The deciptive ads are the problem. They promise you a computer for free, and only in the process of trying to get the computer, do you find out that a large amount of other merchandise must be aquired. These ads do not in general state that merchandise must be aquired, or at what level. Of course a reasonable person should assume that nothing is free, but that is beside the point.
A head of household,due to the high rate of deceptive content, really has no choice but to block ads. I believe that schools has an equal responsibility because most kids are not going to have the sophistication to understand they are being lied to. I believe a case be made for firms of all sizes blocking ads, as the employee should be using the internet for work, and ads will just waste employee and companies resources, not to mention putting the employees at risk.
So home, work, and school are blocked. What is left?
On TV and radio we started with paid product placements, then we were at paid ads, and now we are moving back to paid placement. On the internet we started with the lowest level of advertisement, basically direct sales, just above bartering. We then moved to a model that largely revolves around deceptive advertising. What we have no seen a lot of is the brand building advertising that traditionally has provided long term stability.
The only thing far fetched is that Mexico is part of Solopec. The ROT would clearly have invaded it, if for no other reason than to have easy access to the pacific, which would be critical for military action. Actually, the ROT would probably try to conquer at least oklahoma and everthing to the west, if for no other reason than to have defensible borders. Not to mention at mention most of central America. I don't think they would have the resources to reconstitute Pan Colombia.
In any case, there are few places in the world with more sunlight, and more useless land, than north texas and colorado. It is good to know that texas once again is the best hope for energy in the future.
On garage sale stuff, you will pay a bit more than you would at a garage sale, but then you don't have to have to wake up at six in the morning.
On the other stuff, i guess it depends where you live. Most of the stuff I see is bought cheap through some good retail sale or the like, and then sold at small profit. If you made the sale, you would get a better deal.
OTOH, I see basically the same thing on Yahoo, Google, and Amazon. I find the sites useful if i am looking for discontinued equipment, or hard to find books, but anything else can be gotten cheaper, at least in the U.S. cities.
Or one can do what I do. Only go to the stores that are reasonable. Most real sites work adequately well in all current browsers. The few that don't work are either amaturish low budget developments, or intranets and the like, also usually developed on low budget with inexperienced staff.
To extend your metaphor, I don't generally have to go to stores that do stupid things. I don't have to go to Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal*Mart so I don't get harrased with their stupidity. As long as most stores do something, one is still free to go to the stores that don't.
I know this is not your point, but opera did make a choice that, in the end, aggrevates the problem of IE only sites. They did it in an effort to make money, and now it has bitten them on the ass.
Which is why, in many ways, this is such a surprising decision. For example, I install and occasionally use a virus filter on my Mac to help protect the MS Windows machine. This is the same true for most *nix machines.
In this situation, if MS wants to maximize the user experience on Windows, they should support such software on every platform. Furthermore, a MS based virus solution has some benifits. For instance a firm might have mixed infrastructure, and a MS solution might allow some effeciencies in licensing and distribution. Certainly such a firm would want to filter incoming traffic on a machine less suseptible to the malicious payload.
This is yet another example of hwo MS, at some basic level, does not understand the needs of the customer. MS is going to be in trouble because, unlike IBM or Sun, or even Apple and Dell, it does not put together total solutions. All it does is negotiate to maximize liscensing fees. After the deal is set, there is no assurance that they will continue to protect a firms investment.
And I don't think i will ever get over the trauma of the tough stunt man telling me just how much he is hurt by people stealing movies. How he works so hard and still don't make any money. Like the high school kids complaining how much time they spend in class, and how hard they worked on that failing test, and how they just deserve an A. Or a drug addict saying he only got caught with cocaine once, and only got caught driving drunk once, and how that could keep anyone from public office is just unfair.
I mean the unfairness of the world, especially against the white men and even women, is just astounding.
I agree. Buying stuff is better. Just try to buy indie.
This really is the point. The way a person turns out is probably a combination of the character of the person and the challenges the person faces.
If we take batman as an archtype, then out of perhaps 1,000,000 people in his circumstance, parents dead, police unable to do nother, perhaps 50,000 will have the personal resources to do something about it. Out fo those 50,000, perhaps 49,000 will continue with thier life of either making money or spending the money that is now thiers due to the demise of their parents. Another 900 probably offed thier parent for the inheritence.
