The moron chose to defend himself and likened the other party to Ghengis Khan.
Cases are decided on the merits of the argument. If you're determined to enter a stupid argument, you're going to lose - the amount of money either side has or validity of the underlying concept doesn't matter at that point..
Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can.
Of course, that's of minimal practical use as a) Those are burst figures, I'm damned if I can sustain them and b) I read Slashdot which means my odds of finding a compatible interface are pretty minimal.
>> Why more people don't use encrypted email boggles my mind.
Probably because it requires every person you send email to or receive email from to be aware of the encryption system and how to use it
I for one support all spammers encrypting their emails, even if it means I don't know how to then read them. Hell, especially if it means I can't then read them.
It may be the government's greatest tool for defeating terrorists using encryption: 1. Legally require encryption on all spam. 2. Watch every spam filter on earth say, "It's encrypted... SPAM!" 3. Watch everyone on earth uninstall the now utterly useless encryption tools or disable their spam filtering to the point where their actual evil terrorist doings are so burried in spam they can't carry out an attack anyway.
And from the article, "What's the root cause of Mouse Rage Syndrome? It's primarily caused by badly... hosted Web sites". "And, of course, the killer cause: site unavailability.", "Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this."
Weirdest thing, a study bought (sorry, "paid for") by a managed hosting company found that poorly hosted sites are a bad thing.
Whatever's next? Will a Microsoft funded study find that Windows has a lower total cost of ownership than Linux? A UK music industry funded study will find that most people support an extension of copyright terms? A Lybian court will find Bulgarian nurses guilty of infecting children with a strain of HIV that's been around since before the nurses entered the country and that it's absolutely nothing to do with pre-existing poor hygene conditions at the Lybian hospital? Those that want funding under the Bush administration will find Climate Change isn't real? Why on earth aren't hundreds of scientists speaking out and decrying such blatantly biased research?
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
Just put the TV and computer in the back room. It'll permanently be in shade.
finally this is a PUBLIC site run by as in run by the government! The government shouldn't require one to use a certain browser without a really good reason.
It's still cost vs. reward, even if it's the government and not a private business.
I'd be pretty pissed if I found my tax money was going on projects that had ballooned in cost and massively shrunk in features to support a fraction of a percent of the population that had other valid alternatives but were simply too bloody minded to move from something they felt "should" be supported.
I'll support the added costs and potential feature reductions to meet cost targets of Section 508 because those covered don't have the option to use a different browser. Anyone capable enough to download Opera is capable enough to also download Firefox - which apparently is supported.
So, given that governments run on money just like businesses and they can only provide so much for a given cost, would we rather a) live in denial that they're about money too, b) hike taxes up to cover extra dev costs associated with covering people using [relatively] obscure browsers when they have plenty of supported options, c) drop features so everything can get supported for the same cost or d) tell them to get over themselves/ignore them?
somewhere in the buying process you have an option
1 Windows XP Home restore package (+$99.99) 2 Windows XP Pro restore package (+$99.99) 3 I will provide Windows OS/HP driver kit (+00.00) 4 No OS needed
The flaw in your assumption is that you're assuming retailers have any interest whatsoever in making that process legible.
Take USB 2.0. Hi-speed and full-speed. Which is the faster one? Even assuming you happen to remember without looking it up, now call your mother, grandfather, etc. and see if they know. The whole naming structure's a deliberate obfuscation by manufacturers to allow them to offload the cheaper components on people who don't know the difference - while avoiding having people refuse to buy USB 1 products they assume are "worse" when, in fact, they need a fraction of USB 1's bandwidth in the first place.
Your options are going to be presented as:
HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive. HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, back up operating system CD. HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, true freedom(tm) operating system advantage. HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, operating system advantage(tm) operating system advantage.
One of those has Windows, one has Red Hat and a backup CD, one has no O.S. whatsoever and one has a dual boot with both Windows and Red Hat.
The readers of Slashdot will revel in their freedom and their thorough research will avoid their getting screwed. They will however really quickly get sick of their relatives calling up, wondering why their new PC says something about memory and disk drives before locking up on some weird screen about no boot disk being found - along with being asked to come over and get grandma's new iPod working and hooked up to the iTunes store on her new PC (that's running Red Hat). They'll quickly learn to desperately try and explain what "true freedome operating system advantage" means to grandparents that quickly glaze over and will have a bunch of frustrating trips back to the store to find grandma has to pay a 15% restocking fee or has to pay fifty percent more than the savings she thought she was getting to get the retail rather than OEM version.
Grab the Circuit City, CompUSA, BestBuy and Fry's circulars this weekend. See if you can find a single PC ad that actually clearly explains every feature of the machine on sale. Go in to a store and ask the sales guy to see if you can get anything more intelligent than the more expensive one is better and that he likes brand X. See if he can even explain something as basic as the difference between a Geforce 6800 and a 7300 graphics card without mistakenly telling you the higher number is obviously better. Now ask yourself if the world would be improved for the non geeks out there by having the equivalent of USB hi-speed/full speed for operating systems.
