Comparing the "bundling" that MS does, to bundling in a standard Linux distribution is missing the mark.
Linux bundles are about offering choice and MS bundles are about taking it away.
If MS bundled 3 different browsers or email clients, I don't think many people would complain. When they bundle their own products to secure more market share for that application; that's where they get in trouble.
It seems many people are pretty quick to defend this guy, but how would you feel if you were the pilot?
What if you were speeding down the highway with your children in your car and some jackass was shining a laser pointer into your car? Even if it's not directly in your eyes, it's still distracting and annoying.
Now imagine your flying a plane full of people, who you are responsible for getting to their destination safely and you have some jackass on the ground pulling the same stunt.
Come on. The guy even does the same thing to the police helicopter.
In custody, he tells the FBI agent not to shine the laser in his eyes "because it could blind him".
Actually, the plane was preparing to land at a local airport, so I doubt it was several thousand feet.
I've also had one of those green laser pointers, and they are considerably brighter than the red lasers most people are familiar with.
Hell, here's a quote from the article: During questioning by the FBI, Banach showed an agent his laser. After the agent switched it on, Banach warned him "not to shine the laser in his eyes because it could blind him," the court documents say.
Too bad he didn't give the pilots the same consideration.
At work, we have a number of Japanese employees and give them Japanese language OS's. You're right, this can't be done with different character sets.
The only Japanese I've learned is that the word starting with the "telephone pole" character means Cancel and "Fat man sitting on small toilet" means Start...
The CRTC forces radio and television stations to play a certain amount of Canadian content. While Canada does have a pretty good music scene (our TV generally sucks, with the exception of Trailer Park Boys), there is hardly ever enough new good music to fill this imposed quota on radio.
What this means, is that Canadian radio shoves the same songs by the same artists down your throat, all day long. I know what you're thinking... the US is the same... trust me, it's worse.
So, at the end of the day we've heard enough. Most of what we download is music from the US.
Is this hurting Canadian artists? Maybe a little. The thing is most Canadians look at the levy as free reign to download all the music they want. US artists suffer. Canadians buy the media to copy music from US artists. Canadian musicians get the levy from the media sale.
Win - Win for all Canadians. Americans get screwed. We love it.
Don't have time to check my facts here, but I remember hearing that the levies on blank CDR's only apply to those that are designated "Music" CDR's. You may notice that some stores (COSTCO is one place I've noticed) have these CDR's located in a different area and cost quite a bit more.
The funny part is, some people would buy these beleiving them to be better quality for recording music because of the label and price.
I think there were talks not long ago about imposing the levy on all storage sold in Canada. That included hard drives, static memory, CDR's, personal music players, etc.
Again, take all of this with a grain of salt, as my memory sucks...
Here I am, as an admin, trying to make sure all of our applications work on XP with regular user ID's, and it's so frustrating.
I get so pissed when I hear that some third party application requires admin to run... now I find out the people writing the OS are running it as admins. So much for these bugs coming out in the wash... then again, for MS, the end user is considered "the wash".
For someone who has to deal with these problems all the time, reading something like this is very discouraging.
I think the idea here is to try to attract more novice and intermediate users to Linux.
I use Gentoo and I really like Portage, but the Gentoo install is overly complicated. While it's a great learning experience to mount the disks, create the file systems, etc., a lot of this could be automated to make the install a little easier and convenient. Compiling from scratch is great, but that's no reason not to have at least a basic install GUI/script to take care of some of the more monotonous tasks.
But I digress, I think these projects have vastly different audiences.
I've found that in certain areas the tech market has really increased. I think it this has a lot to do with telemarketing companies opening shop in areas where minimun wage is low and unemployment is high.
There also seem to be quite a few US based companies looking north of the border. With the weakening American dollar that might change...
So in a way, we're exactly like India... except it's colder... and our beer is better. All your jobs are belong to us, eh!
Reverse psychology?
What I was attempting was self moderation. I was trying to not waste people's time and moderation points, by stating exactly what the comment was about.
So at this point there have been 4 moderation points wasted, pointing out the obvious. It would be nice if they had used to bring to light a comment that had some merrit... maybe spread some positive karma...
HBO is doing this. There are also cable companies that offer "on demand" services, that let you watch programs when you want, without commercials.
While you're entitled to your opinion about what's "worth watching", there are millions of Americans willing to watch just about anything. The networks are still doing quite well with the quality of shows they are currently producing. Things are probably going to get worse before they get better.
I don't think geek gamers could really make that much of a difference. That strategy would never work because there are too many people out there that are going to go to Walmart and buy their kids the games.
Geeks:"
RIAA == Evil
MS == monopoly
EA == Tryrants"
General Public: "Hey this new XBox game, EA Sports Synchronized Swimming, has the latest Britney Spears song on the sound track!!!!! Hey, pimply guy with the funny penguin on your shirt, wrap that up for me!!"
Check out http://www.kantech.com/. We use one of their systems and it does exactly what you want.
Some RFID protocols are more secure than others. We use cards with the XSF protocol, which according to our vendor is one of the more secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing the "bundling" that MS does, to bundling in a standard Linux distribution is missing the mark.
Linux bundles are about offering choice and MS bundles are about taking it away.
If MS bundled 3 different browsers or email clients, I don't think many people would complain. When they bundle their own products to secure more market share for that application; that's where they get in trouble.
That's my 2 cents.
It seems many people are pretty quick to defend this guy, but how would you feel if you were the pilot?
What if you were speeding down the highway with your children in your car and some jackass was shining a laser pointer into your car? Even if it's not directly in your eyes, it's still distracting and annoying.
