood.
In other words, I dumbed it down. The sentences are shorter, and each sentence usually contains only one concept. Note that these seven sentences are used to convey the same idea that the original one sentence communicated. I would have to spend some time to polish it up.
Personally, I like it better when something is not dumbed down for my consumption.
But the various ORBS blacklists are raising the vocal ire of opponents such as Electronic Frontiers Foundation co-founder John Gilmore. Gilmore believes ORBS and its derivatives take a heavy-handed, meat cleaver approach to a problem that should be handled with a scalpel.
[...] At present, Gilmore's attorneys are negotiating with his own Web-hosting company Verio, which has threatened to terminate Gilmore's website for refusing to close his open mail relay. [...] Gilmore believes spammers have a right to peddle their messages, and mail server operators have a right to forward mail if they want to. For Gilmore, spam blocking should occur at the recipient level, not at the level of self-appointed upstream censors.
"
*sigh*
which is why I believe is licensing spam so that you, me, and the ISPs can bill the spammers, and we can send the FBI, the IRS, and other appropriate authorities after them.
This is the source of income that the government has been looking for.
Certainly it is very sad to see some assholes abusing the site
Remember that he is providing anonymous posting to USENET. He is not an ISP by himself.
Let us imagine that one or two percent of your usenet readership are fools and assholes.
One or two percent of a planet is an awful lot of fools and assholes. 100,000,000 people online = 1,000,000+ willing to make life unbearable for somebody else.
Mr Keogh said he patented the wheel to prove the innovation patent system was flawed because it did not need to be examined by the patent office, IP Australia. "The patent office would be required to issue a patent for anything," he said. "All they're doing is putting a rubber stamp on it."
And this differs substantially from the current system?
How?
Since Australian Government has been rather clueless of late (sorry lads!), as far as Technology stuff goes, it seems to be par for the course.
But I am glad to see that:
"[...] he has no immediate plans to patent fire, crop rotation or other fundamental advances in civilisation"
this reminds me of that classic article from the Onion:
Re:Dear God!!! You LIKED it??!!
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
iThe movie contained enough plot for approx. 15 minutes of lame TV crap. I feel as though 2.5 hours of my precious youth have been taken away forever!!
This is remarkably similar to some student comments I read in a college newspaper. The comments were about the movie 2001 when it first came out, and the newspaper was found in a box of old stuff. Fascinating how shallow that comment seems with 20/20 hindsight and the passage of a couple of decades.
It is always fascionating to go back through th old newspapers, and read what regular folks felt about stuff, and how the perception has changed.
LOL!! That was one of my submissions to that page! I've got a couple more there, and some on techtales.com too. God, it happened about 3 or 4 years ago now. I wonder whatever happened to that dimwit...
With any luck he's a Microsoft programmer right about now.
Student: "Hey, how do I lodge in to Hotmail?"
Me: "You've got to type in your username and password in those fields that say 'username' and 'password'."
Student: "I don't have one of those."
Me: "You need one to log in to Hotmail."
Student: "It's 'LODGE' in."
Me: "The term is 'log in,' and you can't log in without a username and password. I can help you create one if you'd like."
Student: "Um, excuse me, but I THINK I know what I'm talking about. It's LODGE in, and I don't want a username and password, I just want to get some email!"
I just went back to working after that, and he left complaining about how "crappy" the computers in the lab were, after trying to "lodge in" for ten more
minutes.
Of course, there are hundreds of stories out there just like that one.
I came across this bit, an archive of the Reaction of Douglas Adams to the advent of Windows. the best is the final sentence: 95:
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."
Things haven't changed much at all.
All things considered, I'd rather have Douglas Adams.
I remember the old Star Trek Tricorder that was sort of like a PDA with sensors, but was the size of a 5x8 book. (Book? what is this thing called a book?) What is funny, looking back, is that it was not believable that something would be highly functional, while being really thing (like a clipboard) That is more believable now.
I must say that certain form factors will tend to be used more often, just by being more traditional, such as a tablet, etc.
I like the attempt to get into more exotic form factors and display options
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/images/cfin0004b.jp g
on this webpage, both of which are an interesting read.
Point being, the cartoon reminds me of Microsoft Marketing Practices.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
So with companies wanting to push to a three year cycle, and Microsoft wanting everyone on a two year cycle, there is a little truth to both sides of the argument.
But Microsoft's argument requires you overlook the facts for an awful lot of companies. How convenient.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Of course, almost any proxy server, firewall, etc. could likely be set up that way.
But it is nice to see the popup try to launch, and then watch it go away.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This is his best work in this vein, although Creatures of Light And Darkness is also excellent.
It is certainly entertaining with the thousand and one details that come to mind to make a coherent world.
