(going back to my statistics/business classes) Companies decide that they can afford X number of warranty returns per year. They then check the frequency of failure of their devices over a test period. A nice little statistical crunch later and they know how long to make the warranty to get only X number of returns.
Best way to increase the warranty period? Make the products last longer. I'm sure the iPod will have far fewer warranty returns than the Nomad.
Spin: What we wanted to do was legal under current law, we just wanted to keep our rights, we proposed a 'patch'
Fact: What they wanted to do should have been illegal anyways, but they also wanted to escape any civil penalties for possibly trashing thousands of computers.
Spin: Earlier quote is "It didn't make it into the Senate bill, So the great work of the Senate staff to fix this unintentional problem didn't get through."
Fact: The amendments presented by the RIAA were firmly rebuked by the Hill staffers, some of whom called it the "RIAA's License to Virus."
Spin: It leaves out any rejection of the first attempts to submit an amendment and says "Ultimately, the Senate staff figured out a way to change their original provision to eliminate its unintended effect"
Fact: After the first defeat "...the association's lobbyists will focus on a possible conference committee..." (earlier news item) In other words, the Senate staff figured out a way with the help of the RIAA's lobbyists.
The Army and Marines has been using first-person shoot-up games for training for a while now. I believe the Marines using Doom were the first. It's a cheap way to train for squad-level tactics now that training budgets are squeezed.
Why not sponsor development of a game that you can use to train your people with later?
The Army has even taken this to a higher level, in that many of the major command & control exercises that were accomplished with thousands of troops and vehicles in the past are now done entirely on comptuer.
1) All someone has to do is write the synching software for PC
2) All of Creative Labs' new sound cards - the Audigy series - come with a IEEE-1394 port. That alone will put "Firewire" on millions of PCs in the near future, catching up to the Mac.
Just wait, a PC version will be coming. If not from Apple, then from someone else.
Only styling? It's the best UI I've seen, has massive storage and battery life for its size, synchs seamlessly at firewire speeds, and can be used for regular file storage. Apple also shows its attention to detail by shipping it with some actually good headphones. If I had a Mac, I'd buy one tomorrow. Next year, I guess.
If you are having lots of problems with IEEE-1394 ('Firewire' is the Apple trademark for 1394, just like Sony's iLink), then you are probably using a PC. Actually, you mentioning boards says it because board-capable Macs have had built-in Firewire for years.
But I agree that Sony is the only PC manufacturer that even came close to Apple's idea of styling on a computer (remember the pathetic HP and Compaq attempts).
It has 20 minutes (32 MB) of buffer. I'll bet it just turns on the hard drive for a few seconds when it has to fill the buffer, then shuts it off again.
Steve Gibson
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 3, Informative
His stuff is always small (www.grc.com). Trouble in Paradise is a complete Iomega drive diagnosis package self-running at 52KB under Windows.
For those trashing Adobe as a greedy company with a $600 program, don't forget something very rare in the software industry: Adobe's license lets you install one copy at work and one at home as long as both aren't used at the same time. Okay, they're just making legal what most people do anyway, but it's a good idea.
Photoshop is a professional tool and is priced appropriately: if you make money off of it, you should pay for it. If you're a student, Adobe has educational discounts at a fraction of retail.
Add that to their distaste for dongles, the general quality of the software, interoperability, Windows-Mac cross platform operation, lower-cost bundling, and reasonable/timely upgrades (a couple minor incidents aside), and I'd say Adobe's pricing and licensing is pretty good.
Windows is the defacto choice for most of.mil because of one simple fact:
It's what 95+% of.mil staff use at home.
Funny, it's always explained to me that the reason 99% of government people buy PCs is because that is what they use at work. Not to mention all of the software pirating that's probably going on (how many government employees actually own MS Office?). Can't get your expensive programs for 'free' so easily if you're using Linux or Mac.
Yeah, they did screw up the lyrics in the English version (not to mention her singing of it).
The song is about WWIII, the end of the world, by accident, telling us to be careful about running off to war without a real solid reason and target (it started by them at a concert in West Berlin, wondering what would happen if the balloons floating to East Berlin were thought of as hostile).
They took pretty much everything in the songs out of context.
Banning 99 Luftballons/Red Balloons? These people are banning songs they've never even listened to. Are individual radio stations speaking out against this?
This reminds me of the episode of WKRP where they were told to stop playing, among others, John Lennon's Imagine because it referred to imagining there's no heaven or religion. You know, forget that the song is about world peace.
Unfortunately in order to pay for the processor, that Pentium 4 system is going to be total crap on everything else. And don't forget to pay more than an iMac costs when upgrading your memory.
It's different markets. Most people I know would do fine with an iMac and have no need for a wasteful P4 system.
The US has done a lot of bad things, but this is stupidly one-sided.
