The other word they're suing for is "direct insurance" - according to this slightly more informative story from AP out on the wires now.
What really bugs me is that AXA did not pay Google to be listed. AXA can easily deny, via robots.txt, google's ability to visit their site. AXA is getting tons of free publicity via exposure on google. What right does it have to deny clearly demarcated ads on the very same site?
Originality in art is overrated anyway, a lot of truly great art is derivative. This is true of painting and sculpture as much as it is true of movies. Even something as left-field as cubism has echoes in several older styles.
Movies have _always_ largely been derivative - think of all the "classics" like Ben Hur, Gone with the Wind, Spartacus... Even something like Casablaca was written originally for the stage. The Matrix was heavily influenced by anime and other schools.
But yeah - considering that the average game has the emotional depth of a Penthouse photofeature (and storylines about as scanty too), they'd translate into lousy movies. (Remember Dungeons and Dragons?) Expect a lot of FX and nothing more.
I'd love AIM to be opened up, but I'm not holding my breath. Mail is a commodity now, and there is no obvious benefit in walling it up any more. But IM is dominated by the big three: AOL+ICQ, MSN and Yahoo. AOL has too much to lose by letting go, especially since its craptacular IM client is likely to be beaten hands down by Gaim or MSN Messenger.
> Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Copyright Act, 1957 >... Is that Indian law
Both are Indian laws. FWIW, Indian law is largely based upon English common law. It's quite common for Indian courts to cite English and US Court judgement in their judgements. (India's tradition of of law interpretation is one reason why India has been considered a "safer" IP outsourcing destination than, say, China).
One thing that Indian courts don't have (very apparent in criminal trials) is a jury. (It had one to begin with, it was abandoned after it was found prone to abuse) The judge alone hears arguments and interprets the law.
Quoth grandparent: Accuracy, reliability, and security, is only achieved on mainframes.
If the IT biz thought that way, then the only folk who would benefit from data processing would be the Fortune 1000. Accuracy, reliability, and security are now available in PCs to increasingly greater extents, and this is benefiting small biz tremendously.
And quoth parent: That is because most managers have never made an effort to compute what it would cost them if they should lose their data, and also do not have a clue what a downtime costs them.
Actually, many managers do cost/benefit analysis - if the cost of momentary downtime (such as rebooting after the monthly patch/reboot thing) is less than the (total!) cost of the mainframe, it's cheaper to plonk down for PCs.
For example, *please* don't tell me that the original Hotmail should have ditched it's frontline of BSD httpds for a mainframe or three. Or that Google should abandon its thousands of index and doc servers for a few big fraggin' mainframes.
Mainframes are damned good for some things. But let's not get carried away here: the PC (and even PC based databases) are not a fad, and are damned good at *other* things (and other price points!)
For those who love the command line: exactly nothing. Services for Unix is free and supported by the OS vendor, and if you don't like it there's always UnixUtils, 4NT and Cygwin.
Hey, "hellhole" was just for dramatic effect, to make the Dune connection:-).
About the beach though -- Chennai has a wonderful, long seafront and is doing a great job in f***ing it up. The Marina promenade is great but have you noticed how dirty it is lately? Besant Nagar is a little better, but plummeting by the day. The only way to get a half-decent stretch is to go the relative outskirts, near VGP (please correct me if there's someplace closer).
And yes, I hope the desalination plants kick in quickly too -- I think it's pretty clear that Chennai groundwater won't last the next 10-15 years at current consumption rates.
I live in Chennai. Imagine: a dusty hellhole blasted by an unforgiving tropical sun (daytime can be as bad as 44C/90% humidity, from the sea), parched by chronic water shortages because there's not enough fresh/river water to support the population, a place where no sane man would choose to be, but which is "outsourcing's ground zero" (Salon's words) because it has the one thing prized throughout the Imperium: CHEAP PROGRAMMERS.
There's such a severe shortage of water here that while the wealthy buy theirs commercially and have it delivered to their homes in trucks by the tankful, their servants -- the legions of drivers and cooks and maids and guards -- wait in line for more than an hour each day to receive their own subsidized rations.
Walking the ragged sidewalks here means dodging not only the other pedestrians and stray dogs, but one-man-band businesses that have annexed scraps of pavement: a tailor sits behind an ancient sewing machine in the middle of the pavement, open for business.
