It is like any product or service. Let's take, for example, a restaurant. I live in an area where there is pretty much a restaurant for every resident. The service varies. Some place acknowledge you are the customer, while other feel the need to pretend that the staff is doing you a favor. Some customers like the service, others like to be abused. For a business situation, service is usually preferable, while if one it out with friends perhaps the abuse can be entertaining.
As you mention, there are two issues. In food there are really three. Service, food, and ambiance. With great food and ambiance, bad service is more tolerable. Likewise, good service does not always make for tolerable food and bad ambience, though that is the model of fast food.
Now, what does this have to do with MS. MS has a reasonable product and reasonable service. However it has consistently shown that it will screw over most of it's customers if necessary to maintain a monopoly. So, while that may be fun and all for the casual users, it is certainly not acceptable for a user who is serious. And given that spyware on a corporate computer can cost money, and presumable there are spyware detection tools of equal quality(the parent simply listed the free or cheap ones), one wonders why serious users simply don't just go to another restaurant. I mean most of us don't go to the free sandwich line simply because it is free.
You know the manned space program is fixed when Johnson is closed. It was insane to put a 1000 miles between the launch site and mission control just because LBJ wanted to give his home state jobs, see, a jobs program again. The bad communication between Johnson and Kennedy was a leading contributor to both shuttle disasters.
You know that someone has either done too much cociane, is stupid, or has read too much Rand when they try to apply a theory made up in an ideal situation to a real world on going issue. Challenger was caused by an Senile republican, and Columbia was caused by multiple failures and basic design flaws. Neither of these were distance related.
First, we do not live in a world where distance matters. Even in 1960 distance did not matter that much. Yes JSC is in houston becuase of LBJ, but if it weren't in houston, it would be somewhere else nearly equally far away.
I can generally tell that people are clueless about spaceflight, and real world events in general, when they complain about the locations of the space centers. KSC is where it is because it is the most southern part of the US. This allows us to save a bit of fuel on launch. It is not a good location for many other things due it exposure to threats, both natural and man made. If everything was in one place, a single bomb could take out everything. JSC is stout set of buidling that can work even in dangerous weather.
Furthermore, no practical politician is going to build that much money into one location. It would make the economy too dependent on the government teat. Just look at the communities that have dependencies on the dole created by the military bases.
And, as mentioned, distance is not that much of an issues. Even in the 60's we had these high tech things called telephones and aeroplanes. This allowed us to have the launch facilities in a very good location, and mission control in much more protected locations, and other centers in other locations to maximize the availablity of resources.
It is not the ideal solution, but no real world solution is. It is better than some commercial solutions, which carry the launch vehicle to sea, or launch from the texas desert, which means that we are going to have a fully fueled aircraft exploding, dropping burning peices and combustables from Dallas to Atlanta, instead of over the ocean.
As I have mentioned before, the private commercial sector has done little more that the Soviets did over 40 years ago. While your points are somewhat valid, they hav not produced an infrasture to send people to space, merely LEO, which can really be done with a hot air ballon.
I believe that the private sector can do, and will do it, in the next 10 years. But look at the ineffeciencies and waste in any large corporations. It matches or exceed governments. The same will be true for space travel.
And, btw, without government handouts we would have very little industry. Some of these handouts lasted a long time. The government funding of the taking of land from the native americans, and the giving of land to the new immigrants. The government handout of land to the railroads. The government handout of spectrum. The government support of the early airlines through the air mail. NASA is a government handout, one that is going to pay off when the private sector gets off it's ass and startes investing. Now, thanks to the dot com bubble, there is enough money to so do.
Yes, perhaps we should get Michael Bay to do Foundation, and then hire Jessica Simpson, Tom Cruise, and some unknown-girl-who-will-strip-and-engage-in-random-s ex-acts.
I don't know anyone who take comic books seriously, at least not adults. Likewise, most movies are crap. Thier budgets are blown on big name actors and fx. The proportion of decent movies in any genre is probably about the same. Take a look at the IMDB top 100, biased toward geeks, but still telling.
Budget has realy little to do with the quality of a film. And really, 1.5 million is a good budget for TV. A story can be well written and well produced, and sill be boring to many people. B5 is case in point. Likewise a story can be badly written, and badly produced, and be widly popular. For instance freinds.
It is a bit more than this. They want to sell as many books as possible, but don't want to annoy readers who must have it first. Really, this has nothing to do with reading or the book itself. This have everything to do with the children who must tell their freinds 'I got it first', and will do anything to get it first. So, they protect the books so that no one can aquire a copy and put it online. Then they make the sales start at midnight so that no one can say, hey, unfair, they got to buy a copy before me. Of course, that does not mean that NY does not get a book before California.
