Word became dominant not only because it piled on the features, but because Microsoft was clever enough to invent the bundled "office suite". Why pay $150 for WordPerfect when for $250 you can get MS Word AND Excel AND PowerPoint? Word may or may not have been the better word processor, but Office was perceived as the better value.
As for the state of Word today, what innovation is left for them to add? (famous last words) Ninety percent of the features that Word DOES have are only used by five percent of the users.
So, tell me, if I'm a counterfitter, why wouldn't I just copy the older bills and 'age' them in the washing machine?
How many pre-1990's $20's do you see in circulation anymore?
As the 'greenback' bills wear out and more and more are taken out of circulation and replaced with the new bleach-stain-looking bills, it will be more and more suspicious for someone to possess a large number of green bills.
So you might be able to make passable counterfeits of the old bills today, but 5 or 10 years from now those same bills are going to raise eyebrows.
the money is going to come out of the user/customer's pocket...
IE became the dominant browser in part because it was completely free. If MS has to start charging users for it, they WILL lose some users to other, better commercial browsers like Opera, and still-absolutely-free browsers like Mozilla.
(On the other hand, if the price of a PC with Windows and IE pre-installed just has to go up $5 due to this, no one will notice.)
All that this comment taught me is that people who watch television are depriving themselves of their ability to be sanctimonious assholes.
So you don't enjoy TV, great. That's no reason for you to start foaming at the mouth about how it's rotting the rest of our minds and destroying our imaginations.
I want to read the article, but it's going to take me a few minutes until I figure out which of the dozen hyperlinks in the story submission actually GOES to the article.
Hyperlinks are like drugs; they can be addictive, they can make your life happier or worse, and perhaps most importantly, abuse of them ought to be punishable by law.
At the exit station, patrons must walk through a barrier that reads the RFID tag, and looks up the tag in the database of all books currently checked out. If it fails the test, an alarm sounds (and the little exit bar locks)
What if the database is unavailable? Does everyone get locked inside the library until a DBA manages to restore service?
I'm half-inspired to submit your story to RISKS Digest. Trouble waiting to happen.
This will just make checking out books a bit easier. Walk through the RFID scanner, swipe you library card, and walk out.
Is this REALLY that much more efficient than scanning a barcode on the library card, and then scanning a barcode on each item to be checked out, as is currently typical practice?
Is it so much more efficient that it would be worthwhile for libraries to buy hundreds of thousands of RFID tags and have staff spend months if not years re-tagging every item in the collection?
Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame?
Well, if a spot is embedded every three minutes or so, cutting out the bad frames would result in the run time of a typical feature film being reduced by an entire second! This would obviously be very bad.
Look, just cut to the chase and give the VIP a blowjob. That's symbolically what you'd be doing with an expensive, favor-currying technogift for someone who already makes more money than you, anyway.
Or better yet, the geniuses at Handspring.com could have designed their site in a way that visiting a product information page doesn't involve a session ID in any way.
Putting session ID's in the URL is extroardinarily insecure and mungable anyway. It's terrible design.
Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
Well, Windows users don't seem to complain too much about having Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime for Windows, RealOne Player, and Winamp all installed on their systems simultaneously...
Are you suggesting that spammers actually bother to pay sales taxes on the herbal viagras and teen slut web site subscriptions they peddle? I would doubt that.
"if I were on life-support, I'd rather have it run by a Gameboy than a Windows box"
Really? In my experience Windows boxes can usually go about a week before requiring a reboot, but a Gameboy's batteries will be lucky to go longer than 10 hours...
$25 an hour if they give you benefits. If they don't, insist on at least $40.
But seriously, a lot of other variables need to be taken into consideration too. How many hours a week do you want to work on it? What else is going on in your life that will be competing with it for your time? Who will own the copyright to the code you will produce (remember that "open source" and "public domain" mean different things)? What specific features do they want you to add to your software, and how does that match up with your own development plans?
Slashdot Mirror
will Napster regain its place as the premiere music distribution service?
No.
Any more brain-busters?
Word became dominant not only because it piled on the features, but because Microsoft was clever enough to invent the bundled "office suite". Why pay $150 for WordPerfect when for $250 you can get MS Word AND Excel AND PowerPoint? Word may or may not have been the better word processor, but Office was perceived as the better value.
As for the state of Word today, what innovation is left for them to add? (famous last words) Ninety percent of the features that Word DOES have are only used by five percent of the users.
So, tell me, if I'm a counterfitter, why wouldn't I just copy the older bills and 'age' them in the washing machine?
How many pre-1990's $20's do you see in circulation anymore?
As the 'greenback' bills wear out and more and more are taken out of circulation and replaced with the new bleach-stain-looking bills, it will be more and more suspicious for someone to possess a large number of green bills.
So you might be able to make passable counterfeits of the old bills today, but 5 or 10 years from now those same bills are going to raise eyebrows.
the money is going to come out of the user/customer's pocket...
IE became the dominant browser in part because it was completely free. If MS has to start charging users for it, they WILL lose some users to other, better commercial browsers like Opera, and still-absolutely-free browsers like Mozilla.
(On the other hand, if the price of a PC with Windows and IE pre-installed just has to go up $5 due to this, no one will notice.)
