Slashdot is great if you like watching people comically oversimplifying the feats of others.
It's an interesting hobby. maybe I should give it a go.
Edward Jenner invents vaccination, thus erradicating smallpox, and paving the way to the elimination of many other fatal diseases.. Slashdot commment: Well, any idiot knows you'll catch something if you touch diseased cows.
James Watt invents steam engine. Slashdot comment: My kettles been boiling over for decades!
Newton realises that gravity is responsible for the motion of the planets, and derives formulae that will send men to the moon. Slashdot comment: Objects fall. Big deal.
Surely Dell are entitled to sell XP under whatever terms the customer agrees to. In this case, they sold a copy of XP and a PC for £800 (or whatever). No, Dell are entitled to sell the PC at £780, and make a £27 loss on the OS, or sell the PC at £700 and make a £53 profit on the OS, or even assume that the PC was given away for free, and the £753 profit was made on the OS. All of these are indistinguishable. Since they were sold as a bundle, surely Dell's only actual obligation is to offer a full refund on the OS and laptop.
I really wish Slashdot would stop doing this. Taking a patent, making the most ludicrous assumptions about the scope, and then criticising these assumptions as ludicrous. It doesn't help. It undermines the anti-patent argument.
One of them is a box, a couple are posters, one of them is a PS2 with the 2 crossed out and 3 scrawled on, and another is a PS2 taped to a PS1. The other 2 are imports.
Point and shoots have price, weight, and model range in their favour. Many have a movable LCD viewfinder which allows you to point the thing over other people's heads. Decent quality compacts have full control over aperture, shutter speed and white balance and good build quality, and the high end compacts have very good sensors and optics, as well as decent ergonomics.
So, do you spend the extra in money and weight for interchangable lenses, and no shutter lag? If you're need those features then of course you do. Personally, I take photos at parties and science fiction conventions. A compact is portable, and since the images are going to be redced to 800x600 for display, the high quality optics and CCD are worthless.
You need to have a group of people for each polling station, at least. The more people you have to involve in your vote-changing scheme, the bigger chance you have of getting caught. Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes,
Remember - Depending on the election, fraud doesn't always require a lot of votes. Look at the 2000 Presidential election. All you needed to change were a few hundred votes to turn the election either way.
Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?
That in itself is not too much of a problem. Null ballots don't skew the election too much since they're statistically evenly distributed amongst all the candidates. Something that is more of a problem is that the counting process can dislodge chads. The result is that two machine counts will not be consistent.
Personally though, I prefer systems that are designed to work well in a human recount. Punched holes aren't that easy to read by eye. Large marks such as crosses can be clearly identified.
Apple will likely become another Netscape, at least within the digital media market. Don't forget that Apple has nowhere near the 97% marketshare that Netscape had at their peak.
Netscape was crushed because MS could bundle their browser with their monopoly product. But MS can't ship a Zune with every copy of Windows. They can't offer music for free. They'd have difficulty offering a limited subscription to their download service.
Perhaps. But the argument certainly applies to retail versions. Then you're squeeky clean even according to the EULA.
Ultimately my examples just an illustration. We have no way of knowing how many people are going to buy a barebones PC and transfer their OS. I just gave it as an example of a case where you might legitimately want a PC with no OS.
This isn't Microsoft. Or even an ordinary safety critical software development. This is how NASA develops sofware. A 5 second fix will require an investigation into why the fix is needed in the first place, what can be added to the procedures to prevent anything similar happening again, an investigation into how this will interact with every other module, scenarios, a test plan, and verification.
Windows has always been competing with older versions of windows. I have a legitimate copy of Windows XP. If I buy a new machine, I'm not going to pay the extra for Vista. I'll just install XP on the new one and if I feel like being legitimate, I'll wipe the old one and install Linux on it.
It's a valid concern. But I'm not convinced that the public have a duty to go much further than I suggested to prevent the crime. He assumes that the compnay isn't going to break the law, and there's no reason for him to think otherwise. There's no way for him to know what information the company is providing to the clients. He's in the clear.
Even in the worst case, if criminal charges were filed, the prosecution would be much more interested in getting a contractor as a witness than as another defendant.
And established Microsoft as a player in the console market.
Plus, the XBox has a few more years left in it, and an established userbase that's willing to keep paying for new games and xbox live subscription for a while to come.
I'm only taling about consoles. Video recoprders have different user demands.
And I'm not sure 3D0 was all it was cracked up to be. There wasn't that much of a gap between it and the Playstation in terms of release date, and the playstation did have better looking games.
Well, anything that completely failed to achieve any of its potential. The XBox was never going to be profitable. It existed to promote Microsoft as a player in the console market. The Jaguar did well at the start, but lost popularity when the playstation was around the corner. The N64 was by no means a failure. It was a profitable console for Nintendo. The neo-geo did okay even though it never hit the top spot. The 3D0 was a bit of a failure.
