Really? I always thought that their success was due to marketing their products to death. I'm so glad you came and set the record straight.
Wow - I wonder if you're as much of an asshole in real life as you are online. This cloak of pseudo-anonymity really seems to bring out the prick in you. Anyway, I wouldn't have thought this sentence would have been that hard to figure out: part of their success is definitely due to ease of use. I'm sorry I couldn't come up with a less obscure synonym for the word part.
Funny that you mention Microsoft in the same post as this, because I've never seen a Microsoft product "just work".
Look fruitcake, I understand you're trying to whore karma, but try to be a little more creative than regurgitating the same old anti-Microsoft bullshit, okay? I'm no Microsoft apologist, but for you to deny that any MS products "just work" shows that you're either a complete fucking moron or... No, I guess that's it - you're a moron.
From a marketing point of view you're dead wrong. If you want to survive in a competitive marketplace you can't be telling your customers to RTFM. It just doesn't work that way. Bash Microsoft and AOL all you want, but part of their success is definately due to ease of use.
There is no such thing as "too user-friendly". If someone buys a surround sound stereo system it's because they want good sound while they watch movies. They really shouldn't be asked to learn the intracacies of stereo system design.
In the end, it should just work. If you don't make a product that's easy to use, somebody else will.
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs? There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days. And we cant get smaller drives.
Because it's cheaper for Seagate (or whoever) to kick out 50,000 40GB drives than it is to make 50,000 drives spread out over 10 different product lines. It's the same reason that a P3 600 is technically identical to a P3 800. (I speak from personal experience.)
Uh, did you even read my links? Specifically this one. UltimateTV has been shuffled off into the darkness since TiVo received its patents. So - where have you been?
Um, what about patents?
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not quite sure how MS plan's on evading the patent issue. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the PVR industry is laden with patents like a minefield. Both TiVo and ReplayTV hold a number of them on PVR technology. Unless these companies plan on surviving on license fees like a tick on Microsoft's neck, it seems to me like Microsoft is going to have quite a wait (about 15 years) before it can get into the PVR biz.
Won't the $200K reward encourage greedy developers to hide their work and end up reducing the amount of sharing that goes on?
I'm not so sure about that. It's been my experience that the majority of open source projects are actually coded by a very small number of developers. Projects with widely dispersed development such as Linux or Samba seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
I think $200K could certainly inspire a dozen or so individuals to do what they are already day-dreaming about doing.
Not true. Go to the Secret Service's webpage based on the measures they've taken. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there.
How the hell are you supposed to know if someone's passing you counterfeit bills if the countermeasures are hidden to the naked eye? Maybe this has something to do with the fact that U.S. currency is the most successfully counterfeited money in the world.
Re:Bad Idea: We'll lose brand recognition
on
Greenbacks No More
·
· Score: 5, Funny
From a marketing standpoint, the greenish color scheme has fantastic brand awareness.
Good point - we wouldn't want people to start using competing U.S. currencies. Seriously, you sat through too many marketing classes if you think U.S. currency needs brand awareness to be valuable.
Yes please tell.. I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive. I haven't released it due to blatent patent infringement.
In all fairness, the article states that the path of the asteroid was on a line with the sun. There is no way Earth based telescopes could have seen it, even had they known exactly where to look.
Fools! They should just slap a sheet of welder's glass on their telescopes.
Would your favorite open-source project survive being sued back into the stone age?
Uhhh yes.
Realistically, who could you sue that would kill Apache? The best you'd be able to do is stop one person or organization from distributing it. Of course since it's open source somebody else will just distribute/sponsor it instead.
McAfee's claim of a virus spread through JPEGs requires one essential element: you have to have already been infected by ANOTHER virus transmitted by some actual executable code.
That's technically not true. Although I've never seen it done with JPEGs, it's entirely possible that there could be a potential buffer overflow in the image viewer's decoding algorithm. This wouldn't be a JPG virus per se, because it would only be specific to a certain viewer. And the virus would only have the rights that the image viewer had. But it's still possible.
For this to be used effectively it would require that a large number of people use the same image viewer - which is not entirely impossible in today's Microsoft monoculture.
Re:This could be done today...
on
P2P Television?
·
· Score: 2
I have a Pentium 2 400 machine in my bedroom. [...] It can capture at 640 by 480 @ 30 fps without breaking a sweat.
Hmmm, can I have a username/password to your web site? I'm over 18 - I swear.;-)
Next in the same series: using cell locations to guide missiles to achieve more casualties.
