Painful? Yes. Helps long term? I don't see it.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 5, Insightful
What? From what I've read, most of the outsourced jobs, however white collar they may be in the 'States, are passed so that they can lower costs buy exploiting the workers in cheaper markets. Trust me, this was never about economic stimulation in third-world countries. Corporations are certainly more interested in the bottom line, and do you really think for one minute that their motivation is actually triggered by some huminitarian spark in their hearts? Hardly.
Think about all of the jobs in the steel industry and raw goods refining that used to be housed in the US. I was born in a region that housed booming towns that thrived on the steel, zinc, coal and cement in Pennsylvania. I can tell you firsthand that when refining was able to be done for 87 cents in Asia, the companies left town, the towns dwindled, and the equipment sat under 30 feet of water at the bottom of the quarrys. Was this good for us? The people that live there are just simple folk scrounging as best they can in small, dilapidated houses. Yeah, I guess they're only a mile from the nearest McDonald's, maybe they are better off than Hong Kong.
Oh, and guess what? A major factory and headquarters of Lucent (now Agere) used to be housed there, they even built a state-of-the-art Optoelectronics factory a few years ago. What happened when the bottom dropped out of optoelectronics? It was cheaper to manufacture in Asian countries, so tens of thousands lost their jobs. The new plant was sold for $40 Million in a fire sale, the grounds and any one of the many buildings were easily worth that much.
It's happening all over again now. Tell me how that's good for my town, Waterton Man.
Mm..don't take that as more of an Apple flame than it is. From your comment it seems that you're pro-OS X, as Office is available for it. However, the original poster was not saying anything about NOT buying an Apple, rather that for the money you're spending on one, you'd be better suited to run it's default windowing system (as Aqua is opitimized for the platform, not KDE).
The quotation you used was taken out of context. Stories like the aforementioned two were written long before Walt Disney was a struggling Hollywood cartoonist. His point was that Disney "interpreted" stories written long ago and made millions, but if someone 80 years from now were to write a movie derived from a Disney original, then they would be sued. There is irony inherent in that idea, as you can see.
You are right about Mickey Mouse being an original idea, but HE WASN'T TALKING ABOUT MICKEY MOUSE.
Case study:
Did you see Treasure Planet? Yeah, me neither, I heard it was horrible. But either way, Treasure Island was a book written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883. 114 years from now, if my great-great grandchild wanted to write The Lion King in space (the only discernable difference between Treasure Island and Treasure Planet), Disney would NEVER give them the right to make it, and would sue the pants off them if they tried.
1.) Notice there is only ONE Solotrek for sale, and there were two orginal Solotrek XFV prototypes, one that crashed, causing them to miss the fatal milestone, and another unscathed on.
3.) Originally, Trek Aerospace planned on just closing its doors, but since the last article has updated their status and website greatly. The eBay auction states that the proceeds of the auction will go towards funding for the NEXT generation Solotrek vehicle, which has a much more conservative timeline.
4.) According to Trek Aerospace's original statement about closing their doors, they were quick to mention that the first prototype only crashed because of a change in the management at DARPA, who would not allow them to extend the deadline of the milestone they would eventually miss. As such, they were forced to fly in inclement conditions, which were blamed for the crash.
5.) The eBay auction, also states "As a condition of sale, the successful bidder will have to execute an agreement warranting that they will use the aircraft for static exhibition and educational purposes only."
As a personal note, after not metioning that the vehicle was not in one piece, and showing pictures of a fully functional Solotrek, I'm sure it would have to be some form of misrepresentation to just hand the winner a broken Solotrek in a box of parts.
Don't be a troll. There are lots of financial institutions and, as we've seen, ATMs that run OS/2, and will for a good while, even after support ends. I've seen a lot of places still running Windows 3.1/3.11 even though now to Microsoft it is now completely dead, so even in death I expect that OS/2 will be around for awhile because, as we've heard: it "just works" _and_ it's hideously reliable.
Also, AIX is not ultra prevalent, but it's defintely still in use. As for never seeing one..well that probably is indicative of how many server farms you've been too lately, or perhaps just which. Google sure seems to find a lot of info on it. Of course, I doubt you'll listen, because like your user profile says "Open source == good, M$ == bad."
I disagree. Timothy's statement (submitter's text is always in italics, the 'snide remark' was in plain font) wasn't very scathing, nor did it provide a one-sided viewpoint of Microsoft's business or products.