I'm pretty sure that, even in france, only geeks would choose to buy a computer without an operating system, and they would only do so if they had their own means of installing an operating system.
You're making the common mistake of assuming everyone has at least a good basic grounding in tech.
To illustrate, I've just got back from the office Christmas party. As part of a white elephant gift exchange, our receptionist got a high end Logitech 2.1 speaker setup. She loves her iPod but had absolutely no idea that this heavy box she got could somehow work with her iPod - "surely iPods only work with headphones or really expensive adaptors, right?"
You advertise, as part of whatever the French equivalent of Black Friday sales is, that HP has a laptop going for 249 euros and you'll have a hell of a lot of people desperately queuing up to get this door busting deal. Probably half to three quarters of them will have no idea that the small print that says "O.S. free" or some other deliberately obscure term means that they just bought a 249 euro doorstop unless they're willing to buy the Windows they assumed all PCs come with or track down a Linux install.
Look at USB 2.0 hi speed and USB 2.0 full speed. Do you think the average consumer can tell you which is 12mbps and which is 480mbps. They're both better than USB 1.1, right? Nope. Not in the least. But companies quickly figured out how to obscure the difference in order to offload cheap garbage on to people who, realistically, aren't going to decypher every latest obfuscation.
People are motivated by perceived deals. You offer a 500 euro home PC and a 400 euro PC with "true operating system freedom(tm)" or some other obscure term, a very great number of consumers will end up essentially defrauded after thinking the 400 euro one represents a better deal and now have to pay 150 euros to get the retail rather than OEM priced version of the O.S. Of course the store will no doubt be more than happy to restock the mistaken purchase for a very reasonable 15% restocking fee, providing the box is still sealed.
Again, just because you assume something is so obvious doesn't mean it is for most non technical people.
For an OS, you may not even need to go to the store. You could download one of many free Linux (or BSD or other) OS's many of which do not even need to be installed to function.
Assuming HP shipped you a PC with absolutely no O.S. installed, how exactly would you go about downloading this wonderful free O.S.?
A great solution if you already have a PC. A pretty lousy one if you're picking up a phone, squeeling, "Bleep, bleep, blurrrrrrp, bleep" at it, then desperately noting down the bleeps and burps it sends back before trying to etch the ISO image on to a CD with a flashlight and a magnifying glass.
Batteries are a common consumer item. It can generally be assumed that even the least technically inclined can figure out where to buy them and how to install them. For the average non-Geek, finding out where to buy an O.S., understanding that the cool one Apple sells doesn't work on their PC and then going through a typical Linux install is way beyond them. Thus a product without batteries remains largely functional within the means of an average consumer whereas a PC without an O.S. does not.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff is defending the upcoming rollout of the national ID card as vital for the nation's security.
Define vital.
Will it likely make the job of security - and therefore delivering a little bit more security - easier? Most likely, yes. Is it worth the cost? Well, given the U.S. was founded on the notion of restricting government intrusion on grounds of security, probably not.
All sorts of things are vital to improving security - but just not worth it when the costs are weighed against what may well be a "vital" benefit.
It's like the old joke about the only way to truly secure a computer is to unplug it. Even with this latest intrusion, bad stuff will still happen. The only way to secure the nation entirely is to move every last person out of it, nuke it down to glass and then have satelites monitor any further heat/movement and nuke that too for good measure. Is that ridiculous behavior "vital" for absolute security? Sure. Is it worth it? Absolutely not.
All kinds of things are "vital" to achieve their end result - but it's a false assumption to think that end result itself is vital when compared to the cost of getting there.
Think of the numbers... In the last average American's lifetime's worth (~70 years), maybe 5,000 U.S. citizens have been victims of terrorism on U.S. soil - out of a population of 300,000,000. That's a one in sixty thousand chance, over an entire lifetime, of falling victim to terrorism if we don't secure things any more than they are right now (what media hype would have us believe aside). Removing a one in sixty thousand risk during my entire lifetime merits a tiny, tiny, intrusion in to my liberties. Whilst all kinds of things may be "vital" to removing that risk, the risk is actually so damn small that the slightest intrusion from any of those "vital" things means it's far better to suck the risk up and live with it. And that's before you consider that this is a major intrusion in to civil liberties for something that won't even remove that tiny 1:60,000 risk and will, at best, just add another zero on the end of an already negligibly small number.
The crazy thing is, we're hundred, if not thousands, of times more likely to be killed by the crap we eat - yet suggest curtailing our liberty to buy junk food even the slightest bit and you get a political shitstorm far in excess of the people who blindly accept we need to curtail liberties far worse to simply tweak a 1:60,000 risk. Yay for disproportionate responses based on media and political hype.
since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent.