Starts in 1948, long after the Jews had been kicked out of their homeland in the first place (makes it look like they just came into a foreign land and took it)
"U.S. blocks Sadat's efforts to reach a peace agreement with Egypt." Completely forgetting Carter at Camp David. Of course, no mention of the peace deal with Arafat.
The dam? Hmmm, you deal with my enemy, should I keep giving you money?
About the airliner, let's just say there are a lot of questions out on that one that make it look like a provoked incident by Iran. The ship was threatened militarily from sea and air, putting it into defensive mode, and Iran sent that airliner straight at the ship it the middle of it all.
"U.S.-backed rebels in Afghanistan fire on civilian airliner," like we're responsible for a rebel with an itchy trigger finger on his Stinger. These people were fighting for their freedom, we helped.
"U.S. rejects any diplomatic settlement of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. (for example, rebuffing any attempt to link the two regional occupations, of Kuwait and of Palestine)" And why should we have accepted? They invaded and refused to get out, end of story. To fall to a tactic like that would be essentially giving into terrorism in that all someone has to do to get their way is invade a country and negotiate from there.
"Washington makes it known that the sanctions would remain as long as Saddam remains in power." Okay, let him stop his weapons program and cooperate fully and see what happens.
Most Christians in Northern Africa were quite happy to live under Islam as Christians. At a time when the church in Rome was persecuting and killing all breakaway sects of Christianity, Muslim conquerers had a simple policy: convert and become a full citizen, or don't convert and live in peace, but be taxed.
Hmmm, peaceful life under another religion vs. being hunted and killed by your own religion. Hard choice.
This is one reason that Islam swept through Africa so fast in the years following Mohammed's death.
As you know, other Congresscritters are already saying again it's time to have mandatory backdoors into encryption This will stop the terrorists because they won't be able to buy anything without a backdoor.
Right.
Bin Laden just sent a few people to pilot school for a year in preparation for a suicide mission. There's nothing keeping him from sending people to get computer science degrees specializing in cryptography and have in-house software development.
Slashdot Mirror
(going back to my statistics/business classes) Companies decide that they can afford X number of warranty returns per year. They then check the frequency of failure of their devices over a test period. A nice little statistical crunch later and they know how long to make the warranty to get only X number of returns.
Best way to increase the warranty period? Make the products last longer. I'm sure the iPod will have far fewer warranty returns than the Nomad.
Spin: What we wanted to do was legal under current law, we just wanted to keep our rights, we proposed a 'patch'
Fact: What they wanted to do should have been illegal anyways, but they also wanted to escape any civil penalties for possibly trashing thousands of computers.
Spin: Earlier quote is "It didn't make it into the Senate bill, So the great work of the Senate staff to fix this unintentional problem didn't get through."
Fact: The amendments presented by the RIAA were firmly rebuked by the Hill staffers, some of whom called it the "RIAA's License to Virus."
Spin: It leaves out any rejection of the first attempts to submit an amendment and says "Ultimately, the Senate staff figured out a way to change their original provision to eliminate its unintended effect"
Fact: After the first defeat "...the association's lobbyists will focus on a possible conference committee..." (earlier news item) In other words, the Senate staff figured out a way with the help of the RIAA's lobbyists.
The Army and Marines has been using first-person shoot-up games for training for a while now. I believe the Marines using Doom were the first. It's a cheap way to train for squad-level tactics now that training budgets are squeezed.
Why not sponsor development of a game that you can use to train your people with later?
The Army has even taken this to a higher level, in that many of the major command & control exercises that were accomplished with thousands of troops and vehicles in the past are now done entirely on comptuer.
"How on earth can you make any assesment of the UI? "
Because if you go to the Apple site you can see animations of all of the menu functions in QuickTime.
1) All someone has to do is write the synching software for PC
2) All of Creative Labs' new sound cards - the Audigy series - come with a IEEE-1394 port. That alone will put "Firewire" on millions of PCs in the near future, catching up to the Mac.
Just wait, a PC version will be coming. If not from Apple, then from someone else.
Only styling? It's the best UI I've seen, has massive storage and battery life for its size, synchs seamlessly at firewire speeds, and can be used for regular file storage. Apple also shows its attention to detail by shipping it with some actually good headphones. If I had a Mac, I'd buy one tomorrow. Next year, I guess.
If you are having lots of problems with IEEE-1394 ('Firewire' is the Apple trademark for 1394, just like Sony's iLink), then you are probably using a PC. Actually, you mentioning boards says it because board-capable Macs have had built-in Firewire for years.
But I agree that Sony is the only PC manufacturer that even came close to Apple's idea of styling on a computer (remember the pathetic HP and Compaq attempts).
It has 20 minutes (32 MB) of buffer. I'll bet it just turns on the hard drive for a few seconds when it has to fill the buffer, then shuts it off again.
His stuff is always small (www.grc.com). Trouble in Paradise is a complete Iomega drive diagnosis package self-running at 52KB under Windows.