It was a joke. Plain and simple, it wasn't at anyone's expense, either. Like you said, they dropped support for it...which is why he mentioned it.
Just because you read something you thought was ocol on their KnowledgeBase or E2 doesn't mean you have to accuse others of being closed minded and act indignant.
"No Silver Bullet" was included in the famous book, The Mythical Man-Month, as most or some of you know. The newest 20th anniversary edition includes both "No Silver Bullet" and "No Silver Bullet Refired", an introspective look an how software methodology has improved over the last 20 years. I don't mean to sound pompous, but while some of you have talked of your experience over the last 20 years, Dr. Brooks was already a project manager at IBM working on operating systems 30 years ago, so the man assuredly knows what he's talking about.
Admittedly, I can't comment on Dr. Brooks' latter essay, as I bought the book myself not long ago and just finished "No Silver Bullet" (the last chapter in the original version of the book), but it still makes for interesting reading. Pick up a copy, or just even sit down at Borders and read both chapters, I promise you'll be intrigued if you're interested in software development.
The part *I* thought was ridiculous about fallibility was, "Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC." Granted, I may forget where I put my keys now and again, but my brain's never turned blue and needed to be restarted...though I have suffered some memory leaks. hm.
Included in the title should be who is running it
on
Backup Your Life on a DVD
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
I'll agree that VHS is poor quality, and I'll agree that 450 megs isn't that bad with a cable modem on in an uncrowded sector. My point though (it may not have been entirely lucid) was that, I *don't* have cable, and the majority of people I know in my area (a city halfway between NYC and Philadelphia, we're not talking rural Kansas) don't either, it'd be simply impossible to me to justify paying to download 450 megs over a connection that could easily be severed. Also, I'm certainly not alone in having less than cable.
Obviously you havent tried their system which blew me outta the water.
You're right. I can't. There is literally no way that you'd get me to pay to download a movie (hell, even pirate it) over dialup.
This whole Movielink thing suffers one point: digital video will (probably) always be either a) large, or b) low quality. Broadband has caught on to a large degree, but not as large as anyone thought it would, and certainly not enough for the huge streaming video boom that was supposed to happen. This means that while I'm not exactly sure which choice Movielink will make, either it will take 80% US users a day and a half to download a movie, or it will be so poor quality that their is no motivation not to go rent from Hollywood Video down the road. The only people who can't drive under 15 minutes to a local video rental store are almost certainly operating on 56k or less (except for those towns offering their own DSL;-)). In either case, fine. I'll be just happy going to Mom & Pop's Video Store down the road and renting the new LOTR DVD to watch on my PowerBook.
Without doing research, I can pretty reasonably put this in two words -- "bull" and "shit".
I am *not* going to make an attack on the validity of your comments, but simply because WE DON'T KNOW. To me, it seemed that your comment involved much more speculation and "guess work" (seeing as it was much more in depth, but self-admittedly backed up without any facts) than the original poster's, yet you called bullshit on a broad statement that pretty much summed up the story. I'm confused.
This is not an exercise in futility. This bill would put the freedom of choice back in the consumer's hands. Slashdot is decidedly a very small fraction of the population of the US (especially when you consider all those reading this in other countries who couldn't care less about the DMCA, unless it spreads), most people don't even *know* about the DMCA, or even what it stands for. No, my dad does not know what the DMCA is, but would he buy a CD that says "You cannot play this on some devices, including your Personal Computer"? No. Certainly not, nor I suspect would many other people.
That being said, one of two things could possibly happen (given that most people won't buy crippled CDs if they are informed of them unless there is no alternative): 1) Alternative versions of crippled CDs are available, people buy non-crippled discs. 2) Alternative versions may or may not exist, people who buy the crippled versions become frustrated, a public backlash to the crippling scheme arises.
Mind you, these "crippled" CDs don't just entail "copy-protection", it includes (at this moment, IIRC) any hardware manufacturer that does not build the RIAA's copy protection into its circuits. If Sony decides not to give in, your discman won't play the new Ja Rule CD.
I'm not siding with either paradigm on this one, but you can't broadly apply something that Microsoft did (of all companies) to the rest of the closed source world. There is some merit and dignity left in a few of the companies, and surely the world's leader in insecure data solutions should not be the archetypal closed source company. I'm not saying that the original poster was very lucid or correct, but surely he had a point. Let me amend:
No closed source corporation worth its salt would ever leave source anywhere near a webserver.