It really is silly the amount of money being spent to distribute this book. I am all for children reading, and it good to see this excitement, but really teach some perspective and patience. Don't buy the book at midnight. Don't make it more than it is.
I do agree with you though. The "Right to Read" does not include the right to read anything ever written. No one has a right to go into my house and read my personal writings. If the publisher decided to never release another Harry Potter book, that might be unfortunate, but would not infringe on anyones rights. There are other equally good tales, and some of them in public domain for anyone to download.
Dale, you giblet-head, we live in Texas! It's already 110 in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm going to kick your ass!
And i live for the day when all the christian get raptured into heaven so the rest of us can live happy healthy lives on Earth. I cannot imagine a better heaven than an earth without the bigotry and hate that is the misappropriated statements of the loving and peacenik Jesus. A Jesus that tried to live everyday helping people, and making the world a better place, not justifying his massive consumption and obsessing compulsively about the end of the world.
I mean we all know that his primary concern was that we would all get the best price, no matter who has to suffer to get it. Or that none of us should ever have to suffer, even if such suffering meant less harm to his fathers creation. No Jesus died on the cross so that we in American could all buy cheap shit at walmart. (Oh dude, you not supposed to say shit in front of jesus!)
The big issue with this is that is still costs more to create antimatter than would be saved, even at 10K per kilogram.
Second is containment. NASA already has issue of sending plutonium into orbit, a highly toxic metal that if inhaled will sit a persons body and radiate for a very long time. However, we can build very rugged cases for the plutonium, and rockets don't usually explode, and if they do they plutonium should be secure.
Building a containment for antimatter is a much more complex. OTOH, if it fails we will not be breathing it. It will simply annihalate, 300 micrograms releases arond 30 GJ, perhaps 9 tons of TNT, which won't be a huge explosion, but someone might feel it.
I see most of these technologies as interesing if we get some infrastructure is space. An orbiting platform making a antimatter would be a wonderful way to power us to intersteller space. Unfortunately, we have never been good at long term planning, prefering immidiate and simple solutions.
To push the analogy, let's look at a patio house. What I mean is a house in which is enclosed by an outer wall, but the interior is open onto a garden. There are realy no 'inner doors'. Often one will enter through the outer door, proceed through a hallway, and emerge into the garden area. The garden may have a some minor covering.
Now, in this architecture there is a danger that someone could scale the wall and enter the house. it is really no more dangerous than someone breaking a window, and since there are often no outer windows, it is in fact somewhat safer. However, and this is the point, much of the time all doors are built as exterior doors so they may be locked securely from the inside of the room.
So this is what I see. There is some savings, and some security, to using more expensive door and walls at each room instead of enclosing the whole house, but there are other costs. Now, if one wants the ablity to isolate each room from the rest of house, like the people in the house are untrusted, then the additional cost is well justified. Certainly in a bussiness one does not want everyone to have access to everything on the network, so one is naturally going to isolated bits of the network, as in the patio home. OTOH, most of us also put a real roof on the house.
It kind of reminds me of the old joke about the leakey roof. When it rains it is too wet to be working on it, and when it is dry the roofs works just as well as anyone's.
it is really a life style choice. You want your family to live in a certain place, you have to make enough to pay for it, so you end up driving four hours a day, your kids end up living in a car as well, and before you know it a car is eating up as much as the house.
The reason that gas prices are such an issue is because so many people bought homes and cars that weres so expensive they had a hard time finding the money to pay for the fuel needed to run them. In your calculations, at the current price of gas, about half of the cost is fuel. That means that the cost of owning the vehicle has risen about 20% over the past few years, which is significant amount when one has no additional expendeble income.
In the end it is just like any other expense. I would have a hard time justifing $1000 for a tv and $800 a year for cable, but I easily spend $1000 a year for other communications.
As many has mentioned the basic problem is that we cannot have as much stuff in the US as we seem to believe. Really, we don't need to work as much as we do. Pay is not keepping up with effeciency because there is not enough to do for an eight hour day. Those jobs that do have eight hours of work should be divided to make more work. No, this is nothing new,or europe stuff. It is just technology.
We don't trust companies to regulate themselves. That is why conservatives want to kill all the lawyers. They are the only ones that will protect us from the usurpers of power, Dick and Cade. The lawyers and compentent judges have done too well a job ensuring the rights of the American People.
One thing I would like to see, now that the formats is XML, is the ability to fail gracefully. That is, when an old format is read, or when a file is slight corrupt, word will still try to display what it can, ignoring all unknown tags.
What really made me stop buying Office, and for me it is not a huge expense, was the incompatibilities between versions. Yes, things could be converted. Yes, it mostly worked. But what irked me is that things had to be converted. There did not seem to be any thought that each new release could be a superset, and the old stuff could be just be left alone.
