Probably more expensive then the Microsoft offer, bear with me: Acording to the Register (and other sources, like Heise) Steve "Ape Dance" Balmer interrupted his skiing holidays in Switzerland to shmooz the Munich major and lure them in with very, very steep discounts. Munich however conducted a detailed study about long term aspects (not only costs, but the cost of being an addicted junkie in 5 years, when the dsicounts are no more 90%) and didn't let themselves be fooled.
Why not download a totally free distro and burn it to CD assuming you have the in-house resources?
Because that's not the way you do it, when you have to replace 14000 desktops. That might be fine for a company of 10 or 50 people, but not for a project of this magnitude. "Licensing costs" are probably irelevant here, it's primarily integration and services
SuSE teamed up with IBM in order to execute this project.
Speak for yourself. Me and most of my friends use e-mails and SMS to arrage meeting up, nights out etc. SMS is more popular because of it's instancy, but e-mail will catch up when proliferation of mobile e-mail becomes more widespread.
So, and what exactly stops me from using sms on a phone without built in mp3 player, the capability to watch movies and the possibility to edit word/excel documents? The beauty of sms is its simplicity.
What failure? Please elaborate on what you think is a failure.
For starters: They weren't able to lure any major cellphone manufacturer in. Big suprise: They didn't want to be OEM manufacturers for a Microsoft branded phone. So they turned to the network providers and where able to cut a deal with Orange. A couple month later deals with Swisscom as well as T-Mobile to release a Microsoft powered phone fell appart, due to bad bugs, which they weren't able to resolve.
You can read some of Orange SPV reviews for yourself. In general there seem to be a few zealots, which consider this to be a good phone, despite all it's limitations. In essence:
Battery life is barely sufficient to last a day
Bugs crash the phone on occasion
After which it requires 40 seconds+ to boot and connect
You can't dial your synchronised Outlook contacts directly (this might, or might not be fixed, alas it doesn't thing high praise on the much touted integration)
There are very, very reasonable security concerns
...
I wouldn't exactly call this a roaring success for the Microsoft Smartphone platform.
Add to that the absolute miniscule marketshare in comparision to Symbian.
This might change of course, if Microsoft pours billions and billions of $ into this market, but there's certainly no guarantee (especially since the telecom industry fears nothing more then deviating from standards and Microsoft has a rotten track record in this respect).
So, yeah: Given all those reasons I'd call Microsofts Smartphone Platform a spectacular failure to date.
Ok, apologies for seemingly being a luddite, but who actually cares?
WiFi might be nice to give you added flexibility, but frankly do I really frantically want to search a hot spot every hour in order to download my 7 mails from which usually 7 are spam? I don't think so.
Granted, it might be nice to pass your time by browsing the web when you wait for a train. But I can do that just fine with a newspaper.
Methinks this is a rather desperate attempt to (finally) get a foot into the mobile, wireless world and Microsofts attempt to lure (GSM-)manufacturers/network providers in can only be described as a spectacular failure up to now.
Also, WiFi is not the GSM killer; a notion which seems popular in the US, but it's just plain wrong. Those are two very, very different technologies with very different objectives..
In theory it could be a marvelous idea, especially for technical publications. For novels they somewhat lack the sexyness of the good ol' paper book (this goes especially for hardcovers and imo of course).
The publishers themselves seem to kill the goldeneggslayinggoose themselves due to absurd copy restrictions and non-compatible standards. Hell: Do you really want to buy three e-book readers at 500Euros a pop for the really meager catalogue out there.
I don't get their paranoia, though. What stops anybody of scanning a book in plain, good ol' ascii text and releasing it on the internet (else that this is illegal, of course)?
All the Eurocrats are doing now is covering the same censorship in salad dressing in hopes of making it more appealing and more tasty, but underneath it's the same old censorship.
Yeah, I think about this when smoking a dooby in parallel with quaffing a beer in public.
I will give it even more thought when I do some skinny dipping in the lake.
In the good old printed press there are certain rules that have to be followed.
For example you will be in hellish hot water as a paper when you just print accusations without even giving the accused so much as a chance to answer to those allegations.
Also, if somebody feels unfairly treated he has a right to a counter statement (Gegendarstellung in German). That's not an elaborate article, but the right to set the facts straight from his/her position. The paper doesn't have to agree with it an can explicitely mention that, but they must print it with few exceptions.
So why the fsck should this be different on the net then in the printed press? Should Mr. Drudge have the right to smear around his rumours, without the right of a potentially badly harmed person to even respond to it? I think not.
By the way: This right to a counter statement is based on Swiss press laws. think Germany is quite comparable.