I recall with amusement the prayo-mats (think arcade like devices with flashing lights, etc. that send your prayers to heaven for a few coins), and someone filling a bunch of them with slugs.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Tiny 'big bang' performs quantum computations
Using a computer model that "explodes" a single particle into an infinite regress of quantum waves, University of Arkansas physics professor William Harter has demonstrated a new approach to quantum computation. "Our model reveals a fractal interference pattern emerging from quantum waves -- after what we are calling a tiny big bang -- that can perform useful calculations, such as calculating all the prime factors of any size integer," said Harter.
Like I said, this could be difficult to manufacture into a chip.
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Then of course, there is the space fungus.
But seriously, who wants to make a bet that one of the best selling early flicks actually shot in space would be a porn flick? There might be enough money in it to finance non governmental space flight. I guess it depends on who are the most appropriate stars.
enuf said.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
And as a monopoly, they may wind up under regulation similar to how public utilities are regulated.
I can see this as an acceptable solution to the Microsoft problem.
Microsoft under the control of a panel of tech savvy bureaucrats (say, a panel of 25 or 30 Non-Microsoft Technology Experts) who have to approve every tweak and change in the software in advance of deployment, with public hearings and all the rest. And who could force a recall at any time.
This would be entertaining to say the least.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Maybe AOL can learn something?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
The treasury DOES redeem money, new for old, even if it has been severly damaged. I remeeber a PBS program where they even redeemed money that had been burned. They used sophisticated technology to ID the bills from the fragile layers of ashes.
Given this, the problem of processing money with a small hole seems mute.
Also, The US Treasury is the most conservative in the world when it comes to adopting new fangled features. They seem to let the rest of the planet beta test it first.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
It is built out of a converted fire extnguisher. You pressurize it to the spec of the canister, often in the range of 100 PSI.
Do Not Over Pressurize!
How to build instructions at the page.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
heck, the government will even go to lengths to replace money destroyed in a fire, so mildly damaged bills that are legit should not be an issue.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Jefferson proposed specific language for an amendment that would have allowed copyrights and patents, despite his doubts, but forbidden any other type of commercial monopoly. "For instance," Jefferson wrote, "the following alterations and additions would have pleased me: Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding _____ years, but for no longer term, and no other purpose."
There are advantadges to having broad market controls, but there is a price as well. Take a look at a history of the Oil industry before Rockerfeller took it over. The PBS film (transcript here) on the Rockerfellers is enlightening.
As the oil gushed skyward, fantastic stories appeared of instant fortunes. Among the Cleveland businessmen lured to the region was John D. Rockefeller. He was no wildcatter. He saw that drilling for oil was a very risky business. Refining, not drilling, he decided, was where the steady money was to be made. Soon, a new rail line linked Cleveland with the oil region. Rockefeller built his refinery right beside it.
Rockefeller's future, however, was harnessed to an industry in trouble. "So many wells were flowing," he lamented, "that the price of oil kept falling, yet they went right on drilling." He saw an industry plagued by over-production, and his own success threatened by what he described as "ruinous, cutthroat competition."
John D. was shrewd enough and he was analytical enough that he realized that in order to figure out a way to save his own firm and his own newly-won fortune, that he had to figure out a solution for the entire industry. It was at that point that John D. began to conceive of the oil industry as one big interrelated mechanism. And you couldn't just change one component, you had to control the entire machine.
In a move that would transform the American economy, Rockefeller set out to replace a world of independent oilmen with a giant company controlled by him. In l870, begging bankers for more loans, he formed Standard Oil of Ohio. The next year, he quietly put what he called "our plan" -- his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry - into devastating effect.
Jefferson would have been alarmed by this is the extreme. and it is something that far surpasses what they had experienced with industries in there day.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This is not always true.
You also run into the phenomena of Thing X that you are trying to understand is based on ten other things. If you do not have those other things nailed down properly, this sabotages you down the road. This leads to clueless MSCE techs who cannot apply what they know.
For Example, a network tech who has never even built a machine or spliced a wire. Or has never once done basic hexadecimal math
If you are jammed up trying to understand something, you need to be able to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle.
You do have alot of folks who try to skim over things skimp on things skip things that are not important. And every once in a while, you get bit in the ass by this.
The screaming in frustration you describe is a perfect symptom of this. It is not attention deficit, unless the attention deficit is the fact that you did not pay attention in the first place.
Of course being able to spot your own blind spots in technology or whatever is a difficult task, because alot of folks won't own up to it. This is a bit foolish of course, it is what makes you or breaks you.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Strangely, I had no problem reading it.
Although the writing style is more complex than you typically find in tech journals. Note that it is not the content that is more complicated, but the style is.