And yet, on the same streets where child beggars wade into traffic, putting their cupped filthy hands to their mouths to plead for food, billboards advertising "Business Process Outsourcing" broadcast an entirely different set of possibilities.
(Taking tongue away from cheek) Ha ha only serious. On a more positive note, it's also India's Bandwidth Capital because of all those transpacific cables landing here via Singapore. And electricity is very cheap here, probably the cheapest among all of India's major cities.
I admit, the closed-source UIs are very pretty, but they're easily outweighed by things like NFS, greater stability, etc.
I really hate to break this to you, but Windows has been a pretty stable/desktop/ environment since, oh, Windows 2000. File sharing over NTFS works pretty damn well, and there's a great *free* set of tools for scp'ing, NFSing, and whatnot. Lots of great 3rd party tools too.
Btw, not seen this mentioned anywhere, but John Udell did a great job of digging into how good Macs really are at connecting to network printers. Ain't pretty. Have to say, Gruber is bang-on when he says this is something that Windows is much better at. On Windows, connecting to shared printer is as easy as:
- type the URN for the printer (say \\kathy\printer) into Explorer's address bar (or navigate to it via Network Places) - If you've never used that printer before, you are prompted to click "yes" to install a driver (Windows caches common drivers, or fetches it via the web, or asks you to insert a driver CD/floppy) - the printer's now usable
Btw, I'm a happy and satisfied Linux user, but my interface of choice is bash via PuTTY since I've not yet met a Linux GUI that actually allowed me to be productive.
I think Real is not unaware of the nag/ad-ware problem, but they seem to be doing nothing about it unless big customers like the BBC pressure them. From Boing Boing:
An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a
unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."
The problems may sound similar, but there is a difference in the level of the problem. Read the links I provided in the parent post and tell me if what they describe isn't barbarous. From here:
Indians are driven by different needs, and most live in a world quite alien to American suburbia. The domestic economy is the number one issue for most Indian voters. Government corruption runs a close second. Of course, context is most important. A concern for the economy in India is about getting a job that makes the difference between starving or a life of crime, not about a dip in ones 401(k) returns. Government corruption is about convicted murderers running for office while in jail, and the execution of minorities aided by the misuse of official power, not disappearing Ted Kennedy DUIs.
Devdas fits into the usual Bollywood stereotype very neatly. In fact, considering it was first made back in the 30s, it was probably responsible for setting the moronic melodrama trend that permeates Bollywood to this day.
Lagaan - melodramatic crap. They had balls to nominate it for an Oscar.
Monsoon Wedding - Hindi movie != Bollywood. Mira Nair isn't a mainstream director. Monsoon Wedding did about as well in India as Spirited Away did in the US.
I think in another 50 years that India will be beside the US in terms of being a world superpower. In a hundred it will be the most powerful nation in the world
> I will preface this with, I have never used Lotus Notes.
This is not intended to flame, but you touched a nerve. I have to use Notes at work and my 2p is -- Notes sucks! Since you said "designed by and for geeks", I'll give you two points:
It can't show conversation threads in email unless you switch to a special "Mail Threads view" -- but this view operates *across folders*, so if you use folders to store email for different projects -- sorry, out of luck, you will see all your mail together. Good luck subscribing to multiple mailing lists with this mail client.
Mail Rules suck as well. You can route mail to different folders, but if a message matches more than one rule, then *both* will be executed (and the message can end up in more than one folder!) -- there is no way (upto R6, I don't know if this is fixed in 6.5) to tell Notes to "stop processing other rules if this rule matches". If you can program Notes, you can hack the template to get around this, but any MUA that processes rules this way is brain dead.
There are other issues as well, but these are my top 2.
> They let thier geeks have some real fun in creating > what may be the best email client program ever.
They did let their geeks have fun, and they had amazingly cool guys like Ray Ozzie, but they created the most amazing Document Workflow Engine ever, not the best email client. Email in Notes feels like, and always has been, a bolted-on afterthought.
The "wide ranges" is necessary for MSN Messenger file sharing (and audio+video chat), not for basic text chat. Technet has some details on how NATs and firewalls affect Messenger.
I'm curious: are there any apps that do P2P voice/video/file sharing and still are considered "secure" from a firewall administrator's perspective?
