It's not the MP3 per se that's illegal in this case, at least under US law. In fact, personally ripping an MP3 from a CD you own is possibly (this is still not clear) illegal in the United States. Note that it's the ACT OF RIPPING that's supposedly illegal, the act of making an unauthorized copy. Just like making a direct copy of the CD (in CD-Audio format) is also supposedly illegal. Now that MP3 or CD copy may be technically "counterfeit merchandise", but OWNING it is not illegal per se. So it's really up in the air whether PURELY downloading an MP3 (from an FTP site for example) of a track on a CD you already own is illegal. Probably not. But UPLOADING even a tiny part of that MP3 to anyone (even people who own the CD) IS ILLEGAL as it's "distribution". Due to the way most P2P programs work, downloading MP3s through P2P is illegal because you're "distributing".
If you think about it for a minute, this is basically pure extortion by the labels against the ISPs "Do what we say (read: Give us money.), or we will put you out of business." The ISPs really have no choice but to fight, because if they continue to pay blackmail to the labels they'll eventually be forced out of business. Again, make no mistake, the labels want the ISPs to give them a pile of money. This isn't about "enforcement" of any "laws". They simply see the ISPs as a juicier target that's easier to sue. This strategy hasn't worked in the USA, where telecom companies have a lot of power, so they're trying it in Australia were media is considerably more powerful.
I mean, since I've completely fabricated the entire notion of Sharia law showing up as an actual consideration in German court proceedings And Creationism or Christian thinking would NEVER show up in American or German courts, right? No sane religious person would ever want his religious values reflected in the law and courts, would they? You Christians are just whiners. Sorry of there's another pile of bullshit out there to compete with YOUR pile of bullshit.
I'm obviously mistaken about there being an entire culture that would want you to consider your wife or daughter as property, You are mistaken, in that I'm not aware of such a culture existing anymore. Islam, at no point in the history of the religion, has treated wives and daughters as property. Yes, Muslims kept slaves. And Muslims even married slaves (one of the caliphs famously married a European slave) but they were freed when married. Christians did exactly the same things. St Paul himself endorsed slavery. The Catholic Church officially endorsed slavery right into the 20th century and you can find individual Christians that still advocate it today.
Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.
And this is the fault of the "superhackers"? Most of the "cracks" of third-party (hell, first party) systems of financial info have consisted SOLELY of the bank SELLING the information to the wrong people. Like organized crime. Why? Because the banks are fucking greedy and want to make more money any way they can. Look out, your friends in the banks are pushing legislation to give themselves immunity to lawsuits (God forbid the cops go after them. I mean, it's ONLY fraud and racketeering. Everyone knows big corporations don't commit crimes) or any sort of liability for these shenanigans. And look for bailouts over all the risky home-lending they've been doing recently.
Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!
How many bombings have there been in Detroit? Zero? Maybe this has something to do with the fact that we (in the United States) don't treat our Muslim population as 3rd-class citizens they way they do in Europe. And even if there were bombings, so the fuck what? More people in the USA will die of lead poisoning. Or how about this bit of simple logic: The #2 cause of death in America is poisoning related to drug interactions. This is both accidental and completely preventable. Would we save more lives by increasing funding to the FDA and special programs for hospitals to reduce drug interactions (a national standardized system would help even more) or by spending money on dubious pork-barrel security systems at airports and stadiums?
Why not attack this from the other end? Terrorists need weapons to shoot people and blow shit up. Where do you think they get those weapons? For the most part, from US. The United States is the #1 arms producer in the world, by a fairly wide margin, so it's a little hypocritical for us to be bitching about the terrorists we've armed. But cutting foreign arms sales would cost the "defense" manufacturers money, and we can't have that.
You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage.
No, they're selling a product. You're not complaining about grocery stores selling cigarettes and alcohol (including Wal-Mart), or lottery tickets/gambling (Wal-mart again), or coffee shops (caffeine is addictive, and they sell it at Wal-mart), or doctors (millions of Americans are hooked on prescription drugs, and you can get the drugs at Wal-mart) or banks making people slaves with excessive debts (there are shady lenders at Wal-mart too!), or any of the countless other ways poor people are fucked over in America. Rich people do drugs and go to "rehab". Poor people do drugs and go to prison.
You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin?
Yes, they already sell everything else. At least then addicts could get access to unadulterated drugs.
Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull?