[...] but as soon as they install a brewery I'll be the first to buy a ticket!
Not that it was quite a brewery, but the now defunct Swissair did roll a barrell of beer into the first - and business class cabin on a flight to Chicago.
Not that I really needed a beer at that time, but the concept was so intriguing, that I er! topped off my slightly intoxicated state.
It seems as if PKWare and Winzip are moving into the realm that is dominated by PGP and the GNU variant. PGP compresses the data when it encrypts it, so that need was taken care of already.
This might be absolutely true. But why should I shell out 39.99$ for a piece of software, which is nicely implemented by GPG in the first place? It seems to me that this is a somewhat flawed business model.
In addition I get to see the source and compile it myself. Mind you, not that I have a fucking clue about the specifics of that source, but it's still a nice thought in the age of total information awareness (I couldn't care less, what they call it this week), supermarket shopping cards and bad data that might be stored about you in an airline reservation system.
If this guy sells me this really cheap television set because - you know - it fell from a truck it's unfair that the law is out to get me?
I think it's not quite as easy as you make it sound and I don't really know the terms of the deal between Microsoft and Orange. But I can fully envision that Microsoft offered Orange an absolute sweetheart of a deal, since they are desperate to get their crappy, bloated and proprietary phone "platform" to the market.
I can further envision Orange overlooking some potential poison pills, since the deal (for the first adapter and a major carrier in Europe neverless) might have been so sweet.
Sure, this is speculative; but after the shitty that Microsoft has pulled on Sendo (wwhich seems to be pretty well documented) and Orange might be profiting from that I'm with Sendo here and don't see this in anyway related to what SCO is trying to pull off.
"The month of June is show-and-tell time," McBride said. "Everybody's been clamoring for the code...and we're going to show hundreds of lines of code."
This whole SCO thingie is a really rotten copy of one of the worse Marx Brothers flicks?
And yes, if I'm on the local variant of pricewatch, and the webshop was $2 cheaper but it doesn't work with my browser, I say screw it. Chalk up a lost sale. Same if I'm doing a google search and has opened ten windows. One refuses to load? Too bad, let's see if the other 9 have what I want. The only reason I'd fire up IE is because your site has something special(tm). And truth be told, most aren't that special.
That's actually the very reason why I don't order from B&N any more. It chokes on Mozilla when you get to the checkout and all I ever got was a canned "your business is very important to us" response.
Yeah, I might be a stubborn son of a bitch, but if your business doesn't support standards I'm more then happy yo take it somewhere else.
Re:In the tradition of Gonzo Journalism
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
The "response rate" probably includes things like:
UNSUBSCRIBE
Yeah well, and in terms of iq those folks are probably not smarter then the other part of the response rate: The ones really intending to get rich quick.
In the tradition of Gonzo Journalism
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Mr. Scelson claims that "People still buy this stuff," he said, claiming that his clients get a response rate to his e-mail of 1 to 2 percent.
1-2 percent on penis enlargement - and knock off Viagra offers?
Mr. Scelson is a fucking liar.
Re:Saw this on Google News a while back
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 1
SCO is far less trying to fsck over linux than IBM, yes they've made noises toward the Distributions, but a primary thrust of their suit is to revoke IBM's Unix license.
I would have bought that up to the point when Microsoft started to "license" 20 year old computer technology of which there's no chance in hell that it ever gets incorporated into their products.
The last cd I bought was Mezzanine; I wanted to get 100th window but absolutely, positively and most definitely refrain from buying overcharged, corrupted consumer goods (Mezzanine is not (yet) copy protected).
Yeah, great shit! The music industry just lost another paying customer. Don't worry: I won't go and rip of your shit from the net. There's anyway no more that much to rip off nowadays and I'm quite happy with the back catalog, my own cd collection and with the ones you force me to borrow from friends.
You management type geezers of the major entertainment companies, you who couldn't care less if you push Pepsi, hawk razorblades or deal in cigarettes, but accidentally wound up at a record company should be aware of that. Quite possibly your dwindling sales are not primarily related to kiddies downloading Britneys crap, but to people like my mate Chuck or myself who absolutely refrain from being extorted in exchange for a corrupted product and who are sick and tired of being treated as crooks by you. Y'know it's people like us who ultimately sign your paychecks. But you'd proabably have to first get your heads out of your asses in order to understand that. In the meantime; and in good old Metallica fashion my I suggest that you:
Microsoft made a huge conceptual error in believing that they can cram their Windows Everything philosophy into a cell phone.
Cell phones require far more resilience then organizers or pocket PCs. For example: Compare the Treo to the Nokia Communicator. While the second is designed as a cell phone with added functionality, the first is primarily an organizer with crammed in phone functionality. I know a number of happy Communicator users, while the number of happy Treo users I know of is precisely zero.
