That's seems like a good idea. Build a second area for the computer. I have seen this done it auto repair shops where they want a computer out in the garage, but want it protected. This is also done in warehouses. A second roof to protect it from water and a seperate air filter could not hurt either.
What I might do is find an old portable with a dock connector. Put an old CRT in a plastic enclosure, connect it to the dock, in a seperate accesible enclosure, and connect the dock to an exposed keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse are cheap to replace so can be used with little concern. The computer can be connected and disconnected as neccesary, but will be protected in it's own enclosure. This way it is no big deal to bring it in during a bad storm or the summer absence.
I am a reasonable well off white person is not really concerned about the things that the bleeding heart liberals complain about. Even though I have worked in manufacturing, i was mostly in a clean office while the poor white and minorities were the ones exposed to the chemicals, albeit in small doses that were likely not harmful, even after many years. I never had to live next to the factories that dumped the chemicals into my drinking water, even though the levels were probably dilute enough not to matter. If I worked with dangerous chemicals, i did so in a lab environment where there were no production issues forcing me to cut corners that might risk my health. I used chemical in personal quantities, and was seldom if ever exposed to the industrial quantities that many poor white and minorities are exposed to.
As such it makes little sense for me to suffer the mild aggravation of having to use lead free solder, or acetone instead of trichloroethylene, or perhaps, god forbid, drive a car that get better than 20 miles to the gallon. After all I have air conditioning so I do not have to breathe the air. I have water filtration so I do not have to drink straight tap water. My kids have clean play grounds to they do not get exposed to the toxic sludge in that the poor kids play in.
In fact there is no reason why i should not just starting getting into the American spirit and get an obedient wife, some servants, and watch my property cut down the sugar cane. Why we ever gave poor and colored people any power at all is a mystery to me. Fortunately our president and congress will fix that mistake.
Well, no one is answering the question, so i guess i won't either.
I have used quicken, and quickbooks, and the like. They are good to keep up with moderately complex finances. For a year or two, I actualy bought tax programs and paid for submission. Rebates made it cost very little. This is what I found.
The last time I could file a 1040ez, I did it by phone.
More recnetly, when my taxes got real complex, I had an accountant do it. Not a chain like HR Block. I established a relationship with a reputable accountant.
Currently my taxes are not simple, but only require a few sheets of paper. I don't itemize. I just fill out the forms. I am a geek, so numbers don't scare me.
If my taxes did get more complex, like marriage or a house, i would really be tempted to establish a relationship with an accountant to handle those things. It is nothing I could not do, but the proffesionals have easier access to the forms and infomation. The apps will cost you $50, and your time. The accountant might only be a couple hundred.
This is an interesting aspect of the PC. Everything is in the box, and if something breaks, then the box must be compromised to fix it. So, if the DVD player breaks, unless you have the ability to swap it out, the whole computer must be sent in.
This is different from the component technology in which you have a tv, a reciever, an amp, a VCR, a DVD, and a cable tuner, for example. If one thing breaks simply unplug a couple cables, replace, and we are back in bussiness. A no new drivers to install.
There are clearly some companies that take the component philosophy seriously. Where things can be hot swapped in a bay or connected with a firewire of USB cable. The computer and peripherals have enough intelligence to communicate without custom drivers. It is not so popular beceause one must pay for the technology, but as computers become 'hubs' and not 'boxes', and consumers expect to do more things more easily, it will be important.
As has been true, for quality systems components are better for the consumer.
Shouldn't the BSA be writing an amicus brief complaining that CD have taken jobs from hard working Americans and demanding that the CD manufacturers pay a royalty to keep the buggy whip, i mean record, i mean reel-to-reel manufacturers afloat?
The issue is not so much that they know where the next bug will be, because they likely so not, at least in any specific sense, but they have control of the API. They can change it to suite their current needs. They can also use non-standard API, something that would be a significant risk to any other developer.
This has always been the advantage of the OS developer. MS has used to great effect from the days of the original DOS. Apple is using it know to secure the iPod position. Anything their either does not like can be easily broken. No one else can get to the underlying data structures without risking future incompatibilities.
It seems that retailer generally don't like consumers to have a choice. Walmart undercuts competition until they go out of business. Krogers has loyalty cards, which they can mine and sell the aggregate data. Bookstores do the same thing. Even smaller player, like medical dispensing, has loyalty programs. Competition commercial interest profits. They want it gone, and it is the reason why government must insure that adequate competition exists.
So why then would any retailer want a system that makes it easier to get to a competitors site. Why would a retailer want competitors to know how customers spend money at the retailer store.
