We do, if they lose, they can end up paying the legal fees of the winning party.
Don't forget about damages - not only does the losing party have to pay the legal fees but a lot more money since now Google's had to waste time, image, etc. on these peons.
The real abuse comes when the party being sued doesn't have the money to even go to court so they, in this case, would buy the software since that way it's cheaper (see: PanIP).
In that respect it's fantastically stupid that they picked Google to sue - Google's got millions in the bank. If this thing ever sees the inside of a courtroom it'll be amazine.
IT Marketing learned it's history lesson, or will it forever doomed to repeat it?
What lesson exactly? The flaw in the CueCat concept was this - it was trying to solve a problem that no one had - that being the difficulty of typing in web site addresses. This is hardly a flaw of IT Marketing - lots of useless products hit the market.
Perhaps the lesson is that pumping millions into flimsy ideas is a bad idea. But that's always going to happen - just not in the sort of frenzy with which it happened in the dot-com era, and probably not too easily for anyone for a while. But someone was selling something correctly to get $195 million in VC funding for 265 employees all centered around sending little cats to people in hopes that they'd scan barcodes out of the Dallas Morning News and Wired Magazine.
I can't help but think that either a) DigitalConvergence had grander schemes in the pipes and this CueCat thing was just to be the first, or b) The DigitalConvergence guys were con artists and the whole thing was a scam to get lots of money from VC's. The 260+ other employees were just pawns in a ponzi scheme.
That sounds fair enough, but I was thinking the original poster was saying something more like "even one infected machine is too much!" which is unrealistic.
So yes they implement security but only when someone else points out that over 25% of all computers are infected with malware. Obviously this new Security concious microsoft takes some time to believe thaty they may be wrong... enjoy
What percentage would you like it to hit before they do something?
As long as Microsoft isn't planning to buy out vmware
Well given that they bought Connectix, and now puts out the main VMWare competitor as Microsoft VirtualPC, I think you're safe. Especially since buying Company A and then Company A's Competitor is asking for trouble.
Reminds me of an MSNBC article from Dr. Bob Arnot (sp?) where he implied that the reason the 9/11 terrorists picked the WTC was because they were the largest buildings in NYC in Flight Simulator.
I didn't realize anyone actually wasted their time learning VB.NET.
Well, and this is from a C# guy, if you already knew VB then VB.NET is "easier" to learn. Plus it's like how they named it ASP.NET or ADO.NET - it implies an upgrade or an update, so managers will sign off on it.
but wasn't the whole point of dot net platform independence !?!
Actually a good chunk of the "point" of.NET is language independence. Right now I'm on a couple of projects where portions are written in C# and portions are written in VB.NET. If we wanted to, we could do portions of it in Managed C++. The notion is that if you have a developer that's good in C# and one that's good in VB.NET instead of one having to learn the language of the other, they can both work together.
Of course the limitation to this is that it has to be a managed.NET language. The two new ones MS has out of the box are of course the ones that get used the most. Other companies have come out with.NET versions of COBOL, Fortran, Perl, etc. but in some cases the languages have limitations imposed on them (and in some cases, OOP shoehorned in) and are mainly just syntactically approximate to the language they claim to be - this way the thirty year COBOL veteran doesn't have to toss everything he's learned.
I still have a Diamond Rio PMP300 - the one they got sued over and established the precedent on MP3 players being legal. Some dude sold it to me for $10 used - and it wasn't too old at the time (~1999). Of course the 32MB size limit got hit pretty quickly and meant incomplete albums or downsampled ones. And it had this really annoying flaw where the battery door would break and then have to be taped shut.
I think it still works and it's a cool piece of nostalgia. But what struck me was - it has a digital screen across the top and a large, circular interface across the bottom. So did the iPod draw inspiration from this? Or did Rio just nearly get it right the first time?
I haven't lost my job to an outsourcing firm etc, but thats because I rarely work for large firms that can afford outsourcing in the first place.
There's the part about offshore outsourcing people miss. The biggest corporations are the ones trying it. Your smaller organizations mostly aren't. It's ironic since it's the largest organizations are the only ones who can afford it. They're the ones with tasks that can be placed in a box, sent overseas, completed, and then sent back.
I hate offshore outsourcing probably more than anyone here, but this is a bank. These are the institutions that came up with the idea of automating most teller tasks with an ATM machine and then charging you for using it (and then patting themselves on the back when they don't) IMO, banks are bad places to work right now, mostly since a lot of them are still on mainframes. You've got a huge system with a need for a lot of programmers on archaic old languages. The programmers you do have are retiring and dying. The new programmers don't want to do it - they want to learn J2EE and.NET. Rewrite the system in flavor-of-the-month language? Or just send the work to India where they jump at the chance to work with it and will do so for a smaller wage?