In addition embrace and extend is a philopsophy, which rightfully has zero credibility in the phone business. It's all about (meticulously respected) standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably more expensive then the Microsoft offer, bear with me: Acording to the Register (and other sources, like Heise) Steve "Ape Dance" Balmer interrupted his skiing holidays in Switzerland to shmooz the Munich major and lure them in with very, very steep discounts. Munich however conducted a detailed study about long term aspects (not only costs, but the cost of being an addicted junkie in 5 years, when the dsicounts are no more 90%) and didn't let themselves be fooled.
Why not download a totally free distro and burn it to CD assuming you have the in-house resources?
Because that's not the way you do it, when you have to replace 14000 desktops. That might be fine for a company of 10 or 50 people, but not for a project of this magnitude. "Licensing costs" are probably irelevant here, it's primarily integration and services
SuSE teamed up with IBM in order to execute this project.
Hope this helps
Those are three very distinct technologies with very different uses. I recap and then we all shuddup, ok?
Bluetooth: Designed for tiny personal networks, i.e. connect your cell phone with the earphones and your pda without cables.
WiFi: Wireless lan since it's a wireless lan you can't really roam around outside of area, which is pretty restricted, nuff said!
Cell phones: Well, cell phones, you get the picturu
I thank you
So, and what exactly stops me from using sms on a phone without built in mp3 player, the capability to watch movies and the possibility to edit word/excel documents? The beauty of sms is its simplicity.
What failure? Please elaborate on what you think is a failure.
For starters: They weren't able to lure any major cellphone manufacturer in. Big suprise: They didn't want to be OEM manufacturers for a Microsoft branded phone. So they turned to the network providers and where able to cut a deal with Orange. A couple month later deals with Swisscom as well as T-Mobile to release a Microsoft powered phone fell appart, due to bad bugs, which they weren't able to resolve. You can read some of Orange SPV reviews for yourself. In general there seem to be a few zealots, which consider this to be a good phone, despite all it's limitations. In essence:
Battery life is barely sufficient to last a day
Bugs crash the phone on occasion
After which it requires 40 seconds+ to boot and connect
You can't dial your synchronised Outlook contacts directly (this might, or might not be fixed, alas it doesn't thing high praise on the much touted integration)
There are very, very reasonable security concerns
...
I wouldn't exactly call this a roaring success for the Microsoft Smartphone platform.
Add to that the absolute miniscule marketshare in comparision to Symbian.
This might change of course, if Microsoft pours billions and billions of $ into this market, but there's certainly no guarantee (especially since the telecom industry fears nothing more then deviating from standards and Microsoft has a rotten track record in this respect).
So, yeah: Given all those reasons I'd call Microsofts Smartphone Platform a spectacular failure to date.
WiFi might be nice to give you added flexibility, but frankly do I really frantically want to search a hot spot every hour in order to download my 7 mails from which usually 7 are spam? I don't think so.
Granted, it might be nice to pass your time by browsing the web when you wait for a train. But I can do that just fine with a newspaper.
Methinks this is a rather desperate attempt to (finally) get a foot into the mobile, wireless world and Microsofts attempt to lure (GSM-)manufacturers/network providers in can only be described as a spectacular failure up to now.
Also, WiFi is not the GSM killer; a notion which seems popular in the US, but it's just plain wrong. Those are two very, very different technologies with very different objectives..
Hey! Give me a shout when your invention reaches market. I'd have a few suggestions though, that you may consider implementing:
Shoot the spammer into the knew
Shoot the spammer into the groin (for repeat offenders)
For horse laughing spammers: Let them find the decapacitatet head of their favorite horse in bead (credit to the Godfather)
Magically suck the spammer to the next food processor and draw in his arm. Then start at full throttle (should make a nice wrrr,wrrr sound)
Have the spammers savings magically converted into Enron shares
The publishers themselves seem to kill the goldeneggslayinggoose themselves due to absurd copy restrictions and non-compatible standards. Hell: Do you really want to buy three e-book readers at 500Euros a pop for the really meager catalogue out there.
I don't get their paranoia, though. What stops anybody of scanning a book in plain, good ol' ascii text and releasing it on the internet (else that this is illegal, of course)?
Yeah, I think about this when smoking a dooby in parallel with quaffing a beer in public.
I will give it even more thought when I do some skinny dipping in the lake.
But then again: Maybe not...
For example you will be in hellish hot water as a paper when you just print accusations without even giving the accused so much as a chance to answer to those allegations.
