Microsoft's biggest mistake was thinking people wouldn't write complicated apps in Javascript. They supported it, in their usual half broken style, but it created the only widely deployed cross-platform system for running code that Microsoft has ever implemented. Now, with Firefox 3 running so fast javascript might become THE platform. It's hilarious because Javascript started out as such a kludgy platform and now it is becoming a serious contender if only because it's the only cross-platform thing Microsoft ever supported.
Happens with a lot of drugs after they go generic. They will come back next year with new "improved" prozac which has an extra methyl ring that doesn't do anything except let them patent a new drug that's largely the same as the old drug.
1. You have no motivation at all to do any kind of exercise when depressed. It's hard to even get out of bed. Thus Physical exercise is a symptom of depression lifting not a cause.
2. Why don't you ask the person on the meds whether they help. He has a brain and stuff and unless he's really stupid he can tell you what's going on up there.
I remember seeing a presentation on this at a Search Engine Marketing conference in 2005. PPC bidding companies have been doing this for a long time. Microsoft has the media muscle to get the average IT dummy to start thinking about this like it's a revolutionary breakthrough that only the geniuses at Microsoft could possibly figure out.
Empirical confirmation of supersymmetry (for example detecting the hypothetical Lightest Supersymmetric Particle or any other particle predicted by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model) would falsify all existing versions of Heim theory, which are mutually exclusive with supersymmetry. Also, it is not certain whether Heim theory would be able to accommodate the existence of the Higgs boson, the only undiscovered particle expected in the Standard Model, and one which has not been predicted by the published versions of the Heim mass formula. Heim theory is said to be a Higgs-less theory as it is not dependent on the Higgs mechanism for the concept of mass. The ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to discover the Higgs boson in the next several years, if it exists.
As a Sidekick owner I am totally bummed out about this. The one area where the Sidekick is better than any other smart phone out there is it is DEBUGGED! I have never lost data, never had to reboot, never gone out of my mind dealing with bugs or slowness like I have with most other cellphones I have tried. The thing would sometimes not render wide-screen websites properly but it would never flat out crash. That was kind of the bargain with the sidekick, all you can eat data and easy to use well tested features instead of the latest in whiz bangy glitz. Well at least they didn't buy Yahoo...
Yeah how are they going to keep making money off of OS Upgrades if they can't break the Internet for everyone who hasn't paid their OS upgrade tax recently?
No just build the thing into a desk fan, build a million of them in China. Sell them at cost and then sell a solar panel to run them on that is actually just a wire that shorts the circuit appropriately to activate the perpetual motion device and make the fan run forever.
Bio-fuels make developing and developed world farmers switch from food crops to bio-fuels crops which drives up the price of food for the poorest members of society. In some cases farmers are even switching to thigns like Jatropha which are poisonous. It's really sick and twisted that we can drive our SUVs and feel good about being environmentalists by using corn that could be eaten by starving people in developing nations and be depleting topsoil at the same time.
Let me also pre-emptively respond to those who think that because they have cellphones they are now contributing to global warming. By not having to travel to see their children or far off relatives in order to have a conversation they are reducing their carbon footprint massively.
An above-average wrongful death compensation award for a healthy working parent would be in the $1-3 million dollar range. You could go murder somebody. It'd be cheaper than pirating a few CDs. And if the CDs had DRM, the jail sentence would be shorter for the murder too! The US military pays out $600 for wrongful deaths in Iraq. A pirated CD copy is worth more than 2500 Iraqis! But you forget, dead formerly working parents and Iraqis don't give big campaign contributions.
The generals will also get to blame collateral damage on bugs in the software. For instance: "Oh yeah the flame thrower robot went crazy and torched the entire village because some guy at Lockheed put a semicolon on the end of a for loop. Oops, we'll have to fix that in the next rev".