The problem with Passport was it was a huge cognitive dissonance on the part of MS. It was not the first, and will not be the last. Commercial interests are not in the internet because it provides the means to perfect competition. They are there so as not to lose sales. Their nightmare is someone using Yahoo and having the freedom to buy from the cheapest place because everyone is a "trusted retailer" with data stored in Passport. Their hope for is that the consumer will pay the extra buck because it is not worth the effort to set up a new account at the other retailer.
Online retailers go through great effort to register customers, collect data, and make repeat sales as painless as possible. In the process they make the first sale hard. But look at someone like Amazon. Are they more interested in someone who makes one purchase a year, or the customer who will make a purchase a week because of oneclick? Are the grocery stores making more money on sales of goods or sales of consumer patterns? Do either want to give up the lucrative sideline to MS.
It says something about a company and people. It is one thing to put an obligatory banner ad, it is another to make aid your primary focus, even at the expense of normal revenue.
MS has nothing to lose short term, and seems to be keeping a handle on the long term as well.
MS has conned web developers large and small, not to mention web users, that IE is the web. It practically gives away front page and other tools so that web sites can be developed cheaply, either by the site owner or by cheap labor.
I am running into an increasing number of site that require IE to function. Not because of rendering or ActiveX, but because some small detail in the code is unique to IE.
As we have said, most users do not see the web, they see IE. What is increasingly happening is the most developers do not see the HTML, the see the MS tools. When you talk to them about the HTML, they look blankly and saythey just say that they develop for IE and the user is responsible for downloading it. What I have said is that IE is a applicaiton front end, and the developers are creating applications, not web pages. As long as we think of everything as a web page, MS is going to dominate the market.
The issue is not the broswer. Firefox is good. Netscape was never bad. And don't give the me the bullshit, I watched all the drama. I was running. The only major browser i have not run in Lynx. I even had my copy of Cyberdog. But firefox is simply a gimick to win the now irrelevent broswer wars.
What the open source community has missed, and what has not been commoditized, is the web page editor. Many of us on/. can code HTML in our sleep. We can write engines to code HTML. We can visualize what the markups will do. However, the people who make websites don't have the resources to code. They want to plug objects into the page and have stuff like search boxes, boiler plates, and images automagically work. MS has given them this power. Open source, to the best of my knowledge, has not. And until that happens, the pages will be written for IE only.
The write indicated that the pilot program would be free, but would incurr a daily fee with the full roll out.
The thing is that Texas has gobs of money. There was a time when it used the money to fund all sorts of free and cheap cultural opportunities. The quality may not be up to standards set by the pompous elite, but then these opportunities were not for the elite, they were for the average joe.
But now we feel more divided, and less willing to give up resources to benifit everyone. The state parks significant amounts of money for entrace and camping. This WiFi service is a wonderful way for the family to experience the stars, the birds, the other animals, the lakes, the trees, in a contemporary relevent fashion. A kid is not neccesarily going to trudge through a book when he or she can search the web.
So, i hope that this does not just become another way to fill the Texas treasury and enrich more corrupt bussinessmen. We can afford to put WiFi in the parks and be an example to the nation. I mean oil is at $40 for gods sake.
The other issue is trust. When allowing a consumer to check themselves out, there has to be some level of trust, or, alternatively, a significant tolerance for shrinkage. Wal*Mart has niether.
This completely eliminates the advantage for the consumer, which is fast checkout without the hassles of going through a poorly trained human. At Kroger's, for instance, it is perfectly possible to get out of the store without any significant interventions. The few times I have ben to Wal*mart, I have never been able to get out without hassle. Not only do you have the normal thug at the door, but the atttendent seems much more willing to assume malice on the part of the consumer.
I assume that this assumption that most of the customers are thieves derives from the fact that Wal*Mart executives are theives. This would also likely mean that the executive presume tha the suppliers are thieves, which is why every item has to be tagged. The only thins that can be trusted are computers.
This is such a troll. A car is about energy management and energy tradeoffs. A hybrid is designed to use minimal fuel, with the compromise of acceleration, which is around 0-60 mph in 11.5 seconds. Something like an Accord has much lower gas milage, and about the same size, so it can accelerate to 60 mph in around 7.5 seconds. An Escape, which is bigger but still respects fuel economy, accelerates to 60 mph in around 9.0 seconds. A Miata which is designed to be quick and small, needs 6.5 seconds. OTOH, a Hummer, which does not respect size, fuel economy, or other people lives, needs 21 seconds to accelerate to 60 mph, although they have recently gotten down to below 15 seconds.
And yet we do not hear people complaining about Hummers wasting all our time at stop lights. This is because people buy Hummers to show they can. Just like people who buy hybrids do so not to go fast, but to conserve the US stratigic supply of fuel for those Americans who are dying and might need it Iraq rather than thier selfish need to look flash.
I just wish i had mod points. This seems to classic sour grapes from a competitor. This is the only thing that would explain the anonymous coward posts. Is this Roland guy so entrenched in media that we are afraid of him?