So of the 100 that are left, 10 are of the right age to become a badass villian hunter. Five of those turn to the profitable likfe of evil rather than the hopeless life of a hero. Four die trying. One surives.
This is funny, but isn't it better that this happened now and not in the a few month when they were in the national spotlight. What they are saying is that they has not adequately planned the enterprise, and had to shut it down because they did not anticipate the usage problems, even though the usage problems have in fact been solved on many different forums.
It seems like every service such as this goes through the problems, and they have found a way to solve it. What is interesting about a newpaper is that they should be a forum for free speech, including unconfortable speech, and it is only the fact that we do not have free speech that the problem emerges.
And I realize that the kids really push free speech to absurd levels, but it if the fear that makes us powerless.
I guess my confusion is over the terms "controlling a media playing device" and " that is coupled to the computer". So while iTunes is an interface for a "media database", it is not, as far as i know, capable of controlling an player piano. In fact the closest thing is Airport express, and, AFAIK, is really just a fancy interface to speakers.
In my mind, this is a patent that allows the user to utilize the computer as the a control and mass storage device for existing external home devices. This made sense 10 years ago as mass storage was at a primium, and computer graphics and sound were bad. It would be cheap to offload some processing to external devices. It made sense to assume that all our data would be stored on the computer, and piped to some other device for processing and display, as with a printer.
However, that is not the case. We can play movies directly on our computer, and media players have thier own mass storage. The computer and media player are independent machines with thier own software. Only a common data format relates then. There is in fact no real coupling.
Why is this so important. I mean the TV people have been digging themselves into a hole for many years. At this point broadcast TV survives on low quality and cheap reality shows, and cable providers depend on the demagogues that demand Fox news. The number of people who actually watch TV, other than sports, who are increasingly eating up more of the remaining profits.
I understand that for many the only hope of having a naked person in your bedroom, or any person outside of your immediate family, is the television, but that is no reason to waste time on this issue. It will not go away, and you will continue to loop the latest teen idol as they take off their clothes.
What we are seeing here is a result of televisions main purpose, to deliver viewers to advertisers. With the VCR, and Tivo, and the net, fewer people are watching the ads. This makes TV increasingly irrelevant. To make matters worse, the increase image quality really has nothing to do with bringing viewers to the advertisers, yet cost money. Furthermore, as advertising wanes, DVD sales are becoming more important. The increased picture quality might reduce DVD sales.
But given the general illiteracy and obesity of the American public, there is no better way to reach viewers than TV. Even the net requires to much interaction, and broadcast over the net is not yet practical. So TV cannot go away. So what we are going to see is what we are seeing now. People actively not buying the more expensive sets. People not buying the conversion unit because the useless extra hardware makes it too expensive. And ultimately no conversion happening because there are not enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile.
In the end, the free market may very well save us. In this case the consumer has the ultimate power because without the consumer, the advertisers have no reason to pay for the TV. And how few viewers are going to be worthwhile.
Or we could just chuck the whole TV thing and go read a book, or, if we want to watch sports, go to the local college.
I'm not sure how errors can be prevented, assuming that they're not within control of the application. Does he mean design errors? Can someone explain?
First, errors typically mean that the user did not experience the expected outcome, and is not typically a judgemental statement. My unmderstanding of this is that a human will expect certain things, and will act based on past experience. For instance, on a web page certain colors have come to mean visited links, while others will attract attention. So, to maximize success, one want to follow existing guidelines and use colors so that the most often used content will be highlighted.
For the OS, this means that the user is able to do what he or she expects. For instance, if the OS brings an unrequested(by the user) inactive windows into focus or allowing dialog boxes from background processes to the foregroung will often lead to user error. The OS should therefore typically allow the user to work in the foreground application while attracting the user attention in a non-hostile way.
Other things quickly come to mind. The default box in an exit query should neither be save or discard, but cancel. We figured this out many years ago in vi. Autosave is fine, but it should not save over the actual file. Unlimited undo is a blessing. Having the menus in the same place and in the same order utilizes the human habit of repitition to maximize succes.
Like in any process much of the success of the human factor comes from the way of the design. All to often the designers will blame the user when it is really the incompentent design. A sucessful design makes the next logical step the path of least resistance. For most tasks, it should not require years of training to utilize the interface.
We do not know what the switch will do. The price of a Mac was going to get lower anyway, and is getting lower. Mac will continue to use higher than average hardware, so it will continue to cost higher than average.