As it is saving from OO.org seems to be more universally reliable than word.
Isn't that what we learned at the superbowl. Watching a game that retells the story of armies carrying body parts back to camp, or perhpas drunks carring stolen merchandise back to the pub, and continuously reminds kids that isn't doesn't matter how much you learn, just how well you play the game, is good family fun. However one teat is going to traumatize a country. Somehow it is better to baash someones head in than see a body part.
That was pretty much what I was thinking. They publish these huge numbers, but don't put them in any useful perspective. Once it is put in persepctive, it seems silly not implement the system, except that it would put the local telco out of bussiness.
For instance, the inner loop of houston, tx, which is dense in homes and money, is around 130 square miles. This means that the cost to provide wide coverage for five years would be around 20 million, or a mile or so of highwayt.
The whole city is around 2.5 million. To be conservative, say that 1 million of those live or regulary visit the inner loop. Let say tht 10% of those will use wireless at least once a month. The is 100,000 people. So the city can provide broadband for $200 per person over five years. That is 40 a year, or around $3 a month per person. Even if each person only used it once, that is a bargain. Most other services run between 20-40 dollars.
To further put in perspective, the city of houston budget it around 1.5 billion, so we are talking like a 1/4 of a percent. To make it more realistic, the budget for convention and entertainment facilities and some other technology related funds is seems to be around 60 million. Tapping 1% of that fund every year would build the infrastructure, and greatly increase the value of houston as a destination. After all, Houston, it's worth it.
OTOH I think this is a good thing as it shows that firefox is now seen as the browser of the common person. If one assumes that google toolbar is primarily a method to collect personal data, then it makes little sense to skew the data by targeting a largely geek audience. Therefore, if google has developed a firefox toolbar, it must mean that firefox is making inroads to the general population.
The bad thing might be that other more malicious spyware and adware will be targeted to firefox. The best hope is that since FireFox does not have the ActiveX security issues, it will be slightly safer.
Repeat after me. This has nothing to do with the degree. The person could have been a high school drop out. The person could have been a nobel prize winner. The person could have a 3rd grade graduate from the the backwoods of texas.
The only thing that matters is that this person got the attention of someone at MS, and MS asked him to come and talk. That shifts the balance in the interview. If you ask me to your house, and then ask me to clean it, that is rude.
If MS did not have the notion that the person they are calling is qualified, then they should not be calling. If they are asking unqualified candidates to come and interview, then they are just like the companies that send out credit card application to a million people saying 'you are prequalified'. It is disrespectful becuase it wastes the time of another person.
Again this is different from me asking for a job, and having to prove myself. An invitation was issued, and baisc respect dictates that you do not waste the time of your guests.
We should not be surprised of this behavior. MS regularly wastes the time of it's customers by making them repeatedly input massive serial numbers, sending agents just to show that out of 1000 machines, only 998 have licenses, and installing spyware to make sure that all computers are in complience.
As posters have noted, it is out honor to be allowed to us MS products, and it is the ultimate honor to be allowed to work at MS.
Buzzword compliance usually makes me sick, especially when used by marketing drones or other hacks who have no sense of what the words mean. These people truly speak in phrases devoid of any meaning. They have speech writers to create their verbiage, or, even worse, merely copy interesting sounding passages from the web.
Gibson is not such a person. Complaining that Gibson is simply using internet buzzwords it like complaining that Kuhn uses the word paradigm way too much. Both of these people predate and transcend the buzz.
Google toolbar is useful as it compensates for certain deficiencies in IE. Otherwise it is like realplayer. Useful, but one is never sure exactly what information google is collecting or will collect, and what might be done with it. In both product you can turn off the spyware features, but one never knows.
So it is a choice. For IE the choice is often clear because IE is nearly useless on it's own. For other browser that provide a more customer centric approach, I have found nothing in Google, or Yahoo, or the number of other value added products to deal with the uncertainty. I know that everyone has been harking on the highlighting features, but most one is looking for a phrase or single word. The find function not only highlights one instance at a time, but also take the user to the location.
So, while google might be a big thing for some people, for those that just wants a browser that works, it is a bit of overkill. If for no other reason that the valuable screen real estate. Besides that, it is good that google is paying attention to all browsers. It means that IE is losing market share, and they must expand to other browsers to acquire thier consumer data.
This was over at the register and i read it earlier. They want to create an intel device with DRM that will allow users to download first run movies before they hit DVD. Presumably the DRM will be 'strong enough' and enforced with the DCMA. They think this will compete with, for example, the copies of star wars III that were available 5 days after release.