Anyway, cribbing articles into a collection is an age old tradition. There are very few original articles, and people seldom use 'orignal sources' Often the analysis provided by secondary soruces is useful. Ignorance and heeding to complaints is also an age old tradition. I am not familiar with this roland guy, and obviously the poster is embarrassed enough so as to hide, and I am neither defending or attacking either. It is just that we are talking about private companies. If there is a connection between Roland and Slashdot, go out and find it post the expose. All you have now is that the Slashdot editors favor a particular news repackager. As you say, many of the articles generate much discussion, and some don't, which is normal. Of the few posts I have had accepted, some have generated discussion and others have not. The/. editors decisions may negatively affect your profits, as they certainly do many others, but you have not shown any unethical behavior.
So, i suggest that you go out an prove that unethical behavior is happening. First, I suggest that you hire a private dick to servile the persons in question. See if you can discover any connections. Perhaps they are school buddies or in-laws? Perhaps they are lovers? Who knows.
Second, scan all/, user accounts. Find out how many competing stories were submitted. Were the competitors submitted after or before. Were the write-ups of lesser or greater quality. It could be that roland provides professional write-ups, free of the dreaded grammar and spelling errors. This analysis in itself could provide a simple sanity check, which is why you are unlikely to complete it.
Third, post as a real user. At this point you are just some crack head who does not know how to positively contribute to the greater social good.
This is kind of my feeling. I think I have recieved two letters saying I am qualified for two different settlements from Apple. I never bothered with either. It was not enough money to matter.
My impression was that both suits were worthy, and I am glad they were litigated. I would hope that all settlement include a minimum amount of money that must be settled, and any extra would go to some appropriate charity or agency, perhaps digital cameras for soldiers or development of rural infrastruture. Something that requires cash, and not just movement of dead stock. After all the executives and lawyers are seldom paid in little plastic disks.
That was my thought. My questions for you is how much service are you willing to provide? How much time are you willing to spend helping your neighbors get setup and remain connected. How much liability are you willing to assume when thier networks get infected, or when they have thier identity stolen?
Certainly if you want to be an ISP, then you need to have a lawyer. You also need to figure out if your customers will pay enough to cover the lawyer, the DSL fees, and your time. So what might it be, 10 costumers paying $25 a month?
In rural areas they have an issue with utilities. They use collectives. A group decides that a service is needed, but no one is willing or able to cover all normal overhead expenses. So they chip in to get the service, and everyone helps wil the maintainance. In your case each person chips in some money every month to cover the bills, each person is on a rotating schedule to maintain the system, and no one person is screwed. Of course, any profit you might expect to make will evaporate, except the intangible like being the only one hardwired to a 6 MBS line, while everyone else can be throttled for 'fairness'.
The slide show is an interesting way to force viewing of ads, and the new cookie set every other screen is a good profit generator, but why are there no controls to go back and forth? To insure a minimum view time for ads? Or were there control but the UI so bad that I could not find them.
I am not anti-advertising. Just interested in the compromises that are made to sell product.
having just spent hours reinstalling MS Windows, drivers, included programs, updates(4 different installs, four different restarts) and reconfiguring mail and browser, let me tell you something. People are making butloads of money off these idiots, and the people who are raking in the profits are the criminals, not the lusers.
The ISP should supply every DSL or Cable subscriber with a NAT firewill. This should be preconfigured by the ISP. There should be no options. If the luser wants a control over the firewall, that costs more. People will bitch. Screw them. An ISP should not by default allow direct connections. Perhaps the ISPs need to be sued back to the dark ages until thye stop this dangerous pratice
And no one tell me that they never had any significant problems with IE. I grew up in a pretty dangerous neighborhood and only got attacked once or twice, and our house was only broken into once. Does that mean the neighborhood did not have systemic problems. No. It just meant that I knew who to avoid the problems.
The lusers are getting computers for Christmas, and many of them will get MS crap because it is cheap. We can compliain that they are not able to go through the 100 step process to secure thier machines, or will we hold the proffesional accountable.
Re:Enough with the silly.
on
Ho, Ho, Ho
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· Score: 1
The thing to remember is that adults are fiendishly clever. Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes accidentally.
The argument presented has one big fallacy. Most kids don't do cause and effect. Even precious few teenagers and adults do cause and effect. I mean when was the last time you heard a teenage boy say 'she won't have sex with me because it was not the right place and we were not old enough and it was a time of the month when she probably would get pregnant.' Yeah, maybe you hear that once or twice, but it is mostly 'she doesn't love me'. Even adults get into that 'you would buy the expensive toy if you loved me' deal.
