He's telling the truth. He's not spreading FUD. He's originating it.
You know, if Ballmer read/. you may have given him an idea for their next ad campaign, against Linux:
Gloom, despair and agony on me (whoooa)
Deep dark depression, excessive misery (whoooa)
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all (whoooa)
Gloom, despair and agony on me!
Come to think of it, that would make a good startup tune for Windows...
"I'm not trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt," Ballmer said
Fear - Ballmer argued that companies should be wary of the lack of indemnity from lawsuits, such as the suit filed by The SCO Group Inc. against DaimlerChrysler AG, IBM, Novell Inc. and others over parts of the Linux operating system that SCO claims infringe on elements of the Unix operating system that it owns.
But don't worry about on a weekly basis your computer and all your precious data is at risk thanks to our security holes.
Uncertainty - "In the Linux world, nobody stands behind patent claims," he said, noting that Microsoft could be forced to swallow a $550 million judgement if it loses its ongoing case with Eolas Technologies Inc., but that its customers would be protected.
But you could lose everything you own, thanks to a Microsoft software bug and the EULA plainly states 'As Is' and they will not be held liable for your losses.
Doubt - On the touchy issue of security, Ballmer also dismissed the notion that Linux is more secure than Windows, saying that Linux would be attacked just as frequently as Windows if the open source operating system had as large a share of the operating system market as Windows.
Exploits are already being found in SP2 Windows will be secure in about 10 years, maybe.
Don't spend those billions of dollars all in one place, Steve.
Necessity is a Mutha
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Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Avast, ye bloomin' brine-swiggin' picaroon!
it'll stink for a few years, and then it will fizzle away as developers agree that there's a better solution than the patented one anyway.
Which, when you think about it, has been the intiative behind lots of great development, if you don't like the toll road, dig your own and many fine things have come of this. Further browsers like Mozilla and Opera progress while IE stagnates.
And Text Messaging is free? I was shocked -- shocked! -- when I learned what it costs for this feature. Preposterous, but puts things in context. Indeed, someone has to make them solvent, might as well be customers.
Right now, Bush's ideas for a new space program are simply a pipe dream with some funding.
I thought NASA's budget was reduced in the last go round on the hill.
If we lose our infrastructure for a manned space program, we may lose the space program all together!
This has never stopped members of the GOP from cutting or withholding highway funds. Funny how we'll do everything we can to ensure cheap petroleum, allow automakers to sell guzzlers with impunity (and even give people tax breaks for buying them) and then neglect highways until it costs 3x as much to completely replace sections than it would to have kept up maintenance. (Now that I think about it, maybe it's really a scan and the road replacement businesses are big contributors...)
While I know of several people who would be happy about that,
How do creationists (particularly those trying to get evolution thrown out of schools) feel about space? Is there a Connection to the Religious Right?
Cutting off manned travel is short-sighted. Without manned travel, we're guaranteeing that the cost of sending probes will always be high
Also casts cold water on my plans for a rocket car, but anway...
We're guaranteeing that we'll run out of raw materials in less than a century.
Petro probably, but other materials? Nope, they're just starting to havest much of Russia and former Soviet Republics, now that investment (if you're not afraid of another Yukos happening to your investment...) being possible.
we're guaranteeing that we will NEVER reach another star system.
I'm sure we can find all the Stars we need on American Idol, however, which probably (and even sadly) has a larger following than space exploration.
To those of you who think a manned space program is a waste of resources because exploration happens more effectively with robots: You are a selfish bastard planning your own demise.
I think disease or famine and maybe a nasty war will thin the herd at some point. If you'd like to consider space colonization, you might read the first few chapters of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein, the author does go into a bit of the logistics and realities of space colonization...the rest of the book I gradually lost interest in, but may pick up again later.
With the federal budget in the sickly shape it's in, it's going to be tough to get additional funds to repair (and reasonably upgrade) the facilities.
I'm talking about movie stars that are paid $10M+ to do a movie.