Of course this ignores the fact that SWIII was avalable worldwide for download the day of release. It also ignores the fact that this service will not be available on the standard PC, and since it will compete with iTunes, which will also likely go movies in the next year, the Intel Mac. It ignores the fact that these movies will be on PPV for a comparable cost, where they can be copied from the TiVo, at or before the time they are available from this new service. It also ignores the fact that increasingly the release of DVDs are not timed by marketing concerns, but by the time they take to master. Not to mention that the unlicensed copies in Pakistan were probably a fraction of what a studio would charge(say $20 instead of $25).
So I see this as just another in a long line of failed DRM schemes that litter the living rooms of unfortunate early adopters. A few will buy the special device and the expensive broadband neccesary to use it. A few OEM manufacuters might even build it into the computer. But at the end of the day whoever delievers directly to computer, or, as is happening now, directly to the TiVo, will previal.
Oh, one more thing. As mentioned before, the saving grace of the DVD is the added content. The additional sound tracks, the interviews, the music videos. If the studios just plan to provide a vanilla copy of the movie, that probably won
t compete with the unlisenced copies.
If your cell phone is stolen, it should be easy to connect the called numbers to the person who has the phone. In some cases this will work, and I have seen cell phones returned.
However even the young kids who casually steal cell phones appear to have some sophistication, and are able to reprogram or wipe phones for resale.
Given that wiping and reinstalling the OS for laptop is trivial compared to reprogramming a phone, I do not see how this would stop anyone but the most casual of laptop thief.
I would like to see how easy it is to get the $1000. If the service was cheap enough, it would be valuable merely as $1000 insurance policy.
Re:Of course it isn't dead!
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
i rember having a DEC PDP 11 in school. We had enough terminals for the entire class. I do not remember a single day when the computer and all terminals were not available. The same with the VAX in college.
Contrast with the PCs of today when we often do not enough computers for the entire class because so many of then are broken. I am not advocating going back to big iron, but when one factors in the cost of redundancy to compensate for the unreliable PC, the PC solution is not nearly so cheap.
One of the interesting cases of drinking law is the US bible belt where rabid fundementalism collides with rabid individualism. Here in Texas it is illegal to from a minor to drink alcohol, but it is defensable to do so in front a parent. That is, one can arrest a minor for drinking, but he or she will probably get off if the parent was around and says it is ok. There is no minimum age. Of couse, our complex child abuse laws can be enacted as needed. Therefore many started drinking at very early ages, and avoided the embarrassment of learning to drink in college.
One makes many enemies on the way to the top, and one has to deal with that when one is playing in the big league. Whiners will complain that it is unfair, or want thay are being targeted, but then that is what whiners have always done.
Now, MS clearly did some bad things on the way to the top, and the agents on the attack now are clearly the losers. We are in a pickle becuase we often look at things in terms of loser and winners, and know who we want to back. However, that doesn't realy matter becuase we have the rule of law, which is what we base most of our dealing on.
So, it is true that succesful companies have to deal with lawsuits. That is because succesful comapnies have done bad things and they have funds to compensate thier victims. Unsucceesful comapanies may have done equally bad things, but they are left alone because they have no restitution funds.
So, what is the moral? To limit the number of bad things you do, or to make sure that you are never so succesful as to become a target. In the end it really doesn't matter that the loser is suing the winner. Simply that a firm has a history of breaking the law, and therefore has done things that leaves it open for litigation.
I would tend to agree. It is pretty silly to sign a contract with a company worth 1-2K for services and equipment, and then not have the equipment match published specs.
The problem is that consumers buy these expensive phones, that don't really do what they are supposed to. This provides an incentive for the manufacturers to produce these expensive phones which are likely not to be fully utilized.
The best thing to do is make people aware of these problems, and encourag them to return the units. The first thing i did whn I got my phone was to make sure I had minimal connection through USB and bluetooth without additional softwar. I did so I kept the phone. I would have returned it if i need another $50 of software and additional services.
Verizon was once the best cell service in the states, but, even with phone number portability, I did not switch to them because they are playing at least as many shennanigans as the other companies, and the coverage is not a dominant as it used to be.
Much of the protocols seem standard. I can acess my pictures and ringtones, for download and upload, with the bluetooth client in Mac OS 10.3. I can also get to the data through USB. The phone uses a standard mini USB cable. One reason I got the phone was I could do everything I needed to do without buying the additional software.
So, perhaps if Linux has the usb tools, it would be a simple matter of hooking up the phone and starting a session. Perhaps not GUI, but mounted from the command line.
On another topic, can one download software (jad) from the Bluetooth client?
It seems to me that to commit a crime one has to have means, motive, and opportunity. A part of the motive is the psychological need to ability to commit the crime. This motivation is the only thing that a video game can after. It cannot affect the means, i.e., the possession of a weapon or the ability to use the weapon. It cannot affect opportunity, which frankly, for the suicide terrorist, is not so big of a deal. Realistically speaking, the effect on motivation is spurious, at best.