The irony is that I was given a raise and promoted thanks to the fact that the bullshit scripting task I was originally hired for was offshored to India. But I still don't trust it as far as I can throw it.
On the other hand, you could take that $10 and buy a used copy of Super Mario Brothers Deluxe, a 1999 Game Boy Color release that includes the game in its original format along with the Japan-only sequel and a number of challenge modes.
First off, it's downright hilarious how he spells out "Bros." and "DX". It's Super Mario Bros. DX, no "Brothers" about it.
Also, I own SMB DX and it's a neat game but to say that it's the right way to go is not entirely accurate. I agree that the "Classic NES Series" reissue of SMB is a ripoff at $20 but SMB DX has a few nearly fatal flaws. The biggest is this - the resolution of the GBC wasn't good enough to represent the entire screen, so you actually have to pan up and down manually with the D-pad. This is really a problem in some areas (like when the bad guys are off screen or you don't know if there's a platform at the bottom of the screen to land on). Plus playing a GB/GBC cart on a GBA has the issue that either it's the square screen in the middle or it's unnaturally stretched. In addition, SMB DX is loaded down with a bunch of weird crap that little kids in Japan must have loved, but which make little sense here. However, I still like it simply because it has the Japanese SMB2 on it (the lost levels).
I'd still prefer to play the original SMB on the GBA if it were, say, $10 (which it of course will be eventually)
This isn't like pop up/under advertising where it's actually interfering with your ability to use Tivo. This isn't like unskippable ads at the beginning of a DVD. This is something in the upper-right corner saying "click thumbs-up for more...". This is the very definition of non-intrusive - they're putting a small ad on top of a commercial. A commercial you're skipping anyway. Here's the thing - the ad also displays if you're just watching commercials (like if the show is "caught up" and you're watching it in real time) so it's not punishing those who skip commercials. Tivo has some database of what time/channel you're watching and they put the ad up then. It's not perfect yet, as per those who have had the things pop up when a normal show plays.
Either choose to be subscription-supported or advertising-supported, but not both.
Yeah, like newspapers and magazines.
Years ago, before I was a techie/developer I did the math and figured out that the price I was paying to subscribe to a magazine was less than it probably cost to actually print the thing, much less cover the salaries of the people making the things.
So it became obvious that it's the advertisers that cover the cost of the magazine. This was made further apparent when I had the "opportunity" to subscribe to a technical journal - one of those 12-page pamphlet dealies with monochrome ink and no ads, for the cost of $95 per year. No freaking way! But that's the price you have to pay if you don't want ads.
So it occured to me - why do they even sell these things at all? I mean, if they're selling ad prices based on pairs of eyes reading the ads, why not just give the things away to ensure the most pairs?
And this is what's happened, sorta. I'm currently getting a few technical publications for free - I got an actually useful spam ad from Fawcette and ever since I've been getting Visual Studio magazine for free. Actually, it's been over a year now so I guess they renewed me for free, too.
The only snag is that the advertising is only worth it if the target demographic is right. So it's been a given for many years now that people who subscribe to a magazine like the topic the magazine is about, so that's how the advertising models work. The 350,000 people who pay $30 a year to get PC Gamer make it such that the advertisers think it's worth it to target those subscribers. I had to fill out a survey to get VS Magazine, so that's how they can justify to advertisers that developers are really reading it. I could find a free sewing magazine out there but I don't sew, so it would be useless for everyone involved.
The only flaw in this logic is that I don't think they actually deny people the free magazines. I found a magazine from Fawcette called "The.NET Magazine", so I signed up for it and took the survey. It became obvious that this isn't a magazine for developers, it's a magazine for the head of the IT purchasing department. So when asked questions like "how much money in hardware purchasing decisions do you make" I answered $0. Same for how much software, etc. I still got the magazine and since then they've had the good sense to rename it "Windows Server System Magazine".
The other thing is this - it's actually quite rare to know someone who can fix cars. Sure, you probably know of at least one other person who's an amateur mechanic but you probably don't know many more.
The average person however probably knows half a dozen people who are "good at computers" and they like to pick these peoples' brains at dinner or something. So the odds of knowing someone who would be able to un-spyware your system is much greater. So why pay $50 an hour to someone when your nephew Timmy can do the same thing for cookies?