You mean like this? (Hint: read the second paragraph)
For the link lazy, here is what it says:
It is a well-founded fear. During the First Chechen War, in April 1996, Dzhokar Dudayev, President of the Muslim republic of Chechnya, was killed by the Russians after a foreign satellite and Russian airborne intercept stations pinpointed the location of his satellite phone. A single Russian attack aircraft fired two laser guided missiles homed in on Dudayev's satellite phone. One missile exploded a few feet from Dudayev, killing him instantly. Dudayev was then making a call on his satellite phone. There was widespread speculation that the satellite used to pinpoint Dudayev's location was American.
In particular, the Boeing design uses conventional hydraulics for actuating its various parts, but the LockMart plane uses an electrical bus to distribute power to motors that actuate the various parts.
Hmmm, sounds like a prime target for an EMP type weapon. Of course, I suppose any aircraft built in the last 50 years would probably succumb to an EMP pulse too.
I had to face the facts: I was stealing music. A few of my friends asked me to justify what I was doing, and I couldn't justify it. I was stealing music.
MEANING: The BSD license can be embraced and extended. We receive no benefit for our tax dollars with a BSD license. [..] I am not a GPL zealot. I am a taxation zealot. This is MY MONEY we're talking about.
Okay, say MIT uses government funding to develop software and releases it under the BSD license. You are then free to use what "YOUR MONEY" paid for. How do you arrive at the conclusion that you received no benefit? You have full access to everything that was created with tax funding.
What you don't like is that AT&T may come along and utilize the software that they paid for (remember - corporations pay taxes too) without making everything it touches free as well.
I think you weaken your position when you claim to be a taxation zealot. The point of the GPL is to ensure that good software is improved upon. It's a sound philosophic concept and that's why I use it. It was not designed to be used as a weapon against monopolistic practices or to allow cheapskates to never have to pay for software again.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean: Slashbots will be modded down with prejudice.
I see, so if one state doesn't want something but the other 49 gang up on them, then they're gonna get it. What a wonderful system we have.
You got it.
Sitting around and bitching never solves anything. What is your solution?
In other news, results from a new study were released today that show that smoking is found to lower IQs.
Oh man, I gotta find me one of these servers. No more getting spanked by 11 year-olds in CounterStrike. This is my kind of competition.
Really? I always thought that their success was due to marketing their products to death. I'm so glad you came and set the record straight.
Wow - I wonder if you're as much of an asshole in real life as you are online. This cloak of pseudo-anonymity really seems to bring out the prick in you. Anyway, I wouldn't have thought this sentence would have been that hard to figure out:
part of their success is definitely due to ease of use. I'm sorry I couldn't come up with a less obscure synonym for the word part.
Funny that you mention Microsoft in the same post as this, because I've never seen a Microsoft product "just work".
Look fruitcake, I understand you're trying to whore karma, but try to be a little more creative than regurgitating the same old anti-Microsoft bullshit, okay? I'm no Microsoft apologist, but for you to deny that any MS products "just work" shows that you're either a complete fucking moron or... No, I guess that's it - you're a moron.
From a marketing point of view you're dead wrong. If you want to survive in a competitive marketplace you can't be telling your customers to RTFM. It just doesn't work that way. Bash Microsoft and AOL all you want, but part of their success is definately due to ease of use.
There is no such thing as "too user-friendly". If someone buys a surround sound stereo system it's because they want good sound while they watch movies. They really shouldn't be asked to learn the intracacies of stereo system design.
In the end, it should just work. If you don't make a product that's easy to use, somebody else will.
Why doesn't anyone make cheap, fast, small (3-6gig) HDs? There really is ZERO reason for the office folk at my workplace to have the 30gig drives that we are getting these days. And we cant get smaller drives.
Because it's cheaper for Seagate (or whoever) to kick out 50,000 40GB drives than it is to make 50,000 drives spread out over 10 different product lines. It's the same reason that a P3 600 is technically identical to a P3 800. (I speak from personal experience.)
Economies of scale.
Uh, did you even read my links? Specifically this one. UltimateTV has been shuffled off into the darkness since TiVo received its patents. So - where have you been?
I'm not quite sure how MS plan's on evading the patent issue. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the PVR industry is laden with patents like a minefield. Both TiVo and ReplayTV hold a number of them on PVR technology. Unless these companies plan on surviving on license fees like a tick on Microsoft's neck, it seems to me like Microsoft is going to have quite a wait (about 15 years) before it can get into the PVR biz.