Music companies are in the business of telling people what to buy. They used to be in the business of recording and distribution. Recording and distribution are not very hard to do these days. Piracy means that they don't get paid for telling people what to buy. However, buying from a record company with DRM is a serious disadvantage to piracy over and above the price. By getting rid of DRM it is easier for people to justify buying music. People will always pirate. Not having DRM means that the record companies are now not at a disadvantage compared to piracy though, except for the price. Before piracy had a better distribution model than non-drmed music (Physical CDs vs Downloads) and had a better price. Now it only has a better price.
It seems they are battening down all the hatches, going totally overboard as far as "Homeland Security" is concerned. The question is what for? Is it paranoia for its own sake or is something going to happen in the near future that they are preparing for?
I don't think that the solution is either the status quo or socialized medicine. I think that the medical system has turned into a big special interest dominated dysfunctional cartel.
1. I think the HMO system should be abolished and hospital chains should issue insurance policies instead. Like you pay your local hospital your insurance premium and you get as much free health care there as you want there. That would fix the incentives because right now the hospitals and the insurance companies aren't in a constant capitalist clusterf**k with the patients caught in the middle.
2. I think the best way to fix the system would be to allow non-doctors, maybe with a 2 year degree, to deal with minor medical issues and prescribe medicines. The abusable medicines that are DEA scheduled should only be prescribed by specially licensed practitioners (background checks, etc) but the rest should be available to these "lesser" doctors.
3. Care to the poor should go through the VA system or another system of specialized hospitals so the burdens to the tax system and so forth are obvious and transparent.
Mod Parent Up! Like the legal system, immigration system and the tax system, the medical system is just a big game with fiendishly complicated rules designed to make sure that if you aren't extremely clever and have a paid professional looking for all the loopholes in the system then you'll overpay and/or get generally screwed by the system.
Case in point. An H1-B guy I worked with knew some European ex-pats who were living illegally in the states. They made their money under the table doing property management for an apartment building. They had health care, just went to the emergency room with no id and got free health care via medicare.
Personally, for everything but major physical problems requiring surgery I have totally given up on the medical system. I have a number of reasons why but my favorite anecdote was a doctor explaining to me that he can't refill my prescription over the phone and I had to take time off work and come in and see him because he won't get paid unless I came in to see him to just say "hi". Now I just do everything with alternative/chinese medicine practitioners and pay cash. I've gotten much better results that way.
I think the declining quality of education in the United States has something to do with the cost of the medical system. Not enough doctors and too much demand from aging baby boomers and the like means that medical professionals are far better paid salary-wise than almost all other professions. In countries with better performing educational systems, health care is cheaper. Someone should do a regression on education performance vs health care expenditures per capita per year of life.
The" mark of the beast" thing comes from the practice of the Romans of branding their slaves with a mark or forcing them to wear bronze collars. It's essentially an allegorical warning in the bible against the subtle re-introduction of methods used to persecute Christians in the past.
After Constantine ruled in 315 that slaves condemned to work in the mines or to fight in the arena were to be branded on the hands or legs, not on the face (Theodosian Code 9.40.2), prudent slaveowners who in the past had branded fugitives turned to inscribed bronze collars instead--thirty-five such collars have been found so far, one from Sardinia naming the slaveowner as Felix the archdeacon.13
- Page 1132 - Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley , Chatto & Windus, 1980.
"The main barrier is that the XO has only 1 GB of built-in memory and no hard drive, Utzschneider reportedly said. Accordingly, Microsoft has been exploring the idea of building Windows and Office on a 2 GB add-in card, but this would require writing new BIOS software for booting directly from the SD card."
Cryptographically signed firmware is a bitch... Seems that the whole anti-theft system built into the XO is going to get in the way of Microsoft hijacking the project without OLPC's express consent.
Within one year OLPC is dead in the water. Why? OLPC is now a laptop project. It will be judged by how well it runs Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. No other software will be available for the OLPC for Windows for a reasonable enough price that it can be included with the OS, even if it is donated, the donation will not include software auto-deployable on all OLPCs. All OLPCs will have slightly different packages, the culture will be fragmented, and it won't be about education anymore but about begging commercial software companies to give software to developing countries that will mostly be run on recycled desktops anyway. All the geeks contributing will stop contributing and move onto other projects. Even with all the security features OLPCs will be hacked and stolen for use as cheap windows laptops.