I've changed my viewing habits a lot over the years, I'd much rather see a good performance than some marquee face. Halle Barry getting an Oscar... that's rich!
As for comparisons to VHS, you are talking about a practice called "rental" pricing which made most videos only available to video rental stores because of the artificially high price -- and it certainly wasn't limited to just one studio, all of them did it for the first X months of release. And again, rental pricing was only feasible because it was supported by the monopoly of copyright and not indicative of any real value.
Interestingly enough... we've gone from ~$1 for a video rental in 1985 to ~$1 for a video rental in 2004, yet the dollar is worth almost half what it was worth back then. One major change is we have large strings of rental chains where we once had several mom & pops, so maybe that's how they can afford it.
Rental is a good deal, no matter how you think about it, particularly if the movie is a dud IYHO.
The fairness of the price of DVDs should not be judged on its relative cost to movie tickets, but rather, the retail cost compared to the cost of the factors of production.
Let's examine that...
The price of a movie ticket, if I buy it, is a fair assessment of how much I'm willing to pay to see a movie, plus taking into account the value of my personal time to see the movie.
If I don't buy the ticket, though I'd like to see the movie then I've demonstrated that the cost is in excess of my valuation of the movie experience.
If I turn around and go back into the thearer, forking over the moolah to purchase another ticket (the movie was that good) then it's worth more money and more time, to me.
Since VHS tapes came out the value of $1 has lost considerable buying power, around 45%, so purchasing a $2 ticket (more like 2.50 or 2.75 if I remember correctly) for a matinee would be in the range of $4 or more today, which seems about right, though I live in a slightly more pricey part of the country than I did prior. A $25 taped movie would be, what $47 today?
Production of a VHS tape is clearly going to be higher, because the tape cassette has more parts and the recording process is a bit more painstaking and was probably done with american labor rates (many DVDs state which country they were burned in.) So there could be an argument made for reduced production cost, but if I can pick up a two year old movie on DVD for $14 and one cost (adjusted to 2003 dollars) ~$47, I can't see the $33 difference as totally a production cost. I think the business model changed, from sell few for $$ to sell many for $.
Part of the change in business model, too, is to recover production cost through DVD sales. If they blow $100 million (yeah, I know about Hollywood accounting...) and recover only $60 million at the box office (which is also pretty fanciful) before it's pulled, then they've got a ways to go to see a profit. If they were losing money you'd see far fewer movies coming out, but there's far more per week then there were 20 years ago. Also, note the number of movies (mostly coming to mind are Disney sequels) straight to video, skipping the silver screen completely. It must be working.
I believe strongly in Fair Use, but I also believe the producer needs to be able to make a living. If they ask too much then the entire business model breaks down. Rather than blame MPAA or RIAA for everything, consider the clods (like me) who go out and buy or see movies and buy music. We've made our dollar votes.
You haven't ever been to Southern California, have you?
Yes I have. As used to clean air coming in off the ocean where I live I could easily smell the stink of smog inside a hotel in downtown LA, even after it had gone through air conditioning. That was only a few years ago. A couple years ago I drove down to Long Beach and remember driving past a lot of smokestacks along the San Diego Fwy and couldn't even see the sky, but it was pretty colorful.
And this marine layer you speak of has this tendency to, say, BURN OFF from ~~10am, without returning normally until early morning, typically after most displays are finished.
Where I live it can last all day and into the next. There's no rule on it's behavior and forecasters are frequently pariahs to even suggest they can predict burn off. Microclimates can contribute to this, too, as I drove from clear to dense fog to light marine layer in a distance of 40 miles this morning.
Next fallacy. Can't see across the Grand Canyon? This Grand Canyon that is separated from any smog source by hundreds of miles? Yeah, right, all of Orange County sends its fog to the Grand Canyon, without any dispersion.
Don't belive me then. See what comes up with simple Google.