Yes, an number of them. Meth is what people do when they don't have access to cocaine. Bring down the wholesale price of cocaine and meth will become far less common in the market.
What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that see
As to the seriousness with which "corporate" PC users take their use of the "tool", I've never worked in a monastery. Where I worked it was a constant struggle to keep users from trashing their own machines, whether it was porn, their favorite music players, games, or, yes, thousands of shareware titles, and that was in the large organizations with rules rules rules. Small businesses have it even worse. The corporate world overall hasn't been all that much better than the home user in sticking to business
It's easier than you think. Just don't give the users Administrator rights. Then they CAN'T install software, or hardware for that matter. You can "push" down updates and software installs from a central server (it's free) and hand-install new hardware if you need to. You can set policies to prevent users from web surfing. At all. You can also make a whitelist of "approved" sites. Or you could use some sort of filtering software to prevent people from going to porn sites, etc. All of this has been available since about NT4.
The administrators you've dealt with apparently were incompetent or lazy. There are a lot of incompetent Windows administrators.
Long ago the case that Windows was faster, more secure, less expensive to use, and so on, began to be seen for what it was, pure marketing message, short on substance
In the enterprise, which remains the most important market for desktops, Windows boxes are basically Active Directory/Exchange/Office clients. AD+Exchange is easily the best groupware solution available. It's only real competitor is Notes, which has the worst mail client ever written. People use Office partially due to momentum/infrastructure, partially due to a lack of features (most notably in Excel and PowerPoint) and partially due to all the great collaboration tools like Project.
Apple isn't even trying to target this market, so they have absolutely no chance of unseating Windows. Novell, Red Hat, etc. ARE targeting this market and slowly making headway.
The big threat to Windows isn't MacOS and it never will be. The threat is Linux, and all sides are keenly aware of this.
That 97% of the music on iPods is from cd rips and pirated downloads says nothing about the whether or not the people buying from ITMS are geeks or not. That's true. Common sense tells you that sophisticated online purchases remains a somewhat geeky activity.
ITMS customers are disproportionately 12 to 17 year olds which is not a demographic known for being IT geeks. Did you read the article you cited? It talks about ITUNES USERS, not the people that purchase tracks through iTunes. An important distinction as (according to Steve Jobs) the vast majority of iTunes/iPod users never purchase a single song through iTunes.
With every new version of Windows Microsoft claims it's "faster", implying that among the other varous new features and improvements are efficiency improvements.
I think most/. users are smart enough to tell the difference between marketing copy and common sense.
Actually, AAC is an open standard and is royalty-free
AAC is NOT a open standard, unless you consider MP4 to be an "open standard", and it is NOT royalty-free. In fact, I'm pretty sure the licensing for hardware players is slightly more than MP3. This is why most portable audio players don't support AAC, because then they would have to pay double licensing fees (one of MP3, one for AAC) and MP3 is vastly more popular than AAC especially overseas.
Why do they include WMA? Because WMA really doesn't have any licensing fees, and it's as much of an "open standard" as AAC. Microsoft will even write code for your player. Hell, if you're big enough they'll even pay you to include WMA (I know they did for Rio). Nowadays they might be entrenched enough that they've stopped doing this but you can see how they got such momentum.
Apple has no serious interest in promoting AAC as an independent codec. AAC/FairPlay is an important "feature" of iPods and licensing it (Jobs has said outright that they will never license Fairplay) would only cut into their lucrative iPod business. It's the same reason they'll never license MacOS.
Ogg and FLAC aren't widely supported, despite being royalty-free, because of lack of popularity. It just isn't worth it to support these formats. I own one of the very few players that does, the Rio Karma. And yeah, I use FLAC a lot.
Do you think Microsoft is serving customer demands when it makes each successive operating system bigger and requiring more resources? Yes. Users want new features from new operating systems. Vista has lots of new features, and the features the slow the OS down the most (desktop search, multimedia, 3D effects, security) are the ones that users have been clamoring for. If you don't like 'em, turn 'em off.
Do you think customers are demanding that a computer should slow down just because you upgraded your operating system? No. Very few users are ever going to actually INSTALL Windows Vista or upgrade an existing PC. They are going to buy a new PC with Vista during the next upgrade cycle.