Also, if somebody feels unfairly treated he has a right to a counter statement (Gegendarstellung in German). That's not an elaborate article, but the right to set the facts straight from his/her position. The paper doesn't have to agree with it an can explicitely mention that, but they must print it with few exceptions.
So why the fsck should this be different on the net then in the printed press? Should Mr. Drudge have the right to smear around his rumours, without the right of a potentially badly harmed person to even respond to it? I think not.
By the way: This right to a counter statement is based on Swiss press laws. think Germany is quite comparable.
Not that it was quite a brewery, but the now defunct Swissair did roll a barrell of beer into the first - and business class cabin on a flight to Chicago.
Not that I really needed a beer at that time, but the concept was so intriguing, that I er! topped off my slightly intoxicated state.
Is there a good way to avoid that, or did I miss something in the RTFM?
Prolly comes from the same authority, which claims that Sweden won the Americas Cup and that Volvo is a Swiss car.
Free service and helps like a charm.
This might be absolutely true. But why should I shell out 39.99$ for a piece of software, which is nicely implemented by GPG in the first place? It seems to me that this is a somewhat flawed business model.
In addition I get to see the source and compile it myself. Mind you, not that I have a fucking clue about the specifics of that source, but it's still a nice thought in the age of total information awareness (I couldn't care less, what they call it this week), supermarket shopping cards and bad data that might be stored about you in an airline reservation system.
Not really! In fact such a label makes it crystal clear to stay away with a ten foot pole from such a "product".
It breaks down to clarity for consumers.
I still think it's a far shot from the stunt SCO is trying to pull off (which gets funnier by the day).
I think it's not quite as easy as you make it sound and I don't really know the terms of the deal between Microsoft and Orange. But I can fully envision that Microsoft offered Orange an absolute sweetheart of a deal, since they are desperate to get their crappy, bloated and proprietary phone "platform" to the market.
I can further envision Orange overlooking some potential poison pills, since the deal (for the first adapter and a major carrier in Europe neverless) might have been so sweet.
Sure, this is speculative; but after the shitty that Microsoft has pulled on Sendo (wwhich seems to be pretty well documented) and Orange might be profiting from that I'm with Sendo here and don't see this in anyway related to what SCO is trying to pull off.
The DCMA is a US law, Sendo is a British company and Orange is a (French owned) British company.
So how exactly would the DCMA apply here?
I'm a tad late here. But all I can say is "Hallelujah, Brother!"
This whole SCO thingie is a really rotten copy of one of the worse Marx Brothers flicks?
Right?
That's actually the very reason why I don't order from B&N any more. It chokes on Mozilla when you get to the checkout and all I ever got was a canned "your business is very important to us" response.
Yeah, I might be a stubborn son of a bitch, but if your business doesn't support standards I'm more then happy yo take it somewhere else.
UNSUBSCRIBE
Yeah well, and in terms of iq those folks are probably not smarter then the other part of the response rate: The ones really intending to get rich quick.
1-2 percent on penis enlargement - and knock off Viagra offers?
Mr. Scelson is a fucking liar.
I would have bought that up to the point when Microsoft started to "license" 20 year old computer technology of which there's no chance in hell that it ever gets incorporated into their products.
At least that's my take.
The last cd I bought was Mezzanine; I wanted to get 100th window but absolutely, positively and most definitely refrain from buying overcharged, corrupted consumer goods (Mezzanine is not (yet) copy protected).
Yeah, great shit! The music industry just lost another paying customer. Don't worry: I won't go and rip of your shit from the net. There's anyway no more that much to rip off nowadays and I'm quite happy with the back catalog, my own cd collection and with the ones you force me to borrow from friends.
You management type geezers of the major entertainment companies, you who couldn't care less if you push Pepsi, hawk razorblades or deal in cigarettes, but accidentally wound up at a record company should be aware of that. Quite possibly your dwindling sales are not primarily related to kiddies downloading Britneys crap, but to people like my mate Chuck or myself who absolutely refrain from being extorted in exchange for a corrupted product and who are sick and tired of being treated as crooks by you. Y'know it's people like us who ultimately sign your paychecks. But you'd proabably have to first get your heads out of your asses in order to understand that. In the meantime; and in good old Metallica fashion my I suggest that you:
GO BANGE YER HEADS...
Cell phones require far more resilience then organizers or pocket PCs. For example: Compare the Treo to the Nokia Communicator. While the second is designed as a cell phone with added functionality, the first is primarily an organizer with crammed in phone functionality. I know a number of happy Communicator users, while the number of happy Treo users I know of is precisely zero.
In addition embrace and extend is a philopsophy, which rightfully has zero credibility in the phone business. It's all about (meticulously respected) standards.