"Sulpherous[sic] ash may drift into your eyes". The only ash, or solid product of a gunpowder shell, comes from the paper+glue casing. The (minimal) amount of Sulphur in gunpowder is converted mostly to Sulphur Dioxide, a gas.
I've had this crap land in my eyes and it was hardly from the casing, which is mostly cardboard and lands all over the place in much larger pieces. Tiny, hard pieces of sulphur compounds are the non-gaseous remains of firework combustion as sulphur is one of the primary ingredients in most common fireworks. You should consider doing some actual research on fireworks.
You made all of this up, didn't you?
All real life experience. I assume you live in a bunker and get all your information from video games.
Sure, it may be smoggy, but blaming this on LA is pretty farfetched...
No, there's a funneling action which channels the CO and Ozone, among other gasses, towards northern Arizona. Various sources of information on this can be found with a simple Google
the smog will dissipate in the hundreds of miles of desert between the two... hell, it's not smoggy in the desert 50 miles from LA.
Perhaps your desert is lower elevation. I've been to Death Valley before and thought visibility was just fine. There's a great display, though, along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon which shows the view across the canyon on a high smog day and in the photo you can't see the North Rim. Keep in mind, too, that the South Rim is about 8,000 ft el. Where do you expect disipation to go?
Thanks to Michaels Cooking the books and some finagling they had a pretty good looking quarter, last report, mostly due to the theme parks. They've been hemoraging cash on movies though, which should warm your heart.
Looks Great, Less Smogging
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Disney Goes Boom!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm not sure the launch charge contributes too much smoke, as I've found the charge which distributes the firework to create more -- usually
evidenced by a series of greyish clouds carried away by higher winds. Grand Finales have had so much smoke at heights to obscure some
of the fireworks themselves. Then there's the matter of where I live having a chronic fog/marine layer problem which has rendered the most
fantastic displays only so many noisy, colorful blurs. Even they cute smiley ones, like the mouse pattern Disney is so fond of.
The air in the Los Angeles/San Bernardino area can be pretty awful, which probably has a lot more to do with their efforts to decrease smoke. I visited the Grand Canyon years ago and heard sometimes the visibility, in the summer is
so poor you can't see across the canyon, thanks to smog from San Diego and Los Angeles/San Bernardino, hundreds of miles to the west. (Fortunately I was there in winter, which I highly recommend (South Rim open only), with 200+ miles of visibility.)
A word of advice: Try to avoid a down-wind position for fireworks as sulpherous ash may drift down into your eyes and it burns like H2S.
I rather understand why Katz hasn't had an article in ages, after all the tards who didn't like his articles couldn't resist sh!tting all over them with their witty repostes.
To be fair, the Philly story was posted, and will doubtless be posted again tomorrow at the latest in case you missed it.
Indeed! To which I utter the required "D'oh!" and slap my forehead in the prescribed manner.
There's still the Owl/Beetle thing.
I wonder if Philly will leave browser choice open to the individual or if this represents too large a carrot to ignore and some big company tries to pull a hammerlock worthy of Olympic wrestling on them to lock every user into a particular one which just happens to require a fat O/S and hardware to accompany it. Probably should forward the 'sleek' Mozilla.org page to the movers and shakers in Philly....
Ok, this is bordering on infatuation. "Mozilla Organization has launched its new Web site and it's looking a fair bit sleeker than it used to. No new product releases to go with the new look" This is
effectively saying we looked at 500 submissions and this was the best of them.
Slow news day or infatuated with Mozilla? Heck, I like Mozilla and use it at home and work, but I don't drop everything to see what's happened with their website in the last day. Gee willikers.
Here's some other fine articles which could probably have been posted:
Aside from having a name too close to the original, the idea is hardly original. How many times have you sat in a Saturday afternoon matinee and heard a few jokers in the front moking the film? (Ok, maybe never happened to you, but has to me and occasionally I've been one of them.)
"Togehter I shall rule the world!" -- Tom Servo
BTW, didn't the original guy who did this show get screwed by rightsholders?
