Yeah, I can see it now. Over time they'll add bits of red and yellow shading to the orange icon. They'll change the level of anti-aliasing a little bit, and maybe slightly adjust the radius of the rounded corners. After a year or two, they'll add drop shadows, and before you know it, no one will regognize the original orange and white icon used in Firefox and Opera and all of the other browsers that agreed to follow Microsoft into this standard. Everyone will be locked into the new and improved Microsoft version.
Meanwhile, Dave Winer will be somewhere saying "See, I told you that you should have just used an orange rectangle with the letters 'XML'. But would you listen to me? NO! And now Microsoft has gone and emrace-and-extended your precious litle radio icon. I hope you're happy!"
Try reading the same sentence again, and emphasizing a different portion of the sentence.
I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
When compared to the previous sentence: I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents... we see that the interesting part here was the change in behavior from not opening documents to opening documents. It does still ask him to license the product (which it probably did during the trial phase as well) but that is not really the interesting part- because we know it hasn't ever been registered, the fact that it would ask shouldn't be very surprising.
If you can get your system without giving up your identity (steal it or buy it through someone who "loses" records),
No need to find somebody who loses records- just go to your local Fry's/CompUSA/MicroCenter, and pay with cash. You know, that green stuff that nobody uses anymore, and is basically untrackable...
The TCEHAF Act? Sorry, it'll never fly. You have to start with a catchy acronym first, and then you can make up a name to go with it. Maybe you could change it to DECAF...
Not that that's ever stopped anyone from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, of course...
You don't get it. The telephone companies are trying to kill the goose, because they're not making any money off the eggs. They know what made the Internet successful, and they want to stop it.
This isn't a matter of "Hey, what kind of stupid scheme can we use to milk more money out of this new technology?" This is a matter of "Crap, this new technology is taking away from our business, what can we do to kill it without being too obvious about it?"
Software interfaces shouldn't make you think, but they should at least allow you to think. The problem with GNOME as it stands now is that it doesn't even give the user this simple courtesy. The is a not-so-fine line between "Don't make our users think" and "Our users can't think", and GNOME seems to be on the wrong side of it lately.
I don't know that I would say that this statement is very "out there". While I normally try to avoid religious flamewars, and don't think too highly of people who purposefully start them, in this case I think he is 100% right. Long ago, I was a die hard GNOME user, but now I can barely stand it. It's still more attractive than KDE, but that's about the only thing it has going for it anymore. Over the years they have systematically removed every helpful and useful facet of the system in the name of 'usability'. At this point, I no longer find GNOME any more useful than Windows. It now has all of Windows' lack of configurability and most annoying 'features' (like new windows popping up and stealing your focus at the worst possible times) but lacks much of the (long overdue) refinement that Microsoft finally added with WinXP.
Is it just me, or is it hard to take any summary seriously that starts out with "* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us YubaNet is reporting that in recent tests by Stephanie C Schuckers..."
Even if you don't recognize the name **Beatles-Beatles (I didn't until somebody pointed it out), it just sounds like a setup for an April Fools prank.
I'm led to assume that you spend the other 10% of your time trying to remember math that you forgot before you started high school.
Then again, from my experience, spending 10% of your day trying to figure out where to eat lunch is probably a bit on the low end- Maybe I should give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a typo, and you meant to say 20%.
I'm one of the three people who plays Matrix Online, and I know quite a few people in the game... My experience breaks down:
1. men who play female avatars... 2. Women who play female avatars... 3. Men who play male avatars...
I haven't run into a lot of female players who play male avatars
Given the first statement, and the list of different players you provided, I think I can see why you can't find many female players playing male avatars. And a sample of 1 for each of the other populations isn't very convincing either.;)
(Apologies for excessive editing of your post, BTW.)
I think you missed a 0. IIRC it's 230,000 years. And it's not 'every' 230,000 years, the interval just tends to be a multiple of 230,000. The last reversal was something like 700,000 years ago.