In shocking news, consumer goods purchases peak during the holiday season, drop considerably afterwards.
At Christmas, people get given iPods that they then stock up themselves. Those who already have iPods get given iTunes gift cards. Everyone has more time during vacations to waste on iTunes and for it to occur to them they might like to buy X. People are hosting Christmas parties and want music for them. People are already hammering themselves in to credit card debt and one more iTunes purchase seems much smaller than during the rest of the year. Nope, can't imagine how that period could create a contrast with the rest of the year.
1 billion poorly lit, poorly framed, grainy images from cameras where people believed mega pixels === quality.
How did we ever live with slightly less timely clear images that were composed well?!
Besides, it's challenging enough to get alleged photo professionals whose careers depend on it not to add smoke to Lebanese buildings. How much is your reputation as a news agency going to be worth after your fiftieth photoshopping scandal because no on has a career to put in jeopardy but their odds of selling the single shot go up massively if it's more impressive?
Sure, some of the less valid photographers will face competition and things may get a little tighter for the great ones - but there'll always be a need for reliable quality backed by a scandal proof reputation.
Remember those numbers vary from install to install. They were likely running a fairly new install but not completely so.
Probably 80% of the boot time is crappy drivers and helper apps that seem to accumulate over time.
I put my OS on a Raptor and a clean install boots in roughly 6 seconds. A few months later, it's up around 20 seconds. Give it a year and I have no doubt I'll be sucking up near 60 second boot times as the assorted cruft Windows picks up tries to initialize itself and happily conflicts with everything else.
Much as I love knocking Microsoft as much as the next guy, their pure OS can boot relatively quickly. Adobe's acrobat reader, VersionCue and color management, Microsoft's own office and search helpers, various IM clients, Apple's iPod agent, ATi's Catalyst Control Center, the ever useful ABit uGuru, the Windows Media connect I have for my 360, the UPS monitor, Spyware blocker, Java install and the Windows Update I chose to set to auto-download-but-not-install culmulatively kill me. The sad truth is, I know a clean OS install takes me maybe a quarter of what I currently endure due to my love of additional features.
The interesting question will be whether Microsoft has forced anything useful in to their new found love of signed drivers that actually aids this. A logical system would involve drivers that had to register how critical they really were, along with criteria to change that criticality. Arguably, VersionCue could sit there saying, "OK, load your critical stuff and get to me when you can unless an Adobe program tries to start." The same goes for the iPod agent - until the USB bus anounces the presence of a connected iPod, it can probably let the user run the rest of the boot, open iTunes, check mail, etc. My UPS monitor could function almost as well if it didn't start until a minute or two after boot - so long as I had the option to bump its priority up for fault finding. Same goes for uGuru. ATi's catalyst control center could likely load a few critical features for the desktop and worry about the 3D stuff only when an app required it or I tried opening the full control center. Most of the boot could be far more sensibly prioritized but, sadly, Microsoft likely only has signed drivers so they can promote crap like Zune better whilst hindering competition and, even if they did have it, every hardware manufacturer would likely ignore it in the name of never having users curse their software for taking an extra two seconds on those rare occasions. Oh well. A dream at least.
How about a broken pipe flooding the house?... (There will still be broadband at the house.)
Given the potential for there not to still be broadband at the house should the modem be sitting in a few inches of water/have water run through the closet it's in/etc. you may want to consider having whatever data the house outputs get stored elsewhere.
That way, when you check and get no signal, you can get a pretty good idea of what happened right up to the loss of signal rather than find, "hmm, the house is off the net, I'd better buy a plane ticket to find out nothing more than my ISP sucks."
Similarly, you may want to leave a key with a trusted neighbor who can go in and restart any crappy consumer grade gear that's managed to lock itself up.
In short, broadband's a wonderful thing but it's not as "always on" as you'd want for being able to monitor things from a distance.
Consider that the serious violent crime rate (and murder if you check those numbers too) has dropped pretty much year on year since 1993 - the year Doom, arguably the first "murder simulator," was released.
About the one connection you can draw is the murder rate went up rapidly under Reagan and Bush I, down rapidly under Clinton and is slowly going up again under Bush II. Now whether conservatives cause murders or vice-versa and conservative voting is simply a sign of a homicidal society, I'm not even going to venture a guess. But, compared to the "absolutely beyond any doubt" connection that's falsely drawn by conservative politicians to video games and violent crime, it is curious that there's a vastly stronger and far more demonstrably connection between the politicians themselves and violent crime.
They actually did apply the test to non criminals. If I recall correctly, the BBC got hold of one generation of this test (before it was comuputerized) and applied it to CEOs.
A score of 20+ out of 40 implies you're likely to exhibit some degree of psycho- or socio- pathic behavior. Something like 50% of all prisoners in the U.S. score 20 or above.
The median CEO scored something like 22.