Microsoft has generally always done a piss poor job with information security, even in handling their own information.
I agree with your points about this being an exploit of trust, but the ibiblio.org mirrors did *not* contain Trojaned versions of the source, the HLUG page declared them as safe versions.
NO, it's the Pre-AltiVec G3 chip that makes his system sub-optimal, it's not only a lesser chip, but the loss of the AltiVec engine severly inhibits the raw number crunching capability of the processor. OS X supports the iBook G3, but it was certainly not designed for it.
My personal theory is that the surge of independent music(which is easily accesible on the internet)is really why the major labels sales are down. Not only is independent music usually better, but it's available for free on P2P's all the time(which is why killing Kazaa/Gnucleus/etc.
I wish that were the case. Actually, a friend and I were talking with a mutual friend that runs a local (one of the only) independent music store in Allentown, PA. As we bought a few cds, he said that even though he'd been there since 1, we were the first sales of the day (at 6pm), although many people had stopped by. He also said that he has spoken recently to other store owners both in and out of the area, and they all related the same thing: although a few indie (not just the indie genre, I mean independent music) releases sell out very quickly, sales in general have been slumping. While a lot of independent bands that I know are certainly all about getting their music out there, it's more the independent stores that are taking the hit, at least from his perspective. If you really want to take a shot at the RIAA, don't pirate music, buy independent music from your local independent store.
Actually, according to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, it is a transitive verb meaning "to write off as an expense". This is a clear cut case of "I think it should be this way, and I've never heard otherwise, so I'll assert it and act petulant." that so often pervades Slashdot. See also Proof By Intimidation.
expense Pronunciation Key (k-spns) n.
Something spent to attain a goal or accomplish a purpose: an expense of time and energy on the project. A loss for the sake of something gained; a sacrifice: achieved speed at the expense of accuracy. An expenditure of money; a cost: an improvement that was well worth the expense; a trip with all expenses paid. expenses Charges incurred by an employee in the performance of work: was reimbursed for her travel expenses. Informal. Money allotted for payment of such charges. Something requiring the expenditure of money: Redecorating the house will be a considerable expense. Archaic. The act of expending.
tr.v. expensed, expensing, expenses To charge with expenses. To write off as an expense.
Source: Dictionary.com ..and sorry about being a spelling nazi.
Slashdot Mirror
What? From what I've read, most of the outsourced jobs, however white collar they may be in the 'States, are passed so that they can lower costs buy exploiting the workers in cheaper markets. Trust me, this was never about economic stimulation in third-world countries. Corporations are certainly more interested in the bottom line, and do you really think for one minute that their motivation is actually triggered by some huminitarian spark in their hearts? Hardly.
Think about all of the jobs in the steel industry and raw goods refining that used to be housed in the US. I was born in a region that housed booming towns that thrived on the steel, zinc, coal and cement in Pennsylvania. I can tell you firsthand that when refining was able to be done for 87 cents in Asia, the companies left town, the towns dwindled, and the equipment sat under 30 feet of water at the bottom of the quarrys. Was this good for us? The people that live there are just simple folk scrounging as best they can in small, dilapidated houses. Yeah, I guess they're only a mile from the nearest McDonald's, maybe they are better off than Hong Kong.
Oh, and guess what? A major factory and headquarters of Lucent (now Agere) used to be housed there, they even built a state-of-the-art Optoelectronics factory a few years ago. What happened when the bottom dropped out of optoelectronics? It was cheaper to manufacture in Asian countries, so tens of thousands lost their jobs. The new plant was sold for $40 Million in a fire sale, the grounds and any one of the many buildings were easily worth that much.
It's happening all over again now. Tell me how that's good for my town, Waterton Man.
Plus your car won't depreciate 50% in 6 months.
Never bought a Neon, didja?
Mm..don't take that as more of an Apple flame than it is. From your comment it seems that you're pro-OS X, as Office is available for it. However, the original poster was not saying anything about NOT buying an Apple, rather that for the money you're spending on one, you'd be better suited to run it's default windowing system (as Aqua is opitimized for the platform, not KDE).
Ever hear of Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty?
The quotation you used was taken out of context. Stories like the aforementioned two were written long before Walt Disney was a struggling Hollywood cartoonist. His point was that Disney "interpreted" stories written long ago and made millions, but if someone 80 years from now were to write a movie derived from a Disney original, then they would be sued. There is irony inherent in that idea, as you can see.
