Actually, it is. Think of it as being like the captain of a ship -> it doesn't matter who owns the title / deed to the vessel, it's still "the captain's ship." Responsibility starts and ends with him.
At first, it's "there is no evidence of corruption." Then it becomes "well, one or two bad apples doesn't mean the rest are corrupt, you can't judge them all by the actions of a few." Followed by "well, maybe there is some serious corruption, but hey, everyone is doing it / you have to accept that for all the great services we get in return." And so on.
Yeah, no. The way things are...you can use a VPN to grab a Russian or British or French IP address...that's on top of the general inaccuracy of IPs to begin with. I'd feel bad for anyone who tried to present an IP Address as some sort of geographic location in court; the defence would just dismantle the DA's case in that fact alone.
IP Address -> kind of like a telephone number. Sure, sometimes it gives you a lead on the general exchange (last hop) that the number is calling from, but (show of hands) the number of people who'd believe, with eyes closed, that a person with an 215 area code is actually in Philadelphia these days?
Sounds about right. I mean, it's 2012, and only now is Newsweek transitioning to a web only format.
To say that the journalists are a little behind, technologically speaking, is to say that we don't use oil lamps as our primary source of light any-more.
They appear to want you to spend several minutes in frustration using a crappy WordPress search engine to find the one article you came for, and hopefully accidentally open a dozen others (more clicks).
Hmm. They appear to want a dumbed down search engine, where it provides a link and says "what you are looking for might be on this site, but you'll have to use their crappy built-in search and work to find it, instead us of just linking directly to it." Or they want Google to pay them for having identical content ("We put an AP article up like 3,000 other news sites! We deserve some money! Gimme gimme!"). This is what happens when you let journalists on the web -> they have no grasp or understanding of how or why things are the way they are, and want the techs (servants / slaves) to completely rewrite a design that has worked just fine for decades so that they don't have to think of a new business model.
In a strange way, it reminds me of how the pirates told the musicians, "We aren't your enemies," with some of them believing the pirates and a fair portion of them not. The funny part, loosely related to all this, is that now the musicians are being asked to take an 85% pay cut with compulsory licensing on radio play rights, proving the point.
Yes, they would cut their noses off to spite their faces. Happens all the time.
Ever have a boss who denied a reasonable request that the rest of the team needed fulfilled before continuing work, if only to exercise his / her arbitrary powers of decision? For some people, it's less about the money, and more about the power. Why serve in heaven when you can rule in hell?
Microsoft's Surface? It will probably sell well; when MS does hardware, they typically do it better than even the established players. Windows 8? Ouch.
Ubuntu with Ads? That's the sound of a death knell for that company. Other linux distros have tried this before, it did not end well. The larger problem is that Ubuntu is lying to itself, essentially a servant with two masters: on one hand, without the OSS community, they're dead in the water, on the other hand, they feel they are owed something for the work they've put in. Until they realize that they want to be paid first, contribute to OSS second, they're in for a world of hurt.
Apple is in its own hell. Their co-founder and primary design engineer / artist is dead, as is his ability to sell people stuff that they may not want nor need. They have someone else in there right now, but it sounds like he isn't flexible enough to wear the black turtleneck and the blue jeans. Simply increasing the resolution of your current devices, or playing with form factors will buy you time, but it can't give the company the vision it needs to sustain itself. Given the way Apple is run, you need someone at top who understands what he / she is looking for, and whether the engineers will be able to deliver before he / she even picks up the phone. They have a capable person for the latter, but not necessarily for the former.
Google has its own issues, namely that it appears to be living in a fantasy world / disconnect with the real world. Google search is just absolutely terrible these days, just horrid, as a search engine. Advertisers want more (they always do) intrusive ads, and Google has yet to convince them why progressing to the next format may be a bad idea (it is). Jelly Bean, however, has been well received, and aside from patent issues with Apple, it is shaping up to be a real operating system. On another note, they haven't put anything else out lately worth mentioning, which coming from a company that gave us GMail & friends, seems a little odd. Additionally, there are some rumors of the NSA getting its fingernails into Google's databases, which is a minor concern for alarm; the image of Google opening up various accounts with confidential information at the snap of a bureaucrat's fingers is not one well received.