For amusement value, here is the link for Robert Hare's PCL-R subset of questions for identifying sociopaths in the workplace.
Sony Electronics are the ones who made your Vaio laptop.
Sony Computer Entertainment are the ones who make the PlayStation and most of their games (ignoring groups like Sony Online Entertainment that're a division of Sony Pictures).
The odds that the idiot who approved the root kit passed that information up even as high as the head of Sony Music are pretty minimal. That the head of Sony Music told Ken Kutaragi as head of Sony Computer Entertainment and gave Ken the slightest chance to question it are minimal in the extreme. That whoever approved a ton of advertising on your Vaio had absolutely nothing to do with SCE is pretty much guaranteed.
The truth is, Sony's a huge entity. Some parts do communicate - like the PS3 being as much about trying to win the next gen DVD wars as it is about gaming - but more parts have absolutely nothing to do with each other than do. Even were people to boycot the PS3 as a protest about the root kit, the odds the guy at Sony Music will ever feel the slightest suffering for it are pretty small.
If it makes you feel better, you can go right ahead and wish venom upon them. At the end of the day, it's about productive as wishing ill upon every last soldier because a rogue few committed an atrocity. More likely than not, those who committed the atrocity won't give a damn that you made life hell for upstanding people they've never met and who likely disagreed just as strongly as you do.
Does Microsoft's precedent mean the start of a slippery slope that will add a "pirate tax" to every piece of hardware that touches digital music?
Supply and demand applies here:
85% of all MP3 players are iPods.
After briefly debuting as the 7th most popular MP3 player, the Zune dropped to 13th most popular.
Universal gets three choices here:
Put up (only sell music through the Zune store as that is, let's face it, the only influence they have) and deal with only having the 13th most popular MP3 player market to go after... Not going to happen.
Shut up... Also not likely to happen.
Neither... They'll whine loudly, whilst sensibly not daring to cut their noses off to spite their faces, and occasionally create hype inducing headlines.
The previous MP3 taxes on hardware got through five plus years ago when MP3s were something weird the kids do. Passing laws to fine people who don't get a vote is really easy. In the half decade since, huge numbers of middle Americans have bought iPods and they're a part of mainstream society. The ignorance and "aren't l33t pirates bad!" claim doesn't work so well when middle American voters realize it suddenly applies to them and they'd be voting to make their toys more expensive.
So, Zune is such an embarassing joke it can hardly be called a trend setter, Universal won't dare actually boycot iTunes in order to make a point and MP3 players are so popular that the laws that got snuck through in the past now get soccer moms outraged. They can't affect it through business models or laws... Game over.
In much the same way, I want endless women. However, I control such a small part of the dating market that even if I boycot women, I doubt it'll bother them half as much as it'll bother me. I can't get a law passed that forces women to like me because it'd be political suicide for politicians. So, much like universal, that leaves me whining loudly about how things should be and yet nothing actually changing.
"École Secondaire Mont-Bleu has... suspended two 13-year-old girls after one uploaded to YouTube a camera phone video of their teacher yelling at the other... the teacher was so embarrassed that he stayed home from work, where he remains on stress leave.
In other news, Canada has also put all Jewish people on notice for totally humiliating Hitler. He realizes the holocaust, which Canada refuses to punish him for, was stepping out of line but the Canadian government finds the Jewish determination to let the entire world know what happened utterly unacceptable.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate, make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration, mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office, mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity?
They're called headphones.
Yes, headphones are anti-social, can be overcome by determinedly difficult people and can have difficult managers demand you take them off. All of those remain true for doors and private offices too.
Some business owners and managers cannot understand the advantages of teleworking, different office layouts, or the morale benefits of private offices with Aeron chairs.
Thank god someone dared to say this.
I've been looking for an just such an environment: where I can stay home, doze in a really comfortable chair with no one around to catch me, completely refuse to interact with team members except via IMs and e-mails on my own passive aggressive schedule and justify my lack of productivity on my home ISP that's like totally unreliable so it's not my fault I wasn't even logged in all morning, let alone working. I'm never going to power level my Warcraft character if I have to keep alt-tabbing out whenever my boss walks by.
Now when will managers get a clue and realize this kind of shining future would be awesome for my morale!?
Slashdot Mirror
The moron chose to defend himself and likened the other party to Ghengis Khan.
Cases are decided on the merits of the argument. If you're determined to enter a stupid argument, you're going to lose - the amount of money either side has or validity of the underlying concept doesn't matter at that point..
Record?
Given the amount of information DNA encodes... that there's, what, a complete set in every single sperm?... I think my Siemen can squirt more than 107Gbps of data per second down "a series of interconnected pipes" than their Siemens can.
Of course, that's of minimal practical use as a) Those are burst figures, I'm damned if I can sustain them and b) I read Slashdot which means my odds of finding a compatible interface are pretty minimal.