Why do the ISPs even give a damn? How do they make money by pissing off their customers? Are the record companies going to pay them? Are they hoping to so bore their customers so much by limiting their access to entertainment that they will be forced to buy some other over-priced approved proprietary cintent?
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Well with GWT and all... javascript is the new assembly language :).
Microsoft's biggest mistake was thinking people wouldn't write complicated apps in Javascript. They supported it, in their usual half broken style, but it created the only widely deployed cross-platform system for running code that Microsoft has ever implemented. Now, with Firefox 3 running so fast javascript might become THE platform. It's hilarious because Javascript started out as such a kludgy platform and now it is becoming a serious contender if only because it's the only cross-platform thing Microsoft ever supported.
I am sitting in a chair, no one is going to TAX me on the fact that I own some chair (personal property).
In most of Europe they tax you for owning a TV set.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tv_tax
Happens with a lot of drugs after they go generic. They will come back next year with new "improved" prozac which has an extra methyl ring that doesn't do anything except let them patent a new drug that's largely the same as the old drug.
1. You have no motivation at all to do any kind of exercise when depressed. It's hard to even get out of bed. Thus Physical exercise is a symptom of depression lifting not a cause.
2. Why don't you ask the person on the meds whether they help. He has a brain and stuff and unless he's really stupid he can tell you what's going on up there.
I remember seeing a presentation on this at a Search Engine Marketing conference in 2005. PPC bidding companies have been doing this for a long time. Microsoft has the media muscle to get the average IT dummy to start thinking about this like it's a revolutionary breakthrough that only the geniuses at Microsoft could possibly figure out.
As a Sidekick owner I am totally bummed out about this. The one area where the Sidekick is better than any other smart phone out there is it is DEBUGGED! I have never lost data, never had to reboot, never gone out of my mind dealing with bugs or slowness like I have with most other cellphones I have tried. The thing would sometimes not render wide-screen websites properly but it would never flat out crash. That was kind of the bargain with the sidekick, all you can eat data and easy to use well tested features instead of the latest in whiz bangy glitz. Well at least they didn't buy Yahoo...
Yeah how are they going to keep making money off of OS Upgrades if they can't break the Internet for everyone who hasn't paid their OS upgrade tax recently?
No just build the thing into a desk fan, build a million of them in China. Sell them at cost and then sell a solar panel to run them on that is actually just a wire that shorts the circuit appropriately to activate the perpetual motion device and make the fan run forever.
Bio-fuels make developing and developed world farmers switch from food crops to bio-fuels crops which drives up the price of food for the poorest members of society. In some cases farmers are even switching to thigns like Jatropha which are poisonous. It's really sick and twisted that we can drive our SUVs and feel good about being environmentalists by using corn that could be eaten by starving people in developing nations and be depleting topsoil at the same time.
Here's a feature matrix of new features vs. old versions. It's easy to see that 8.3 is a huge upgrade.
http://www.postgresql.org/about/featurematrix
Let me also pre-emptively respond to those who think that because they have cellphones they are now contributing to global warming. By not having to travel to see their children or far off relatives in order to have a conversation they are reducing their carbon footprint massively.
An above-average wrongful death compensation award for a healthy working parent would be in the $1-3 million dollar range. You could go murder somebody. It'd be cheaper than pirating a few CDs. And if the CDs had DRM, the jail sentence would be shorter for the murder too! The US military pays out $600 for wrongful deaths in Iraq. A pirated CD copy is worth more than 2500 Iraqis!
But you forget, dead formerly working parents and Iraqis don't give big campaign contributions.
The generals will also get to blame collateral damage on bugs in the software.
For instance:
"Oh yeah the flame thrower robot went crazy and torched the entire village because some guy at Lockheed put a semicolon on the end of a for loop. Oops, we'll have to fix that in the next rev".