As for the shares, we all know that the US economy is desperate for some good news, having jumped the gun a few times over the past several weeks. However, despite the horrible deficits and mounting debt problems, we are reminded that it is an election year, so the market will probably remain, as it has sometimes, near the low end until a candidate emerges victorious; whether it will go up or down, after that victory, is open to some guessing.
Bitcoins are an experimental currency at the moment, with developers still writing the software to accept BitCoin payments. It also lacks circuit-breakers and what are considered traditional theft protections, but if you know what you are doing, it might be worth a look.
Iranian Rials are in an odd position at the moment. You can buy in, but it's hard to buy out. However, if sanctions are eventually lifted, the currency may be worth more than originally purchased.
Indeed. Which is why my latest program is probably going to be GPL v3'ed, with a donation page on there somewhere. I'm going to put Benjamin Franklin's quote to the test, to see if something universally useful is better off not being patented / locked up / paid licensing. If there is ever enough money in there to buy a pizza, I will be surprised.
Now, the other program I am working on...will only be seen in the light of day after I have enough to buy a few south Pacific islands. It's taking slightly more than a year to finish the basic framework, and if it does work (preliminary tests were promising, but again, you can only go so far at that stage), it will be quite exciting. That particular program will probably spend a few years acting as a web service, with the output being what I'd sell.
Dude, it's a heavy handed attempt at controlling the market, and Microsoft is going to FEEL the magnitude of its mistake here. Even Apple isn't feeling so hot, as without S. Jobs's charisma field, the company is suddenly sitting out in the open with a target on its back.
MS wants to copy Apple in that respect, which would be fine, except MS isn't Apple. Ballmer doesn't have charisma, and certainly doesn't have S. Jobs's ability to bend reality around 'The Chosen.' As such, he's making a hideous mistake (this is going to hurt, like a blow to the solar plexus).
Between their sad attempts at market segregation (Windows 7 with its dozen or so editions, just spreading confusion), and now their attempt to dictate to developers what will and will not run on their OS (that'll end well), I would short MS's stock immediately after their Windows 8 blowout (I imagine the stock will rise for a few months, after they mention that it now accounts for 80% of their OS sales or something (nevermind that the OEMs will be using the downgrade clause), after which some news report will mention that people hate it, with a sudden drop in stock price, as the bad news press really starts rolling).
MS had a choice between investing in DRM, a wonky GUI, and a walled garden, or a better GUI, better communications, and moving everything out of unmanaged land. Guess which one it chose? If you are thinking "money grab," you would be correct.
And in the end, the Greens realized that it was their own efforts to prevent environmental degradation that spurred it.
Foreign species brought in to repair the damage to local environments became invasive. Carbon markets, to tax and control pollution in the atmosphere, were soon gamed by every lawyer who had a creative mind. Even their attempts to depopulate or cull humanity only resulted in a population explosion, as stress + humans = sex.
I mean, if you can't even get the philosophy right, when there's a whole institute dedicated to it...well, that shows, in great detail, what you know about the subject: zilch.
*shrouds himself in shadows* Then perhaps someone needs to place a phone call to one of the gentlemen at the CIA with a morally casual stance towards crime fighting and nation building, and offer him (& friends) a hefty sum of untraceable monies to fix the problem?
Nonsense. Cable companies are facing an end, though I doubt that it will take ten years before the peak of their power has been hit.
They are using copper...fiber right up until the last mile, then copper. They are resorting to every legal tactic in the book to lock in content providers, who oddly enough, come across as the better guys in this scenario. And this would be fine, if it weren't for the baby that Ma Bell gave birth to -> Verizon and its FiOS service. Since it's pushing fiber to the home, the game ends with it, unless scientists come up with some new technology that tops fiber.
Cable companies are very aware of how effortless FiOS provides high-speeds and eats away at their customers. They know they have limited time before their monopolies, natural or otherwise, are over.
Sadly, yes. If you give into people who believe that something such as 'blasphemy' exists, very soon their stated adversaries will make use of the same laws to silence them. Imagine how many religions would fall apart if they couldn't criticize other religions?
They did something similar to the hyperthreading that Intel does -> that was the Bulldozer design! As it stands, they actually did it better than Intel, but it's still not what their customers were looking for.
