This just goes to show how full of sh*t those who said, "I've got nothing to fear, I've not done anything wrong, support the government [waterboarding/wiretapping/warring/whatever] to keep us safe", actually are.
The PATRIOT act, erosion of constitutional freedoms, secret courts, extranational torture, gutting of privacy protections, every thing that the government did since 9/11 was to increase their control over US citizens, not to protect them from maniacs using aircraft as cruise missiles.
Funny how getting to say "I told you so" in this case feels less like vindication and more like mourning.
"The scrollball design is really cool and intuitive... until it gets gummed up and stops working in one direction. This WILL happen to you, repeatedly."
Agreed. I have a client with this problem. What is your solution to unsticking it?
Since I used to schlep my MBP to work every day I went with the VX Nano over a year ago. When I bought my second MBP I was hooked and bought another (Circuit City close-out, red, without the glide wheel, @ $29).
Battery life is about 4 months with the original, well over that with the newer model, as it take AA's vs. AAA's.
They have surprising range as well, I can stretch out on the floor five feet away or more away from my home set up, and run VLC to play.mkv files just fine.
The final study conclusion will be that Fukitol (the new shizzy wonder drug from Smith-Kline-Glaxo-Bayer-Bendover) will alleviate all symptoms...for a mere $6.66 per day.
Industry has always lagged behind the consumer market.
Well into the 90s, in the right catalogs, you could still buy VESA cards and other legacy parts, to keep repairing the 286/386 boxes running DOS and your NC lathe/drill/w.e.. Why should a business upgrade to some shiny new box when the old one, completely amortized and producing pure profit, was still working just fine, thank you very much.
Likewise with the new OS and Office suite. Gartner said when Vista/Office 2K7 came out "no compelling reason to upgrade". Any bean counter worth his salt could see that the new software combination would require a considerable cash outlay in new hardware just to keep productivity at current levels. Non-adoption became a no-brainer.
What MS did was ignore the market and attempt to make too clean a break from their previous policy of the greatest backwards compatibility for hardware and software. They miscalculated and are now reaping the results of that decision.
"Some go see the movie, love it, download it, then buy the DVD. It seems to me that this is not a reduction of profits but instead a tool that content developers could exploit for more profit."
I said years ago...hell, over half a decade ago...that movie studios should have tiered (i.e. 320x240/grainy/50 - 640x480/semi-clear/$1 - 800x600/pretty clear/$2 - all the way to near widescreen VHS quality/$8) downloadable editions of their movies available at release.
This would open new markets, kill "camcorder piracy", and free studios from 19th century distribution methods.
However, since movies today are poster children for Sturgeon's Law, studios would need to close that QC gap before implementing such a plan.
The I.D. crowd picks on Darwin since telescopes are too easy to acquire and the observations supporting heliocentricity too easy to make.
Brian Greene, Niels Bohr, and others may be the targeted next, since initiatives of this ilk seem to gravitate towards scientific disciplines with hard to quantify theories.
Or maybe not. After all, physicists aren't challenging anyone's place as the apex of creation.
"If we could reform the law to cut off all existing copywrites to end in twenty years from now, and then give copywrite to new works for only 20 years, I think we'd break this "monopoly"..."
Better yet make it 10 years, or five. Sidereal time is so 20th century.
The movie-to-DVD/Bluray-to-PayTV-to-BroadcastTV-to-LateNightSyndication interval has dropped to near nothing, the copyright length should as well.
There is absolutely nothing that says a corporation should be able to milk a property in perpetuity.
"I don't even think Apple has 10% of computer market share which makes the claim even more unlikely unless there is some specific reason Mac users are more likely to be internet users than Linux or Windows users are. See here:
Apple does not price it's products "affordably" (read - cheap), so when someone chooses a new computer based on the lowest possible price point they are going to get The-Only-Other-Game-In-Town, Vista.
But does this mean that Vista market penetration is necessarily rising?
No.
It does mean that the metrics used to measure Vista marketshare by Net Applications may have risen for the month, but not that it truly rose overall (BTW, did anyone actually see those numbers/spreadsheets/data to substantiate the claim?).
Next month may see a downturn in those numbers, as those nice new shiny netbooks and laptops are hit by conficker, or users grow tired of the UAC, or Chicken Little says the sky is falling, and owners decide to upgrade (legally or otherwise) to XP, server 2008, Ubuntu, Debian, or what ever else tickles their fancy.
As for me, I remain skeptical. I know several people who are putting XP on new hardware, and several more who said they would, if the spectre of MS support for it discontinuing didn't weigh on their minds.
"Who would have to do the work hunting down the "missing" emails?"
If there was openness and transparency in these things, then the person/s or organizations wanting the records in the first place could be enlisted to aid in their recovery thus freeing "your staff [from] digging around through your predecessors crap".
Unless, of course, there's something there that you wish to hide.
What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.
You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?
While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).