I've got a brand new PC that's right in the sweet spot for Vista performance. Yet, Windows XP runs faster and better on it than Vista. So how can anyone possibly say that Vista is "better"? "Out of the box" Vista runs slower than XP because it's got more features. You start turning off the whiz-bang features and Vista starts performing better. Turn off enough, and you can get it close to XP levels of performance. 98 ran better than 2000 on the same hardware for the same reasons.
There is also the issue of drivers. Most games (for example) currently run slower on Vista because Vista uses a new driver model and developers haven't learned all the quirks/bugs of the new model. Again, exactly the same thing happened in the 98 to 2000 transition.
A new version is supposed to have new features, eventually at a performance cost.
Please tell me how your company adds features to products without using more resources. Not one more bit of HD space, not one more bit of memory, not one more CPU call. This might theoretically be possible if you rewrote the application from scratch each time you added a feature, but you're not doing that.
In my company that's what our clients require.
Do your clients require you to raise the dead as well?
That fundamentally altered the way the way people think of music and the internet. Same for Napster. Sure, there was file sharing before Napster and online purchasing of music before ITMS. But before Napster and ITMS, this was the realm of the geek rather than the everyday joe. Napster and ITMS fundamentally changed the way that most people looked at these things.
It's STILL the realm of the geek. Virtually nobody uses iTunes to purchase music. (And that's according to Steve Jobs himself. 97% of the music on iPods doesn't come from iTunes). iTunes was simply slicker than MusicMatch and bundled with easily the most popular MP3 player available. People are using it because it's the default, and because Apple has made it difficult to use other music organizers.
However, non-geeks DID use Napster, because it was easy (they could handle downloaded tracks however they wanted and downloading tracks was really just click and drag for many users) and, much more importantly, it was FREE so it was available to kids. It's only very recently, through cell charges, that paid downloadable music became available to kids. And iTunes doesn't support that (not until the iPhone anyway).
I suspect that you don't talk about computers very often to everyday people. For many, if not most, Airport is synonymous with Wireless networking.
I've never met a single person who identified wireless with the Airport or Apple in any way. That includes Apple employees. Where I live, networking in general is almost symonymous with Cisco and Linksys. In fact, I've encountered some confusion regarding Apple products as most people I've talked to are more familiar with the concept of "wireless routers" rather than separate hotspots.
And you yourself point out why Enron was not influential. They failed. Not only did they fail, the failed without even making a big splash in that particular market.
Enron was very influential. Their "energy market" business model completely changed the way the energy business worked and those changes remain today in other companies. Enron was a very successful company, in no way was their business model unprofitable or unsuccessful. They just got greedy.
You're not remembering correctly. The Voodoo3 was critically panned at release because a Voodoo3 was marginally slower than a single Voodoo2 and dramatically slower than 2 Voodoo2s in SLI. So for the gamer that had already invested in a 2D card (like a Riva TNT2) and 2 Voodoo2s in SLI the Voodoo 3 actually represented a step backwards. The Geforce, which was released shortly after, was widely regarded as being superior due to it's support for hardware transform & lighting.
3DFx never really recaptured the success of the Voodoo2. It's THAT card that should be regarded as the "best of all time".
...run machines preloaded with pirated copies of Windows. There has been talk in Russian press that he was well aware that software was illegal on dozen of the machines but still decided to cut the costs and pocket the difference.
How did he do this? I'm seriously asking the question because what you're implying is pretty unlikely. What HE claims is that he ordered 12 systems with 12 legal copies of Windows XP (I believe) preinstalled. He claims that the upstream vendor gave him bogus licenses. So I see 4 possibilities:
1) The situation is as the teacher claims and he was defrauded by the upstream vendor. 2) The PCs shipped with bogus licenses but the teacher was aware of this when he bought the PCs. I'd argue this is impossible to prove as you have to read the teacher's mind. 3) The PCs shipped completely blank, and he installed Windows with pirated keys himself. This should be easy to confirm one way or another with the upstream vendor.
or what you're claiming,
4) The PCs shipped to the teacher with legitimate copies of Windows with good keys. The teacher then either changed the keys, or reinstalled a pirate version of Windows, then sold the legitimate copies of Windows on the market and pocketed the money. I think this is damn unlikely, but it's the only way he could have gotten cash out of this.
Yes, this is changing, but not fast enough for me or thousands (millions?) of others. Yes, WoW is available, but most games aren't. Until game studios start porting their software to the Apple platform, MS really has little to worry about.