They aren't using tablets and smartphones in place of desktops and laptops, they're using tablets and smartphones in addition to desktops and laptops.
It's a new market, it grows, it matures, but the other markets still exist (but the players are already established there, so it's not as interesting; plus, people are wiser to manufacturers selling them crap in those markets). People are already getting tired of the 18-month treadmill that the phone manufacturers have had them on.
Huh, didn't know Diamond was still in business. There's a ghost from the past.
Buy from HIS. They tend to care about their card designs, and have a decent warranty. I've bought several cards from them, haven't had any issues with them to date.
Exactly. They should be doubling-down on a new high-end processor design, not shedding employees that know their shit. They appear to be making the same mistakes that HP and friends have made in times past ("Hey, do we even need a PC division?"), which usually happens when you have the wrong people in high places. The company becomes a pump-and-dump, with each new CEO talking about turning things around and not succeeding, while accepting golden parachutes, with slight stock increases followed by larger and larger dips after each new 'message,' while assets are sold / spun off, until the main company is sold off to foreign competitors, and finally buried.
Aside from the botched FX series, AMD is fine in higher-end PCs. However, that last processor line screwed the pooch, and for some odd reason, they bought into the hype / nonsense about low-power devices being "The Next Big Thing," and failed to ready a new top of the line processor. They're doing it to themselves.
As for the server stuff, hell yes they need a separate line. Those 12-core and 16-core processors are selling like hotcakes among University / College net admins, who want as many cores as possible for their VMs / clouds / whatever. No one needs the slight single-threaded performance boost and huge cost disparity that Intel has been offering.
Nonsense. In today's political and economic climate, idiocy rules supreme. AMD will be allowed to die, and Intel will cite competition in the ARM market in any anti-trust case (of which there will be none).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is. Think of it as being like the captain of a ship -> it doesn't matter who owns the title / deed to the vessel, it's still "the captain's ship." Responsibility starts and ends with him.
But by all means, change that. See what happens.
At first, it's "there is no evidence of corruption." Then it becomes "well, one or two bad apples doesn't mean the rest are corrupt, you can't judge them all by the actions of a few." Followed by "well, maybe there is some serious corruption, but hey, everyone is doing it / you have to accept that for all the great services we get in return." And so on.
Yeah, no. The way things are...you can use a VPN to grab a Russian or British or French IP address...that's on top of the general inaccuracy of IPs to begin with. I'd feel bad for anyone who tried to present an IP Address as some sort of geographic location in court; the defence would just dismantle the DA's case in that fact alone.
IP Address -> kind of like a telephone number. Sure, sometimes it gives you a lead on the general exchange (last hop) that the number is calling from, but (show of hands) the number of people who'd believe, with eyes closed, that a person with an 215 area code is actually in Philadelphia these days?
Sounds about right. I mean, it's 2012, and only now is Newsweek transitioning to a web only format.
To say that the journalists are a little behind, technologically speaking, is to say that we don't use oil lamps as our primary source of light any-more.
They appear to want you to spend several minutes in frustration using a crappy WordPress search engine to find the one article you came for, and hopefully accidentally open a dozen others (more clicks).
Hmm. They appear to want a dumbed down search engine, where it provides a link and says "what you are looking for might be on this site, but you'll have to use their crappy built-in search and work to find it, instead us of just linking directly to it." Or they want Google to pay them for having identical content ("We put an AP article up like 3,000 other news sites! We deserve some money! Gimme gimme!"). This is what happens when you let journalists on the web -> they have no grasp or understanding of how or why things are the way they are, and want the techs (servants / slaves) to completely rewrite a design that has worked just fine for decades so that they don't have to think of a new business model.
In a strange way, it reminds me of how the pirates told the musicians, "We aren't your enemies," with some of them believing the pirates and a fair portion of them not. The funny part, loosely related to all this, is that now the musicians are being asked to take an 85% pay cut with compulsory licensing on radio play rights, proving the point.
I see you are still young, padawan.
Yes, they would cut their noses off to spite their faces. Happens all the time.