Most current AJAX applications use XmlHttpRequest, but XmlHttpRequest is not required to develop AJAX applications, and AJAX (minus the name) was around long before XmlHttpRequest.
I would suggest that that their "reason" would have something to do with the fact that a new version of Windows and IE are on their way, that don't have the same holes, and the cost/effort to fix those existing problems would be too costly to the newer versions (going from the IE Blog, alot of the IE 6 team has something to do with IE 7, and the WinXP team is involved in WinVista).
While that may be true now, what was the IE6 team up to for almost four years while IE 6 was left out to dry like a bastard stepchild and Microsoft had no intention of ever writing IE 7? If your hypothesis were true, IE 6 vulnerabilites should have been fixed much faster before work was begun on IE 7 then they are now. Survey says: Not So!
It's not really a holiday, but in some areas of the country (e.g. Wisconsin, where I grew up, and Minnesota) a lot of business and schools close down on the first day of hunting season because they know that the majority of their employees/students/teachers will take the day off anyway. I had a friend who went to University of Wisconsin, and while she never officially had opening day off, almost every year all of her classes that day were cancelled so the professor could get his deer.
While this may be true in an office or school setting, not everyone can or wants to afford to run networking cable all over their house. I can go anywhere in my house and never be more than 10 feet form a power outlet, but there is only one room in my house that has a network hub, and at the moment it is infrequently used for anything.
Throw in interference, inevitable drop outs, and the fact that real world performance is no where near the '54Mbs' marked on the box and it all adds up to an unappealing package in the home.
It may never be anywhere near 54Mbps (I'm on an 11Mbps wireless network, and I think I usually get about half that) but it's still far higher than the 1.5Mbps DSL or 2-3 Mbps cable that most people (at least in the US) have. I suspect that very few wireless users care about transferring data back and forth between other computers on the same network.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success
on
GCC 4.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
First of all, it is true that if one only goes by the definition of open source [opensource.org] then the GNU compiler collection does fulfill all the conditions of that definition. GCC also fulfills the Free software definition [gnu.org]. Since this software package seems to satisfy both we must therefore look at some other facts to see which group this software appropriately belongs to.
I would say that since this software satisfies both requirements, it could accurately be called by both names. In fact, all Free Software could accurately be called Open Source. Would you say that a Ford Taurus is not a car, because Ford Taurus is a more descriptive name and gives more credit to the makers?
There are times when it is most appropriate to call a Ford Taurus by name, and there are times when it is acceptable to call it a car. The same is tre of Free Software. In this casse, the original poster has said that "GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success", and he is absolutely, undeniably correct, because he is not just talking about Free Software, he is talking about all of Open Source Software. It may not give RMS or his movement the credit that he wants (or deserves, in many people's opinion) but that does not mean that it is not correct.
Funny, most places I've worked, it's been the opposite.
Manager: How long will this take? Developer: 1 month. Manager: OK, I'll tell the client it will be ready in two weeks.
Sometimes it's even worse.
Manager: How long will this take? Developer: 1 month. Manager: Oh, we told the client that feature is already supported.
The CTO at one of my first jobs told me that a good rule of thumb is that whenever somebody asks me how long something is going to take, come up with my best conservative estimate, then double it and add 2. I haven't become good at doing this until just recently, and I'm starting to wish I had taken his advice long ago. In addition to giving a little bit of a buffer to ward off manager statements such as the first one above, it also helps to account for all of the unpredictable situations that happen in our life that one never thinks of when planning a timeline (sick days, death in the family, etc.) and all the other random distractions and emergency fixes that pop up in any office at the most inconvenient times.
There is, however, one key difference between the Xbox and the razor/cell phone/inkjet printer examples.
The manufacturer of the razor/cell phone/inkjet printer knows that for as long as you own the product you will be continually be paying for blades/minutes/ink at a more or less fixed rate because the minute you stop buying refills the product becomes useless.