The people who buy dirt cheap hardware will continue to do so, and that hardware will continue to run Windows or Linux. Anyone who runs important desktop applications or server stuff on a dirt cheap machine , or without enough technical expertise to make Linux/Mac/Windows 'easier' to use is an idiot.
So, this is the situation. Windows and the Mac has good usability and good interoperability. If the Mac is on Intel, then the interoperability will be better. Mac has some benifits in that it uses existing standards, so one often does not need device drives to use the basic functionility of hardware that meets those standards. Windows is slightly worse in that department, one needs to find the proper driver to match the hardware/os combination, but has the monopoly advantage.
linux is coming in with neither of these advantages. It does not enforce hardware standards, and so people feel they have a worse user experience becuase the hardware is messed up. It does not run the industry standard software. It is trying to crawl under the door on the basis of price, but it can't becuase MS forces vendors to pay them a tribute no matter what OS is shipped.
Far from damaging the Linux people, Apple is showing them the way. Not the way to 30% market share, but perhaps to 5%. Build a quality system. Be proud of it. Don't deal with the customers that want the cheapest thing. There are a good many people who would buy a linux system if they could get the work done. As long as Linux tries to copy MS and only focuses on the Geek or Cooporate deskttop, nothing will happen. People want a machine that works.
And the thing about some american thinking is they never talk about the possibility that the chat rooms are being used by white protestants to plan the nex Oklahoma City, or the next killing of a doctor, or the next Olympic Bombing, or the next school rampage.
One can only assume that if a white christian kills people it is ok, while all arabs are evil.
When google tries to set third party cookie tied to a keyword in you search. You then may have cookie for a site you never visited and one you may never visit
When a site tries to set a cookie before any content is loaded. This used to be standard for those firms trying to get traffic through mistyped URL. Now, unfortunately, even legitimate websites do this more than not.
When a site sets 10 cookies on the home page
Business is about trying to set up a relationship between people offering a product or service and people willing to acquire the product or service. Reputable businesses do not ask to see the customer cash at the door. Even reputable car dealers do not ask it you are going to buy today.
These cookies problems are largely caused by firms forcing users to make decisions about cookies on the home page, and secondarily, forcing users to make decisions about cookies when the user is browsering product. For content sites, it is appropriate to set a limited number of cookies when the user selects an option from the home page. For those selling a product, I do not see an issue with letting a user browse. Set a cookies when the user adds something to the cart.
One of the silliest things that I see is the brick and motor stores denying a user because cookies are not being accepted. This means that I cannot browse their products online, which means I will just travel to another store, a store where I am more sure product exists, rather than wasting time and gas going to a store that obviously does not want my money. Sale lost.
On more thing. If a firm chooses a third party tracking company, choose only one. The best argument against cookies is that many sites contract with two or more tracking companies. The tracking companies have known vulnerabilities. By contracting with multiple companies, the user basically has little choice but to deny cookies.
Just like now. The person in charge finds some people who can write and do thier ciphers, and aks them to read it. Write now the former is known as "Bush" and the later as "Rove".
Ok, how would this be implemented. Right now we have to go to MS update, and download the updates. We have some level of confidence that the updates are in fact MS certified because they are from the site. It is true that there is some probability of URL spoofing or the like, but that seems to be a second level problem
Now we are suggesting that we use a P2P structure to get the updates. I know some people play fast and loose and download apps from randoms places, and get copies of windows, and install in the computer. However, I think most of us would agree that if this were standard practice, if we all downloaded random window updates, the level of malicious software would dramitically increase, unless some foolproof safeguards were added.
Are such safegaurds possible? I mean if we hashed each update, and compared the hash to that on a MS site, would that provide protection. Well, we would have to make sure that the user software reported the proper hash, and that went to the real site. Even if this were prossible, it would not help the user that downloaded an update, then that program installed a trojan and downloaded the real update.
The problem with MS security is that users are lead to all sorts of strange places to fix thier security problems, becuase MS or the hardware vendor does not provide suffecient help. This provides a opening for malicious coders to take advantage of the users. In other words, if the MS site is slow on updates, then MS should provide better response, not expect the community to provide resources to solve the problem.
This would not likely compete with MS Office Pro, as the people who use this software will likely continue to use it. This software is written for the people who do not have 4+ bills to pay for a productivity app, and simply buy the nearly 2 bill student edition, which can be gotten quite easily.