These means and opportunity is the big thing missed when blaming video games and music. I watched one video made by an ex-navy gun say the repeated killing desensitized the child to killing. That may be true but did the video game teach the kid to fire a real gun or use a real blade, or develop the motor control and muscles to repeatedly fire high powered weapons or impale a person. Last I checked it took some practice to use, for instance, a gun. While we blame the video game, seldom do we question the intelligence of teaching a kid to use an automatic or semiautomatic weapon. Or, as Eminem wrote They say music can alter moods and talk to you, well can it load a gun up for you , and cock it too?/Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude, just tell the judge it was my fault and I'll get sued.
But what really is glossed is that the acts in littleton or oklahoma city are not crimes of passion, or robbery, or assault. These are terrorist act. meant to instill fear in the masses. They were premeditated and vicious. In the littleton case, one seriously doubts that video games could have created such fucked up kids, and no way did the video game create fucked up kids that could load and fire guns. The only reason the video games are targeted is because it is an unknown, and is something that can be controlled, unlike neglectful parents and unregulated owners of guns.
And, to head off the wackos, I quote A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free
State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be
infringed.
which means that while the right of americans to bear arms should not be infringed, the US government has every right to regulate the Militia, or the people who bear arms, as it wishes. In any case, as was shown in the establishment of religion in the half of the colonies, the constitution has limited affect on what the states can do. Anyway, Oklahoma City showed us the danger of an unregulated militia.
This is, of course, what seperates a real geek from someone, who lets say, has merely watched too much TV. The later will go to the store, buy some components hook them together, install a copy of Windows, spend the rest on the day watching TV, and claim to be a geek. The former, perhaps, has worked on a some low level code, or done some wafer fab work, or woked out some large scale integration issue. Such a person will tend not to have the time to post such an insightful comment as the article used some big word that I do not understand, but i will assume it is crap anyway.
The interesting thing here is that someone has though about desoldering components, which takes some skill greater than overclocking a computer, and then matches higher spec components. It is a small thing. It is probably a useless thing. But is often not the thing that is important.
As someone recently posted, there are so many stupid articles put on the home page, and when something really geeky comes up, all anyone can do is laugh at it. I assume this is becuase the site has a large percentage of PHB and adolescent children who have not yet had any experience doing any kind of creative meaningful work.
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As you mention, there are two issues. In food there are really three. Service, food, and ambiance. With great food and ambiance, bad service is more tolerable. Likewise, good service does not always make for tolerable food and bad ambience, though that is the model of fast food.
Now, what does this have to do with MS. MS has a reasonable product and reasonable service. However it has consistently shown that it will screw over most of it's customers if necessary to maintain a monopoly. So, while that may be fun and all for the casual users, it is certainly not acceptable for a user who is serious. And given that spyware on a corporate computer can cost money, and presumable there are spyware detection tools of equal quality(the parent simply listed the free or cheap ones), one wonders why serious users simply don't just go to another restaurant. I mean most of us don't go to the free sandwich line simply because it is free.
You know that someone has either done too much cociane, is stupid, or has read too much Rand when they try to apply a theory made up in an ideal situation to a real world on going issue. Challenger was caused by an Senile republican, and Columbia was caused by multiple failures and basic design flaws. Neither of these were distance related.
First, we do not live in a world where distance matters. Even in 1960 distance did not matter that much. Yes JSC is in houston becuase of LBJ, but if it weren't in houston, it would be somewhere else nearly equally far away.
I can generally tell that people are clueless about spaceflight, and real world events in general, when they complain about the locations of the space centers. KSC is where it is because it is the most southern part of the US. This allows us to save a bit of fuel on launch. It is not a good location for many other things due it exposure to threats, both natural and man made. If everything was in one place, a single bomb could take out everything. JSC is stout set of buidling that can work even in dangerous weather.
Furthermore, no practical politician is going to build that much money into one location. It would make the economy too dependent on the government teat. Just look at the communities that have dependencies on the dole created by the military bases.
And, as mentioned, distance is not that much of an issues. Even in the 60's we had these high tech things called telephones and aeroplanes. This allowed us to have the launch facilities in a very good location, and mission control in much more protected locations, and other centers in other locations to maximize the availablity of resources.
It is not the ideal solution, but no real world solution is. It is better than some commercial solutions, which carry the launch vehicle to sea, or launch from the texas desert, which means that we are going to have a fully fueled aircraft exploding, dropping burning peices and combustables from Dallas to Atlanta, instead of over the ocean.