As someone closely associated with post secondary education, who has seen "computer science" curriculum at the community college level devolving into either Microsoft® or Cisco® application classes at the behest of Those-Who-Don't-Know-Better, I am leery of any effort, no matter how well intentioned, to add anything to a system already overburdened, underfunded, and saddled with failed standardized testing mandates.
The temptation to go from teaching that Copy/Paste is basic and accessible in all operating systems, to "This is a Wizard®, just click here" in order to keep test scores at acceptable levels would be too much for most public school administrators.
The ACM would do well to formulate a curriculum on its own that generates excitement in students, place it in select schools and get other schools to adopt it after results were shown.
Anything else smacks of throwing more public dollars at a perceived problem and then having to pick up the pieces later.
Aren't those distributed through BT technology? Won't this adversely impact the gaming segment? Or will they find that it's been automagically exempted from filtering?
Slashdot Mirror
Military.Intelligence.
They wouldn't try to make me sign up for a "Windows Live ID"®.
Which'll happen when pigs fly.
This just goes to show how full of sh*t those who said, "I've got nothing to fear, I've not done anything wrong, support the government [waterboarding/wiretapping/warring/whatever] to keep us safe", actually are.
The PATRIOT act, erosion of constitutional freedoms, secret courts, extranational torture, gutting of privacy protections, every thing that the government did since 9/11 was to increase their control over US citizens, not to protect them from maniacs using aircraft as cruise missiles.
Funny how getting to say "I told you so" in this case feels less like vindication and more like mourning.
"(Incidentally, why has this vanished from Google? It's not even in the groups/dejanews archive anymore)."
"Don't be evil"?
"The scrollball design is really cool and intuitive... until it gets gummed up and stops working in one direction. This WILL happen to you, repeatedly."
Agreed. I have a client with this problem. What is your solution to unsticking it?
Since I used to schlep my MBP to work every day I went with the VX Nano over a year ago. When I bought my second MBP I was hooked and bought another (Circuit City close-out, red, without the glide wheel, @ $29).
Battery life is about 4 months with the original, well over that with the newer model, as it take AA's vs. AAA's.
They have surprising range as well, I can stretch out on the floor five feet away or more away from my home set up, and run VLC to play .mkv files just fine.
'nuff said.
They read about it on the Interwebs, and co-opted their spam partners to do the dirty work.
Really. Scouts honor.
The final study conclusion will be that Fukitol (the new shizzy wonder drug from Smith-Kline-Glaxo-Bayer-Bendover) will alleviate all symptoms...for a mere $6.66 per day.
Industry has always lagged behind the consumer market.
Well into the 90s, in the right catalogs, you could still buy VESA cards and other legacy parts, to keep repairing the 286/386 boxes running DOS and your NC lathe/drill/w.e.. Why should a business upgrade to some shiny new box when the old one, completely amortized and producing pure profit, was still working just fine, thank you very much.
Likewise with the new OS and Office suite. Gartner said when Vista/Office 2K7 came out "no compelling reason to upgrade". Any bean counter worth his salt could see that the new software combination would require a considerable cash outlay in new hardware just to keep productivity at current levels. Non-adoption became a no-brainer.
What MS did was ignore the market and attempt to make too clean a break from their previous policy of the greatest backwards compatibility for hardware and software. They miscalculated and are now reaping the results of that decision.
"Some go see the movie, love it, download it, then buy the DVD. It seems to me that this is not a reduction of profits but instead a tool that content developers could exploit for more profit."
I said years ago...hell, over half a decade ago...that movie studios should have tiered (i.e. 320x240/grainy/50 - 640x480/semi-clear/$1 - 800x600/pretty clear/$2 - all the way to near widescreen VHS quality/$8) downloadable editions of their movies available at release.
This would open new markets, kill "camcorder piracy", and free studios from 19th century distribution methods.
However, since movies today are poster children for Sturgeon's Law, studios would need to close that QC gap before implementing such a plan.
The I.D. crowd picks on Darwin since telescopes are too easy to acquire and the observations supporting heliocentricity too easy to make.
Brian Greene, Niels Bohr, and others may be the targeted next, since initiatives of this ilk seem to gravitate towards scientific disciplines with hard to quantify theories.
Or maybe not. After all, physicists aren't challenging anyone's place as the apex of creation.
"If we could reform the law to cut off all existing copywrites to end in twenty years from now, and then give copywrite to new works for only 20 years, I think we'd break this "monopoly"..."
Better yet make it 10 years, or five. Sidereal time is so 20th century.
The movie-to-DVD/Bluray-to-PayTV-to-BroadcastTV-to-LateNightSyndication interval has dropped to near nothing, the copyright length should as well.
There is absolutely nothing that says a corporation should be able to milk a property in perpetuity.
"I don't even think Apple has 10% of computer market share which makes the claim even more unlikely unless there is some specific reason Mac users are more likely to be internet users than Linux or Windows users are. See here:
h**p://www.slashgear.com/apple-os-x-market-share-drops-in-feb-as-vista-use-rises-0236001/"
This is almost a given in a tight economy.