If you're using Cygwin, what are the advantages to using software packages like Dev-C++ and PuTTY, rather than the GNU gcc and ssh equivalents?
The downside of this plan?
The form factor for the PC case is 600 meters tall.
That's where the standard agrument fails, because mega, kilo, giga, terra, et al are base 10 prefixes not base 2.
True, but they've been (mis)appropriated for use with binary storage systems for as long as binary systems have been in use. Hence the confusion.
(Semi-)Officially, 'kilo' means 1000 and 'kibi' means 1024. But unofficially, 'kilo' means either 1000 or 1024, depending.
(forget what you saw in the overly romanticized movie 'A Beautiful Mind')
Aww, but Jennifer Connelly is SO PRETTY...!
I think if I'm getting hired for a job and I can communicate effectively that should be the basis I am hired for, not for if I give a great interview.
And what do you think the purpose of a job interview is? One of the most important purposes is to demonstrate that you can communicate effectively.
1/41/23/4''xaae(R)uuiooaBdoae(C)nc
I'm assuming you didn't actually input this as plain 7-bit ASCII characters, and something in the Slashcode automagically converted it.
Why the German 'ess-tsett' was translated into a capital 'B', I can only wonder.
All that this comment taught me is that people who watch television are depriving themselves of their ability to be sanctimonious assholes.
So you don't enjoy TV, great. That's no reason for you to start foaming at the mouth about how it's rotting the rest of our minds and destroying our imaginations.
I want to read the article, but it's going to take me a few minutes until I figure out which of the dozen hyperlinks in the story submission actually GOES to the article.
Hyperlinks are like drugs; they can be addictive, they can make your life happier or worse, and perhaps most importantly, abuse of them ought to be punishable by law.
In order for Linux to become as popular and intuitive [shiver] as Windows, things like "setting execute permissions" need to be automatic
No. Not automatic. NEVER automatic. It only needs to be simple.
Right click, "Let me run this file". That's intuitive enough for Windows users that can't deal with `chmod u+x`.
Look at Lindows! You run as root.
That's what I would call a "critical design flaw." YMMV.
But "Regular User Guy" won't apply that patch.
He might if a "Redhat Update" daemon popped up a dialog saying "It is recommended that you install this security patch."
At the exit station, patrons must walk through a barrier that reads the RFID tag, and looks up the tag in the database of all books currently checked out. If it fails the test, an alarm sounds (and the little exit bar locks)
What if the database is unavailable? Does everyone get locked inside the library until a DBA manages to restore service?
I'm half-inspired to submit your story to RISKS Digest. Trouble waiting to happen.
This will just make checking out books a bit easier. Walk through the RFID scanner, swipe you library card, and walk out.
Is this REALLY that much more efficient than scanning a barcode on the library card, and then scanning a barcode on each item to be checked out, as is currently typical practice?
Is it so much more efficient that it would be worthwhile for libraries to buy hundreds of thousands of RFID tags and have staff spend months if not years re-tagging every item in the collection?
Doubtful.
Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame?
Well, if a spot is embedded every three minutes or so, cutting out the bad frames would result in the run time of a typical feature film being reduced by an entire second! This would obviously be very bad.
Look, just cut to the chase and give the VIP a blowjob. That's symbolically what you'd be doing with an expensive, favor-currying technogift for someone who already makes more money than you, anyway.
Or better yet, the geniuses at Handspring.com could have designed their site in a way that visiting a product information page doesn't involve a session ID in any way.
Putting session ID's in the URL is extroardinarily insecure and mungable anyway. It's terrible design.
If the name of this company doesn't sound entirely familiar, maybe you will remember the name of one of their former employees, Thomas Anderson.
You mean the old bald guy that Beavis & Butt-head used to antagonize?
Won't this seem daunting to the end user (labelled automatically as stupid), having two different applications, with individual libraries, for doing the exact same thing.
Well, Windows users don't seem to complain too much about having Microsoft Windows Media Player, Apple Quicktime for Windows, RealOne Player, and Winamp all installed on their systems simultaneously...
Spam is revenue for the State
Huh?
Are you suggesting that spammers actually bother to pay sales taxes on the herbal viagras and teen slut web site subscriptions they peddle? I would doubt that.
"Hacker" is not a technical term like "CPU" or "hard drive" or "modem". Its definition IS dependent on the way people use it.
The same guidelines for meaning cannot be applied to all words regardless of their context. Ask any linguistician.
"if I were on life-support, I'd rather have it run by a Gameboy than a Windows box"
Really? In my experience Windows boxes can usually go about a week before requiring a reboot, but a Gameboy's batteries will be lucky to go longer than 10 hours...
$25 an hour if they give you benefits. If they don't, insist on at least $40.
But seriously, a lot of other variables need to be taken into consideration too. How many hours a week do you want to work on it? What else is going on in your life that will be competing with it for your time? Who will own the copyright to the code you will produce (remember that "open source" and "public domain" mean different things)? What specific features do they want you to add to your software, and how does that match up with your own development plans?
combined with advanced adaptive audio compression techniques like MP3 and MP4
EEEEEEW!
Lossy compression in anathema to pro/semi-pro/home-studio audio recording and mastering.