Some people call the 'you don't love me' argument magical thinking, and it tends to be the child's primary thought process. If some desire of the child is or is not met, it is not because of a complex series of factors, but simply how the world feels about the child. The child wants a pony. The child does not get the pony. This is probably because the family does not have the resources to acquire and maintain a pony. The child cannot understand this, so thinks that he or she did something wrong, or that the parents do not care. Realistically there is no way to counter this process, so Santa is used as a proxy. The child was not good enough for a pony, and Santa is the ultimate and fairest arbiter.
As far as the confusion et al, it is caused by growing up, not by any stories we tell. As long as we are reasonable consistent in answering questions, creating rules, and applying consequences, most everything else is ok. The child is naturally confused, and the confusion is what drives learning. The child learns that it is separate from mother. The child learns that there are consequences for specific actions. The child learns that not every desire can be met. All these are extremely painful lessons. When a child is upset about the 'lie' of Santa, it is probably because a fundamental assumption of life, that all needs can be met if the child is just 'good enough', has fallen. No one told the child this assumption was true, and no one could tell the child that it isn't.
You kid sib will learn that Santa is fake, and it will make him very sad. When he does, you will know he is growing up, and maybe be sad because it is happening too fast. You will learn that life expects so much from you, maybe more than you can give, and your parents will be sad because they were not able to protect you from it forever.
It is really quite simple
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· Score: 2, Funny
It is really simple folks. Santa advances with the times and can well handle the increased number of children. He does this by actively refocusing his core competencies, and insuring that customer service does not suffer, especially to his best customers.
The elves spend most of the year compiling data on all children. School records, criminal records, first hand surveillance and the like. It was becoming increasingly clear that no one was being good, and Santa was losing his primary asset, that of the ultimate arbiter of good behavior. To solve this, he restructured his parameters and created a system in which every child would be assigned a normalized value. This allows him to simply, a fairly, decide who is naughty and nice. The closer the normalized value is to one, the more nice.
Next Santa throws all children more than two standard deviations out into the naughty pile. This may sound harsh, but if you are nice enough to get above a 0.95, you probably just playing the system, and Santa does not like players. Either group is without merits.
Next Santa takes those in the center, that is one SD out, and subcontract to Wal*mart or Amazon. Since these are just average kids, they can live with average presents.
Finally there are the kids between one and two standard deviations. These are the ones that merit personal, or almost personal, reward or scolding from Santa. The good kids gets a personal visit and a personal gift from Santa. The naughty kids get a Santa branded piece of coal delivered by the special class of santa-like elves.
This system keeps the number of trips that Santa much make to aroud a few hundred million, assuming only about half the world celebrates christmas. This is the most that he can make, which is around five deliveries every millisecond. The implication of this system is that every child must be on their guard to be exactly good enough every year. Any mistake could bump you into the larger class of no Santa visit. This is going to be more important as the world population grows, even if the Christmas celebrating population declines. Certain cost cutting measure have already been instituted, the most significant was in the 1999 season when Santa stopped visiting those that were in the first SD of being 'good'. As the world economy falters, Santa may no longer be able to afford a full night of support, or the gear that allows him to visit all the houses. Any season now, cost cutting and unfair taxes on corporations might force him to visit only those areas in that are friendly to the independent spirit.
when you can't even read the instructions. I assume this is latin, and I just discovered that google does not have a latin translators, the bastards.
"Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est"
It seem to say something about write down the stuff you make up to the best of ability yours, but I will leave the real translation to those who are smart and well educated.
All I can say is that the test seems to over useless stuff. Give me a quiz over Star Trek or South Park or ATHF or TNMT. That would be time well spent and prove my superiority.
My current needs for MS windows is very minimal. I need an internet connection and maybe a print driver. I do not need fancy graphics support, as most everything I do windows is little more than drawing letters on the screen in the generally proper palce, with some simple graphics. The most complex thing might be LaTex. Perhpas a PDF printer would be nice.
The fact that NT could not print to every device, or accept a special expansion, or run games, was never an issue in all the years I used NT.
Used to be that you would put all the blocks on the floor, and then start brainstorming ideas about what to build. The ideas often weren't complex or particularly excited, but the process developed several forms thinking and creativity. I attribute sets like this for the fact that I am not scared of blank sheet of paper.
But kids are used to more structure now. It goes beyond the need of the five year old to repeatedly view the sam set of images. It is like why should I take the time to create a new world when the pros like Lucas have already done it for me. It even extends to those that considers themselves pro. It used to be that you got your start writing fan fiction. Now many writers never get beyond it.
The average person owns few, if any, books. In the US one can often expect the home to have a bible, and perhaps a couple other books, but most people have read very little. They read what they were forced to read in school, the sports section, and perhaps a few magazines written at the 5th grade level. And lest people get pissed about me dissing the sport section, let me state here that we owe a lot to sport section, as it is often written at above a 5th grade level and is likely responsible for the minimum level of literacy of the common man.