>> Why more people don't use encrypted email boggles my mind.
Probably because it requires every person you send email to or receive email from to be aware of the encryption system and how to use it
I for one support all spammers encrypting their emails, even if it means I don't know how to then read them. Hell, especially if it means I can't then read them.
It may be the government's greatest tool for defeating terrorists using encryption:
1. Legally require encryption on all spam.
2. Watch every spam filter on earth say, "It's encrypted... SPAM!"
3. Watch everyone on earth uninstall the now utterly useless encryption tools or disable their spam filtering to the point where their actual evil terrorist doings are so burried in spam they can't carry out an attack anyway.
...commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting...
... hosted Web sites". "And, of course, the killer cause: site unavailability.", "Unfortunately, many Web sites and their servers cannot deliver this."
And from the article, "What's the root cause of Mouse Rage Syndrome? It's primarily caused by badly
Weirdest thing, a study bought (sorry, "paid for") by a managed hosting company found that poorly hosted sites are a bad thing.
Whatever's next? Will a Microsoft funded study find that Windows has a lower total cost of ownership than Linux? A UK music industry funded study will find that most people support an extension of copyright terms? A Lybian court will find Bulgarian nurses guilty of infecting children with a strain of HIV that's been around since before the nurses entered the country and that it's absolutely nothing to do with pre-existing poor hygene conditions at the Lybian hospital? Those that want funding under the Bush administration will find Climate Change isn't real? Why on earth aren't hundreds of scientists speaking out and decrying such blatantly biased research?
Crazy.
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
Just put the TV and computer in the back room. It'll permanently be in shade.
finally this is a PUBLIC site run by as in run by the government! The government shouldn't require one to use a certain browser without a really good reason.
It's still cost vs. reward, even if it's the government and not a private business.
I'd be pretty pissed if I found my tax money was going on projects that had ballooned in cost and massively shrunk in features to support a fraction of a percent of the population that had other valid alternatives but were simply too bloody minded to move from something they felt "should" be supported.
I'll support the added costs and potential feature reductions to meet cost targets of Section 508 because those covered don't have the option to use a different browser. Anyone capable enough to download Opera is capable enough to also download Firefox - which apparently is supported.
So, given that governments run on money just like businesses and they can only provide so much for a given cost, would we rather a) live in denial that they're about money too, b) hike taxes up to cover extra dev costs associated with covering people using [relatively] obscure browsers when they have plenty of supported options, c) drop features so everything can get supported for the same cost or d) tell them to get over themselves/ignore them?
somewhere in the buying process you have an option
/HP driver kit (+00.00)
1 Windows XP Home restore package (+$99.99)
2 Windows XP Pro restore package (+$99.99)
3 I will provide Windows OS
4 No OS needed
The flaw in your assumption is that you're assuming retailers have any interest whatsoever in making that process legible.
Take USB 2.0. Hi-speed and full-speed. Which is the faster one? Even assuming you happen to remember without looking it up, now call your mother, grandfather, etc. and see if they know. The whole naming structure's a deliberate obfuscation by manufacturers to allow them to offload the cheaper components on people who don't know the difference - while avoiding having people refuse to buy USB 1 products they assume are "worse" when, in fact, they need a fraction of USB 1's bandwidth in the first place.
Your options are going to be presented as:
HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive.
HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, back up operating system CD.
HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, true freedom(tm) operating system advantage.
HP, DVD-RW, genuine Intel Dual Core processor, 120GB hard drive, operating system advantage(tm) operating system advantage.
One of those has Windows, one has Red Hat and a backup CD, one has no O.S. whatsoever and one has a dual boot with both Windows and Red Hat.
The readers of Slashdot will revel in their freedom and their thorough research will avoid their getting screwed. They will however really quickly get sick of their relatives calling up, wondering why their new PC says something about memory and disk drives before locking up on some weird screen about no boot disk being found - along with being asked to come over and get grandma's new iPod working and hooked up to the iTunes store on her new PC (that's running Red Hat). They'll quickly learn to desperately try and explain what "true freedome operating system advantage" means to grandparents that quickly glaze over and will have a bunch of frustrating trips back to the store to find grandma has to pay a 15% restocking fee or has to pay fifty percent more than the savings she thought she was getting to get the retail rather than OEM version.
Grab the Circuit City, CompUSA, BestBuy and Fry's circulars this weekend. See if you can find a single PC ad that actually clearly explains every feature of the machine on sale. Go in to a store and ask the sales guy to see if you can get anything more intelligent than the more expensive one is better and that he likes brand X. See if he can even explain something as basic as the difference between a Geforce 6800 and a 7300 graphics card without mistakenly telling you the higher number is obviously better. Now ask yourself if the world would be improved for the non geeks out there by having the equivalent of USB hi-speed/full speed for operating systems.
I'm pretty sure that, even in france, only geeks would choose to buy a computer without an operating system, and they would only do so if they had their own means of installing an operating system.