What makes you think this is changing? Virtually all PC games nowadays are based on DirectX. As the feature gap widens between DirectX and the alternatives, even more games are targeting DirectX. Hell, the Xbox360 is a DirectX platform (PS3 too? I'm not sure) so a lot of CONSOLE games are based on DirectX. There are fewer and fewer big-budget titles released for Linux and MacOS each year.
I'd argue that Parallels was the nail in the coffin for native Mac gaming. Hell, it might be the nail in the coffin for MacOS in general eventually. It's my understanding that MS offered Apple a special version of Vista at a reduced price to bundle with Parallels (or even preinstall), but Apple turned them down.
It's almost certainly a support issue. At the price these are selling, they can't afford to do ANYTHING for support, especially if they're running linux. And they can't take any sort of returns either (costs too much). This makes it tough to sell in the USA because you can't sell new PCs "as is" with no returns. With bulk purchase from governments (governments can waive consumer protection laws) they can get around these issues.
I don't think we'll see these at retail. Look on EBay once they become available.
You know one thing MS could do that would be charitable is just give the poor guy 12 licenses and tell the Russian courts to fuck off once and for all.
I'm pretty certain they already have. "Innocently" receiving pirated software is covered under the TOS and Microsoft can, at their discretion, issue new keys.
And he's going to win at trial. He's not claiming that he has the "right" to pirate software, but that he didn't pirate it at all. He claims that he got Windows preinstalled on PCs he purchased for the classroom, assuming they had legitimate licenses. According to him, it was the upstream vendor that pirated the software, not him. And he's almost certainly telling the truth, as this is standard practice in the Russian IT industry. I suspect the Russian courts can't FIND the upstream vendor, that's why they're going after him.
I assume you were posting things on FreeRepublic that would be counter to the perspective of that forum - liberal, democratic or whatever. I do have a question for you: what is the attraction?
Oddly enough, no. I was posting from a "libertarian" perspective. This was not long after 9/11 and I was expressing concern for the Patriot Act and other (IMO) bogus anti-terrorism measures. I also expressed concerns over the overt racism I saw in the forums. I'd say that my opinion was held by the vast majority of "freepers". It is/was a vocal minority that threatened me.
It seems to me that participating in forums where you don't agree with the thrust of the forum
I don't agree that the "thrust" of FreeRepublic is actually supposed to be white power racism, but a vocal minority seems to push that view. I'd argue that the difference is that MOST forums would toss people for posting such garbage, but FR doesn't. I think it's a matter for debate whether or not this represents tacit endorsement or a commitment to free speech.
I find it amusing that many of the bloggers seem to think this is something novel. I used to post to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in the 1980s, and yeah, death threats and (especially) crude sexual comments were pretty common. Of course this should not come as a shock to anyone because these were KIDS posting. Y'know, 13-year old boys? This woman is facing childish pranks and getting a little too worked up over it. The postings were on a site called, of all things, "meankids".
You want threats, go post over on FreeRepublic. After about a week of posting people managed to track me down and started putting up pictures of the front of my house, accompanied by threats and accusations of terrorism. THAT'S when you should start getting a little worried.
How many copies of Vista have sold at retail? I have seen relatively few problems with OEM installs of Vista on new desktops, but lots of little compatibility problems upgrading a system from XP to Vista (even if doing a clean install). I'd say that isn't roughly comparable to the 98 to 2000 transition.
It strikes be that one of the first applications will be for pilots, especially helicopter pilots. Modern instrument displays are often multicolored and the need to distinguish colors has prevented pilots from using night vision systems in the past. I think that the fancy systems in Apaches deal with this somehow, but it would be very useful in other (cheaper) aircraft.
How else would you separate very rich and foolish people from their money, aside from forcibly taking it?
No, you forcibly take their money. Very rich and very foolish people essentially don't exist. Common sense should tell you this. The realty is that most "very rich" people/organizations are very stingy and conservative with their money, that's a big part of why they're rich. The fantasy of VCs and other major investors tossing out billions for incredibly bad investments died during the.com bust. And even then, the average US taxpayer soaked up most of those losses due to various "legal" tricks.
This laptop is almost certainly not being sold to a "real" customer anyway. It's a shill sale to drive business towards move reasonably-price "luxury" laptops.
The exact 640k quote from the talk: "So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. . That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
All he is saying is that DOS had a 640K barrier, which is well-known. He's not making a dogmatic statement saying that's the way things "should" be, which is what is usually claimed. In this quote he's specifically acknowledging this as an architectural mistake.