For these customers that just need a simple productivity suite, the one thing holding them back might be the lack of spreadsheet application. With the addition of a spreadsheet, Apple sells a competitive product for half the cost of MS.
Apple has a good combination of premium and value products. The value product tend to be the commodity offerings, like office applications and the like, while the premium products are high tech.
There is enough money around for space tourism to be at least a short term fad, leading to some significant technical developments. It does seem thar bigelow will launch something by the end of the year. It also seems that Virgin air has has several million dollars in sales for it sub orbital flights. The Hilton people have some far fetched plan to build space hotels in the next decade.
What Rutan did was admirable, but it was really less than the soviets did 44 years ago,about equal to what the US did a month later. What is going to be interesting is see who can actually reach a real orbit with real people that could concivable be used to deliver the customers to the product.
The market for people going up and down is small. Basically a 100K or so to buy astronaut wings. Io would do it if I had the money. But I would much rather pay multiples of that to spend a few days in space. If I had then money.
The technology is way beyond that. Specific adresseses can easily be mapped to zip+4, which should be detailed enough to solve the problem. It is not like companies don't already solve this problem. Apple charge the correct amount of sales tax on web and telephone orders. The situation is even simpler if, following the lead in this case, which only concerns the state, the company only collects state tax.
This will cost money to implement, and money to maintain, but if the company has a presence, that should not be a problem. Either the company is in Texas, in which case it has to deal with the rules of Texas, or it is outside and the consumer is responsible.
As far as you last point, that is no differnt from brick and motor. If you buy something in town, you accept the charge of 2% city tax, even though the product ends up at your house. The same thing relates to outside the city, when you save 2%, even if th product ends up at you office.
Again, these problems seemed to have been solved, and the problem is not small changes in geography. In your example the state just wants to collect enough tax revenue to run, and the Interner has screwed up the budget.
My first thought is that it is illigal to set up a firm for the sole purpose of avoiding taxes, even if it is offshore. For instance UPS got busted for setting up a sham transaction to launder it's insurance money.
The Borders deal could easily be construed as a similiar tranaction. The site has the same name and is in the same industry as the brick and morter store. There is nothing to differentiate the parent. Certainly if I tried to create a site called Bordersbook.com, they would sue me. And,as the judges mention, customers can return books to the physical store, makeing it even more clear that this is a tax dodge.
Amazon really does not figure into the matter at this point. Amazaon is merely acting as a fullfillment center, and has not been asked to pay money. However, as they are closely associated with comapanies in the state, the state might argue that the structure is set up only to avoid taxes, with no legitimate bussiness need.
If I buy something from another state and have it shipped to me, I agree that it probably is an undue burden to force the vendor to collect taxes or me to pay after the fact. However, if the vendor operates in the state, adn already has the IT to deal with the taxes, and significantly benifits from the infrastructure in the state, even though i don't neccesarily wish to pay taxes, it might be so much of an undue burden.
One last thing. This ruling will affect big box stores. If they provide superior services, they will survive. However, the more locilized distributors, who usually provides better prices anyway, will not be so effected.
I think what all these people are saying is that college is to get an education. There are other ways to get an education, and, as long you educate yourself, as long as you work hard, and with a little luck you can be as succesful as you want. And let's not forget that most of the people mentioned in these comments are white males.
This is an important messege because all too often people go to high school and college with the sole intent to get a peice of paper. They do not wish to learn. They do not wish to take advantage of the experiences that are very often given to them at little or no expense. Many of these people then expect a job to be given to them on the sole basis that they were able to cheat their way through school. All they have to show for it is a piece of paper, and coping mechanisms that might be useful if you wish to cheat people out their money, say working for a major investment firm, but not for creating wealth.
So, I fully support anyone who tells kids that going to school for a sheet of paper is a waste of time. My father always said as much, and always went to school to learn, never just for documentation. Too much time in college is wasted on the students that do not care about the content. They just want to get out and make a lot of money.
As an aside, I have often thought the greatest thing about the advent of the 'proffesional masters' program is that it allows some people a legitimate method to buy a diploma, thereby benifiting those who wish to learn by subsidizing their education and limiting the contact with those that just want to play.
The comparison with the shuffle is not a fair one. One either wants a solid state players with these features or one doesn't.