As I have mentioned before, the private commercial sector has done little more that the Soviets did over 40 years ago. While your points are somewhat valid, they hav not produced an infrasture to send people to space, merely LEO, which can really be done with a hot air ballon.
I believe that the private sector can do, and will do it, in the next 10 years. But look at the ineffeciencies and waste in any large corporations. It matches or exceed governments. The same will be true for space travel.
And, btw, without government handouts we would have very little industry. Some of these handouts lasted a long time. The government funding of the taking of land from the native americans, and the giving of land to the new immigrants. The government handout of land to the railroads. The government handout of spectrum. The government support of the early airlines through the air mail. NASA is a government handout, one that is going to pay off when the private sector gets off it's ass and startes investing. Now, thanks to the dot com bubble, there is enough money to so do.
I don't know anyone who take comic books seriously, at least not adults. Likewise, most movies are crap. Thier budgets are blown on big name actors and fx. The proportion of decent movies in any genre is probably about the same. Take a look at the IMDB top 100, biased toward geeks, but still telling.
Budget has realy little to do with the quality of a film. And really, 1.5 million is a good budget for TV. A story can be well written and well produced, and sill be boring to many people. B5 is case in point. Likewise a story can be badly written, and badly produced, and be widly popular. For instance freinds.
It really is silly the amount of money being spent to distribute this book. I am all for children reading, and it good to see this excitement, but really teach some perspective and patience. Don't buy the book at midnight. Don't make it more than it is.
I do agree with you though. The "Right to Read" does not include the right to read anything ever written. No one has a right to go into my house and read my personal writings. If the publisher decided to never release another Harry Potter book, that might be unfortunate, but would not infringe on anyones rights. There are other equally good tales, and some of them in public domain for anyone to download.
And i live for the day when all the christian get raptured into heaven so the rest of us can live happy healthy lives on Earth. I cannot imagine a better heaven than an earth without the bigotry and hate that is the misappropriated statements of the loving and peacenik Jesus. A Jesus that tried to live everyday helping people, and making the world a better place, not justifying his massive consumption and obsessing compulsively about the end of the world.
I mean we all know that his primary concern was that we would all get the best price, no matter who has to suffer to get it. Or that none of us should ever have to suffer, even if such suffering meant less harm to his fathers creation. No Jesus died on the cross so that we in American could all buy cheap shit at walmart. (Oh dude, you not supposed to say shit in front of jesus!)
Second is containment. NASA already has issue of sending plutonium into orbit, a highly toxic metal that if inhaled will sit a persons body and radiate for a very long time. However, we can build very rugged cases for the plutonium, and rockets don't usually explode, and if they do they plutonium should be secure.
Building a containment for antimatter is a much more complex. OTOH, if it fails we will not be breathing it. It will simply annihalate, 300 micrograms releases arond 30 GJ, perhaps 9 tons of TNT, which won't be a huge explosion, but someone might feel it.
I see most of these technologies as interesing if we get some infrastructure is space. An orbiting platform making a antimatter would be a wonderful way to power us to intersteller space. Unfortunately, we have never been good at long term planning, prefering immidiate and simple solutions.
Now, in this architecture there is a danger that someone could scale the wall and enter the house. it is really no more dangerous than someone breaking a window, and since there are often no outer windows, it is in fact somewhat safer. However, and this is the point, much of the time all doors are built as exterior doors so they may be locked securely from the inside of the room.
So this is what I see. There is some savings, and some security, to using more expensive door and walls at each room instead of enclosing the whole house, but there are other costs. Now, if one wants the ablity to isolate each room from the rest of house, like the people in the house are untrusted, then the additional cost is well justified. Certainly in a bussiness one does not want everyone to have access to everything on the network, so one is naturally going to isolated bits of the network, as in the patio home. OTOH, most of us also put a real roof on the house.
It kind of reminds me of the old joke about the leakey roof. When it rains it is too wet to be working on it, and when it is dry the roofs works just as well as anyone's.
The reason that gas prices are such an issue is because so many people bought homes and cars that weres so expensive they had a hard time finding the money to pay for the fuel needed to run them. In your calculations, at the current price of gas, about half of the cost is fuel. That means that the cost of owning the vehicle has risen about 20% over the past few years, which is significant amount when one has no additional expendeble income.
In the end it is just like any other expense. I would have a hard time justifing $1000 for a tv and $800 a year for cable, but I easily spend $1000 a year for other communications.
As many has mentioned the basic problem is that we cannot have as much stuff in the US as we seem to believe. Really, we don't need to work as much as we do. Pay is not keepping up with effeciency because there is not enough to do for an eight hour day. Those jobs that do have eight hours of work should be divided to make more work. No, this is nothing new,or europe stuff. It is just technology.