Now imagine your flying a plane full of people, who you are responsible for getting to their destination safely and you have some jackass on the ground pulling the same stunt.
Come on. The guy even does the same thing to the police helicopter.
In custody, he tells the FBI agent not to shine the laser in his eyes "because it could blind him".
Jackass.
Actually, the plane was preparing to land at a local airport, so I doubt it was several thousand feet.
I've also had one of those green laser pointers, and they are considerably brighter than the red lasers most people are familiar with.
Hell, here's a quote from the article:
During questioning by the FBI, Banach showed an agent his laser. After the agent switched it on, Banach warned him "not to shine the laser in his eyes because it could blind him," the court documents say.
Too bad he didn't give the pilots the same consideration.
At work, we have a number of Japanese employees and give them Japanese language OS's. You're right, this can't be done with different character sets.
The only Japanese I've learned is that the word starting with the "telephone pole" character means Cancel and "Fat man sitting on small toilet" means Start...
What do you mean, an African or European canary?
Uh... how is this statement "just wrong"?
He didn't say "Macs are ONLY good for new to computers people"...
Macs are good for everyone.
He's right.
You're right.
We're all right.
Merry Christmas.
I have a theory on this:
The CRTC forces radio and television stations to play a certain amount of Canadian content. While Canada does have a pretty good music scene (our TV generally sucks, with the exception of Trailer Park Boys), there is hardly ever enough new good music to fill this imposed quota on radio.
What this means, is that Canadian radio shoves the same songs by the same artists down your throat, all day long. I know what you're thinking... the US is the same... trust me, it's worse.
So, at the end of the day we've heard enough. Most of what we download is music from the US.
Is this hurting Canadian artists? Maybe a little. The thing is most Canadians look at the levy as free reign to download all the music they want. US artists suffer. Canadians buy the media to copy music from US artists. Canadian musicians get the levy from the media sale.
Win - Win for all Canadians. Americans get screwed. We love it.
Don't have time to check my facts here, but I remember hearing that the levies on blank CDR's only apply to those that are designated "Music" CDR's. You may notice that some stores (COSTCO is one place I've noticed) have these CDR's located in a different area and cost quite a bit more.
The funny part is, some people would buy these beleiving them to be better quality for recording music because of the label and price.
I think there were talks not long ago about imposing the levy on all storage sold in Canada. That included hard drives, static memory, CDR's, personal music players, etc.
Again, take all of this with a grain of salt, as my memory sucks...
Here I am, as an admin, trying to make sure all of our applications work on XP with regular user ID's, and it's so frustrating.
I get so pissed when I hear that some third party application requires admin to run... now I find out the people writing the OS are running it as admins. So much for these bugs coming out in the wash... then again, for MS, the end user is considered "the wash".
For someone who has to deal with these problems all the time, reading something like this is very discouraging.
I think the idea here is to try to attract more novice and intermediate users to Linux.
I use Gentoo and I really like Portage, but the Gentoo install is overly complicated. While it's a great learning experience to mount the disks, create the file systems, etc., a lot of this could be automated to make the install a little easier and convenient. Compiling from scratch is great, but that's no reason not to have at least a basic install GUI/script to take care of some of the more monotonous tasks.
But I digress, I think these projects have vastly different audiences.
I've found that in certain areas the tech market has really increased. I think it this has a lot to do with telemarketing companies opening shop in areas where minimun wage is low and unemployment is high.
There also seem to be quite a few US based companies looking north of the border. With the weakening American dollar that might change...
So in a way, we're exactly like India... except it's colder... and our beer is better.
All your jobs are belong to us, eh!
Reverse psychology?
What I was attempting was self moderation. I was trying to not waste people's time and moderation points, by stating exactly what the comment was about.
So at this point there have been 4 moderation points wasted, pointing out the obvious. It would be nice if they had used to bring to light a comment that had some merrit... maybe spread some positive karma...
And Bob Ross, God rest his sole, still rocks.
Isn't it nice to state in your subject that your post is offtopic and still be moded -1 Offtopic.
Moderators, what would we do without your infinite wisdom and guidance?
No, seriously, what?
-1 Flamebait
Bob Ross rocks!!!
Jonathan , is that you?
Didn't I read an article about you here
HBO is doing this. There are also cable companies that offer "on demand" services, that let you watch programs when you want, without commercials.
While you're entitled to your opinion about what's "worth watching", there are millions of Americans willing to watch just about anything. The networks are still doing quite well with the quality of shows they are currently producing. Things are probably going to get worse before they get better.
ever notice how (almost) every computer ever shown in movie or TV show is a Mac?
I've heard that's really because two button mice confuse actors.
I don't think geek gamers could really make that much of a difference. That strategy would never work because there are too many people out there that are going to go to Walmart and buy their kids the games.
Geeks:" RIAA == Evil
MS == monopoly
EA == Tryrants"
General Public: "Hey this new XBox game, EA Sports Synchronized Swimming, has the latest Britney Spears song on the sound track!!!!! Hey, pimply guy with the funny penguin on your shirt, wrap that up for me!!"
Unlike smoking crack, selling crack actually has victims...
hrrmm.. most slashdotters probably wouldn't know much how to "take advantage of perturbations of a second body"...
Why is *every* negative comment about the prequels moderated as trolls? They did suck. Moding people down isn't going to change that fact.
Check out http://www.kantech.com/. We use one of their systems and it does exactly what you want.
Some RFID protocols are more secure than others. We use cards with the XSF protocol, which according to our vendor is one of the more secure.