But I agree on the size issue. Let's compare with a older solid state player, the nomad II. This was a very good machine that cost twice as much. There has been three or four generations since the nomad II.
The nomad II was 6.5X9.3X2.1 cm. This means the width might is 60% less, but the other dimensions are 30% bigger. This make the device around 30% smaller, overall. The mass is about 15% less.
So, in four generations we have 16 times the memory, which is expected. Should it be smaller. Maybe. The nomad was already a good size, which was mandated by the memory card, battery, and screen, none of which have gotten smaller. And, after all, it is half the price.
Of course, a current generation creative mp3 player has 4 gigs for the same price, and in a smaller case. But the same thing applies. One either wants the Ogg and radio, or one doesn't.
I think this is the most succint comment. Really you can do whatever you want, but if you plan to ask someone to pay you for a job, then you should be as nuetrally dressed as possible. I mean even something like a christian cross, which most would take as a net benifit, might turn into a liability if the employer is Jewish.
What we are talking about here really is identifiing with the dominant culture. Some people have natural attributes that put them at a disadvantage for the most desirable jobs, for instance they are of dark complexion or have breasts. For these people we have laws to discount these natural difference, as long as the conform to the dominant expections in every possible way.
One can argue, I think rightly, that the jobs should be given to people with the best skills, and the economy suffers from the ineffeciencies caused by the 'old boys club', but reality is upon us. OTOH, the defense is of that the white male with no tattos or piercings and other applicants were pretty much equal, and the choice was made based on proffesional appearance. One can either fight for justice, or get a job. Many choose the large paycheck, and ditch or hide thier peer group identifiers.
I know it is not perfect, but no activex, and it is very easy to make whatever browser you want the default. Maybe pay for opera? Not to mention set permissions so she can never install anything, and still have everything else run.
The fact is that if anything is dead, it is CISC, and it's remnants result in massive ineffeciencies. The current chip designs, IRRC, are a hybrid. Intel was going down a bad road. Huge clock rates to compensate for the ineffeciency of the prememptive cache. The huge clocks rates then needed more preemptive cache to fill it. These requires larger circuits, that generated heat, the needed fan to cool the box, that need HVAC to cool the rooms, that wasted 10X more power than was used in the processing.
RISC solved many of these ineffeciencies, and were integrated. But like anything, it was not the silver bullet. So, as technolgy and nature does, it merged and created a more resiliant hybrid, which is where we are. If the PC manufacturers were as brutal as Apple, and left thier legacy mistakes behind, the Intel would be much more RISC.
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A head of household,due to the high rate of deceptive content, really has no choice but to block ads. I believe that schools has an equal responsibility because most kids are not going to have the sophistication to understand they are being lied to. I believe a case be made for firms of all sizes blocking ads, as the employee should be using the internet for work, and ads will just waste employee and companies resources, not to mention putting the employees at risk.
So home, work, and school are blocked. What is left?
On TV and radio we started with paid product placements, then we were at paid ads, and now we are moving back to paid placement. On the internet we started with the lowest level of advertisement, basically direct sales, just above bartering. We then moved to a model that largely revolves around deceptive advertising. What we have no seen a lot of is the brand building advertising that traditionally has provided long term stability.
In any case, there are few places in the world with more sunlight, and more useless land, than north texas and colorado. It is good to know that texas once again is the best hope for energy in the future.
Sometime we take this way too seriously.
On the other stuff, i guess it depends where you live. Most of the stuff I see is bought cheap through some good retail sale or the like, and then sold at small profit. If you made the sale, you would get a better deal.
OTOH, I see basically the same thing on Yahoo, Google, and Amazon. I find the sites useful if i am looking for discontinued equipment, or hard to find books, but anything else can be gotten cheaper, at least in the U.S. cities.
To extend your metaphor, I don't generally have to go to stores that do stupid things. I don't have to go to Best Buy, Circuit City, or Wal*Mart so I don't get harrased with their stupidity. As long as most stores do something, one is still free to go to the stores that don't.
I know this is not your point, but opera did make a choice that, in the end, aggrevates the problem of IE only sites. They did it in an effort to make money, and now it has bitten them on the ass.
In this situation, if MS wants to maximize the user experience on Windows, they should support such software on every platform. Furthermore, a MS based virus solution has some benifits. For instance a firm might have mixed infrastructure, and a MS solution might allow some effeciencies in licensing and distribution. Certainly such a firm would want to filter incoming traffic on a machine less suseptible to the malicious payload.