We don't trust companies to regulate themselves. That is why conservatives want to kill all the lawyers. They are the only ones that will protect us from the usurpers of power, Dick and Cade. The lawyers and compentent judges have done too well a job ensuring the rights of the American People.
What really made me stop buying Office, and for me it is not a huge expense, was the incompatibilities between versions. Yes, things could be converted. Yes, it mostly worked. But what irked me is that things had to be converted. There did not seem to be any thought that each new release could be a superset, and the old stuff could be just be left alone.
As it is saving from OO.org seems to be more universally reliable than word.
Isn't that what we learned at the superbowl. Watching a game that retells the story of armies carrying body parts back to camp, or perhpas drunks carring stolen merchandise back to the pub, and continuously reminds kids that isn't doesn't matter how much you learn, just how well you play the game, is good family fun. However one teat is going to traumatize a country. Somehow it is better to baash someones head in than see a body part.
For instance, the inner loop of houston, tx, which is dense in homes and money, is around 130 square miles. This means that the cost to provide wide coverage for five years would be around 20 million, or a mile or so of highwayt.
The whole city is around 2.5 million. To be conservative, say that 1 million of those live or regulary visit the inner loop. Let say tht 10% of those will use wireless at least once a month. The is 100,000 people. So the city can provide broadband for $200 per person over five years. That is 40 a year, or around $3 a month per person. Even if each person only used it once, that is a bargain. Most other services run between 20-40 dollars.
To further put in perspective, the city of houston budget it around 1.5 billion, so we are talking like a 1/4 of a percent. To make it more realistic, the budget for convention and entertainment facilities and some other technology related funds is seems to be around 60 million. Tapping 1% of that fund every year would build the infrastructure, and greatly increase the value of houston as a destination. After all, Houston, it's worth it.
OTOH I think this is a good thing as it shows that firefox is now seen as the browser of the common person. If one assumes that google toolbar is primarily a method to collect personal data, then it makes little sense to skew the data by targeting a largely geek audience. Therefore, if google has developed a firefox toolbar, it must mean that firefox is making inroads to the general population.
The bad thing might be that other more malicious spyware and adware will be targeted to firefox. The best hope is that since FireFox does not have the ActiveX security issues, it will be slightly safer.
The only thing that matters is that this person got the attention of someone at MS, and MS asked him to come and talk. That shifts the balance in the interview. If you ask me to your house, and then ask me to clean it, that is rude.
If MS did not have the notion that the person they are calling is qualified, then they should not be calling. If they are asking unqualified candidates to come and interview, then they are just like the companies that send out credit card application to a million people saying 'you are prequalified'. It is disrespectful becuase it wastes the time of another person.
Again this is different from me asking for a job, and having to prove myself. An invitation was issued, and baisc respect dictates that you do not waste the time of your guests.
We should not be surprised of this behavior. MS regularly wastes the time of it's customers by making them repeatedly input massive serial numbers, sending agents just to show that out of 1000 machines, only 998 have licenses, and installing spyware to make sure that all computers are in complience.
As posters have noted, it is out honor to be allowed to us MS products, and it is the ultimate honor to be allowed to work at MS.
Gibson is not such a person. Complaining that Gibson is simply using internet buzzwords it like complaining that Kuhn uses the word paradigm way too much. Both of these people predate and transcend the buzz.
So it is a choice. For IE the choice is often clear because IE is nearly useless on it's own. For other browser that provide a more customer centric approach, I have found nothing in Google, or Yahoo, or the number of other value added products to deal with the uncertainty. I know that everyone has been harking on the highlighting features, but most one is looking for a phrase or single word. The find function not only highlights one instance at a time, but also take the user to the location.
So, while google might be a big thing for some people, for those that just wants a browser that works, it is a bit of overkill. If for no other reason that the valuable screen real estate. Besides that, it is good that google is paying attention to all browsers. It means that IE is losing market share, and they must expand to other browsers to acquire thier consumer data.
Of course this ignores the fact that SWIII was avalable worldwide for download the day of release. It also ignores the fact that this service will not be available on the standard PC, and since it will compete with iTunes, which will also likely go movies in the next year, the Intel Mac. It ignores the fact that these movies will be on PPV for a comparable cost, where they can be copied from the TiVo, at or before the time they are available from this new service. It also ignores the fact that increasingly the release of DVDs are not timed by marketing concerns, but by the time they take to master. Not to mention that the unlicensed copies in Pakistan were probably a fraction of what a studio would charge(say $20 instead of $25).
So I see this as just another in a long line of failed DRM schemes that litter the living rooms of unfortunate early adopters. A few will buy the special device and the expensive broadband neccesary to use it. A few OEM manufacuters might even build it into the computer. But at the end of the day whoever delievers directly to computer, or, as is happening now, directly to the TiVo, will previal.