With a game console, this is not the case. It is quite possible to buy a console and only ever buy a handful of games for it. I only own about 5 playstation 2 games, and I know another person who only owns 3. If Microsoft sells me an XBox 360 at a $150 loss, it's possible that many purchasers will never spend $150 total on the games for it, much less that Microsoft will ever see $150 profit off those purchases.
Personally, I'm just wondering whether I can pick up an original Xbox on the cheap now that the 360's are out, since aside from San Andreas (which I will probably buy once the price comes down a bit) the selection of Playstation games available for the last year or two has been rather disappointing.
Seriously, this whole debate was decided by the pressure from big American IT firms and also the furore in the American press about this whole issue.
What furor? Outside of Slashdot (and the tech rags that Slashdot was linking to) I never saw this issue mentioned anywhere. If it was in any of the mainstream media (e.g. CNN) it was well off the front page, so to speak.
Does he take into account tax credits and deductions available for hybrid cars? There is a $2000 federal tax deduction for buying ahybrid vehicle, which is probably worth about $400-800 depending on tax bracket and other factors. Plus some states have additional tax incentives for hybrid vehicles. In Colorado, I believe you can get a state tax credit for the full price difference between a hybrid and the closest comparable non-hybrid.
Of course, my wife and I probably would have bought a Prius regardless of cost difference had it been an option for us. Unfortunately, at the time we bought our car, there was a year wait to get a new 2004 Prius, and we needed a new car ASAP.
When my wife and I considered buying a Prius, people were offering $3-5K over list price, and there was a 6 month to a year waiting list in every state. I know it's come down substanitally since then, but if you are on the market for a Prius right now, I would expect to still pay at least list price. This is probably not true for the civic hybrids, but the civic hybrids are not nearly in as high demand as the prius, and they are not as technologically advanced.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I can see it now. Over time they'll add bits of red and yellow shading to the orange icon. They'll change the level of anti-aliasing a little bit, and maybe slightly adjust the radius of the rounded corners. After a year or two, they'll add drop shadows, and before you know it, no one will regognize the original orange and white icon used in Firefox and Opera and all of the other browsers that agreed to follow Microsoft into this standard. Everyone will be locked into the new and improved Microsoft version.
Meanwhile, Dave Winer will be somewhere saying "See, I told you that you should have just used an orange rectangle with the letters 'XML'. But would you listen to me? NO! And now Microsoft has gone and emrace-and-extended your precious litle radio icon. I hope you're happy!"
Try reading the same sentence again, and emphasizing a different portion of the sentence.
I try to open an MS document now it does open using Word except it does ask me to license the product.
When compared to the previous sentence:
I used Word until the trial period expired then when I could no longer open documents...
we see that the interesting part here was the change in behavior from not opening documents to opening documents. It does still ask him to license the product (which it probably did during the trial phase as well) but that is not really the interesting part- because we know it hasn't ever been registered, the fact that it would ask shouldn't be very surprising.
If you can get your system without giving up your identity (steal it or buy it through someone who "loses" records),
No need to find somebody who loses records- just go to your local Fry's/CompUSA/MicroCenter, and pay with cash. You know, that green stuff that nobody uses anymore, and is basically untrackable...
The TCEHAF Act? Sorry, it'll never fly. You have to start with a catchy acronym first, and then you can make up a name to go with it. Maybe you could change it to DECAF...
Not that that's ever stopped anyone from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, of course...
You don't get it. The telephone companies are trying to kill the goose, because they're not making any money off the eggs. They know what made the Internet successful, and they want to stop it.
This isn't a matter of "Hey, what kind of stupid scheme can we use to milk more money out of this new technology?" This is a matter of "Crap, this new technology is taking away from our business, what can we do to kill it without being too obvious about it?"
Software interfaces shouldn't make you think, but they should at least allow you to think. The problem with GNOME as it stands now is that it doesn't even give the user this simple courtesy. The is a not-so-fine line between "Don't make our users think" and "Our users can't think", and GNOME seems to be on the wrong side of it lately.