Indeed. Many developers won't take that risk so that's why a lot of games are so mediocre. It is a risk though, so the developer that puts out Everquest gets paid big when the game works out and Dynamix gets fired when Tribes 2 fizzles. The flip side of innovation is when people don't want it (see Shenmue)
Dynamix: Tribes 2 isn't ready, we need to delay it. Vivendi: Release the game now. Dynamix: It's not ready. Vivendi: When will it be ready? Dynamix: Six months from now. Vivendi: You said that six months ago. And six months before that. And six months before that. We've missed two Christmas seasons now and sunk umpteen million dollars into this game. You told us it would be our next Half-Life. We told you that was great since those fuckers from Valve won't even return our phone calls. Now would you please finish the function you're working on and give us the fucking thing? You can keep working, we'll call it a patch. Oh, and please for your sake hope that you get that patch right the first time.
(later)
Vivendi: This game sucks. No ones buying it, and those who did are returning it. Dynamix: We told you the game wasn't ready. Vivendi: And WE told YOU that the game was supposed to be ready over a year and a half ago when you said it would be. No one's buying the game since you guys can't even patch, let alone code. Oh, and great idea taking a game which people were seriously hardcore about and changing or removing everything they liked. Did any of you ever even test this thing on XP? And don't give me the excuse of "the lead programmers left". Now we're going to be lucky to break even on this, we didn't sell any copies of Half-Life: Titanium Edition and the stockholders want someone's heads. You're fired.
Tribes could have been a very strong title to this day had they simply followed the example that ID put forward with Quake I/III or the Doom series.
An interesting choice of examples. However, are you saying Quake III: Arena was "almost the same" as Quake? The three Quake games couldn't be more unalike. The first one was a mishmash FPS with no plot, the second had the Strogg plot, and the third was multiplayer only with no plot. Hell, all people did with Quake II was bitch that it wasn't enough like Quake.
And DOOM 3? You're right in that it's "almost the same game with but with better graphics and new maps". And people shit on it. A lot. I loved it, personally. I'm like that - I can have multiple good games in my life. But all people did was complain that it had the same 1993 game mechanics as DOOM, only with better graphics.
Ultimately though Tribes will go down as a pseudo-sports FPS game and as EA learned with Madden - the only way to keep the masses happy is to come out with basically the same game over and over, just improved graphically.
Well, I use one of those "you can have up to eight phones" deals from Uniden and we have three phones on the one line. But I also went to Wal-Mart and bought one of their $4 specials since the entire system is useless if the power goes out. Go ahead and use cordless phones - just be sure to have one that's not.
The example is in any case moot since the recipie has been known for years. It is pretty much an iced tea made with the leaves of a number of plants with a huge quantity of sugar added. The Kott company has a pretty good facsimile which is why the own label colas taste much better than they once did.
No one knows for sure if the recipe that's out there is the mixture they use today. (link) but one of the ingredients (decocainized flavor essence of the coca leaf) is imported by the one company that has the DEA permit to import the leaves and remove the cocaine, and they're under exclusive contract to Coca-Cola to provide this ingredient. So that's why no one's cola is ever going to taste exactly like Coca-Cola and why Coca-Cola isn't really worried about it.
Why the obsession with people "switching"? Has anyone thought that perhaps their market share is going up because people are buying a Macintosh in addition to their current machine, which they keep? If people buy Macs and then use them in addition to their Windows PC then the Mac market share goes up but the actual number of people using Windows doesn't go down.
I think this is what Apple finally realized with the Mac Mini. They'll never get people en masse to go to the Mac cold turkey, but by giving them an affordable option, there's a lot of people who might try it since there's a way out (they can just write off the $500).
I guess the better question is - what percentage of Mac Mini purchasers continue to use it actively and don't eventually write it off as a bad investment? And how many of them swear off Windows?
There are usually just a handful of Scientology books that anyone can walk into a Barnes & Noble and buy - Dianetics is of course always in print but sometimes there's others, such as Scientology: A New Slant on Life and Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought. These are put out by Bridge Publications, which Scientology owns. The thing is, these "fit for the public" books are slick. They make it sound like what they're describing match the problems you're having, and the reason you're having them is due to X, which in Dianetics is roughly translated to being due to "Engrams" in the brain. It's not until you've had a lot of expensive therapy that they hit you with "Body Thetans", souls of dead aliens hiding from Xenu.
Scientology's religious cult status is of course merely a ruse to keep their practices from being considered medicine (and regulated as such) and it means their money isn't taxed the same (at all?)