Currently only about 15% of households have HDTVs, and HDTVs currently make up 50% of new TVs sold;
I have no reason to doubt your figures, but how many of the 50% who decided not to go HD are likely to buy a high end console? In the foirst 6 months, I'd bet 90% of sales will be to those 15% with HDTV. The PS3 is being sold to a technology loving demographic.
Now, I'll agree that it would probably have made more sense to wait for the next generation to add HD support, but I think it will help both initial sales and longevity. The extra cost could hurt them in the mid term. Perhaps they expect the hardware costs to have fallen sufficiently after 2 years that this will not affect the unit cost too much.
In other words it is likely that the PS3 will sell worse than either the PS2 or Playstation, and the Wii and XBox 360 will gain in marketshare; how dramatic these changes are is still open to debate.
This is a possibility. It would not neccesarily be a disaster if the PS3 didn't make a profit though. As long as it does well enough for Sony to learn its lessons, and have a springboard for the PS4, they'll have been justified in their decisions.
While it is expensive, and although Sony have been pretty evil in the past, the fact remains that the PS3 is a very powerful system, with a decent level of brand recognition.
HD support may not be a requirement for many people, but those with HDTV will want some hardware to complement it. Blu-ray might have been a result of pressure from Sony's top level, but the extra capacity is not to be sneezed at.
Early adopters have a lot of money. They can afford the thing. And how often has the most powerful console been a total market failure?
All he can do is give the company his opinion that the clients should be told. What management choose to do after that is entirely up to them. Not informing the customers is the decision of the executives, and any resulting problems this causes are therefore their responsibility.
Informing customers may also cause problems for the company that are disproprortionate to the damage done. If this friend informs the clients himself, he could be held responsible for harm done to the company.
Whether this is likely to be successful or not is another matter. utube's lawyers may well be able to spin it so that it is. It certainly seems rather unfair on utube that they have suffered an effective DoS. And is it really that unexpected that so many people decide to spell the name of the company with a u? Hell, it's not like youtube actually means anything. If you hear the name, you may well think the 'u' is just an arbitary letter like the 'i' in ipod.
But really, my actual point is that they are extremely unlikely to base any claim on trademark infringement.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason it works is probably because so few other sites use the same method.
Security through obscurity dogma be damned! When a breach isn't fatal, there are cases where obscurity works well enough.
Slashdot is great if you like watching people comically oversimplifying the feats of others.
It's an interesting hobby. maybe I should give it a go.
Edward Jenner invents vaccination, thus erradicating smallpox, and paving the way to the elimination of many other fatal diseases.. Slashdot commment: Well, any idiot knows you'll catch something if you touch diseased cows.
James Watt invents steam engine. Slashdot comment: My kettles been boiling over for decades!
Newton realises that gravity is responsible for the motion of the planets, and derives formulae that will send men to the moon. Slashdot comment: Objects fall. Big deal.
Surely Dell are entitled to sell XP under whatever terms the customer agrees to. In this case, they sold a copy of XP and a PC for £800 (or whatever). No, Dell are entitled to sell the PC at £780, and make a £27 loss on the OS, or sell the PC at £700 and make a £53 profit on the OS, or even assume that the PC was given away for free, and the £753 profit was made on the OS. All of these are indistinguishable. Since they were sold as a bundle, surely Dell's only actual obligation is to offer a full refund on the OS and laptop.
Agreed.
I really wish Slashdot would stop doing this. Taking a patent, making the most ludicrous assumptions about the scope, and then criticising these assumptions as ludicrous. It doesn't help. It undermines the anti-patent argument.
One of them is a box, a couple are posters, one of them is a PS2 with the 2 crossed out and 3 scrawled on, and another is a PS2 taped to a PS1. The other 2 are imports.
Point and shoots have price, weight, and model range in their favour. Many have a movable LCD viewfinder which allows you to point the thing over other people's heads. Decent quality compacts have full control over aperture, shutter speed and white balance and good build quality, and the high end compacts have very good sensors and optics, as well as decent ergonomics.
So, do you spend the extra in money and weight for interchangable lenses, and no shutter lag? If you're need those features then of course you do. Personally, I take photos at parties and science fiction conventions. A compact is portable, and since the images are going to be redced to 800x600 for display, the high quality optics and CCD are worthless.
The LCD takes up a lot of juice on a lot of cameras. If you leave it on all the time, then it will drain the battery very quickly.
You need to have a group of people for each polling station, at least. The more people you have to involve in your vote-changing scheme, the bigger chance you have of getting caught. Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes,
Remember - Depending on the election, fraud doesn't always require a lot of votes. Look at the 2000 Presidential election. All you needed to change were a few hundred votes to turn the election either way.
Remember FL in 2000? Paper ballots... are those punched ALL the way through or not?
That in itself is not too much of a problem. Null ballots don't skew the election too much since they're statistically evenly distributed amongst all the candidates. Something that is more of a problem is that the counting process can dislodge chads. The result is that two machine counts will not be consistent.
Personally though, I prefer systems that are designed to work well in a human recount. Punched holes aren't that easy to read by eye. Large marks such as crosses can be clearly identified.
Apple will likely become another Netscape, at least within the digital media market. Don't forget that Apple has nowhere near the 97% marketshare that Netscape had at their peak.