This is yet another example of hwo MS, at some basic level, does not understand the needs of the customer. MS is going to be in trouble because, unlike IBM or Sun, or even Apple and Dell, it does not put together total solutions. All it does is negotiate to maximize liscensing fees. After the deal is set, there is no assurance that they will continue to protect a firms investment.
I mean the unfairness of the world, especially against the white men and even women, is just astounding.
I agree. Buying stuff is better. Just try to buy indie.
If we take batman as an archtype, then out of perhaps 1,000,000 people in his circumstance, parents dead, police unable to do nother, perhaps 50,000 will have the personal resources to do something about it. Out fo those 50,000, perhaps 49,000 will continue with thier life of either making money or spending the money that is now thiers due to the demise of their parents. Another 900 probably offed thier parent for the inheritence.
So of the 100 that are left, 10 are of the right age to become a badass villian hunter. Five of those turn to the profitable likfe of evil rather than the hopeless life of a hero. Four die trying. One surives.
It seems like every service such as this goes through the problems, and they have found a way to solve it. What is interesting about a newpaper is that they should be a forum for free speech, including unconfortable speech, and it is only the fact that we do not have free speech that the problem emerges.
And I realize that the kids really push free speech to absurd levels, but it if the fear that makes us powerless.
In my mind, this is a patent that allows the user to utilize the computer as the a control and mass storage device for existing external home devices. This made sense 10 years ago as mass storage was at a primium, and computer graphics and sound were bad. It would be cheap to offload some processing to external devices. It made sense to assume that all our data would be stored on the computer, and piped to some other device for processing and display, as with a printer.
However, that is not the case. We can play movies directly on our computer, and media players have thier own mass storage. The computer and media player are independent machines with thier own software. Only a common data format relates then. There is in fact no real coupling.
I understand that for many the only hope of having a naked person in your bedroom, or any person outside of your immediate family, is the television, but that is no reason to waste time on this issue. It will not go away, and you will continue to loop the latest teen idol as they take off their clothes.
What we are seeing here is a result of televisions main purpose, to deliver viewers to advertisers. With the VCR, and Tivo, and the net, fewer people are watching the ads. This makes TV increasingly irrelevant. To make matters worse, the increase image quality really has nothing to do with bringing viewers to the advertisers, yet cost money. Furthermore, as advertising wanes, DVD sales are becoming more important. The increased picture quality might reduce DVD sales.
But given the general illiteracy and obesity of the American public, there is no better way to reach viewers than TV. Even the net requires to much interaction, and broadcast over the net is not yet practical. So TV cannot go away. So what we are going to see is what we are seeing now. People actively not buying the more expensive sets. People not buying the conversion unit because the useless extra hardware makes it too expensive. And ultimately no conversion happening because there are not enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile.
In the end, the free market may very well save us. In this case the consumer has the ultimate power because without the consumer, the advertisers have no reason to pay for the TV. And how few viewers are going to be worthwhile.
Or we could just chuck the whole TV thing and go read a book, or, if we want to watch sports, go to the local college.
First, errors typically mean that the user did not experience the expected outcome, and is not typically a judgemental statement. My unmderstanding of this is that a human will expect certain things, and will act based on past experience. For instance, on a web page certain colors have come to mean visited links, while others will attract attention. So, to maximize success, one want to follow existing guidelines and use colors so that the most often used content will be highlighted.
For the OS, this means that the user is able to do what he or she expects. For instance, if the OS brings an unrequested(by the user) inactive windows into focus or allowing dialog boxes from background processes to the foregroung will often lead to user error. The OS should therefore typically allow the user to work in the foreground application while attracting the user attention in a non-hostile way.
Other things quickly come to mind. The default box in an exit query should neither be save or discard, but cancel. We figured this out many years ago in vi. Autosave is fine, but it should not save over the actual file. Unlimited undo is a blessing. Having the menus in the same place and in the same order utilizes the human habit of repitition to maximize succes.
Like in any process much of the success of the human factor comes from the way of the design. All to often the designers will blame the user when it is really the incompentent design. A sucessful design makes the next logical step the path of least resistance. For most tasks, it should not require years of training to utilize the interface.