Won't the $200K reward encourage greedy developers to hide their work and end up reducing the amount of sharing that goes on?
I'm not so sure about that. It's been my experience that the majority of open source projects are actually coded by a very small number of developers. Projects with widely dispersed development such as Linux or Samba seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
I think $200K could certainly inspire a dozen or so individuals to do what they are already day-dreaming about doing.
Not true. Go to the Secret Service's webpage based on the measures they've taken. Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there.
How the hell are you supposed to know if someone's passing you counterfeit bills if the countermeasures are hidden to the naked eye? Maybe this has something to do with the fact that U.S. currency is the most successfully counterfeited money in the world.
From a marketing standpoint, the greenish color scheme has fantastic brand awareness.
Good point - we wouldn't want people to start using competing U.S. currencies. Seriously, you sat through too many marketing classes if you think U.S. currency needs brand awareness to be valuable.
Hmmm, maybe that has something to do with what Michael wrote when he posted the story:
the Dutch national railroad discovered it
What's more puzzling is why American web-forum Slashdot chickened out of linking to any Radikal mirrors as well.
So Dutch National Railroad, let's see you do something about this.
[Heh - there's nothing so brave as using someone else's liability to make a political statement.]
Yes please tell.. I have a fully working SVQ3 codec that I reverse engineered sitting on my harddrive. I haven't released it due to blatent patent infringement.
Yeah, me too.
In all fairness, the article states that the path of the asteroid was on a line with the sun. There is no way Earth based telescopes could have seen it, even had they known exactly where to look.
Fools! They should just slap a sheet of welder's glass on their telescopes.
Where do I pick up my Nobel Prize?
Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Asimov's Second Law sucks. Why would I want a robot that would always be doing favors for other people?
Hmmm, on the other hand, maybe I don't even need a robot. I can just go over to my neighbor's house and tell his robot to wash my car.
Would your favorite open-source project survive being sued back into the stone age?
Uhhh yes.
Realistically, who could you sue that would kill Apache? The best you'd be able to do is stop one person or organization from distributing it. Of course since it's open source somebody else will just distribute/sponsor it instead.
Am I wrong?
McAfee's claim of a virus spread through JPEGs requires one essential element: you have to have already been infected by ANOTHER virus transmitted by some actual executable code.
That's technically not true. Although I've never seen it done with JPEGs, it's entirely possible that there could be a potential buffer overflow in the image viewer's decoding algorithm. This wouldn't be a JPG virus per se, because it would only be specific to a certain viewer. And the virus would only have the rights that the image viewer had. But it's still possible.
For this to be used effectively it would require that a large number of people use the same image viewer - which is not entirely impossible in today's Microsoft monoculture.
I have a Pentium 2 400 machine in my bedroom. [...] It can capture at 640 by 480 @ 30 fps without breaking a sweat.
;-)
Hmmm, can I have a username/password to your web site? I'm over 18 - I swear.
Utterly irrelevant.
You mean like this? (Hint: read the second paragraph)
For the link lazy, here is what it says:
In particular, the Boeing design uses conventional hydraulics for actuating its various parts, but the LockMart plane uses an electrical bus to distribute power to motors that actuate the various parts.
Hmmm, sounds like a prime target for an EMP type weapon. Of course, I suppose any aircraft built in the last 50 years would probably succumb to an EMP pulse too.
I had to face the facts: I was stealing music. A few of my friends asked me to justify what I was doing, and I couldn't justify it. I was stealing music.
Wow - your friends staged a Napster intervention?
MEANING: The BSD license can be embraced and extended. We receive no benefit for our tax dollars with a BSD license. [..] I am not a GPL zealot. I am a taxation zealot. This is MY MONEY we're talking about.
Okay, say MIT uses government funding to develop software and releases it under the BSD license. You are then free to use what "YOUR MONEY" paid for. How do you arrive at the conclusion that you received no benefit? You have full access to everything that was created with tax funding.
What you don't like is that AT&T may come along and utilize the software that they paid for (remember - corporations pay taxes too) without making everything it touches free as well.
I think you weaken your position when you claim to be a taxation zealot. The point of the GPL is to ensure that good software is improved upon. It's a sound philosophic concept and that's why I use it. It was not designed to be used as a weapon against monopolistic practices or to allow cheapskates to never have to pay for software again.