If you think that game was frustrating, you should have tried his Bureacracy game. It took me a while to figure out what a gaol was, but it's certainly another pleaseantly nutty diversion.
It's been a while, but I don't remember Agrajag being in the HHGG game I played on a C64. I do remember being aboard the Heart of Gold, something to do with the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, entering my own head, but I don't
recall Agrajag being in there. Sounds like it's been expanded a bit.
Certainly has taken a while for the sequel, I don't even wear a digital watch anymore!:-)
I'd say that their legal team would probably bail under this new contract (given that they probably don't expect to win), but then I read the "capped" number. 31 million dollars?!? Isn't that a bit like capping baseball players? i.e. They already make so much money that the cap doesn't matter in many ways other than principle.
If they didn't expect to win they would have capped it at $15M
What's almost comedy here is that SCO stock will only be worth whatever the lawyers and BayStar don't keep, which is probably nearly nothing. Aren't there types of stock where investors may actually be responsible for company debts?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if Ballmer read /. you may have given him an idea for their next ad campaign, against Linux:
Come to think of it, that would make a good startup tune for Windows...
But don't worry about on a weekly basis your computer and all your precious data is at risk thanks to our security holes.
But you could lose everything you own, thanks to a Microsoft software bug and the EULA plainly states 'As Is' and they will not be held liable for your losses.
Exploits are already being found in SP2 Windows will be secure in about 10 years, maybe.
Don't spend those billions of dollars all in one place, Steve.
it'll stink for a few years, and then it will fizzle away as developers agree that there's a better solution than the patented one anyway.
Which, when you think about it, has been the intiative behind lots of great development, if you don't like the toll road, dig your own and many fine things have come of this. Further browsers like Mozilla and Opera progress while IE stagnates.
There's a first time for everything.
And Text Messaging is free? I was shocked -- shocked! -- when I learned what it costs for this feature. Preposterous, but puts things in context. Indeed, someone has to make them solvent, might as well be customers.
When it left, it went from Michigan to Georgia, then on boat to Taiwan, where it's probably polluting groundwater to this day.
IIRC RCA wasn't the only company to mimic IBM's systems as I thought that was the business model for Amdahl.
Firbird toy -- was there one?
I thought NASA's budget was reduced in the last go round on the hill.
If we lose our infrastructure for a manned space program, we may lose the space program all together!
This has never stopped members of the GOP from cutting or withholding highway funds. Funny how we'll do everything we can to ensure cheap petroleum, allow automakers to sell guzzlers with impunity (and even give people tax breaks for buying them) and then neglect highways until it costs 3x as much to completely replace sections than it would to have kept up maintenance. (Now that I think about it, maybe it's really a scan and the road replacement businesses are big contributors...)
While I know of several people who would be happy about that,
How do creationists (particularly those trying to get evolution thrown out of schools) feel about space? Is there a Connection to the Religious Right?
Cutting off manned travel is short-sighted. Without manned travel, we're guaranteeing that the cost of sending probes will always be high
Also casts cold water on my plans for a rocket car, but anway...
We're guaranteeing that we'll run out of raw materials in less than a century.
Petro probably, but other materials? Nope, they're just starting to havest much of Russia and former Soviet Republics, now that investment (if you're not afraid of another Yukos happening to your investment...) being possible.
we're guaranteeing that we will NEVER reach another star system.
I'm sure we can find all the Stars we need on American Idol, however, which probably (and even sadly) has a larger following than space exploration.
To those of you who think a manned space program is a waste of resources because exploration happens more effectively with robots: You are a selfish bastard planning your own demise.
I think disease or famine and maybe a nasty war will thin the herd at some point. If you'd like to consider space colonization, you might read the first few chapters of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Heinlein, the author does go into a bit of the logistics and realities of space colonization...the rest of the book I gradually lost interest in, but may pick up again later.
With the federal budget in the sickly shape it's in, it's going to be tough to get additional funds to repair (and reasonably upgrade) the facilities.