Now, most educated people will point to the number of books they have read and own. They will expect others to stand in awe at their collection of books and the factoids they can pull up from their vast reading. They are intelligent because intelligent people read books. And there may be some truth in this. There is certainly a relationship between the number of books a child has read and some measures of intelligence.
But then we start discussing certain types of book and the intelligentsia consesus on books starts to fall apart. Oh, I would never read those kind of books. Those books are only for the fanatic, or only for those who read books for the vilest of pleasure. Or those books contain nothing but dry facts, and are not suitable for those us who read to learn about truth and beauty. At some point, it seems, people who fancy themselves intelligent have to defend thier chosen status by denigrating the activities in which they do not wish to take part. After all, intelligent people treasure a wide variety of experiences, and know they should take part in any experience that will make us more intelligent. Therefore, if we choose not to take part in an experience, it must be because that experience has no intellectual basis. To wit, math books are of no interest to the average person, and therefore the fact that I could never even begin to comprehend one has nothing to do with my status as a smart person.
And so it is that the act of getting children to read is doomed to failure because everyone is more concerned about making sure their preferred reading material is considered the best and only path to intellectual bliss, while all others are deemed as junk or porn or pulp.
Or, to put more bluntly, if I hear one more person tell my kids that math is hard and no one really understands it, I will likely go on a mad rage.
Although it is true that reading the press forms a basis for all espionage, corporation have much more sophisticated techniques for discovering industrial secrets. One of the more interesting stories in recent times, one that details the social and technical methods, is that of the development of yeast embedded pizza crust by kraft. This was a big deal as it would(has) revolutionized the frozen pizza market and would give a huge advantage to anyone who could figure out a way to make it work.
What Apple is more likely concerned with is the effect that early product rumors has on sales of current stock. Apple is not a company that likes to give discounts or rebates, and seems to minimize the need for this by carefully controlling stock and release of new products. While rumors can be good for market capitalization, credible rumors are bad for profits.
People want to be able to be entertained without a lot of fuss. VHS you just put in and it worked. CDs had the advantage of not having to turn the record over or pay for some fancy autoreverse tape palyer. Moving entertainment between formats used be reletively easy.
Today people expect to use thier computers to be entertained. On the Apple, with iTunes and DVD Player, this is a simple matter. If something doesn't work, just return it.
The question is how much complications with the consumer accept. I now takes much more interaction to watch a DVD than it did to watch a VHS. You can't fast foward over the initial junk. There are incompatibilities that makes in hard for the consumer to make the several buying decisions that must be made, on a daily basis, if the economy is to improve.
How much of the current problems are caused by marketers who have lost thier sense of simplicity. How much of the sales lost during the current holiday season are caused by marketers who force consumers to think twice before buying that $20 item. There is simply no time to think twice.
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What I might do is find an old portable with a dock connector. Put an old CRT in a plastic enclosure, connect it to the dock, in a seperate accesible enclosure, and connect the dock to an exposed keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse are cheap to replace so can be used with little concern. The computer can be connected and disconnected as neccesary, but will be protected in it's own enclosure. This way it is no big deal to bring it in during a bad storm or the summer absence.
As such it makes little sense for me to suffer the mild aggravation of having to use lead free solder, or acetone instead of trichloroethylene, or perhaps, god forbid, drive a car that get better than 20 miles to the gallon. After all I have air conditioning so I do not have to breathe the air. I have water filtration so I do not have to drink straight tap water. My kids have clean play grounds to they do not get exposed to the toxic sludge in that the poor kids play in.
In fact there is no reason why i should not just starting getting into the American spirit and get an obedient wife, some servants, and watch my property cut down the sugar cane. Why we ever gave poor and colored people any power at all is a mystery to me. Fortunately our president and congress will fix that mistake.
I have used quicken, and quickbooks, and the like. They are good to keep up with moderately complex finances. For a year or two, I actualy bought tax programs and paid for submission. Rebates made it cost very little. This is what I found.
The last time I could file a 1040ez, I did it by phone.
More recnetly, when my taxes got real complex, I had an accountant do it. Not a chain like HR Block. I established a relationship with a reputable accountant.
Currently my taxes are not simple, but only require a few sheets of paper. I don't itemize. I just fill out the forms. I am a geek, so numbers don't scare me.
If my taxes did get more complex, like marriage or a house, i would really be tempted to establish a relationship with an accountant to handle those things. It is nothing I could not do, but the proffesionals have easier access to the forms and infomation. The apps will cost you $50, and your time. The accountant might only be a couple hundred.
This is different from the component technology in which you have a tv, a reciever, an amp, a VCR, a DVD, and a cable tuner, for example. If one thing breaks simply unplug a couple cables, replace, and we are back in bussiness. A no new drivers to install.