I don't know that I would say that this statement is very "out there". While I normally try to avoid religious flamewars, and don't think too highly of people who purposefully start them, in this case I think he is 100% right. Long ago, I was a die hard GNOME user, but now I can barely stand it. It's still more attractive than KDE, but that's about the only thing it has going for it anymore. Over the years they have systematically removed every helpful and useful facet of the system in the name of 'usability'. At this point, I no longer find GNOME any more useful than Windows. It now has all of Windows' lack of configurability and most annoying 'features' (like new windows popping up and stealing your focus at the worst possible times) but lacks much of the (long overdue) refinement that Microsoft finally added with WinXP.
Is it just me, or is it hard to take any summary seriously that starts out with "* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us YubaNet is reporting that in recent tests by Stephanie C Schuckers..."
Even if you don't recognize the name **Beatles-Beatles (I didn't until somebody pointed it out), it just sounds like a setup for an April Fools prank.
I'm led to assume that you spend the other 10% of your time trying to remember math that you forgot before you started high school.
Then again, from my experience, spending 10% of your day trying to figure out where to eat lunch is probably a bit on the low end- Maybe I should give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a typo, and you meant to say 20%.
I'm one of the three people who plays Matrix Online, and I know quite a few people in the game... My experience breaks down:
... ... ...
;)
1. men who play female avatars
2. Women who play female avatars
3. Men who play male avatars
I haven't run into a lot of female players who play male avatars
Given the first statement, and the list of different players you provided, I think I can see why you can't find many female players playing male avatars. And a sample of 1 for each of the other populations isn't very convincing either.
(Apologies for excessive editing of your post, BTW.)
I think you missed a 0. IIRC it's 230,000 years. And it's not 'every' 230,000 years, the interval just tends to be a multiple of 230,000. The last reversal was something like 700,000 years ago.
Most current AJAX applications use XmlHttpRequest, but XmlHttpRequest is not required to develop AJAX applications, and AJAX (minus the name) was around long before XmlHttpRequest.
I would suggest that that their "reason" would have something to do with the fact that a new version of Windows and IE are on their way, that don't have the same holes, and the cost/effort to fix those existing problems would be too costly to the newer versions (going from the IE Blog, alot of the IE 6 team has something to do with IE 7, and the WinXP team is involved in WinVista).
While that may be true now, what was the IE6 team up to for almost four years while IE 6 was left out to dry like a bastard stepchild and Microsoft had no intention of ever writing IE 7? If your hypothesis were true, IE 6 vulnerabilites should have been fixed much faster before work was begun on IE 7 then they are now. Survey says: Not So!
It's not really a holiday, but in some areas of the country (e.g. Wisconsin, where I grew up, and Minnesota) a lot of business and schools close down on the first day of hunting season because they know that the majority of their employees/students/teachers will take the day off anyway. I had a friend who went to University of Wisconsin, and while she never officially had opening day off, almost every year all of her classes that day were cancelled so the professor could get his deer.
I have an idea: how about concentrating on making a decent phone? You know, one with practical and ergonomic telephony features?
umm... hello? this is nokia you're talking about, remember? i wouldn't hold your breath waiting for anything good out of them.
While this may be true in an office or school setting, not everyone can or wants to afford to run networking cable all over their house. I can go anywhere in my house and never be more than 10 feet form a power outlet, but there is only one room in my house that has a network hub, and at the moment it is infrequently used for anything.
Throw in interference, inevitable drop outs, and the fact that real world performance is no where near the '54Mbs' marked on the box and it all adds up to an unappealing package in the home.
It may never be anywhere near 54Mbps (I'm on an 11Mbps wireless network, and I think I usually get about half that) but it's still far higher than the 1.5Mbps DSL or 2-3 Mbps cable that most people (at least in the US) have. I suspect that very few wireless users care about transferring data back and forth between other computers on the same network.