The people who buy dirt cheap hardware will continue to do so, and that hardware will continue to run Windows or Linux. Anyone who runs important desktop applications or server stuff on a dirt cheap machine , or without enough technical expertise to make Linux/Mac/Windows 'easier' to use is an idiot.
So, this is the situation. Windows and the Mac has good usability and good interoperability. If the Mac is on Intel, then the interoperability will be better. Mac has some benifits in that it uses existing standards, so one often does not need device drives to use the basic functionility of hardware that meets those standards. Windows is slightly worse in that department, one needs to find the proper driver to match the hardware/os combination, but has the monopoly advantage.
linux is coming in with neither of these advantages. It does not enforce hardware standards, and so people feel they have a worse user experience becuase the hardware is messed up. It does not run the industry standard software. It is trying to crawl under the door on the basis of price, but it can't becuase MS forces vendors to pay them a tribute no matter what OS is shipped.
Far from damaging the Linux people, Apple is showing them the way. Not the way to 30% market share, but perhaps to 5%. Build a quality system. Be proud of it. Don't deal with the customers that want the cheapest thing. There are a good many people who would buy a linux system if they could get the work done. As long as Linux tries to copy MS and only focuses on the Geek or Cooporate deskttop, nothing will happen. People want a machine that works.
One can only assume that if a white christian kills people it is ok, while all arabs are evil.
- When google tries to set third party cookie tied to a keyword in you search. You then may have cookie for a site you never visited and one you may never visit
- When a site tries to set a cookie before any content is loaded. This used to be standard for those firms trying to get traffic through mistyped URL. Now, unfortunately, even legitimate websites do this more than not.
- When a site sets 10 cookies on the home page
Business is about trying to set up a relationship between people offering a product or service and people willing to acquire the product or service. Reputable businesses do not ask to see the customer cash at the door. Even reputable car dealers do not ask it you are going to buy today.These cookies problems are largely caused by firms forcing users to make decisions about cookies on the home page, and secondarily, forcing users to make decisions about cookies when the user is browsering product. For content sites, it is appropriate to set a limited number of cookies when the user selects an option from the home page. For those selling a product, I do not see an issue with letting a user browse. Set a cookies when the user adds something to the cart.
One of the silliest things that I see is the brick and motor stores denying a user because cookies are not being accepted. This means that I cannot browse their products online, which means I will just travel to another store, a store where I am more sure product exists, rather than wasting time and gas going to a store that obviously does not want my money. Sale lost.
On more thing. If a firm chooses a third party tracking company, choose only one. The best argument against cookies is that many sites contract with two or more tracking companies. The tracking companies have known vulnerabilities. By contracting with multiple companies, the user basically has little choice but to deny cookies.
Just like now. The person in charge finds some people who can write and do thier ciphers, and aks them to read it. Write now the former is known as "Bush" and the later as "Rove".
Now we are suggesting that we use a P2P structure to get the updates. I know some people play fast and loose and download apps from randoms places, and get copies of windows, and install in the computer. However, I think most of us would agree that if this were standard practice, if we all downloaded random window updates, the level of malicious software would dramitically increase, unless some foolproof safeguards were added.
Are such safegaurds possible? I mean if we hashed each update, and compared the hash to that on a MS site, would that provide protection. Well, we would have to make sure that the user software reported the proper hash, and that went to the real site. Even if this were prossible, it would not help the user that downloaded an update, then that program installed a trojan and downloaded the real update.
The problem with MS security is that users are lead to all sorts of strange places to fix thier security problems, becuase MS or the hardware vendor does not provide suffecient help. This provides a opening for malicious coders to take advantage of the users. In other words, if the MS site is slow on updates, then MS should provide better response, not expect the community to provide resources to solve the problem.
For these customers that just need a simple productivity suite, the one thing holding them back might be the lack of spreadsheet application. With the addition of a spreadsheet, Apple sells a competitive product for half the cost of MS.
Apple has a good combination of premium and value products. The value product tend to be the commodity offerings, like office applications and the like, while the premium products are high tech.
What Rutan did was admirable, but it was really less than the soviets did 44 years ago,about equal to what the US did a month later. What is going to be interesting is see who can actually reach a real orbit with real people that could concivable be used to deliver the customers to the product.
The market for people going up and down is small. Basically a 100K or so to buy astronaut wings. Io would do it if I had the money. But I would much rather pay multiples of that to spend a few days in space. If I had then money.