There are clearly some companies that take the component philosophy seriously. Where things can be hot swapped in a bay or connected with a firewire of USB cable. The computer and peripherals have enough intelligence to communicate without custom drivers. It is not so popular beceause one must pay for the technology, but as computers become 'hubs' and not 'boxes', and consumers expect to do more things more easily, it will be important.
As has been true, for quality systems components are better for the consumer.
Shouldn't the BSA be writing an amicus brief complaining that CD have taken jobs from hard working Americans and demanding that the CD manufacturers pay a royalty to keep the buggy whip, i mean record, i mean reel-to-reel manufacturers afloat?
This has always been the advantage of the OS developer. MS has used to great effect from the days of the original DOS. Apple is using it know to secure the iPod position. Anything their either does not like can be easily broken. No one else can get to the underlying data structures without risking future incompatibilities.
So why then would any retailer want a system that makes it easier to get to a competitors site. Why would a retailer want competitors to know how customers spend money at the retailer store.
The problem with Passport was it was a huge cognitive dissonance on the part of MS. It was not the first, and will not be the last. Commercial interests are not in the internet because it provides the means to perfect competition. They are there so as not to lose sales. Their nightmare is someone using Yahoo and having the freedom to buy from the cheapest place because everyone is a "trusted retailer" with data stored in Passport. Their hope for is that the consumer will pay the extra buck because it is not worth the effort to set up a new account at the other retailer.
Online retailers go through great effort to register customers, collect data, and make repeat sales as painless as possible. In the process they make the first sale hard. But look at someone like Amazon. Are they more interested in someone who makes one purchase a year, or the customer who will make a purchase a week because of oneclick? Are the grocery stores making more money on sales of goods or sales of consumer patterns? Do either want to give up the lucrative sideline to MS.
It says something about a company and people. It is one thing to put an obligatory banner ad, it is another to make aid your primary focus, even at the expense of normal revenue.
MS has conned web developers large and small, not to mention web users, that IE is the web. It practically gives away front page and other tools so that web sites can be developed cheaply, either by the site owner or by cheap labor.
I am running into an increasing number of site that require IE to function. Not because of rendering or ActiveX, but because some small detail in the code is unique to IE.
As we have said, most users do not see the web, they see IE. What is increasingly happening is the most developers do not see the HTML, the see the MS tools. When you talk to them about the HTML, they look blankly and saythey just say that they develop for IE and the user is responsible for downloading it. What I have said is that IE is a applicaiton front end, and the developers are creating applications, not web pages. As long as we think of everything as a web page, MS is going to dominate the market.
The issue is not the broswer. Firefox is good. Netscape was never bad. And don't give the me the bullshit, I watched all the drama. I was running. The only major browser i have not run in Lynx. I even had my copy of Cyberdog. But firefox is simply a gimick to win the now irrelevent broswer wars.
What the open source community has missed, and what has not been commoditized, is the web page editor. Many of us on /. can code HTML in our sleep. We can write engines to code HTML. We can visualize what the markups will do. However, the people who make websites don't have the resources to code. They want to plug objects into the page and have stuff like search boxes, boiler plates, and images automagically work. MS has given them this power. Open source, to the best of my knowledge, has not. And until that happens, the pages will be written for IE only.
The thing is that Texas has gobs of money. There was a time when it used the money to fund all sorts of free and cheap cultural opportunities. The quality may not be up to standards set by the pompous elite, but then these opportunities were not for the elite, they were for the average joe.
But now we feel more divided, and less willing to give up resources to benifit everyone. The state parks significant amounts of money for entrace and camping. This WiFi service is a wonderful way for the family to experience the stars, the birds, the other animals, the lakes, the trees, in a contemporary relevent fashion. A kid is not neccesarily going to trudge through a book when he or she can search the web.
So, i hope that this does not just become another way to fill the Texas treasury and enrich more corrupt bussinessmen. We can afford to put WiFi in the parks and be an example to the nation. I mean oil is at $40 for gods sake.
This completely eliminates the advantage for the consumer, which is fast checkout without the hassles of going through a poorly trained human. At Kroger's, for instance, it is perfectly possible to get out of the store without any significant interventions. The few times I have ben to Wal*mart, I have never been able to get out without hassle. Not only do you have the normal thug at the door, but the atttendent seems much more willing to assume malice on the part of the consumer.
I assume that this assumption that most of the customers are thieves derives from the fact that Wal*Mart executives are theives. This would also likely mean that the executive presume tha the suppliers are thieves, which is why every item has to be tagged. The only thins that can be trusted are computers.
And yet we do not hear people complaining about Hummers wasting all our time at stop lights. This is because people buy Hummers to show they can. Just like people who buy hybrids do so not to go fast, but to conserve the US stratigic supply of fuel for those Americans who are dying and might need it Iraq rather than thier selfish need to look flash.