First of all, it is true that if one only goes by the definition of open source [opensource.org] then the GNU compiler collection does fulfill all the conditions of that definition. GCC also fulfills the Free software definition [gnu.org]. Since this software package seems to satisfy both we must therefore look at some other facts to see which group this software appropriately belongs to.
I would say that since this software satisfies both requirements, it could accurately be called by both names. In fact, all Free Software could accurately be called Open Source. Would you say that a Ford Taurus is not a car, because Ford Taurus is a more descriptive name and gives more credit to the makers?
There are times when it is most appropriate to call a Ford Taurus by name, and there are times when it is acceptable to call it a car. The same is tre of Free Software. In this casse, the original poster has said that "GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success", and he is absolutely, undeniably correct, because he is not just talking about Free Software, he is talking about all of Open Source Software. It may not give RMS or his movement the credit that he wants (or deserves, in many people's opinion) but that does not mean that it is not correct.
Funny, most places I've worked, it's been the opposite.
Manager: How long will this take?
Developer: 1 month.
Manager: OK, I'll tell the client it will be ready in two weeks.
Sometimes it's even worse.
Manager: How long will this take?
Developer: 1 month.
Manager: Oh, we told the client that feature is already supported.
The CTO at one of my first jobs told me that a good rule of thumb is that whenever somebody asks me how long something is going to take, come up with my best conservative estimate, then double it and add 2. I haven't become good at doing this until just recently, and I'm starting to wish I had taken his advice long ago. In addition to giving a little bit of a buffer to ward off manager statements such as the first one above, it also helps to account for all of the unpredictable situations that happen in our life that one never thinks of when planning a timeline (sick days, death in the family, etc.) and all the other random distractions and emergency fixes that pop up in any office at the most inconvenient times.
There is, however, one key difference between the Xbox and the razor/cell phone/inkjet printer examples.
The manufacturer of the razor/cell phone/inkjet printer knows that for as long as you own the product you will be continually be paying for blades/minutes/ink at a more or less fixed rate because the minute you stop buying refills the product becomes useless.
With a game console, this is not the case. It is quite possible to buy a console and only ever buy a handful of games for it. I only own about 5 playstation 2 games, and I know another person who only owns 3. If Microsoft sells me an XBox 360 at a $150 loss, it's possible that many purchasers will never spend $150 total on the games for it, much less that Microsoft will ever see $150 profit off those purchases.
Personally, I'm just wondering whether I can pick up an original Xbox on the cheap now that the 360's are out, since aside from San Andreas (which I will probably buy once the price comes down a bit) the selection of Playstation games available for the last year or two has been rather disappointing.
The first statement is a definition, not a condition:
#define question (bb || !bb)
Seriously, this whole debate was decided by the pressure from big American IT firms and also the furore in the American press about this whole issue.
What furor? Outside of Slashdot (and the tech rags that Slashdot was linking to) I never saw this issue mentioned anywhere. If it was in any of the mainstream media (e.g. CNN) it was well off the front page, so to speak.
Does he take into account tax credits and deductions available for hybrid cars? There is a $2000 federal tax deduction for buying ahybrid vehicle, which is probably worth about $400-800 depending on tax bracket and other factors. Plus some states have additional tax incentives for hybrid vehicles. In Colorado, I believe you can get a state tax credit for the full price difference between a hybrid and the closest comparable non-hybrid.
Of course, my wife and I probably would have bought a Prius regardless of cost difference had it been an option for us. Unfortunately, at the time we bought our car, there was a year wait to get a new 2004 Prius, and we needed a new car ASAP.
Over the last 20 years, (if you look at pre-katrina prices) gas prices have gone up more like 3-4% a year, or slightly less than inflation.
At least in the U.S. I'm not sure about other countries.
When my wife and I considered buying a Prius, people were offering $3-5K over list price, and there was a 6 month to a year waiting list in every state. I know it's come down substanitally since then, but if you are on the market for a Prius right now, I would expect to still pay at least list price. This is probably not true for the civic hybrids, but the civic hybrids are not nearly in as high demand as the prius, and they are not as technologically advanced.