You're making the common mistake of assuming everyone has at least a good basic grounding in tech.
To illustrate, I've just got back from the office Christmas party. As part of a white elephant gift exchange, our receptionist got a high end Logitech 2.1 speaker setup. She loves her iPod but had absolutely no idea that this heavy box she got could somehow work with her iPod - "surely iPods only work with headphones or really expensive adaptors, right?"
You advertise, as part of whatever the French equivalent of Black Friday sales is, that HP has a laptop going for 249 euros and you'll have a hell of a lot of people desperately queuing up to get this door busting deal. Probably half to three quarters of them will have no idea that the small print that says "O.S. free" or some other deliberately obscure term means that they just bought a 249 euro doorstop unless they're willing to buy the Windows they assumed all PCs come with or track down a Linux install.
Look at USB 2.0 hi speed and USB 2.0 full speed. Do you think the average consumer can tell you which is 12mbps and which is 480mbps. They're both better than USB 1.1, right? Nope. Not in the least. But companies quickly figured out how to obscure the difference in order to offload cheap garbage on to people who, realistically, aren't going to decypher every latest obfuscation.
People are motivated by perceived deals. You offer a 500 euro home PC and a 400 euro PC with "true operating system freedom(tm)" or some other obscure term, a very great number of consumers will end up essentially defrauded after thinking the 400 euro one represents a better deal and now have to pay 150 euros to get the retail rather than OEM priced version of the O.S. Of course the store will no doubt be more than happy to restock the mistaken purchase for a very reasonable 15% restocking fee, providing the box is still sealed.
Again, just because you assume something is so obvious doesn't mean it is for most non technical people.
For an OS, you may not even need to go to the store. You could download one of many free Linux (or BSD or other) OS's many of which do not even need to be installed to function.
Assuming HP shipped you a PC with absolutely no O.S. installed, how exactly would you go about downloading this wonderful free O.S.?
A great solution if you already have a PC. A pretty lousy one if you're picking up a phone, squeeling, "Bleep, bleep, blurrrrrrp, bleep" at it, then desperately noting down the bleeps and burps it sends back before trying to etch the ISO image on to a CD with a flashlight and a magnifying glass.
Batteries are a common consumer item. It can generally be assumed that even the least technically inclined can figure out where to buy them and how to install them. For the average non-Geek, finding out where to buy an O.S., understanding that the cool one Apple sells doesn't work on their PC and then going through a typical Linux install is way beyond them. Thus a product without batteries remains largely functional within the means of an average consumer whereas a PC without an O.S. does not.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff is defending the upcoming rollout of the national ID card as vital for the nation's security.
Define vital.
Will it likely make the job of security - and therefore delivering a little bit more security - easier? Most likely, yes. Is it worth the cost? Well, given the U.S. was founded on the notion of restricting government intrusion on grounds of security, probably not.
All sorts of things are vital to improving security - but just not worth it when the costs are weighed against what may well be a "vital" benefit.
It's like the old joke about the only way to truly secure a computer is to unplug it. Even with this latest intrusion, bad stuff will still happen. The only way to secure the nation entirely is to move every last person out of it, nuke it down to glass and then have satelites monitor any further heat/movement and nuke that too for good measure. Is that ridiculous behavior "vital" for absolute security? Sure. Is it worth it? Absolutely not.
All kinds of things are "vital" to achieve their end result - but it's a false assumption to think that end result itself is vital when compared to the cost of getting there.
Think of the numbers... In the last average American's lifetime's worth (~70 years), maybe 5,000 U.S. citizens have been victims of terrorism on U.S. soil - out of a population of 300,000,000. That's a one in sixty thousand chance, over an entire lifetime, of falling victim to terrorism if we don't secure things any more than they are right now (what media hype would have us believe aside). Removing a one in sixty thousand risk during my entire lifetime merits a tiny, tiny, intrusion in to my liberties. Whilst all kinds of things may be "vital" to removing that risk, the risk is actually so damn small that the slightest intrusion from any of those "vital" things means it's far better to suck the risk up and live with it. And that's before you consider that this is a major intrusion in to civil liberties for something that won't even remove that tiny 1:60,000 risk and will, at best, just add another zero on the end of an already negligibly small number.
The crazy thing is, we're hundred, if not thousands, of times more likely to be killed by the crap we eat - yet suggest curtailing our liberty to buy junk food even the slightest bit and you get a political shitstorm far in excess of the people who blindly accept we need to curtail liberties far worse to simply tweak a 1:60,000 risk. Yay for disproportionate responses based on media and political hype.
Little hiring is being done at all in the U.S. by IBM while attrition continually reduces the U.S. numbers.
That's disgusting, don't they know I.B.M. stands for American Business Machines?! It's not supposed to be an international company!
since January the monthly revenue has fallen by 65 per cent, with the average transaction size falling 17 per cent.