Maybe because it'd be a kamikaze defence: if the EMP goes off, the city is toast: no water, no electricity. Etc. The EMPs seem to have been intended to be set off _away_ from Zion.
Slashdot Mirror
The other word they're suing for is "direct insurance" - according to this slightly more informative story from AP out on the wires now.
What really bugs me is that AXA did not pay Google to be listed. AXA can easily deny, via robots.txt, google's ability to visit their site. AXA is getting tons of free publicity via exposure on google. What right does it have to deny clearly demarcated ads on the very same site?
Originality in art is overrated anyway, a lot of truly great art is derivative. This is true of painting and sculpture as much as it is true of movies. Even something as left-field as cubism has echoes in several older styles.
Movies have _always_ largely been derivative - think of all the "classics" like Ben Hur, Gone with the Wind, Spartacus... Even something like Casablaca was written originally for the stage. The Matrix was heavily influenced by anime and other schools.
But yeah - considering that the average game has the emotional depth of a Penthouse photofeature (and storylines about as scanty too), they'd translate into lousy movies. (Remember Dungeons and Dragons?) Expect a lot of FX and nothing more.
It still is. TOC is a stripped down version of OSCAR, which is what AOL's IM clients (and other licensed IM clients like IBM's Sametime) use.
I'd love AIM to be opened up, but I'm not holding my breath. Mail is a commodity now, and there is no obvious benefit in walling it up any more. But IM is dominated by the big three: AOL+ICQ, MSN and Yahoo. AOL has too much to lose by letting go, especially since its craptacular IM client is likely to be beaten hands down by Gaim or MSN Messenger.
> Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Copyright Act, 1957 ... Is that Indian law
>
Both are Indian laws. FWIW, Indian law is largely based upon English common law. It's quite common for Indian courts to cite English and US Court judgement in their judgements. (India's tradition of of law interpretation is one reason why India has been considered a "safer" IP outsourcing destination than, say, China).
One thing that Indian courts don't have (very apparent in criminal trials) is a jury. (It had one to begin with, it was abandoned after it was found prone to abuse) The judge alone hears arguments and interprets the law.
> have the mp3 player read the data from standard-in
:-)
To a large extent this is a mindset problem. Most Windows MP3 player writers don't consider reading from stdin to be an important feature.
> commands to interact with the clipboard
Again, a mindset problem. Thankfully, pclip.exe from UnxUtils does the trick.
Frankly, I solve this problem by using the best of both worlds: the Windows GUI and the Linux command line. Definitely boosts my productivity
Quoth grandparent: Accuracy, reliability, and security, is only achieved on mainframes.
If the IT biz thought that way, then the only folk who would benefit from data processing would be the Fortune 1000. Accuracy, reliability, and security are now available in PCs to increasingly greater extents, and this is benefiting small biz tremendously.
And quoth parent: That is because most managers have never made an effort to compute what it would cost them if they should lose their data, and also do not have a clue what a downtime costs them.
Actually, many managers do cost/benefit analysis - if the cost of momentary downtime (such as rebooting after the monthly patch/reboot thing) is less than the (total!) cost of the mainframe, it's cheaper to plonk down for PCs.
For example, *please* don't tell me that the original Hotmail should have ditched it's frontline of BSD httpds for a mainframe or three. Or that Google should abandon its thousands of index and doc servers for a few big fraggin' mainframes.
Mainframes are damned good for some things. But let's not get carried away here: the PC (and even PC based databases) are not a fad, and are damned good at *other* things (and other price points!)
>What are the Windows people missing out on?
For those who love the command line: exactly nothing. Services for Unix is free and supported by the OS vendor, and if you don't like it there's always UnixUtils, 4NT and Cygwin.
> That has got the be the weirdest use of drag and drop I have ever heard.
PS. Works on Windows too! (Drag a file from Explorer onto a cmd window)
Hey, "hellhole" was just for dramatic effect, to make the Dune connection :-).
About the beach though -- Chennai has a wonderful, long seafront and is doing a great job in f***ing it up. The Marina promenade is great but have you noticed how dirty it is lately? Besant Nagar is a little better, but plummeting by the day. The only way to get a half-decent stretch is to go the relative outskirts, near VGP (please correct me if there's someplace closer).