Oh, one more thing. As mentioned before, the saving grace of the DVD is the added content. The additional sound tracks, the interviews, the music videos. If the studios just plan to provide a vanilla copy of the movie, that probably won t compete with the unlisenced copies.
However even the young kids who casually steal cell phones appear to have some sophistication, and are able to reprogram or wipe phones for resale.
Given that wiping and reinstalling the OS for laptop is trivial compared to reprogramming a phone, I do not see how this would stop anyone but the most casual of laptop thief.
I would like to see how easy it is to get the $1000. If the service was cheap enough, it would be valuable merely as $1000 insurance policy.
Contrast with the PCs of today when we often do not enough computers for the entire class because so many of then are broken. I am not advocating going back to big iron, but when one factors in the cost of redundancy to compensate for the unreliable PC, the PC solution is not nearly so cheap.
One of the interesting cases of drinking law is the US bible belt where rabid fundementalism collides with rabid individualism. Here in Texas it is illegal to from a minor to drink alcohol, but it is defensable to do so in front a parent. That is, one can arrest a minor for drinking, but he or she will probably get off if the parent was around and says it is ok. There is no minimum age. Of couse, our complex child abuse laws can be enacted as needed. Therefore many started drinking at very early ages, and avoided the embarrassment of learning to drink in college.
Now, MS clearly did some bad things on the way to the top, and the agents on the attack now are clearly the losers. We are in a pickle becuase we often look at things in terms of loser and winners, and know who we want to back. However, that doesn't realy matter becuase we have the rule of law, which is what we base most of our dealing on.
So, it is true that succesful companies have to deal with lawsuits. That is because succesful comapnies have done bad things and they have funds to compensate thier victims. Unsucceesful comapanies may have done equally bad things, but they are left alone because they have no restitution funds.
So, what is the moral? To limit the number of bad things you do, or to make sure that you are never so succesful as to become a target. In the end it really doesn't matter that the loser is suing the winner. Simply that a firm has a history of breaking the law, and therefore has done things that leaves it open for litigation.
The problem is that consumers buy these expensive phones, that don't really do what they are supposed to. This provides an incentive for the manufacturers to produce these expensive phones which are likely not to be fully utilized.
The best thing to do is make people aware of these problems, and encourag them to return the units. The first thing i did whn I got my phone was to make sure I had minimal connection through USB and bluetooth without additional softwar. I did so I kept the phone. I would have returned it if i need another $50 of software and additional services.
Verizon was once the best cell service in the states, but, even with phone number portability, I did not switch to them because they are playing at least as many shennanigans as the other companies, and the coverage is not a dominant as it used to be.
So, perhaps if Linux has the usb tools, it would be a simple matter of hooking up the phone and starting a session. Perhaps not GUI, but mounted from the command line.
On another topic, can one download software (jad) from the Bluetooth client?
These means and opportunity is the big thing missed when blaming video games and music. I watched one video made by an ex-navy gun say the repeated killing desensitized the child to killing. That may be true but did the video game teach the kid to fire a real gun or use a real blade, or develop the motor control and muscles to repeatedly fire high powered weapons or impale a person. Last I checked it took some practice to use, for instance, a gun. While we blame the video game, seldom do we question the intelligence of teaching a kid to use an automatic or semiautomatic weapon. Or, as Eminem wrote
They say music can alter moods and talk to you, well can it load a gun up for you , and cock it too?/Well if it can, then the next time you assault a dude, just tell the judge it was my fault and I'll get sued.
But what really is glossed is that the acts in littleton or oklahoma city are not crimes of passion, or robbery, or assault. These are terrorist act. meant to instill fear in the masses. They were premeditated and vicious. In the littleton case, one seriously doubts that video games could have created such fucked up kids, and no way did the video game create fucked up kids that could load and fire guns. The only reason the video games are targeted is because it is an unknown, and is something that can be controlled, unlike neglectful parents and unregulated owners of guns.
And, to head off the wackos, I quote
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
which means that while the right of americans to bear arms should not be infringed, the US government has every right to regulate the Militia, or the people who bear arms, as it wishes. In any case, as was shown in the establishment of religion in the half of the colonies, the constitution has limited affect on what the states can do. Anyway, Oklahoma City showed us the danger of an unregulated militia.
The interesting thing here is that someone has though about desoldering components, which takes some skill greater than overclocking a computer, and then matches higher spec components. It is a small thing. It is probably a useless thing. But is often not the thing that is important.
As someone recently posted, there are so many stupid articles put on the home page, and when something really geeky comes up, all anyone can do is laugh at it. I assume this is becuase the site has a large percentage of PHB and adolescent children who have not yet had any experience doing any kind of creative meaningful work.