For the record, I did vote, and will continue to, regardless of my opinion that voting is purely symbolic.
Stop fighting fair. Attack the commissioners directly. When he starts attacking the proposal, accuse them of molesting children and trying to distract attention away from their malfesiance. Post flyers around the town with photographs of the commissioners naming them as serial child molesters. If that's not plausible for some reason, make up an issue (or a friend, they might be on to you by now), and corner them after a meeting and record yourself attempting to bribe them. Cut it in such as way as to make it look like he accepted it and then bring it to the local news. If they don't bite, put up flyers with the URL. etc.
It is very important that you try to stay as anonymous as possible while doing this because the natural reaction of the county commissioners will be to send the local PD to harass you.
A one man campaign can easily get someone tossed off a county commission or board, especially during an election. It works even better if it's complete bullshit because the targets can't articulate a defense other than "it's bullshit".
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It's not the MP3 per se that's illegal in this case, at least under US law. In fact, personally ripping an MP3 from a CD you own is possibly (this is still not clear) illegal in the United States. Note that it's the ACT OF RIPPING that's supposedly illegal, the act of making an unauthorized copy. Just like making a direct copy of the CD (in CD-Audio format) is also supposedly illegal. Now that MP3 or CD copy may be technically "counterfeit merchandise", but OWNING it is not illegal per se. So it's really up in the air whether PURELY downloading an MP3 (from an FTP site for example) of a track on a CD you already own is illegal. Probably not. But UPLOADING even a tiny part of that MP3 to anyone (even people who own the CD) IS ILLEGAL as it's "distribution". Due to the way most P2P programs work, downloading MP3s through P2P is illegal because you're "distributing".
If you think about it for a minute, this is basically pure extortion by the labels against the ISPs "Do what we say (read: Give us money.), or we will put you out of business." The ISPs really have no choice but to fight, because if they continue to pay blackmail to the labels they'll eventually be forced out of business. Again, make no mistake, the labels want the ISPs to give them a pile of money. This isn't about "enforcement" of any "laws". They simply see the ISPs as a juicier target that's easier to sue. This strategy hasn't worked in the USA, where telecom companies have a lot of power, so they're trying it in Australia were media is considerably more powerful.
Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.
And this is the fault of the "superhackers"? Most of the "cracks" of third-party (hell, first party) systems of financial info have consisted SOLELY of the bank SELLING the information to the wrong people. Like organized crime. Why? Because the banks are fucking greedy and want to make more money any way they can. Look out, your friends in the banks are pushing legislation to give themselves immunity to lawsuits (God forbid the cops go after them. I mean, it's ONLY fraud and racketeering. Everyone knows big corporations don't commit crimes) or any sort of liability for these shenanigans. And look for bailouts over all the risky home-lending they've been doing recently.
Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!
How many bombings have there been in Detroit? Zero? Maybe this has something to do with the fact that we (in the United States) don't treat our Muslim population as 3rd-class citizens they way they do in Europe. And even if there were bombings, so the fuck what? More people in the USA will die of lead poisoning. Or how about this bit of simple logic: The #2 cause of death in America is poisoning related to drug interactions. This is both accidental and completely preventable. Would we save more lives by increasing funding to the FDA and special programs for hospitals to reduce drug interactions (a national standardized system would help even more) or by spending money on dubious pork-barrel security systems at airports and stadiums?
Why not attack this from the other end? Terrorists need weapons to shoot people and blow shit up. Where do you think they get those weapons? For the most part, from US. The United States is the #1 arms producer in the world, by a fairly wide margin, so it's a little hypocritical for us to be bitching about the terrorists we've armed. But cutting foreign arms sales would cost the "defense" manufacturers money, and we can't have that.
You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage.
No, they're selling a product. You're not complaining about grocery stores selling cigarettes and alcohol (including Wal-Mart), or lottery tickets/gambling (Wal-mart again), or coffee shops (caffeine is addictive, and they sell it at Wal-mart), or doctors (millions of Americans are hooked on prescription drugs, and you can get the drugs at Wal-mart) or banks making people slaves with excessive debts (there are shady lenders at Wal-mart too!), or any of the countless other ways poor people are fucked over in America. Rich people do drugs and go to "rehab". Poor people do drugs and go to prison.
You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin?
Yes, they already sell everything else. At least then addicts could get access to unadulterated drugs.
Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull?
Yes, an number of them. Meth is what people do when they don't have access to cocaine. Bring down the wholesale price of cocaine and meth will become far less common in the market.
What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that see
As to the seriousness with which "corporate" PC users take their use of the "tool", I've never worked in a monastery. Where I worked it was a constant struggle to keep users from trashing their own machines, whether it was porn, their favorite music players, games, or, yes, thousands of shareware titles, and that was in the large organizations with rules rules rules. Small businesses have it even worse. The corporate world overall hasn't been all that much better than the home user in sticking to business
It's easier than you think. Just don't give the users Administrator rights. Then they CAN'T install software, or hardware for that matter. You can "push" down updates and software installs from a central server (it's free) and hand-install new hardware if you need to. You can set policies to prevent users from web surfing. At all. You can also make a whitelist of "approved" sites. Or you could use some sort of filtering software to prevent people from going to porn sites, etc. All of this has been available since about NT4.
The administrators you've dealt with apparently were incompetent or lazy. There are a lot of incompetent Windows administrators.
Long ago the case that Windows was faster, more secure, less expensive to use, and so on, began to be seen for what it was, pure marketing message, short on substance
In the enterprise, which remains the most important market for desktops, Windows boxes are basically Active Directory/Exchange/Office clients. AD+Exchange is easily the best groupware solution available. It's only real competitor is Notes, which has the worst mail client ever written. People use Office partially due to momentum/infrastructure, partially due to a lack of features (most notably in Excel and PowerPoint) and partially due to all the great collaboration tools like Project.
Apple isn't even trying to target this market, so they have absolutely no chance of unseating Windows. Novell, Red Hat, etc. ARE targeting this market and slowly making headway.
The big threat to Windows isn't MacOS and it never will be. The threat is Linux, and all sides are keenly aware of this.
With every new version of Windows Microsoft claims it's "faster", implying that among the other varous new features and improvements are efficiency improvements.
/. users are smart enough to tell the difference between marketing copy and common sense.
I think most
Actually, AAC is an open standard and is royalty-free
AAC is NOT a open standard, unless you consider MP4 to be an "open standard", and it is NOT royalty-free. In fact, I'm pretty sure the licensing for hardware players is slightly more than MP3. This is why most portable audio players don't support AAC, because then they would have to pay double licensing fees (one of MP3, one for AAC) and MP3 is vastly more popular than AAC especially overseas.
Why do they include WMA? Because WMA really doesn't have any licensing fees, and it's as much of an "open standard" as AAC. Microsoft will even write code for your player. Hell, if you're big enough they'll even pay you to include WMA (I know they did for Rio). Nowadays they might be entrenched enough that they've stopped doing this but you can see how they got such momentum.
Apple has no serious interest in promoting AAC as an independent codec. AAC/FairPlay is an important "feature" of iPods and licensing it (Jobs has said outright that they will never license Fairplay) would only cut into their lucrative iPod business. It's the same reason they'll never license MacOS.
Ogg and FLAC aren't widely supported, despite being royalty-free, because of lack of popularity. It just isn't worth it to support these formats. I own one of the very few players that does, the Rio Karma. And yeah, I use FLAC a lot.
There is also the issue of drivers. Most games (for example) currently run slower on Vista because Vista uses a new driver model and developers haven't learned all the quirks/bugs of the new model. Again, exactly the same thing happened in the 98 to 2000 transition.
A new version is supposed to have new features, eventually at a performance cost.
Please tell me how your company adds features to products without using more resources. Not one more bit of HD space, not one more bit of memory, not one more CPU call. This might theoretically be possible if you rewrote the application from scratch each time you added a feature, but you're not doing that.
In my company that's what our clients require.
Do your clients require you to raise the dead as well?
That fundamentally altered the way the way people think of music and the internet. Same for Napster. Sure, there was file sharing before Napster and online purchasing of music before ITMS. But before Napster and ITMS, this was the realm of the geek rather than the everyday joe. Napster and ITMS fundamentally changed the way that most people looked at these things.
It's STILL the realm of the geek. Virtually nobody uses iTunes to purchase music. (And that's according to Steve Jobs himself. 97% of the music on iPods doesn't come from iTunes). iTunes was simply slicker than MusicMatch and bundled with easily the most popular MP3 player available. People are using it because it's the default, and because Apple has made it difficult to use other music organizers.