And yes, I hope the desalination plants kick in quickly too -- I think it's pretty clear that Chennai groundwater won't last the next 10-15 years at current consumption rates.
>Any company that this happens I stop using.
>[...] they speak broken english half the time.
Nothing against $your_nationality, but your English syntax appears to be broken as well.
(Taking tongue away from cheek) Ha ha only serious. On a more positive note, it's also India's Bandwidth Capital because of all those transpacific cables landing here via Singapore. And electricity is very cheap here, probably the cheapest among all of India's major cities.
I admit, the closed-source UIs are very pretty, but they're easily outweighed by things like NFS, greater stability, etc.
/desktop/ environment since, oh, Windows 2000. File sharing over NTFS works pretty damn well, and there's a great *free* set of tools for scp'ing, NFSing, and whatnot. Lots of great 3rd party tools too.
I really hate to break this to you, but Windows has been a pretty stable
Btw, not seen this mentioned anywhere, but John Udell did a great job of digging into how good Macs really are at connecting to network printers. Ain't pretty. Have to say, Gruber is bang-on when he says this is something that Windows is much better at. On Windows, connecting to shared printer is as easy as:
- type the URN for the printer (say \\kathy\printer) into Explorer's address bar (or navigate to it via Network Places)
- If you've never used that printer before, you are prompted to click "yes" to install a driver (Windows caches common drivers, or fetches it via the web, or asks you to insert a driver CD/floppy)
- the printer's now usable
Btw, I'm a happy and satisfied Linux user, but my interface of choice is bash via PuTTY since I've not yet met a Linux GUI that actually allowed me to be productive.
NYTimes -- via CNET -- published the story on March 31, though, and explicity mentions 1GB storage.
Devdas fits into the usual Bollywood stereotype very neatly. In fact, considering it was first made back in the 30s, it was probably responsible for setting the moronic melodrama trend that permeates Bollywood to this day.
Lagaan - melodramatic crap. They had balls to nominate it for an Oscar.
Monsoon Wedding - Hindi movie != Bollywood. Mira Nair isn't a mainstream director. Monsoon Wedding did about as well in India as Spirited Away did in the US.
I think in another 50 years that India will be beside the US in terms of being a world superpower. In a hundred it will be the most powerful nation in the world
Not unless they figure out how to think as one nation instead of several chauvinistic states. Oh, and get rid of the pork-bellied ruling class that has held the country back so far.
> I will preface this with, I have never used Lotus Notes.
This is not intended to flame, but you touched a nerve. I have to use Notes at work and my 2p is -- Notes sucks! Since you said "designed by and for geeks", I'll give you two points:
It can't show conversation threads in email unless you switch to a special "Mail Threads view" -- but this view operates *across folders*, so if you use folders to store email for different projects -- sorry, out of luck, you will see all your mail together. Good luck subscribing to multiple mailing lists with this mail client.
Mail Rules suck as well. You can route mail to different folders, but if a message matches more than one rule, then *both* will be executed (and the message can end up in more than one folder!) -- there is no way (upto R6, I don't know if this is fixed in 6.5) to tell Notes to "stop processing other rules if this rule matches". If you can program Notes, you can hack the template to get around this, but any MUA that processes rules this way is brain dead.
There are other issues as well, but these are my top 2.
> They let thier geeks have some real fun in creating
> what may be the best email client program ever.
They did let their geeks have fun, and they had amazingly cool guys like Ray Ozzie, but they created the most amazing Document Workflow Engine ever, not the best email client. Email in Notes feels like, and always has been, a bolted-on afterthought.
A secure Operating System "like Linux"...
Linux is a secure Operating System? (now if you had said VMS...)
Or try: what is the answer to life, the universe and everything.
The "wide ranges" is necessary for MSN Messenger file sharing (and audio+video chat), not for basic text chat. Technet has some details on how NATs and firewalls affect Messenger.
I'm curious: are there any apps that do P2P voice/video/file sharing and still are considered "secure" from a firewall administrator's perspective?
... check out The Miller's Tale in the Matrix Comics.
Maybe because it'd be a kamikaze defence: if the EMP goes off, the city is toast: no water, no electricity. Etc. The EMPs seem to have been intended to be set off _away_ from Zion.