Netscape was crushed because MS could bundle their browser with their monopoly product. But MS can't ship a Zune with every copy of Windows. They can't offer music for free. They'd have difficulty offering a limited subscription to their download service.
Perhaps. But the argument certainly applies to retail versions. Then you're squeeky clean even according to the EULA.
Ultimately my examples just an illustration. We have no way of knowing how many people are going to buy a barebones PC and transfer their OS. I just gave it as an example of a case where you might legitimately want a PC with no OS.
There are other reasons to be against it. Mistrust of the science behind it. Fear of the potential results. A pathological hatred of the word "stem".
None of these are good reasons, I'll admit...
This isn't Microsoft. Or even an ordinary safety critical software development. This is how NASA develops sofware. A 5 second fix will require an investigation into why the fix is needed in the first place, what can be added to the procedures to prevent anything similar happening again, an investigation into how this will interact with every other module, scenarios, a test plan, and verification.
Windows has always been competing with older versions of windows. I have a legitimate copy of Windows XP. If I buy a new machine, I'm not going to pay the extra for Vista. I'll just install XP on the new one and if I feel like being legitimate, I'll wipe the old one and install Linux on it.
No piracy. No lost sales.
Yeah, Microsoft are scraping for every penny. $4 billion is round about Microsofts quaterly profits. They can afford this sort of loss.
It's a valid concern. But I'm not convinced that the public have a duty to go much further than I suggested to prevent the crime. He assumes that the compnay isn't going to break the law, and there's no reason for him to think otherwise. There's no way for him to know what information the company is providing to the clients. He's in the clear.
Even in the worst case, if criminal charges were filed, the prosecution would be much more interested in getting a contractor as a witness than as another defendant.
And established Microsoft as a player in the console market.
Plus, the XBox has a few more years left in it, and an established userbase that's willing to keep paying for new games and xbox live subscription for a while to come.
I'm only taling about consoles. Video recoprders have different user demands.
And I'm not sure 3D0 was all it was cracked up to be. There wasn't that much of a gap between it and the Playstation in terms of release date, and the playstation did have better looking games.
Define "Total Market Failure"?
Well, anything that completely failed to achieve any of its potential. The XBox was never going to be profitable. It existed to promote Microsoft as a player in the console market. The Jaguar did well at the start, but lost popularity when the playstation was around the corner. The N64 was by no means a failure. It was a profitable console for Nintendo. The neo-geo did okay even though it never hit the top spot. The 3D0 was a bit of a failure.
Currently only about 15% of households have HDTVs, and HDTVs currently make up 50% of new TVs sold;
I have no reason to doubt your figures, but how many of the 50% who decided not to go HD are likely to buy a high end console? In the foirst 6 months, I'd bet 90% of sales will be to those 15% with HDTV. The PS3 is being sold to a technology loving demographic.
Now, I'll agree that it would probably have made more sense to wait for the next generation to add HD support, but I think it will help both initial sales and longevity. The extra cost could hurt them in the mid term. Perhaps they expect the hardware costs to have fallen sufficiently after 2 years that this will not affect the unit cost too much.
In other words it is likely that the PS3 will sell worse than either the PS2 or Playstation, and the Wii and XBox 360 will gain in marketshare; how dramatic these changes are is still open to debate.
This is a possibility. It would not neccesarily be a disaster if the PS3 didn't make a profit though. As long as it does well enough for Sony to learn its lessons, and have a springboard for the PS4, they'll have been justified in their decisions.
While it is expensive, and although Sony have been pretty evil in the past, the fact remains that the PS3 is a very powerful system, with a decent level of brand recognition.
HD support may not be a requirement for many people, but those with HDTV will want some hardware to complement it. Blu-ray might have been a result of pressure from Sony's top level, but the extra capacity is not to be sneezed at.
Early adopters have a lot of money. They can afford the thing. And how often has the most powerful console been a total market failure?
All he can do is give the company his opinion that the clients should be told. What management choose to do after that is entirely up to them. Not informing the customers is the decision of the executives, and any resulting problems this causes are therefore their responsibility.
Informing customers may also cause problems for the company that are disproprortionate to the damage done. If this friend informs the clients himself, he could be held responsible for harm done to the company.
I feel you're not quite unerstanding the comment. This guy did.. So did the person who modded it funny...
I run XP. It boots in about 20 seconds, doesn't have WGA, and uses that same UI as Win2K.
Explorer.exe seems to have become a little unstable though.
Ah well. It wasn't a great joke anyway, and the responses are fairly interesting. At least someone got it:)
Whether this is likely to be successful or not is another matter. utube's lawyers may well be able to spin it so that it is. It certainly seems rather unfair on utube that they have suffered an effective DoS. And is it really that unexpected that so many people decide to spell the name of the company with a u? Hell, it's not like youtube actually means anything. If you hear the name, you may well think the 'u' is just an arbitary letter like the 'i' in ipod.
But really, my actual point is that they are extremely unlikely to base any claim on trademark infringement.