In shocking news, consumer goods purchases peak during the holiday season, drop considerably afterwards.
At Christmas, people get given iPods that they then stock up themselves. Those who already have iPods get given iTunes gift cards. Everyone has more time during vacations to waste on iTunes and for it to occur to them they might like to buy X. People are hosting Christmas parties and want music for them. People are already hammering themselves in to credit card debt and one more iTunes purchase seems much smaller than during the rest of the year. Nope, can't imagine how that period could create a contrast with the rest of the year.
Mmm...
1 billion poorly lit, poorly framed, grainy images from cameras where people believed mega pixels === quality.
How did we ever live with slightly less timely clear images that were composed well?!
Besides, it's challenging enough to get alleged photo professionals whose careers depend on it not to add smoke to Lebanese buildings. How much is your reputation as a news agency going to be worth after your fiftieth photoshopping scandal because no on has a career to put in jeopardy but their odds of selling the single shot go up massively if it's more impressive?
Sure, some of the less valid photographers will face competition and things may get a little tighter for the great ones - but there'll always be a need for reliable quality backed by a scandal proof reputation.
That's actually remarkably easy to fix:
Remember those numbers vary from install to install. They were likely running a fairly new install but not completely so.
Probably 80% of the boot time is crappy drivers and helper apps that seem to accumulate over time.
I put my OS on a Raptor and a clean install boots in roughly 6 seconds. A few months later, it's up around 20 seconds. Give it a year and I have no doubt I'll be sucking up near 60 second boot times as the assorted cruft Windows picks up tries to initialize itself and happily conflicts with everything else.
Much as I love knocking Microsoft as much as the next guy, their pure OS can boot relatively quickly. Adobe's acrobat reader, VersionCue and color management, Microsoft's own office and search helpers, various IM clients, Apple's iPod agent, ATi's Catalyst Control Center, the ever useful ABit uGuru, the Windows Media connect I have for my 360, the UPS monitor, Spyware blocker, Java install and the Windows Update I chose to set to auto-download-but-not-install culmulatively kill me. The sad truth is, I know a clean OS install takes me maybe a quarter of what I currently endure due to my love of additional features.
The interesting question will be whether Microsoft has forced anything useful in to their new found love of signed drivers that actually aids this. A logical system would involve drivers that had to register how critical they really were, along with criteria to change that criticality. Arguably, VersionCue could sit there saying, "OK, load your critical stuff and get to me when you can unless an Adobe program tries to start." The same goes for the iPod agent - until the USB bus anounces the presence of a connected iPod, it can probably let the user run the rest of the boot, open iTunes, check mail, etc. My UPS monitor could function almost as well if it didn't start until a minute or two after boot - so long as I had the option to bump its priority up for fault finding. Same goes for uGuru. ATi's catalyst control center could likely load a few critical features for the desktop and worry about the 3D stuff only when an app required it or I tried opening the full control center. Most of the boot could be far more sensibly prioritized but, sadly, Microsoft likely only has signed drivers so they can promote crap like Zune better whilst hindering competition and, even if they did have it, every hardware manufacturer would likely ignore it in the name of never having users curse their software for taking an extra two seconds on those rare occasions. Oh well. A dream at least.
How about a broken pipe flooding the house? ... (There will still be broadband at the house.)
Given the potential for there not to still be broadband at the house should the modem be sitting in a few inches of water/have water run through the closet it's in/etc. you may want to consider having whatever data the house outputs get stored elsewhere.
That way, when you check and get no signal, you can get a pretty good idea of what happened right up to the loss of signal rather than find, "hmm, the house is off the net, I'd better buy a plane ticket to find out nothing more than my ISP sucks."
Similarly, you may want to leave a key with a trusted neighbor who can go in and restart any crappy consumer grade gear that's managed to lock itself up.
In short, broadband's a wonderful thing but it's not as "always on" as you'd want for being able to monitor things from a distance.
It is absolutely beyond any doubt that such killer games desensitise unstable characters and can have a stimulating effect.
You want the single most compelling argument that this guy, and every other politician like him, are talking out of their asses?
Try the U.S. government's own Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics graph for Serious violent crime by perceived age of offender.
Consider that the serious violent crime rate (and murder if you check those numbers too) has dropped pretty much year on year since 1993 - the year Doom, arguably the first "murder simulator," was released.
About the one connection you can draw is the murder rate went up rapidly under Reagan and Bush I, down rapidly under Clinton and is slowly going up again under Bush II. Now whether conservatives cause murders or vice-versa and conservative voting is simply a sign of a homicidal society, I'm not even going to venture a guess. But, compared to the "absolutely beyond any doubt" connection that's falsely drawn by conservative politicians to video games and violent crime, it is curious that there's a vastly stronger and far more demonstrably connection between the politicians themselves and violent crime.