You are right about Mickey Mouse being an original idea, but HE WASN'T TALKING ABOUT MICKEY MOUSE.
Case study:
Did you see Treasure Planet? Yeah, me neither, I heard it was horrible. But either way, Treasure Island was a book written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1883. 114 years from now, if my great-great grandchild wanted to write The Lion King in space (the only discernable difference between Treasure Island and Treasure Planet), Disney would NEVER give them the right to make it, and would sue the pants off them if they tried.
How about low price?
For the record, the Alienware laptop shown was about $500 more than I paid for my new Powerbook there, killer.
You obviously never read the site.
1.) Notice there is only ONE Solotrek for sale, and there were two orginal Solotrek XFV prototypes, one that crashed, causing them to miss the fatal milestone, and another unscathed on.
2.) As said by Goldenhawk, the ground effect does not apply. Though you are right, it's never flown untethered.
3.) Originally, Trek Aerospace planned on just closing its doors, but since the last article has updated their status and website greatly. The eBay auction states that the proceeds of the auction will go towards funding for the NEXT generation Solotrek vehicle, which has a much more conservative timeline.
4.) According to Trek Aerospace's original statement about closing their doors, they were quick to mention that the first prototype only crashed because of a change in the management at DARPA, who would not allow them to extend the deadline of the milestone they would eventually miss. As such, they were forced to fly in inclement conditions, which were blamed for the crash.
5.) The eBay auction, also states "As a condition of sale, the successful bidder will have to execute an agreement warranting that they will use the aircraft for static exhibition and educational purposes only."
As a personal note, after not metioning that the vehicle was not in one piece, and showing pictures of a fully functional Solotrek, I'm sure it would have to be some form of misrepresentation to just hand the winner a broken Solotrek in a box of parts.
Don't be a troll. There are lots of financial institutions and, as we've seen, ATMs that run OS/2, and will for a good while, even after support ends. I've seen a lot of places still running Windows 3.1/3.11 even though now to Microsoft it is now completely dead, so even in death I expect that OS/2 will be around for awhile because, as we've heard: it "just works" _and_ it's hideously reliable.
Also, AIX is not ultra prevalent, but it's defintely still in use. As for never seeing one..well that probably is indicative of how many server farms you've been too lately, or perhaps just which. Google sure seems to find a lot of info on it. Of course, I doubt you'll listen, because like your user profile says "Open source == good, M$ == bad."
I disagree. Timothy's statement (submitter's text is always in italics, the 'snide remark' was in plain font) wasn't very scathing, nor did it provide a one-sided viewpoint of Microsoft's business or products.
It was a joke. Plain and simple, it wasn't at anyone's expense, either. Like you said, they dropped support for it...which is why he mentioned it.
Just because you read something you thought was ocol on their KnowledgeBase or E2 doesn't mean you have to accuse others of being closed minded and act indignant.
Are you talking about an Astrovan? ;)
"No Silver Bullet" was included in the famous book, The Mythical Man-Month, as most or some of you know. The newest 20th anniversary edition includes both "No Silver Bullet" and "No Silver Bullet Refired", an introspective look an how software methodology has improved over the last 20 years. I don't mean to sound pompous, but while some of you have talked of your experience over the last 20 years, Dr. Brooks was already a project manager at IBM working on operating systems 30 years ago, so the man assuredly knows what he's talking about.
Admittedly, I can't comment on Dr. Brooks' latter essay, as I bought the book myself not long ago and just finished "No Silver Bullet" (the last chapter in the original version of the book), but it still makes for interesting reading. Pick up a copy, or just even sit down at Borders and read both chapters, I promise you'll be intrigued if you're interested in software development.
The part *I* thought was ridiculous about fallibility was, "Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC." Granted, I may forget where I put my keys now and again, but my brain's never turned blue and needed to be restarted...though I have suffered some memory leaks. hm.
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
The SNES uses a 65c816
..which is still a processor in the 6502 family.
I'll agree that VHS is poor quality, and I'll agree that 450 megs isn't that bad with a cable modem on in an uncrowded sector. My point though (it may not have been entirely lucid) was that, I *don't* have cable, and the majority of people I know in my area (a city halfway between NYC and Philadelphia, we're not talking rural Kansas) don't either, it'd be simply impossible to me to justify paying to download 450 megs over a connection that could easily be severed. Also, I'm certainly not alone in having less than cable.