Ever have a boss who denied a reasonable request that the rest of the team needed fulfilled before continuing work, if only to exercise his / her arbitrary powers of decision? For some people, it's less about the money, and more about the power. Why serve in heaven when you can rule in hell?
Agreed.
Microsoft's Surface? It will probably sell well; when MS does hardware, they typically do it better than even the established players. Windows 8? Ouch.
Ubuntu with Ads? That's the sound of a death knell for that company. Other linux distros have tried this before, it did not end well. The larger problem is that Ubuntu is lying to itself, essentially a servant with two masters: on one hand, without the OSS community, they're dead in the water, on the other hand, they feel they are owed something for the work they've put in. Until they realize that they want to be paid first, contribute to OSS second, they're in for a world of hurt.
Apple is in its own hell. Their co-founder and primary design engineer / artist is dead, as is his ability to sell people stuff that they may not want nor need. They have someone else in there right now, but it sounds like he isn't flexible enough to wear the black turtleneck and the blue jeans. Simply increasing the resolution of your current devices, or playing with form factors will buy you time, but it can't give the company the vision it needs to sustain itself. Given the way Apple is run, you need someone at top who understands what he / she is looking for, and whether the engineers will be able to deliver before he / she even picks up the phone. They have a capable person for the latter, but not necessarily for the former.
Google has its own issues, namely that it appears to be living in a fantasy world / disconnect with the real world. Google search is just absolutely terrible these days, just horrid, as a search engine. Advertisers want more (they always do) intrusive ads, and Google has yet to convince them why progressing to the next format may be a bad idea (it is). Jelly Bean, however, has been well received, and aside from patent issues with Apple, it is shaping up to be a real operating system. On another note, they haven't put anything else out lately worth mentioning, which coming from a company that gave us GMail & friends, seems a little odd. Additionally, there are some rumors of the NSA getting its fingernails into Google's databases, which is a minor concern for alarm; the image of Google opening up various accounts with confidential information at the snap of a bureaucrat's fingers is not one well received.
As for the shares, we all know that the US economy is desperate for some good news, having jumped the gun a few times over the past several weeks. However, despite the horrible deficits and mounting debt problems, we are reminded that it is an election year, so the market will probably remain, as it has sometimes, near the low end until a candidate emerges victorious; whether it will go up or down, after that victory, is open to some guessing.
Bitcoins are an experimental currency at the moment, with developers still writing the software to accept BitCoin payments. It also lacks circuit-breakers and what are considered traditional theft protections, but if you know what you are doing, it might be worth a look.
Iranian Rials are in an odd position at the moment. You can buy in, but it's hard to buy out. However, if sanctions are eventually lifted, the currency may be worth more than originally purchased.
Indeed. Which is why my latest program is probably going to be GPL v3'ed, with a donation page on there somewhere. I'm going to put Benjamin Franklin's quote to the test, to see if something universally useful is better off not being patented / locked up / paid licensing. If there is ever enough money in there to buy a pizza, I will be surprised.
Now, the other program I am working on...will only be seen in the light of day after I have enough to buy a few south Pacific islands. It's taking slightly more than a year to finish the basic framework, and if it does work (preliminary tests were promising, but again, you can only go so far at that stage), it will be quite exciting. That particular program will probably spend a few years acting as a web service, with the output being what I'd sell.
Dude, it's a heavy handed attempt at controlling the market, and Microsoft is going to FEEL the magnitude of its mistake here. Even Apple isn't feeling so hot, as without S. Jobs's charisma field, the company is suddenly sitting out in the open with a target on its back.
MS wants to copy Apple in that respect, which would be fine, except MS isn't Apple. Ballmer doesn't have charisma, and certainly doesn't have S. Jobs's ability to bend reality around 'The Chosen.' As such, he's making a hideous mistake (this is going to hurt, like a blow to the solar plexus).
Between their sad attempts at market segregation (Windows 7 with its dozen or so editions, just spreading confusion), and now their attempt to dictate to developers what will and will not run on their OS (that'll end well), I would short MS's stock immediately after their Windows 8 blowout (I imagine the stock will rise for a few months, after they mention that it now accounts for 80% of their OS sales or something (nevermind that the OEMs will be using the downgrade clause), after which some news report will mention that people hate it, with a sudden drop in stock price, as the bad news press really starts rolling).