However, non-geeks DID use Napster, because it was easy (they could handle downloaded tracks however they wanted and downloading tracks was really just click and drag for many users) and, much more importantly, it was FREE so it was available to kids. It's only very recently, through cell charges, that paid downloadable music became available to kids. And iTunes doesn't support that (not until the iPhone anyway).
I suspect that you don't talk about computers very often to everyday people. For many, if not most, Airport is synonymous with Wireless networking.
I've never met a single person who identified wireless with the Airport or Apple in any way. That includes Apple employees. Where I live, networking in general is almost symonymous with Cisco and Linksys. In fact, I've encountered some confusion regarding Apple products as most people I've talked to are more familiar with the concept of "wireless routers" rather than separate hotspots.
And you yourself point out why Enron was not influential. They failed. Not only did they fail, the failed without even making a big splash in that particular market.
Enron was very influential. Their "energy market" business model completely changed the way the energy business worked and those changes remain today in other companies. Enron was a very successful company, in no way was their business model unprofitable or unsuccessful. They just got greedy.
You're not remembering correctly. The Voodoo3 was critically panned at release because a Voodoo3 was marginally slower than a single Voodoo2 and dramatically slower than 2 Voodoo2s in SLI. So for the gamer that had already invested in a 2D card (like a Riva TNT2) and 2 Voodoo2s in SLI the Voodoo 3 actually represented a step backwards. The Geforce, which was released shortly after, was widely regarded as being superior due to it's support for hardware transform & lighting.
3DFx never really recaptured the success of the Voodoo2. It's THAT card that should be regarded as the "best of all time".
How did he do this? I'm seriously asking the question because what you're implying is pretty unlikely. What HE claims is that he ordered 12 systems with 12 legal copies of Windows XP (I believe) preinstalled. He claims that the upstream vendor gave him bogus licenses. So I see 4 possibilities:
1) The situation is as the teacher claims and he was defrauded by the upstream vendor.
2) The PCs shipped with bogus licenses but the teacher was aware of this when he bought the PCs. I'd argue this is impossible to prove as you have to read the teacher's mind.
3) The PCs shipped completely blank, and he installed Windows with pirated keys himself. This should be easy to confirm one way or another with the upstream vendor.
or what you're claiming,
4) The PCs shipped to the teacher with legitimate copies of Windows with good keys. The teacher then either changed the keys, or reinstalled a pirate version of Windows, then sold the legitimate copies of Windows on the market and pocketed the money. I think this is damn unlikely, but it's the only way he could have gotten cash out of this.
Yes, this is changing, but not fast enough for me or thousands (millions?) of others. Yes, WoW is available, but most games aren't. Until game studios start porting their software to the Apple platform, MS really has little to worry about.
What makes you think this is changing? Virtually all PC games nowadays are based on DirectX. As the feature gap widens between DirectX and the alternatives, even more games are targeting DirectX. Hell, the Xbox360 is a DirectX platform (PS3 too? I'm not sure) so a lot of CONSOLE games are based on DirectX. There are fewer and fewer big-budget titles released for Linux and MacOS each year.
I'd argue that Parallels was the nail in the coffin for native Mac gaming. Hell, it might be the nail in the coffin for MacOS in general eventually. It's my understanding that MS offered Apple a special version of Vista at a reduced price to bundle with Parallels (or even preinstall), but Apple turned them down.
It's almost certainly a support issue. At the price these are selling, they can't afford to do ANYTHING for support, especially if they're running linux. And they can't take any sort of returns either (costs too much). This makes it tough to sell in the USA because you can't sell new PCs "as is" with no returns. With bulk purchase from governments (governments can waive consumer protection laws) they can get around these issues.
I don't think we'll see these at retail. Look on EBay once they become available.
You know one thing MS could do that would be charitable is just give the poor guy 12 licenses and tell the Russian courts to fuck off once and for all.
I'm pretty certain they already have. "Innocently" receiving pirated software is covered under the TOS and Microsoft can, at their discretion, issue new keys.
And he's going to win at trial. He's not claiming that he has the "right" to pirate software, but that he didn't pirate it at all. He claims that he got Windows preinstalled on PCs he purchased for the classroom, assuming they had legitimate licenses. According to him, it was the upstream vendor that pirated the software, not him. And he's almost certainly telling the truth, as this is standard practice in the Russian IT industry. I suspect the Russian courts can't FIND the upstream vendor, that's why they're going after him.