Obviously you havent tried their system which blew me outta the water.
You're right. I can't. There is literally no way that you'd get me to pay to download a movie (hell, even pirate it) over dialup.
Wasn't one of them called DiVX;-) (yes, with the dumb smiley)? Which one was that, the original?
This whole Movielink thing suffers one point: digital video will (probably) always be either a) large, or b) low quality. Broadband has caught on to a large degree, but not as large as anyone thought it would, and certainly not enough for the huge streaming video boom that was supposed to happen. This means that while I'm not exactly sure which choice Movielink will make, either it will take 80% US users a day and a half to download a movie, or it will be so poor quality that their is no motivation not to go rent from Hollywood Video down the road. The only people who can't drive under 15 minutes to a local video rental store are almost certainly operating on 56k or less (except for those towns offering their own DSL ;-)). In either case, fine. I'll be just happy going to Mom & Pop's Video Store down the road and renting the new LOTR DVD to watch on my PowerBook.
Without doing research, I can pretty reasonably put this in two words -- "bull" and "shit".
I am *not* going to make an attack on the validity of your comments, but simply because WE DON'T KNOW. To me, it seemed that your comment involved much more speculation and "guess work" (seeing as it was much more in depth, but self-admittedly backed up without any facts) than the original poster's, yet you called bullshit on a broad statement that pretty much summed up the story. I'm confused.
Ooo...maybe Windows now comes with backpacks
This is not an exercise in futility. This bill would put the freedom of choice back in the consumer's hands. Slashdot is decidedly a very small fraction of the population of the US (especially when you consider all those reading this in other countries who couldn't care less about the DMCA, unless it spreads), most people don't even *know* about the DMCA, or even what it stands for. No, my dad does not know what the DMCA is, but would he buy a CD that says "You cannot play this on some devices, including your Personal Computer"? No. Certainly not, nor I suspect would many other people.
That being said, one of two things could possibly happen (given that most people won't buy crippled CDs if they are informed of them unless there is no alternative): 1) Alternative versions of crippled CDs are available, people buy non-crippled discs. 2) Alternative versions may or may not exist, people who buy the crippled versions become frustrated, a public backlash to the crippling scheme arises.
Mind you, these "crippled" CDs don't just entail "copy-protection", it includes (at this moment, IIRC) any hardware manufacturer that does not build the RIAA's copy protection into its circuits. If Sony decides not to give in, your discman won't play the new Ja Rule CD.
I'm not siding with either paradigm on this one, but you can't broadly apply something that Microsoft did (of all companies) to the rest of the closed source world. There is some merit and dignity left in a few of the companies, and surely the world's leader in insecure data solutions should not be the archetypal closed source company. I'm not saying that the original poster was very lucid or correct, but surely he had a point. Let me amend:
No closed source corporation worth its salt would ever leave source anywhere near a webserver.
Microsoft has generally always done a piss poor job with information security, even in handling their own information.
I agree with your points about this being an exploit of trust, but the ibiblio.org mirrors did *not* contain Trojaned versions of the source, the HLUG page declared them as safe versions.
Or, you know..those using PPPoE. Sounds like a pretty incorrect setup to me.
NO, it's the Pre-AltiVec G3 chip that makes his system sub-optimal, it's not only a lesser chip, but the loss of the AltiVec engine severly inhibits the raw number crunching capability of the processor. OS X supports the iBook G3, but it was certainly not designed for it.
My personal theory is that the surge of independent music(which is easily accesible on the internet)is really why the major labels sales are down. Not only is independent music usually better, but it's available for free on P2P's all the time(which is why killing Kazaa/Gnucleus/etc.
I wish that were the case. Actually, a friend and I were talking with a mutual friend that runs a local (one of the only) independent music store in Allentown, PA. As we bought a few cds, he said that even though he'd been there since 1, we were the first sales of the day (at 6pm), although many people had stopped by. He also said that he has spoken recently to other store owners both in and out of the area, and they all related the same thing: although a few indie (not just the indie genre, I mean independent music) releases sell out very quickly, sales in general have been slumping. While a lot of independent bands that I know are certainly all about getting their music out there, it's more the independent stores that are taking the hit, at least from his perspective. If you really want to take a shot at the RIAA, don't pirate music, buy independent music from your local independent store.
Source: Dictionary.com