For those trashing Adobe as a greedy company with a $600 program, don't forget something very rare in the software industry: Adobe's license lets you install one copy at work and one at home as long as both aren't used at the same time. Okay, they're just making legal what most people do anyway, but it's a good idea.
Photoshop is a professional tool and is priced appropriately: if you make money off of it, you should pay for it. If you're a student, Adobe has educational discounts at a fraction of retail.
Add that to their distaste for dongles, the general quality of the software, interoperability, Windows-Mac cross platform operation, lower-cost bundling, and reasonable/timely upgrades (a couple minor incidents aside), and I'd say Adobe's pricing and licensing is pretty good.
Unless the work in question is written by a contractor and the copyright later assigned.
Yep, all of these people are using it, and many look like it's in places where the data matters. Lots of fools around, ... NASA, yahoo...
Windows is the defacto choice for most of .mil because of one simple fact:
.mil staff use at home.
It's what 95+% of
Funny, it's always explained to me that the reason 99% of government people buy PCs is because that is what they use at work. Not to mention all of the software pirating that's probably going on (how many government employees actually own MS Office?). Can't get your expensive programs for 'free' so easily if you're using Linux or Mac.
Chicken and the egg?
You could write a plugin for Adobe InDesign. It has a completely open programming architecture allowing you to change almost anything.
It would be a bit overkill on the design end, but it does have the BEST text justification engine in the world.
Isn't that redundant?
Well, he PGP signed it. You check it.
...being that because of constantly having to patch IIS, the TCO is starting to get too high.
Hey! She has a nice voice in German.
The accent's so thick in the English version, I don't think she even knew English.
Yeah, they did screw up the lyrics in the English version (not to mention her singing of it).
The song is about WWIII, the end of the world, by accident, telling us to be careful about running off to war without a real solid reason and target (it started by them at a concert in West Berlin, wondering what would happen if the balloons floating to East Berlin were thought of as hostile).
They took pretty much everything in the songs out of context.
And it's not even about killing an Arab!
What, did they actually listen to this song and let it through as opposed to all the others?
The NIN song refers to control by religion, not the government.
Of course maybe that's why it's banned, it has a negative reference to religion, and with everyone going back to church now, that might offend.
Of course, if those people piloting the planes hadn't let religion control them, they wouldn't have done it.
Banning 99 Luftballons/Red Balloons? These people are banning songs they've never even listened to. Are individual radio stations speaking out against this?
This reminds me of the episode of WKRP where they were told to stop playing, among others, John Lennon's Imagine because it referred to imagining there's no heaven or religion. You know, forget that the song is about world peace.
Unfortunately in order to pay for the processor, that Pentium 4 system is going to be total crap on everything else. And don't forget to pay more than an iMac costs when upgrading your memory.
It's different markets. Most people I know would do fine with an iMac and have no need for a wasteful P4 system.
The US has done a lot of bad things, but this is stupidly one-sided.
Starts in 1948, long after the Jews had been kicked out of their homeland in the first place (makes it look like they just came into a foreign land and took it)
"U.S. blocks Sadat's efforts to reach a peace agreement with Egypt." Completely forgetting Carter at Camp David. Of course, no mention of the peace deal with Arafat.
The dam? Hmmm, you deal with my enemy, should I keep giving you money?
About the airliner, let's just say there are a lot of questions out on that one that make it look like a provoked incident by Iran. The ship was threatened militarily from sea and air, putting it into defensive mode, and Iran sent that airliner straight at the ship it the middle of it all.
"U.S.-backed rebels in Afghanistan fire on civilian airliner," like we're responsible for a rebel with an itchy trigger finger on his Stinger. These people were fighting for their freedom, we helped.
"U.S. rejects any diplomatic settlement of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. (for example, rebuffing any attempt to link the two regional occupations, of Kuwait and of Palestine)" And why should we have accepted? They invaded and refused to get out, end of story. To fall to a tactic like that would be essentially giving into terrorism in that all someone has to do to get their way is invade a country and negotiate from there.
"Washington makes it known that the sanctions would remain as long as Saddam remains in power." Okay, let him stop his weapons program and cooperate fully and see what happens.
Most Christians in Northern Africa were quite happy to live under Islam as Christians. At a time when the church in Rome was persecuting and killing all breakaway sects of Christianity, Muslim conquerers had a simple policy: convert and become a full citizen, or don't convert and live in peace, but be taxed.
Hmmm, peaceful life under another religion vs. being hunted and killed by your own religion. Hard choice.
This is one reason that Islam swept through Africa so fast in the years following Mohammed's death.
As you know, other Congresscritters are already saying again it's time to have mandatory backdoors into encryption This will stop the terrorists because they won't be able to buy anything without a backdoor.
Right.
Bin Laden just sent a few people to pilot school for a year in preparation for a suicide mission. There's nothing keeping him from sending people to get computer science degrees specializing in cryptography and have in-house software development.