For Example, instead of writing this:
Attention Consciousness is the growing realization that the new economy depends as much on gathering attention as it does on selling particular services, because if the first isn't done, the second becomes irrelevant.
he could have written this:
Attention Consciousness comes about because business people are starting to notice that people have their limits. People have only so much time to spend online, or watch TV, or whatever. People have limited bandwidth. The New Economy depends on getting control of that bandwidth. The New Economy depends on getting control of this limited commodity, the amount of time that people have to spend looking and gawking at stuff. If people are not even looking at your stuff, then you never have the chance to make a sale. You never have a chance.
Now I understood the firsat passage just fine. I rewrote the second passage by taking some of the background ideas and making sure they were more easily understood.
In other words, I dumbed it down. The sentences are shorter, and each sentence usually contains only one concept. Note that these seven sentences are used to convey the same idea that the original one sentence communicated. I would have to spend some time to polish it up.
Personally, I like it better when something is not dumbed down for my consumption.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Let the next Round of Lawsuits begin.
Personally, I prefer to break up Microsoft into as many pieces as possible, but what do I know.
After all, I am only a consumer.
As long as MS has my money, why would they even care?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
But the various ORBS blacklists are raising the vocal ire of opponents such as Electronic Frontiers Foundation co-founder John Gilmore. Gilmore believes ORBS and its derivatives take a heavy-handed, meat cleaver approach to a problem that should be handled with a scalpel. [...] At present, Gilmore's attorneys are negotiating with his own Web-hosting company Verio, which has threatened to terminate Gilmore's website for refusing to close his open mail relay. [...] Gilmore believes spammers have a right to peddle their messages, and mail server operators have a right to forward mail if they want to. For Gilmore, spam blocking should occur at the recipient level, not at the level of self-appointed upstream censors. "
*sigh*
which is why I believe is licensing spam so that you, me, and the ISPs can bill the spammers, and we can send the FBI, the IRS, and other appropriate authorities after them.
This is the source of income that the government has been looking for.
A Spam Tax.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Remember that he is providing anonymous posting to USENET. He is not an ISP by himself.
Let us imagine that one or two percent of your usenet readership are fools and assholes.
One or two percent of a planet is an awful lot of fools and assholes. 100,000,000 people online = 1,000,000+ willing to make life unbearable for somebody else.
10,000,000 on USENET = 100,000+ dedicated jerks
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
And this differs substantially from the current system?
How?
Since Australian Government has been rather clueless of late (sorry lads!), as far as Technology stuff goes, it seems to be par for the course.
But I am glad to see that:
"[...] he has no immediate plans to patent fire, crop rotation or other fundamental advances in civilisation"
this reminds me of that classic article from the Onion:
Secret of Fire Falls into Russian Hands
Now we got to worry about the Aussies as well.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This is remarkably similar to some student comments I read in a college newspaper. The comments were about the movie 2001 when it first came out, and the newspaper was found in a box of old stuff. Fascinating how shallow that comment seems with 20/20 hindsight and the passage of a couple of decades.
It is always fascionating to go back through th old newspapers, and read what regular folks felt about stuff, and how the perception has changed.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
With any luck he's a Microsoft programmer right about now.
Which would explain alot of stuff.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
As seen on Computer Stupidities:
Student: "Hey, how do I lodge in to Hotmail?"
Me: "You've got to type in your username and password in those fields that say 'username' and 'password'."
Student: "I don't have one of those."
Me: "You need one to log in to Hotmail."
Student: "It's 'LODGE' in."
Me: "The term is 'log in,' and you can't log in without a username and password. I can help you create one if you'd like."
Student: "Um, excuse me, but I THINK I know what I'm talking about. It's LODGE in, and I don't want a username and password, I just want to get some email!"
I just went back to working after that, and he left complaining about how "crappy" the computers in the lab were, after trying to "lodge in" for ten more minutes.
Of course, there are hundreds of stories out there just like that one.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."
Things haven't changed much at all.
All things considered, I'd rather have Douglas Adams.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
http://www.infosync.no/en/news/n/419.asp
The Pop up full size ad page is annoying.
I remember the old Star Trek Tricorder that was sort of like a PDA with sensors, but was the size of a 5x8 book. (Book? what is this thing called a book?) What is funny, looking back, is that it was not believable that something would be highly functional, while being really thing (like a clipboard) That is more believable now.
I must say that certain form factors will tend to be used more often, just by being more traditional, such as a tablet, etc.
I like the attempt to get into more exotic form factors and display options
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Inebriety is cause for immediate and indefinite expulsion at the expelled person(s)'s cost!
Sort of takes the fun out of it, no?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"We've discovered websphere developers write 80% less infrastructure code"
As far as the License itself goes, it looks like the Lawyers are still working on it.
"We don't actually have a license for you because they're lawyers," Stutz said. "If it was me, I'd have the license."
Pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip