This guy has some real potential, he could change the world, he could discover some fantastic advancements for the good of human kind, but no. He wants to be a lawyer.
Yes! I was thinking to myself that this kid has potential in two of the areas in the world where he can do a lot of good: physics and math, - he might be one of the few brilliant enough to make significant advances in one of the field(s).
He wants to be a patent lawyer?! I really hope this kid loses his fixation with money and starts thinking about research. His research project on acoustic chambers sounds interesting. Perhaps now that he finally will get some problems worthy of his intellect, he'll start to get the research bug and change to something to do some good in the world. Money will not be one of his problems he turns out to be as brilliant as his speedy degree would indicate.
While I agree that the menu-maze phone system can really suck, sometimes getting a human on the other end to redirect your call can be bad too. I've ended up in multiple call-transfer hell where I get forwarded endlessly to different parts of the company because no one even had any idea who could answer my question. New operators that drop your call are fun too after you've been on hold for 20 minutes.
In a few cases, I even prefer the menu system, for straight forward queries that I just need to provide a meter reading, or get a list of transactions. Once I know the menu route, it's quicker than dealing with a human.
This attitude prevents the general public from using Linux. The general user doesn't want to think about swap files, network configs and boot preferences. Ideally, they want to click "Install" and at the end come up with a system that has their applications ready to go. Command line?! Come on, anyone not interested in computers in general does not want to learn any commands - they want to double-click their application of choice and get on with their day.
I'm smarter than the average bear and I sometimes just want to do something - I'll just install an application with the default settings, learn the minimum nessesary to get the job done and move on. This is the norm for the average user, and computer geeks forget this all the time.
I like walks in the park, cooking and sitting in front of a roaring fireplace with a nice glass of port.
Oh, and I am also seeking a like minded individual that thought the article was stupid - I mean, come on, BusinessWeek talking about the science of Love. Sheesh.
As a geek who who has to work with Marketing in my job, I can say that clueless marketing not an uncommon state of affairs...
I'd say the proprietary format is a lame attempt to protect the intelectual property of the movie; ie. "We'll let you watch it, but you can't copy it anywhere" Stupid Marketing 'roids!
Would someone be able to copy this and make a bit torrent available in a useful format?
Second vote for useless, at least for anyone who uses a computer regulary. Fine for people who have to think what key to hit for 'any key', but useless for anyone else. I find it amusing that they stick with F1..F12 too for the function keys - isn't the point of this thing to show you what the functions are?
Take this simple comparison: at Google, engineers are expected to spend one day a week on a project of personal interest. This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
So Google is ahead as far as technical innovation goes, by some measures. Some here seem to think that that would be enough to ensure success on other fronts, profit and size being the main ones. Can we say "Microsoft" people?
While I think that Google and Yahoo can co-exist if they differentiat their offerings, the "winner" in this battle will be determined by marketing, not technical innovation. The average Joe User will not use Google's latest tool if it is not simple, and/or if the word does not get to Joe User.
Hmmm, wonder if you could upgrade your Windows 3.0 to 3.1 for free? Can't recall. I know I did 3.1 to 3.11 on my work machines for free.
I seem to recall 'service pack' came from the Windows 95 upgrades. I was thinking at the time that M$ thought that 95.1 would look kinda stupid, so they came up with the service pack term. But perhaps NT was first to differentiate between free vs paid upgrade with a service pack?
Anyone remember the first 'service pack' and why it was called a 'service pack'?
Is it just me or are others pissed off that M$ has taken the term "Service Pack" and stretched it way beyond it's intended meaning?
A Service Pack should fix bugs, provide MINOR enhancements, and performance tweaks. Anything more is a version change.
Hell, I would be perfectly happy to see the term "Service Pack" disapear entirely to be replaced by 0.01 releases and 0.1 for bigger changes, like most of the rest of the world does. At least that terminology has meaning to me.
"Please be sure to FILL IN THE DATE when you sign your form."
Use an exclamation point at the end of something important:
"Half the people didn't date the form we asked them to sign!"
The problem is over-use, not straight use.
On another note, I do not think the examples given are that ridiculous; people write some pretty crappy notes when they just let it "drool out onto the screen". I have looked at emails I've written to friends or people I work with closely and seen that I wrote crap. However, I didn't spend any time writing because I assumed I would get it close enough for them to get the meaning. Anything important or written to a general audience, gets more effort put into it. I ALWAYS preview my posts on Slashdot!
Everyone is going to be different here, but I go on number of hours per *day* rather than per week. I find I can work 10 hours per day, up to 12 if the work is easy on the brain and keep going. If I go beyond that, I need a day off every 5 or less the longer I work.
Important for me is to get my sleep. If I'm working long enough that I can't get close to 8 hours, my useful working time goes down rapidly. Next most important is to get at least a couple of hours away doing something else - a game, movie, book etc. By the time you add your travel time, eating, etc you have 12 hours max useful work time.
It's pathetic that EA can't get their asses sued off for treating people like this (and have to pay big time compensation). This, in the sue happy States where you can sue oh so easily for other things...
Runescape lists how many people are playing at one time. I just added up the servers on the pay side of things and came up with just shy of 10,000 players online right now. If you go with 10% online at any one time, 100K doesn't seem an unreasonable figure.
Someone earlier was saying the assumption is 1/5 (20%) of your subscriber base online at anyone time - that's like 2.5 hours everyday. If that is realistic, then you're only talking 50K. Really, considering his methodology, being off by 2X is not that bad, and I think the trends he points out are valid.
Now, for Runescape, I wonder - note the steady progression upward. Perhapes not having to pay to play initially and not pay for upgrades is having an effect The cheap $5 a month means even bored players might hang on a lot longer just to play the updates. These guys might be on to something.
I play Runescape myself and I don't sweat it if I don't play for a week, or a month because I'm busy - it ain't a large chunk 'o change.
Re:Privacy invasion OK as long as it's for sales?
on
The Trouble with RFID
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmm, How about when your life insurance premium is jacked up because they find out that you have been eating at various fast food vendors > 5 days a month? Same justification smoking, which is hard to hide now. You'd have to be more accountable to get the lowest rate, no less free, just that your actions would have more consequences.
Or, is it better that everyone remain anonymous, put their dollars in the pot, and the insurance rate is based on the average actions of the individuals grouped by the limited information the insurace company is allowed to collect on you?
I was reading on JPL's site last night (don't have link handy, sorry) that the vertical resolution was 4000 pixels. They didn't give a horzontal resolution. Given the picture is 3851 pixels high (cropped?), they might be right in some form.
Looking at the picture, I'm guessing a splice of four pictures, with a middle overlap - you can see two vertical splice zones, and two horizontal splice zones - the bottom horizontal splice zone is the hardest to see - look at the large rock just to the right of center on the image, but still to the left of the right vertical split. Perhaps this is how the camera works - take 4 pictures, beam back for post processing into a 4K X 4K pixel picture.
Scaled is doing leading edge - cheap transport to space. While not a clear 'first', they could be pointed to in the future as having been the first to demonstrate cheap space flight.
This really strikes a chord on a similar front -my campus (University of Calgary) took X$ from Pepsi in return to be the exclusive supplier of soda beverages on campus. Protests made no difference nor did pulling my donation, nor would the administration provide an explanation exactly as to what Pepsi was providing in return for restricting my freedom of choice on campus.
The point is: I DON'T BLAME PEPSI. My University signed a shitty contract that (according to them) does not even allow them to divulge the terms of their agreement to the general student body.
Same thing goes for Microsoft. I expect them to offer big dollars with big strings attached, and small dollars with small or no strings. I also expect the university to turn down deals that violate the principles of freedom of choice, be they cola, or OS. A University is NOT a business where simple cost/benifit analysis decides the day. Certain principles should NEVER be crossed no matter how many dollars get thrown in your face. The reality is that principles are being erroded in small and big ways every day, to the point that Universities becoming just another business school catering to business needs - that is bad for both students AND business.
First, for those of you saying 'Google is fast enough even on a 14.4K' - think school with one phone line, perhaps not even available during the day. Or how about connections via satelite phone at $$/min? Suddenly you want super efficient, when you only earn 5 bucks a day.
As to what else this needs, the search engine needs to strip out all the crap before emailing a web page to you (Java, Flash, etc) - should focus on mostly text, small pictures only. Particulary since 486's would be a common platform for people using this, so the search engine better work well on one. You also should be able to strip out all pictures as an option to maximise text info download - remember turning off pictures in Netscape 2.x to speed up your browsing? If you need something it striped out, you should be able to query just for the bits you need later.
Also the ability to share your cache between computers would be huge if they can't have a server to do that for them. At any rate, means of transferring those precious pages you downloaded to another computer - on a floppy, unless you have local email.
I think your idealism has made you forget that IBM and SCO are COMPANIES. That means money is involved. That also means greed is involved.
... and PEOPLE that work for companies. I don't know about you but I certainly would have liked to be involved in the PR group that was carefuly wording that initial response to SCO/everyone else.
I think the FUD line was thought out to drum up support from the Linux/Open source community at large, but it was a sweet little barb none the less.
'Ya know, I used to think short wave radio was cool - until I discovered internet broadcast. Now I can listen to stations around the world, without buying any extra gear.
Maybe in the 3rd world, oh wait, the gear is going to be more expensive than SW radio - maybe not there either. Who is going to buy this to get the mass market price down? Not me.
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Mail (in it's traditional form) is slow, hard to copy, and difficult to compose. Email is fast, easy to copy and easy to compose. Neither are very secure. Combining composability with easy copying gives you forwarding.
With forwarding being so easy, people do it as second nature to share interesting/relevant information. It would not surprise me for a minute to see something I didn't want passed around forwarded because the recipiant didn't realise it was confidential, mostly due to not taking the time to rub two brain cells together. Nevermind the technolgical security issues, which make me place email as being way less secure than calling someone on my phone.
If I'm going to send anything at all that that I don't want forwarded, I'll make it painfully obvious with 'DO NOT FORWARD, PRIVATE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY' etc. Of course, even with that, I still would not forward anything other than the lowest of privacy concern on my part, since email is so insecure.
If I want to keep it secret, the most secure form is to tell no one. If I'm going to tell someone, at the highest security level, it would be in person where I have the least chance of being overheard. Email is LAST method on the list, used only for trivial secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy has some real potential, he could change the world, he could discover some fantastic advancements for the good of human kind, but no. He wants to be a lawyer.
Yes! I was thinking to myself that this kid has potential in two of the areas in the world where he can do a lot of good: physics and math, - he might be one of the few brilliant enough to make significant advances in one of the field(s).
He wants to be a patent lawyer?! I really hope this kid loses his fixation with money and starts thinking about research. His research project on acoustic chambers sounds interesting. Perhaps now that he finally will get some problems worthy of his intellect, he'll start to get the research bug and change to something to do some good in the world. Money will not be one of his problems he turns out to be as brilliant as his speedy degree would indicate.
While I agree that the menu-maze phone system can really suck, sometimes getting a human on the other end to redirect your call can be bad too. I've ended up in multiple call-transfer hell where I get forwarded endlessly to different parts of the company because no one even had any idea who could answer my question. New operators that drop your call are fun too after you've been on hold for 20 minutes.
In a few cases, I even prefer the menu system, for straight forward queries that I just need to provide a meter reading, or get a list of transactions. Once I know the menu route, it's quicker than dealing with a human.
This attitude prevents the general public from using Linux. The general user doesn't want to think about swap files, network configs and boot preferences. Ideally, they want to click "Install" and at the end come up with a system that has their applications ready to go. Command line?! Come on, anyone not interested in computers in general does not want to learn any commands - they want to double-click their application of choice and get on with their day.
I'm smarter than the average bear and I sometimes just want to do something - I'll just install an application with the default settings, learn the minimum nessesary to get the job done and move on. This is the norm for the average user, and computer geeks forget this all the time.
Hi,
I like walks in the park, cooking and sitting in front of a roaring fireplace with a nice glass of port.
Oh, and I am also seeking a like minded individual that thought the article was stupid - I mean, come on, BusinessWeek talking about the science of Love. Sheesh.
Whoever is in charge of marketing has no clue
As a geek who who has to work with Marketing in my job, I can say that clueless marketing not an uncommon state of affairs...
I'd say the proprietary format is a lame attempt to protect the intelectual property of the movie; ie. "We'll let you watch it, but you can't copy it anywhere" Stupid Marketing 'roids!
Would someone be able to copy this and make a bit torrent available in a useful format?
Second vote for useless, at least for anyone who uses a computer regulary. Fine for people who have to think what key to hit for 'any key', but useless for anyone else. I find it amusing that they stick with F1..F12 too for the function keys - isn't the point of this thing to show you what the functions are?
Take this simple comparison: at Google, engineers are expected to spend one day a week on a project of personal interest. This has resulted in new offerings like Google News and social networking site Orkut. At Yahoo, there are posters promoting the "Idea Factory", where employees are invited to well, submit ideas (read boring)."
So Google is ahead as far as technical innovation goes, by some measures. Some here seem to think that that would be enough to ensure success on other fronts, profit and size being the main ones. Can we say "Microsoft" people?
While I think that Google and Yahoo can co-exist if they differentiat their offerings, the "winner" in this battle will be determined by marketing, not technical innovation. The average Joe User will not use Google's latest tool if it is not simple, and/or if the word does not get to Joe User.
So they lost two minutes. Big deal. That's just a cop-out. After so many seasons, they have just run out of steam.
Perhapes a longer story format will bring out something interesting, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hmmm, wonder if you could upgrade your Windows 3.0 to 3.1 for free? Can't recall. I know I did 3.1 to 3.11 on my work machines for free.
I seem to recall 'service pack' came from the Windows 95 upgrades. I was thinking at the time that M$ thought that 95.1 would look kinda stupid, so they came up with the service pack term. But perhaps NT was first to differentiate between free vs paid upgrade with a service pack?
Anyone remember the first 'service pack' and why it was called a 'service pack'?
Is it just me or are others pissed off that M$ has taken the term "Service Pack" and stretched it way beyond it's intended meaning?
A Service Pack should fix bugs, provide MINOR enhancements, and performance tweaks. Anything more is a version change.
Hell, I would be perfectly happy to see the term "Service Pack" disapear entirely to be replaced by 0.01 releases and 0.1 for bigger changes, like most of the rest of the world does. At least that terminology has meaning to me.
Use all CAPS for emphasis:
"Please be sure to FILL IN THE DATE when you sign your form."
Use an exclamation point at the end of something important:
"Half the people didn't date the form we asked them to sign!"
The problem is over-use, not straight use.
On another note, I do not think the examples given are that ridiculous; people write some pretty crappy notes when they just let it "drool out onto the screen". I have looked at emails I've written to friends or people I work with closely and seen that I wrote crap. However, I didn't spend any time writing because I assumed I would get it close enough for them to get the meaning. Anything important or written to a general audience, gets more effort put into it. I ALWAYS preview my posts on Slashdot!
Important for me is to get my sleep. If I'm working long enough that I can't get close to 8 hours, my useful working time goes down rapidly. Next most important is to get at least a couple of hours away doing something else - a game, movie, book etc. By the time you add your travel time, eating, etc you have 12 hours max useful work time.
It's pathetic that EA can't get their asses sued off for treating people like this (and have to pay big time compensation). This, in the sue happy States where you can sue oh so easily for other things...
It's supply and demand - apparently the demand for M$ source code is pretty low if 20 bucks was the best he could do.
Runescape lists how many people are playing at one time. I just added up the servers on the pay side of things and came up with just shy of 10,000 players online right now. If you go with 10% online at any one time, 100K doesn't seem an unreasonable figure.
Someone earlier was saying the assumption is 1/5 (20%) of your subscriber base online at anyone time - that's like 2.5 hours everyday. If that is realistic, then you're only talking 50K. Really, considering his methodology, being off by 2X is not that bad, and I think the trends he points out are valid.
Now, for Runescape, I wonder - note the steady progression upward. Perhapes not having to pay to play initially and not pay for upgrades is having an effect The cheap $5 a month means even bored players might hang on a lot longer just to play the updates. These guys might be on to something.
I play Runescape myself and I don't sweat it if I don't play for a week, or a month because I'm busy - it ain't a large chunk 'o change.
Hmm, How about when your life insurance premium is jacked up because they find out that you have been eating at various fast food vendors > 5 days a month? Same justification smoking, which is hard to hide now. You'd have to be more accountable to get the lowest rate, no less free, just that your actions would have more consequences.
Or, is it better that everyone remain anonymous, put their dollars in the pot, and the insurance rate is based on the average actions of the individuals grouped by the limited information the insurace company is allowed to collect on you?
I was reading on JPL's site last night (don't have link handy, sorry) that the vertical resolution was 4000 pixels. They didn't give a horzontal resolution. Given the picture is 3851 pixels high (cropped?), they might be right in some form.
Looking at the picture, I'm guessing a splice of four pictures, with a middle overlap - you can see two vertical splice zones, and two horizontal splice zones - the bottom horizontal splice zone is the hardest to see - look at the large rock just to the right of center on the image, but still to the left of the right vertical split. Perhaps this is how the camera works - take 4 pictures, beam back for post processing into a 4K X 4K pixel picture.
Scaled is doing leading edge - cheap transport to space. While not a clear 'first', they could be pointed to in the future as having been the first to demonstrate cheap space flight.
So if the Army can pay $hitloads for a bunch of bolts, SCO must be positively drooling for what they can get out of the Army for a Linux licence.
I thought it was supposed to be hooked up to a web cam inside the fridge so you could tell if the light was on inside when the fridge was closed.
The point is: I DON'T BLAME PEPSI. My University signed a shitty contract that (according to them) does not even allow them to divulge the terms of their agreement to the general student body.
Same thing goes for Microsoft. I expect them to offer big dollars with big strings attached, and small dollars with small or no strings. I also expect the university to turn down deals that violate the principles of freedom of choice, be they cola, or OS. A University is NOT a business where simple cost/benifit analysis decides the day. Certain principles should NEVER be crossed no matter how many dollars get thrown in your face. The reality is that principles are being erroded in small and big ways every day, to the point that Universities becoming just another business school catering to business needs - that is bad for both students AND business.
First, for those of you saying 'Google is fast enough even on a 14.4K' - think school with one phone line, perhaps not even available during the day. Or how about connections via satelite phone at $$/min? Suddenly you want super efficient, when you only earn 5 bucks a day.
As to what else this needs, the search engine needs to strip out all the crap before emailing a web page to you (Java, Flash, etc) - should focus on mostly text, small pictures only. Particulary since 486's would be a common platform for people using this, so the search engine better work well on one. You also should be able to strip out all pictures as an option to maximise text info download - remember turning off pictures in Netscape 2.x to speed up your browsing? If you need something it striped out, you should be able to query just for the bits you need later.
Also the ability to share your cache between computers would be huge if they can't have a server to do that for them. At any rate, means of transferring those precious pages you downloaded to another computer - on a floppy, unless you have local email.
... and PEOPLE that work for companies. I don't know about you but I certainly would have liked to be involved in the PR group that was carefuly wording that initial response to SCO/everyone else.
I think the FUD line was thought out to drum up support from the Linux/Open source community at large, but it was a sweet little barb none the less.
'Ya know, I used to think short wave radio was cool - until I discovered internet broadcast. Now I can listen to stations around the world, without buying any extra gear.
Maybe in the 3rd world, oh wait, the gear is going to be more expensive than SW radio - maybe not there either. Who is going to buy this to get the mass market price down? Not me.
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Mail (in it's traditional form) is slow, hard to copy, and difficult to compose. Email is fast, easy to copy and easy to compose. Neither are very secure. Combining composability with easy copying gives you forwarding.
With forwarding being so easy, people do it as second nature to share interesting/relevant information. It would not surprise me for a minute to see something I didn't want passed around forwarded because the recipiant didn't realise it was confidential, mostly due to not taking the time to rub two brain cells together. Nevermind the technolgical security issues, which make me place email as being way less secure than calling someone on my phone.
If I'm going to send anything at all that that I don't want forwarded, I'll make it painfully obvious with 'DO NOT FORWARD, PRIVATE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY' etc. Of course, even with that, I still would not forward anything other than the lowest of privacy concern on my part, since email is so insecure.
If I want to keep it secret, the most secure form is to tell no one. If I'm going to tell someone, at the highest security level, it would be in person where I have the least chance of being overheard. Email is LAST method on the list, used only for trivial secrets.
Brrrr, I just read that and was thinking "What if M$ decided to "program" Hack.net?!
The horror...