Apple does not price it's products "affordably" (read - cheap), so when someone chooses a new computer based on the lowest possible price point they are going to get The-Only-Other-Game-In-Town, Vista.
But does this mean that Vista market penetration is necessarily rising?
No.
It does mean that the metrics used to measure Vista marketshare by Net Applications may have risen for the month, but not that it truly rose overall (BTW, did anyone actually see those numbers/spreadsheets/data to substantiate the claim?).
Next month may see a downturn in those numbers, as those nice new shiny netbooks and laptops are hit by conficker, or users grow tired of the UAC, or Chicken Little says the sky is falling, and owners decide to upgrade (legally or otherwise) to XP, server 2008, Ubuntu, Debian, or what ever else tickles their fancy.
As for me, I remain skeptical. I know several people who are putting XP on new hardware, and several more who said they would, if the spectre of MS support for it discontinuing didn't weigh on their minds.
Just for shits an grins, you should look at what plugins are installed for Firefox: Tools->Add-ons->Plugins tab.
Okees.
So I look and I find:
Am I supposed to find something sinister here?
Just curious, because here's my typical FF Extension/Addons/Etc. Set that I run under Win and Mac FF 3:
Enabled Extensions: [16]
* Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.3.1.3
* Adblock Plus 1.0.1
* ColorZilla 2.0.2
* Forecastbar Enhanced 0.9.6
* Greasemonkey 0.8.20090123.1
* MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.3.3
* NoScript 1.9.0.6
* ObPwd 0.1
* Organize Search Engines 1.4
* Source Viewer Tab 0.3.2009021201
* Splash 2.0.2
* SSL Blacklist 4.0.30
* SSL Blacklist Local Database 1.0.6
* Tab Mix Plus 0.3.7.3
* Ubiquity 0.1.6
* User Agent Switcher 0.6.11
Total Extensions: 19
Installed Themes: [3]
* Default
* GrApple Delicious (blue) 1.0.4
* GrApple Delicious (graphite) 1.0.4
If there's something amiss with this I'd like to correct it.
"Who would have to do the work hunting down the "missing" emails?"
If there was openness and transparency in these things, then the person/s or organizations wanting the records in the first place could be enlisted to aid in their recovery thus freeing "your staff [from] digging around through your predecessors crap".
Unless, of course, there's something there that you wish to hide.
I believe we are seeing change all right...of the short variety.
For those who were sucked into the reality distortion field, this should serve as a dose of reality. Washington will change when hell freezes over.
Russia cannot make it own hard drives or RAM, or many other basic computer components.
They don't *have* to... their natural gas reserves will translate into enough clout that they can buy whatever they damn well please.
Besides, it's not the iron that runs stuff that really matters, it's the code. You have no further to look than IBM and Microsoft to see that.
Putin is right...Russia isn't a country to dismiss or underestimate. They could very well bring something to market that will make Windows© and OS X® look weak, and sell it to markets that don't need, want, or can afford, the bloated American alternatives.
Just my 2
"Quit rocking our boat, or we'll take our toys and go home."
At least he's not throwing things this time.
Same song, different lyric. Will they never learn?
What can be easily said, or thought to be intuitively known, may not have been legally codified, and therein lies the rub.
You can cite the Lexmark patent, elements of Apple's HIG, peruse the citations in one of Jakob Nielson's papers that would seem to support prior art, or just search Patent Storm for "iconic systems" and seeing results dating back more than a decade figure this is a wash. Right?
While IANAL, what seems to make this patent different is that it is for a *system* involving multiple icons at one go (select a bunch of icons at one time, peform an operation on them, and automagically they're re-iconified or something like that).
If other patents dealt with singular icons or methods thereof, and if no one has lined out, in writing, a similar system prior to 2001 (the date of submission), then, well... maybe it's time to pass out the Pepto Bismol©.
will they kick the sh*t out of Gnome, KDE and other GUIs next?
As someone closely associated with post secondary education, who has seen "computer science" curriculum at the community college level devolving into either Microsoft® or Cisco® application classes at the behest of Those-Who-Don't-Know-Better, I am leery of any effort, no matter how well intentioned, to add anything to a system already overburdened, underfunded, and saddled with failed standardized testing mandates.
The temptation to go from teaching that Copy/Paste is basic and accessible in all operating systems, to "This is a Wizard®, just click here" in order to keep test scores at acceptable levels would be too much for most public school administrators.
The ACM would do well to formulate a curriculum on its own that generates excitement in students, place it in select schools and get other schools to adopt it after results were shown.
Anything else smacks of throwing more public dollars at a perceived problem and then having to pick up the pieces later.
Aren't those distributed through BT technology? Won't this adversely impact the gaming segment? Or will they find that it's been automagically exempted from filtering?
"Deep Six - The Blue Screen Edition"