I assume you were posting things on FreeRepublic that would be counter to the perspective of that forum - liberal, democratic or whatever. I do have a question for you: what is the attraction?
Oddly enough, no. I was posting from a "libertarian" perspective. This was not long after 9/11 and I was expressing concern for the Patriot Act and other (IMO) bogus anti-terrorism measures. I also expressed concerns over the overt racism I saw in the forums. I'd say that my opinion was held by the vast majority of "freepers". It is/was a vocal minority that threatened me.
It seems to me that participating in forums where you don't agree with the thrust of the forum
I don't agree that the "thrust" of FreeRepublic is actually supposed to be white power racism, but a vocal minority seems to push that view. I'd argue that the difference is that MOST forums would toss people for posting such garbage, but FR doesn't. I think it's a matter for debate whether or not this represents tacit endorsement or a commitment to free speech.
I find it amusing that many of the bloggers seem to think this is something novel. I used to post to Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in the 1980s, and yeah, death threats and (especially) crude sexual comments were pretty common. Of course this should not come as a shock to anyone because these were KIDS posting. Y'know, 13-year old boys? This woman is facing childish pranks and getting a little too worked up over it. The postings were on a site called, of all things, "meankids".
You want threats, go post over on FreeRepublic. After about a week of posting people managed to track me down and started putting up pictures of the front of my house, accompanied by threats and accusations of terrorism. THAT'S when you should start getting a little worried.
How many copies of Vista have sold at retail? I have seen relatively few problems with OEM installs of Vista on new desktops, but lots of little compatibility problems upgrading a system from XP to Vista (even if doing a clean install). I'd say that isn't roughly comparable to the 98 to 2000 transition.
Once again, I'll pimp the NEC MobilePro. Though now discontinued, it seems to offer everything you wanthttp://support.necam.com/mobilesolutions/hardw are/handhelds/MobilePro900/. They were discontinued to to outrageous cost.
BTW, all the foldable keyboards I've used have sucked.
It strikes be that one of the first applications will be for pilots, especially helicopter pilots. Modern instrument displays are often multicolored and the need to distinguish colors has prevented pilots from using night vision systems in the past. I think that the fancy systems in Apaches deal with this somehow, but it would be very useful in other (cheaper) aircraft.
Nah, it's what's right with the world.
.com bust. And even then, the average US taxpayer soaked up most of those losses due to various "legal" tricks.
Trickle down economics is bullshit.
How else would you separate very rich and foolish people from their money, aside from forcibly taking it?
No, you forcibly take their money. Very rich and very foolish people essentially don't exist. Common sense should tell you this. The realty is that most "very rich" people/organizations are very stingy and conservative with their money, that's a big part of why they're rich. The fantasy of VCs and other major investors tossing out billions for incredibly bad investments died during the
This laptop is almost certainly not being sold to a "real" customer anyway. It's a shill sale to drive business towards move reasonably-price "luxury" laptops.
The exact 640k quote from the talk: "So that's a 1 MB address space. And in that original design I took the upper 340k and decided that a certain amount should be for video memory, a certain amount for the ROM and I/O, and that left 640k for general purpose memory. And that leads to today's situation where people talk about the 640k memory barrier; the limit of how much memory you can put to these machines. I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. . That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
All he is saying is that DOS had a 640K barrier, which is well-known. He's not making a dogmatic statement saying that's the way things "should" be, which is what is usually claimed. In this quote he's specifically acknowledging this as an architectural mistake.
For the record, I did vote, and will continue to, regardless of my opinion that voting is purely symbolic.
Stop fighting fair. Attack the commissioners directly. When he starts attacking the proposal, accuse them of molesting children and trying to distract attention away from their malfesiance. Post flyers around the town with photographs of the commissioners naming them as serial child molesters. If that's not plausible for some reason, make up an issue (or a friend, they might be on to you by now), and corner them after a meeting and record yourself attempting to bribe them. Cut it in such as way as to make it look like he accepted it and then bring it to the local news. If they don't bite, put up flyers with the URL. etc.
It is very important that you try to stay as anonymous as possible while doing this because the natural reaction of the county commissioners will be to send the local PD to harass you.
A one man campaign can easily get someone tossed off a county commission or board, especially during an election. It works even better if it's complete bullshit because the targets can't articulate a defense other than "it's bullshit".