Music companies are in the business of telling people what to buy. They used to be in the business of recording and distribution. Recording and distribution are not very hard to do these days. Piracy means that they don't get paid for telling people what to buy. However, buying from a record company with DRM is a serious disadvantage to piracy over and above the price. By getting rid of DRM it is easier for people to justify buying music. People will always pirate. Not having DRM means that the record companies are now not at a disadvantage compared to piracy though, except for the price. Before piracy had a better distribution model than non-drmed music (Physical CDs vs Downloads) and had a better price. Now it only has a better price.
It seems they are battening down all the hatches, going totally overboard as far as "Homeland Security" is concerned. The question is what for? Is it paranoia for its own sake or is something going to happen in the near future that they are preparing for?
I don't think that the solution is either the status quo or socialized medicine. I think that the medical system has turned into a big special interest dominated dysfunctional cartel.
1. I think the HMO system should be abolished and hospital chains should issue insurance policies instead. Like you pay your local hospital your insurance premium and you get as much free health care there as you want there. That would fix the incentives because right now the hospitals and the insurance companies aren't in a constant capitalist clusterf**k with the patients caught in the middle.
2. I think the best way to fix the system would be to allow non-doctors, maybe with a 2 year degree, to deal with minor medical issues and prescribe medicines. The abusable medicines that are DEA scheduled should only be prescribed by specially licensed practitioners (background checks, etc) but the rest should be available to these "lesser" doctors.
3. Care to the poor should go through the VA system or another system of specialized hospitals so the burdens to the tax system and so forth are obvious and transparent.
Mod Parent Up! Like the legal system, immigration system and the tax system, the medical system is just a big game with fiendishly complicated rules designed to make sure that if you aren't extremely clever and have a paid professional looking for all the loopholes in the system then you'll overpay and/or get generally screwed by the system.
Case in point. An H1-B guy I worked with knew some European ex-pats who were living illegally in the states. They made their money under the table doing property management for an apartment building. They had health care, just went to the emergency room with no id and got free health care via medicare.
Personally, for everything but major physical problems requiring surgery I have totally given up on the medical system. I have a number of reasons why but my favorite anecdote was a doctor explaining to me that he can't refill my prescription over the phone and I had to take time off work and come in and see him because he won't get paid unless I came in to see him to just say "hi". Now I just do everything with alternative/chinese medicine practitioners and pay cash. I've gotten much better results that way.
I think the declining quality of education in the United States has something to do with the cost of the medical system. Not enough doctors and too much demand from aging baby boomers and the like means that medical professionals are far better paid salary-wise than almost all other professions. In countries with better performing educational systems, health care is cheaper. Someone should do a regression on education performance vs health care expenditures per capita per year of life.
- Page 1132 - Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley , Chatto & Windus, 1980.
"The main barrier is that the XO has only 1 GB of built-in memory and no hard drive, Utzschneider reportedly said. Accordingly, Microsoft has been exploring the idea of building Windows and Office on a 2 GB add-in card, but this would require writing new BIOS software for booting directly from the SD card."
Cryptographically signed firmware is a bitch... Seems that the whole anti-theft system built into the XO is going to get in the way of Microsoft hijacking the project without OLPC's express consent.
Prediction:
Within one year OLPC is dead in the water. Why? OLPC is now a laptop project. It will be judged by how well it runs Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. No other software will be available for the OLPC for Windows for a reasonable enough price that it can be included with the OS, even if it is donated, the donation will not include software auto-deployable on all OLPCs. All OLPCs will have slightly different packages, the culture will be fragmented, and it won't be about education anymore but about begging commercial software companies to give software to developing countries that will mostly be run on recycled desktops anyway. All the geeks contributing will stop contributing and move onto other projects. Even with all the security features OLPCs will be hacked and stolen for use as cheap windows laptops.
Why do the ISPs even give a damn? How do they make money by pissing off their customers? Are the record companies going to pay them? Are they hoping to so bore their customers so much by limiting their access to entertainment that they will be forced to buy some other over-priced approved proprietary cintent?
So what exactly is in it for at&t?
How about putting a big hammer and sickle soviet flag icon next to the URL if the url is encoded in cryllic. :)