They actually did apply the test to non criminals. If I recall correctly, the BBC got hold of one generation of this test (before it was comuputerized) and applied it to CEOs.
A score of 20+ out of 40 implies you're likely to exhibit some degree of psycho- or socio- pathic behavior. Something like 50% of all prisoners in the U.S. score 20 or above.
The median CEO scored something like 22.
For amusement value, here is the link for Robert Hare's PCL-R subset of questions for identifying sociopaths in the workplace.
Sony Music were the ones with the root kit.
Sony Electronics are the ones who made your Vaio laptop.
Sony Computer Entertainment are the ones who make the PlayStation and most of their games (ignoring groups like Sony Online Entertainment that're a division of Sony Pictures).
The odds that the idiot who approved the root kit passed that information up even as high as the head of Sony Music are pretty minimal. That the head of Sony Music told Ken Kutaragi as head of Sony Computer Entertainment and gave Ken the slightest chance to question it are minimal in the extreme. That whoever approved a ton of advertising on your Vaio had absolutely nothing to do with SCE is pretty much guaranteed.
The truth is, Sony's a huge entity. Some parts do communicate - like the PS3 being as much about trying to win the next gen DVD wars as it is about gaming - but more parts have absolutely nothing to do with each other than do. Even were people to boycot the PS3 as a protest about the root kit, the odds the guy at Sony Music will ever feel the slightest suffering for it are pretty small.
If it makes you feel better, you can go right ahead and wish venom upon them. At the end of the day, it's about productive as wishing ill upon every last soldier because a rogue few committed an atrocity. More likely than not, those who committed the atrocity won't give a damn that you made life hell for upstanding people they've never met and who likely disagreed just as strongly as you do.
Does Microsoft's precedent mean the start of a slippery slope that will add a "pirate tax" to every piece of hardware that touches digital music?
Supply and demand applies here:
85% of all MP3 players are iPods.
After briefly debuting as the 7th most popular MP3 player, the Zune dropped to 13th most popular.
Universal gets three choices here:
Put up (only sell music through the Zune store as that is, let's face it, the only influence they have) and deal with only having the 13th most popular MP3 player market to go after... Not going to happen.
Shut up... Also not likely to happen.
Neither... They'll whine loudly, whilst sensibly not daring to cut their noses off to spite their faces, and occasionally create hype inducing headlines.
The previous MP3 taxes on hardware got through five plus years ago when MP3s were something weird the kids do. Passing laws to fine people who don't get a vote is really easy. In the half decade since, huge numbers of middle Americans have bought iPods and they're a part of mainstream society. The ignorance and "aren't l33t pirates bad!" claim doesn't work so well when middle American voters realize it suddenly applies to them and they'd be voting to make their toys more expensive.
So, Zune is such an embarassing joke it can hardly be called a trend setter, Universal won't dare actually boycot iTunes in order to make a point and MP3 players are so popular that the laws that got snuck through in the past now get soccer moms outraged. They can't affect it through business models or laws... Game over.
In much the same way, I want endless women. However, I control such a small part of the dating market that even if I boycot women, I doubt it'll bother them half as much as it'll bother me. I can't get a law passed that forces women to like me because it'd be political suicide for politicians. So, much like universal, that leaves me whining loudly about how things should be and yet nothing actually changing.
Yes: It turns out that, over time, they believe they can get it down to needing no more than 21% of the fuel a ship currently requires.
>> I am faced with a problem; my hands are becoming arthritic as I get older.
> 1) Learn to rock climb.
"École Secondaire Mont-Bleu has ... suspended two 13-year-old girls after one uploaded to YouTube a camera phone video of their teacher yelling at the other ... the teacher was so embarrassed that he stayed home from work, where he remains on stress leave.
In other news, Canada has also put all Jewish people on notice for totally humiliating Hitler. He realizes the holocaust, which Canada refuses to punish him for, was stepping out of line but the Canadian government finds the Jewish determination to let the entire world know what happened utterly unacceptable.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate, make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration, mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office, mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity?
They're called headphones.
Yes, headphones are anti-social, can be overcome by determinedly difficult people and can have difficult managers demand you take them off. All of those remain true for doors and private offices too.
They're quite a bit cheaper than remodelling too.
Some business owners and managers cannot understand the advantages of teleworking, different office layouts, or the morale benefits of private offices with Aeron chairs.
Thank god someone dared to say this.
I've been looking for an just such an environment: where I can stay home, doze in a really comfortable chair with no one around to catch me, completely refuse to interact with team members except via IMs and e-mails on my own passive aggressive schedule and justify my lack of productivity on my home ISP that's like totally unreliable so it's not my fault I wasn't even logged in all morning, let alone working. I'm never going to power level my Warcraft character if I have to keep alt-tabbing out whenever my boss walks by.
Now when will managers get a clue and realize this kind of shining future would be awesome for my morale!?