This will cost money to implement, and money to maintain, but if the company has a presence, that should not be a problem. Either the company is in Texas, in which case it has to deal with the rules of Texas, or it is outside and the consumer is responsible.
As far as you last point, that is no differnt from brick and motor. If you buy something in town, you accept the charge of 2% city tax, even though the product ends up at your house. The same thing relates to outside the city, when you save 2%, even if th product ends up at you office.
Again, these problems seemed to have been solved, and the problem is not small changes in geography. In your example the state just wants to collect enough tax revenue to run, and the Interner has screwed up the budget.
The Borders deal could easily be construed as a similiar tranaction. The site has the same name and is in the same industry as the brick and morter store. There is nothing to differentiate the parent. Certainly if I tried to create a site called Bordersbook.com, they would sue me. And,as the judges mention, customers can return books to the physical store, makeing it even more clear that this is a tax dodge.
Amazon really does not figure into the matter at this point. Amazaon is merely acting as a fullfillment center, and has not been asked to pay money. However, as they are closely associated with comapanies in the state, the state might argue that the structure is set up only to avoid taxes, with no legitimate bussiness need.
If I buy something from another state and have it shipped to me, I agree that it probably is an undue burden to force the vendor to collect taxes or me to pay after the fact. However, if the vendor operates in the state, adn already has the IT to deal with the taxes, and significantly benifits from the infrastructure in the state, even though i don't neccesarily wish to pay taxes, it might be so much of an undue burden.
One last thing. This ruling will affect big box stores. If they provide superior services, they will survive. However, the more locilized distributors, who usually provides better prices anyway, will not be so effected.
This is an important messege because all too often people go to high school and college with the sole intent to get a peice of paper. They do not wish to learn. They do not wish to take advantage of the experiences that are very often given to them at little or no expense. Many of these people then expect a job to be given to them on the sole basis that they were able to cheat their way through school. All they have to show for it is a piece of paper, and coping mechanisms that might be useful if you wish to cheat people out their money, say working for a major investment firm, but not for creating wealth.
So, I fully support anyone who tells kids that going to school for a sheet of paper is a waste of time. My father always said as much, and always went to school to learn, never just for documentation. Too much time in college is wasted on the students that do not care about the content. They just want to get out and make a lot of money.
As an aside, I have often thought the greatest thing about the advent of the 'proffesional masters' program is that it allows some people a legitimate method to buy a diploma, thereby benifiting those who wish to learn by subsidizing their education and limiting the contact with those that just want to play.
But I agree on the size issue. Let's compare with a older solid state player, the nomad II. This was a very good machine that cost twice as much. There has been three or four generations since the nomad II.
The nomad II was 6.5X9.3X2.1 cm. This means the width might is 60% less, but the other dimensions are 30% bigger. This make the device around 30% smaller, overall. The mass is about 15% less.
So, in four generations we have 16 times the memory, which is expected. Should it be smaller. Maybe. The nomad was already a good size, which was mandated by the memory card, battery, and screen, none of which have gotten smaller. And, after all, it is half the price.
Of course, a current generation creative mp3 player has 4 gigs for the same price, and in a smaller case. But the same thing applies. One either wants the Ogg and radio, or one doesn't.
What we are talking about here really is identifiing with the dominant culture. Some people have natural attributes that put them at a disadvantage for the most desirable jobs, for instance they are of dark complexion or have breasts. For these people we have laws to discount these natural difference, as long as the conform to the dominant expections in every possible way.
One can argue, I think rightly, that the jobs should be given to people with the best skills, and the economy suffers from the ineffeciencies caused by the 'old boys club', but reality is upon us. OTOH, the defense is of that the white male with no tattos or piercings and other applicants were pretty much equal, and the choice was made based on proffesional appearance. One can either fight for justice, or get a job. Many choose the large paycheck, and ditch or hide thier peer group identifiers.
I know it is not perfect, but no activex, and it is very easy to make whatever browser you want the default. Maybe pay for opera? Not to mention set permissions so she can never install anything, and still have everything else run.
RISC solved many of these ineffeciencies, and were integrated. But like anything, it was not the silver bullet. So, as technolgy and nature does, it merged and created a more resiliant hybrid, which is where we are. If the PC manufacturers were as brutal as Apple, and left thier legacy mistakes behind, the Intel would be much more RISC.