I've changed my viewing habits a lot over the years, I'd much rather see a good performance than some marquee face. Halle Barry getting an Oscar... that's rich!
As for comparisons to VHS, you are talking about a practice called "rental" pricing which made most videos only available to video rental stores because of the artificially high price -- and it certainly wasn't limited to just one studio, all of them did it for the first X months of release. And again, rental pricing was only feasible because it was supported by the monopoly of copyright and not indicative of any real value.
Interestingly enough... we've gone from ~$1 for a video rental in 1985 to ~$1 for a video rental in 2004, yet the dollar is worth almost half what it was worth back then. One major change is we have large strings of rental chains where we once had several mom & pops, so maybe that's how they can afford it.
Rental is a good deal, no matter how you think about it, particularly if the movie is a dud IYHO.
Let's examine that...
The price of a movie ticket, if I buy it, is a fair assessment of how much I'm willing to pay to see a movie, plus taking into account the value of my personal time to see the movie.
If I don't buy the ticket, though I'd like to see the movie then I've demonstrated that the cost is in excess of my valuation of the movie experience.
If I turn around and go back into the thearer, forking over the moolah to purchase another ticket (the movie was that good) then it's worth more money and more time, to me.
Since VHS tapes came out the value of $1 has lost considerable buying power, around 45%, so purchasing a $2 ticket (more like 2.50 or 2.75 if I remember correctly) for a matinee would be in the range of $4 or more today, which seems about right, though I live in a slightly more pricey part of the country than I did prior. A $25 taped movie would be, what $47 today?
Production of a VHS tape is clearly going to be higher, because the tape cassette has more parts and the recording process is a bit more painstaking and was probably done with american labor rates (many DVDs state which country they were burned in.) So there could be an argument made for reduced production cost, but if I can pick up a two year old movie on DVD for $14 and one cost (adjusted to 2003 dollars) ~$47, I can't see the $33 difference as totally a production cost. I think the business model changed, from sell few for $$ to sell many for $.
Part of the change in business model, too, is to recover production cost through DVD sales. If they blow $100 million (yeah, I know about Hollywood accounting...) and recover only $60 million at the box office (which is also pretty fanciful) before it's pulled, then they've got a ways to go to see a profit. If they were losing money you'd see far fewer movies coming out, but there's far more per week then there were 20 years ago. Also, note the number of movies (mostly coming to mind are Disney sequels) straight to video, skipping the silver screen completely. It must be working.
I believe strongly in Fair Use, but I also believe the producer needs to be able to make a living. If they ask too much then the entire business model breaks down. Rather than blame MPAA or RIAA for everything, consider the clods (like me) who go out and buy or see movies and buy music. We've made our dollar votes.
Yes I have. As used to clean air coming in off the ocean where I live I could easily smell the stink of smog inside a hotel in downtown LA, even after it had gone through air conditioning. That was only a few years ago. A couple years ago I drove down to Long Beach and remember driving past a lot of smokestacks along the San Diego Fwy and couldn't even see the sky, but it was pretty colorful.
And this marine layer you speak of has this tendency to, say, BURN OFF from ~~10am, without returning normally until early morning, typically after most displays are finished.
Where I live it can last all day and into the next. There's no rule on it's behavior and forecasters are frequently pariahs to even suggest they can predict burn off. Microclimates can contribute to this, too, as I drove from clear to dense fog to light marine layer in a distance of 40 miles this morning.
Next fallacy. Can't see across the Grand Canyon? This Grand Canyon that is separated from any smog source by hundreds of miles? Yeah, right, all of Orange County sends its fog to the Grand Canyon, without any dispersion.
Don't belive me then. See what comes up with simple Google.
"Sulpherous[sic] ash may drift into your eyes". The only ash, or solid product of a gunpowder shell, comes from the paper+glue casing. The (minimal) amount of Sulphur in gunpowder is converted mostly to Sulphur Dioxide, a gas.