MS had a choice between investing in DRM, a wonky GUI, and a walled garden, or a better GUI, better communications, and moving everything out of unmanaged land. Guess which one it chose? If you are thinking "money grab," you would be correct.
And in the end, the Greens realized that it was their own efforts to prevent environmental degradation that spurred it.
Foreign species brought in to repair the damage to local environments became invasive. Carbon markets, to tax and control pollution in the atmosphere, were soon gamed by every lawyer who had a creative mind. Even their attempts to depopulate or cull humanity only resulted in a population explosion, as stress + humans = sex.
Objectivism.
I mean, if you can't even get the philosophy right, when there's a whole institute dedicated to it...well, that shows, in great detail, what you know about the subject: zilch.
*shrouds himself in shadows* Then perhaps someone needs to place a phone call to one of the gentlemen at the CIA with a morally casual stance towards crime fighting and nation building, and offer him (& friends) a hefty sum of untraceable monies to fix the problem?
And as 'future assassin,' I'm not sure we should adopt this advice. I'd hate to make your job too easy.
Nonsense. Cable companies are facing an end, though I doubt that it will take ten years before the peak of their power has been hit.
They are using copper...fiber right up until the last mile, then copper. They are resorting to every legal tactic in the book to lock in content providers, who oddly enough, come across as the better guys in this scenario. And this would be fine, if it weren't for the baby that Ma Bell gave birth to -> Verizon and its FiOS service. Since it's pushing fiber to the home, the game ends with it, unless scientists come up with some new technology that tops fiber.
Cable companies are very aware of how effortless FiOS provides high-speeds and eats away at their customers. They know they have limited time before their monopolies, natural or otherwise, are over.
Sadly, yes. If you give into people who believe that something such as 'blasphemy' exists, very soon their stated adversaries will make use of the same laws to silence them. Imagine how many religions would fall apart if they couldn't criticize other religions?
I want off this planet, immediately. I can't...I can't facepalm hard enough when I hear shit like this.
Morons weaponizing the internet. It's the idiot kid who needs to prove he's a hard ass to everyone else in the sandbox.
They did something similar to the hyperthreading that Intel does -> that was the Bulldozer design! As it stands, they actually did it better than Intel, but it's still not what their customers were looking for.
They aren't using tablets and smartphones in place of desktops and laptops, they're using tablets and smartphones in addition to desktops and laptops.
It's a new market, it grows, it matures, but the other markets still exist (but the players are already established there, so it's not as interesting; plus, people are wiser to manufacturers selling them crap in those markets). People are already getting tired of the 18-month treadmill that the phone manufacturers have had them on.
12-core Phenom IIIs. That'll fix the problem.
Huh, didn't know Diamond was still in business. There's a ghost from the past.
Buy from HIS. They tend to care about their card designs, and have a decent warranty. I've bought several cards from them, haven't had any issues with them to date.
Indeed. 'Tis Cross-Fire with AMD/ATI, not SLI.
Exactly. They should be doubling-down on a new high-end processor design, not shedding employees that know their shit. They appear to be making the same mistakes that HP and friends have made in times past ("Hey, do we even need a PC division?"), which usually happens when you have the wrong people in high places. The company becomes a pump-and-dump, with each new CEO talking about turning things around and not succeeding, while accepting golden parachutes, with slight stock increases followed by larger and larger dips after each new 'message,' while assets are sold / spun off, until the main company is sold off to foreign competitors, and finally buried.
Aside from the botched FX series, AMD is fine in higher-end PCs. However, that last processor line screwed the pooch, and for some odd reason, they bought into the hype / nonsense about low-power devices being "The Next Big Thing," and failed to ready a new top of the line processor. They're doing it to themselves.
As for the server stuff, hell yes they need a separate line. Those 12-core and 16-core processors are selling like hotcakes among University / College net admins, who want as many cores as possible for their VMs / clouds / whatever. No one needs the slight single-threaded performance boost and huge cost disparity that Intel has been offering.
Nonsense. In today's political and economic climate, idiocy rules supreme. AMD will be allowed to die, and Intel will cite competition in the ARM market in any anti-trust case (of which there will be none).