Anyway, cribbing articles into a collection is an age old tradition. There are very few original articles, and people seldom use 'orignal sources' Often the analysis provided by secondary soruces is useful. Ignorance and heeding to complaints is also an age old tradition. I am not familiar with this roland guy, and obviously the poster is embarrassed enough so as to hide, and I am neither defending or attacking either. It is just that we are talking about private companies. If there is a connection between Roland and Slashdot, go out and find it post the expose. All you have now is that the Slashdot editors favor a particular news repackager. As you say, many of the articles generate much discussion, and some don't, which is normal. Of the few posts I have had accepted, some have generated discussion and others have not. The /. editors decisions may negatively affect your profits, as they certainly do many others, but you have not shown any unethical behavior.
So, i suggest that you go out an prove that unethical behavior is happening. First, I suggest that you hire a private dick to servile the persons in question. See if you can discover any connections. Perhaps they are school buddies or in-laws? Perhaps they are lovers? Who knows.
Second, scan all /, user accounts. Find out how many competing stories were submitted. Were the competitors submitted after or before. Were the write-ups of lesser or greater quality. It could be that roland provides professional write-ups, free of the dreaded grammar and spelling errors. This analysis in itself could provide a simple sanity check, which is why you are unlikely to complete it.
Third, post as a real user. At this point you are just some crack head who does not know how to positively contribute to the greater social good.
My impression was that both suits were worthy, and I am glad they were litigated. I would hope that all settlement include a minimum amount of money that must be settled, and any extra would go to some appropriate charity or agency, perhaps digital cameras for soldiers or development of rural infrastruture. Something that requires cash, and not just movement of dead stock. After all the executives and lawyers are seldom paid in little plastic disks.
Certainly if you want to be an ISP, then you need to have a lawyer. You also need to figure out if your customers will pay enough to cover the lawyer, the DSL fees, and your time. So what might it be, 10 costumers paying $25 a month?
In rural areas they have an issue with utilities. They use collectives. A group decides that a service is needed, but no one is willing or able to cover all normal overhead expenses. So they chip in to get the service, and everyone helps wil the maintainance. In your case each person chips in some money every month to cover the bills, each person is on a rotating schedule to maintain the system, and no one person is screwed. Of course, any profit you might expect to make will evaporate, except the intangible like being the only one hardwired to a 6 MBS line, while everyone else can be throttled for 'fairness'.
I am not anti-advertising. Just interested in the compromises that are made to sell product.
The ISP should supply every DSL or Cable subscriber with a NAT firewill. This should be preconfigured by the ISP. There should be no options. If the luser wants a control over the firewall, that costs more. People will bitch. Screw them. An ISP should not by default allow direct connections. Perhaps the ISPs need to be sued back to the dark ages until thye stop this dangerous pratice
And no one tell me that they never had any significant problems with IE. I grew up in a pretty dangerous neighborhood and only got attacked once or twice, and our house was only broken into once. Does that mean the neighborhood did not have systemic problems. No. It just meant that I knew who to avoid the problems.
The lusers are getting computers for Christmas, and many of them will get MS crap because it is cheap. We can compliain that they are not able to go through the 100 step process to secure thier machines, or will we hold the proffesional accountable.
The argument presented has one big fallacy. Most kids don't do cause and effect. Even precious few teenagers and adults do cause and effect. I mean when was the last time you heard a teenage boy say 'she won't have sex with me because it was not the right place and we were not old enough and it was a time of the month when she probably would get pregnant.' Yeah, maybe you hear that once or twice, but it is mostly 'she doesn't love me'. Even adults get into that 'you would buy the expensive toy if you loved me' deal.
Some people call the 'you don't love me' argument magical thinking, and it tends to be the child's primary thought process. If some desire of the child is or is not met, it is not because of a complex series of factors, but simply how the world feels about the child. The child wants a pony. The child does not get the pony. This is probably because the family does not have the resources to acquire and maintain a pony. The child cannot understand this, so thinks that he or she did something wrong, or that the parents do not care. Realistically there is no way to counter this process, so Santa is used as a proxy. The child was not good enough for a pony, and Santa is the ultimate and fairest arbiter.
As far as the confusion et al, it is caused by growing up, not by any stories we tell. As long as we are reasonable consistent in answering questions, creating rules, and applying consequences, most everything else is ok. The child is naturally confused, and the confusion is what drives learning. The child learns that it is separate from mother. The child learns that there are consequences for specific actions. The child learns that not every desire can be met. All these are extremely painful lessons. When a child is upset about the 'lie' of Santa, it is probably because a fundamental assumption of life, that all needs can be met if the child is just 'good enough', has fallen. No one told the child this assumption was true, and no one could tell the child that it isn't.