I've had this crap land in my eyes and it was hardly from the casing, which is mostly cardboard and lands all over the place in much larger pieces. Tiny, hard pieces of sulphur compounds are the non-gaseous remains of firework combustion as sulphur is one of the primary ingredients in most common fireworks. You should consider doing some actual research on fireworks.
You made all of this up, didn't you?
All real life experience. I assume you live in a bunker and get all your information from video games.
No, there's a funneling action which channels the CO and Ozone, among other gasses, towards northern Arizona. Various sources of information on this can be found with a simple Google
the smog will dissipate in the hundreds of miles of desert between the two... hell, it's not smoggy in the desert 50 miles from LA.
Perhaps your desert is lower elevation. I've been to Death Valley before and thought visibility was just fine. There's a great display, though, along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon which shows the view across the canyon on a high smog day and in the photo you can't see the North Rim. Keep in mind, too, that the South Rim is about 8,000 ft el. Where do you expect disipation to go?
Thanks to Michaels Cooking the books and some finagling they had a pretty good looking quarter, last report, mostly due to the theme parks. They've been hemoraging cash on movies though, which should warm your heart.
The air in the Los Angeles/San Bernardino area can be pretty awful, which probably has a lot more to do with their efforts to decrease smoke. I visited the Grand Canyon years ago and heard sometimes the visibility, in the summer is so poor you can't see across the canyon, thanks to smog from San Diego and Los Angeles/San Bernardino, hundreds of miles to the west. (Fortunately I was there in winter, which I highly recommend (South Rim open only), with 200+ miles of visibility.)
A word of advice: Try to avoid a down-wind position for fireworks as sulpherous ash may drift down into your eyes and it burns like H2S.
Yeah, I kinda miss those, what's up with that?
I rather understand why Katz hasn't had an article in ages, after all the tards who didn't like his articles couldn't resist sh!tting all over them with their witty repostes.
Indeed! To which I utter the required "D'oh!" and slap my forehead in the prescribed manner.
There's still the Owl/Beetle thing.
I wonder if Philly will leave browser choice open to the individual or if this represents too large a carrot to ignore and some big company tries to pull a hammerlock worthy of Olympic wrestling on them to lock every user into a particular one which just happens to require a fat O/S and hardware to accompany it. Probably should forward the 'sleek' Mozilla.org page to the movers and shakers in Philly....
Let's talk understatement here. You don't offer this kind of thing without a significant commitment to the package.
Slow news day or infatuated with Mozilla? Heck, I like Mozilla and use it at home and work, but I don't drop everything to see what's happened with their website in the last day. Gee willikers.
Here's some other fine articles which could probably have been posted:
Philadelphia Considering Free or Low Cost Wireless For All
Microsoft to Exploit Japan's Post Offices to deliver SP2 (their word, not mine!)
The Road Ahead, According to Steve Ballmer
X-Rays Reveal Mummy Faces (Low Cancer Risk to Mummy)
Owls Use Poop to Lure Beetles
How about if they called it "Merged Silhouettes Theatre 2999: The Prior Art"
Aside from having a name too close to the original, the idea is hardly original. How many times have you sat in a Saturday afternoon matinee and heard a few jokers in the front moking the film? (Ok, maybe never happened to you, but has to me and occasionally I've been one of them.)
"Togehter I shall rule the world!" -- Tom Servo
BTW, didn't the original guy who did this show get screwed by rightsholders?
Just wear your Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses until the article goes away.
If you think that game was frustrating, you should have tried his Bureacracy game. It took me a while to figure out what a gaol was, but it's certainly another pleaseantly nutty diversion.
Certainly has taken a while for the sequel, I don't even wear a digital watch anymore! :-)
Seems attractive to Microsoft, who could buy them up then migrate all customers to Windows servers and really milk them.
If they didn't expect to win they would have capped it at $15M
What's almost comedy here is that SCO stock will only be worth whatever the lawyers and BayStar don't keep, which is probably nearly nothing. Aren't there types of stock where investors may actually be responsible for company debts?