You kid sib will learn that Santa is fake, and it will make him very sad. When he does, you will know he is growing up, and maybe be sad because it is happening too fast. You will learn that life expects so much from you, maybe more than you can give, and your parents will be sad because they were not able to protect you from it forever.
The elves spend most of the year compiling data on all children. School records, criminal records, first hand surveillance and the like. It was becoming increasingly clear that no one was being good, and Santa was losing his primary asset, that of the ultimate arbiter of good behavior. To solve this, he restructured his parameters and created a system in which every child would be assigned a normalized value. This allows him to simply, a fairly, decide who is naughty and nice. The closer the normalized value is to one, the more nice.
Next Santa throws all children more than two standard deviations out into the naughty pile. This may sound harsh, but if you are nice enough to get above a 0.95, you probably just playing the system, and Santa does not like players. Either group is without merits.
Next Santa takes those in the center, that is one SD out, and subcontract to Wal*mart or Amazon. Since these are just average kids, they can live with average presents.
Finally there are the kids between one and two standard deviations. These are the ones that merit personal, or almost personal, reward or scolding from Santa. The good kids gets a personal visit and a personal gift from Santa. The naughty kids get a Santa branded piece of coal delivered by the special class of santa-like elves.
This system keeps the number of trips that Santa much make to aroud a few hundred million, assuming only about half the world celebrates christmas. This is the most that he can make, which is around five deliveries every millisecond. The implication of this system is that every child must be on their guard to be exactly good enough every year. Any mistake could bump you into the larger class of no Santa visit. This is going to be more important as the world population grows, even if the Christmas celebrating population declines. Certain cost cutting measure have already been instituted, the most significant was in the 1999 season when Santa stopped visiting those that were in the first SD of being 'good'. As the world economy falters, Santa may no longer be able to afford a full night of support, or the gear that allows him to visit all the houses. Any season now, cost cutting and unfair taxes on corporations might force him to visit only those areas in that are friendly to the independent spirit.
"Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est"
It seem to say something about write down the stuff you make up to the best of ability yours, but I will leave the real translation to those who are smart and well educated.
All I can say is that the test seems to over useless stuff. Give me a quiz over Star Trek or South Park or ATHF or TNMT. That would be time well spent and prove my superiority.
The fact that NT could not print to every device, or accept a special expansion, or run games, was never an issue in all the years I used NT.
But kids are used to more structure now. It goes beyond the need of the five year old to repeatedly view the sam set of images. It is like why should I take the time to create a new world when the pros like Lucas have already done it for me. It even extends to those that considers themselves pro. It used to be that you got your start writing fan fiction. Now many writers never get beyond it.
Now, most educated people will point to the number of books they have read and own. They will expect others to stand in awe at their collection of books and the factoids they can pull up from their vast reading. They are intelligent because intelligent people read books. And there may be some truth in this. There is certainly a relationship between the number of books a child has read and some measures of intelligence.
But then we start discussing certain types of book and the intelligentsia consesus on books starts to fall apart. Oh, I would never read those kind of books. Those books are only for the fanatic, or only for those who read books for the vilest of pleasure. Or those books contain nothing but dry facts, and are not suitable for those us who read to learn about truth and beauty. At some point, it seems, people who fancy themselves intelligent have to defend thier chosen status by denigrating the activities in which they do not wish to take part. After all, intelligent people treasure a wide variety of experiences, and know they should take part in any experience that will make us more intelligent. Therefore, if we choose not to take part in an experience, it must be because that experience has no intellectual basis. To wit, math books are of no interest to the average person, and therefore the fact that I could never even begin to comprehend one has nothing to do with my status as a smart person.
And so it is that the act of getting children to read is doomed to failure because everyone is more concerned about making sure their preferred reading material is considered the best and only path to intellectual bliss, while all others are deemed as junk or porn or pulp.
Or, to put more bluntly, if I hear one more person tell my kids that math is hard and no one really understands it, I will likely go on a mad rage.
What Apple is more likely concerned with is the effect that early product rumors has on sales of current stock. Apple is not a company that likes to give discounts or rebates, and seems to minimize the need for this by carefully controlling stock and release of new products. While rumors can be good for market capitalization, credible rumors are bad for profits.
Today people expect to use thier computers to be entertained. On the Apple, with iTunes and DVD Player, this is a simple matter. If something doesn't work, just return it.
The question is how much complications with the consumer accept. I now takes much more interaction to watch a DVD than it did to watch a VHS. You can't fast foward over the initial junk. There are incompatibilities that makes in hard for the consumer to make the several buying decisions that must be made, on a daily basis, if the economy is to improve.
How much of the current problems are caused by marketers who have lost thier sense of simplicity. How much of the sales lost during the current holiday season are caused by marketers who force consumers to think twice before buying that $20 item. There is simply no time to think twice.