What I want to know is this - who at Scientology is in on the gag? I would imagine the new recruits are true believers as are the people right above them. Are the people at the top, as I would imagine, in on the gag? Surely they're not believers, too. Surely they're aware that the entire thing is a money making sham. And how far down does it go? How many people at the top of Scientology are fully aware of what's really going on? How far down in the organization do you have to go to find people who are brainwashed?
Slashdot Mirror
So instead of taking a gig with Microsoft you took a RIM Job instead?
The real abuse comes when the party being sued doesn't have the money to even go to court so they, in this case, would buy the software since that way it's cheaper (see: PanIP).
In that respect it's fantastically stupid that they picked Google to sue - Google's got millions in the bank. If this thing ever sees the inside of a courtroom it'll be amazine.
Perhaps the lesson is that pumping millions into flimsy ideas is a bad idea. But that's always going to happen - just not in the sort of frenzy with which it happened in the dot-com era, and probably not too easily for anyone for a while. But someone was selling something correctly to get $195 million in VC funding for 265 employees all centered around sending little cats to people in hopes that they'd scan barcodes out of the Dallas Morning News and Wired Magazine.
I can't help but think that either a) DigitalConvergence had grander schemes in the pipes and this CueCat thing was just to be the first, or b) The DigitalConvergence guys were con artists and the whole thing was a scam to get lots of money from VC's. The 260+ other employees were just pawns in a ponzi scheme.
That sounds fair enough, but I was thinking the original poster was saying something more like "even one infected machine is too much!" which is unrealistic.
Apparently he's never seen a NYC postcard...
Of course the limitation to this is that it has to be a managed .NET language. The two new ones MS has out of the box are of course the ones that get used the most. Other companies have come out with .NET versions of COBOL, Fortran, Perl, etc. but in some cases the languages have limitations imposed on them (and in some cases, OOP shoehorned in) and are mainly just syntactically approximate to the language they claim to be - this way the thirty year COBOL veteran doesn't have to toss everything he's learned.
I guess AJAX reinvigorates Javascript. It's a perfectly cromulent term. It sure did embiggen Google Maps
Does anyone know if the action figure line will be carried in major stores, or just hobby shops and online stores?
I think it still works and it's a cool piece of nostalgia. But what struck me was - it has a digital screen across the top and a large, circular interface across the bottom. So did the iPod draw inspiration from this? Or did Rio just nearly get it right the first time?
I hate offshore outsourcing probably more than anyone here, but this is a bank. These are the institutions that came up with the idea of automating most teller tasks with an ATM machine and then charging you for using it (and then patting themselves on the back when they don't) IMO, banks are bad places to work right now, mostly since a lot of them are still on mainframes. You've got a huge system with a need for a lot of programmers on archaic old languages. The programmers you do have are retiring and dying. The new programmers don't want to do it - they want to learn J2EE and .NET. Rewrite the system in flavor-of-the-month language? Or just send the work to India where they jump at the chance to work with it and will do so for a smaller wage?
The irony is that I was given a raise and promoted thanks to the fact that the bullshit scripting task I was originally hired for was offshored to India. But I still don't trust it as far as I can throw it.
Also, I own SMB DX and it's a neat game but to say that it's the right way to go is not entirely accurate. I agree that the "Classic NES Series" reissue of SMB is a ripoff at $20 but SMB DX has a few nearly fatal flaws. The biggest is this - the resolution of the GBC wasn't good enough to represent the entire screen, so you actually have to pan up and down manually with the D-pad. This is really a problem in some areas (like when the bad guys are off screen or you don't know if there's a platform at the bottom of the screen to land on). Plus playing a GB/GBC cart on a GBA has the issue that either it's the square screen in the middle or it's unnaturally stretched. In addition, SMB DX is loaded down with a bunch of weird crap that little kids in Japan must have loved, but which make little sense here. However, I still like it simply because it has the Japanese SMB2 on it (the lost levels).
I'd still prefer to play the original SMB on the GBA if it were, say, $10 (which it of course will be eventually)
IGNORE THE ADS
This isn't like pop up/under advertising where it's actually interfering with your ability to use Tivo. This isn't like unskippable ads at the beginning of a DVD. This is something in the upper-right corner saying "click thumbs-up for more...". This is the very definition of non-intrusive - they're putting a small ad on top of a commercial. A commercial you're skipping anyway. Here's the thing - the ad also displays if you're just watching commercials (like if the show is "caught up" and you're watching it in real time) so it's not punishing those who skip commercials. Tivo has some database of what time/channel you're watching and they put the ad up then. It's not perfect yet, as per those who have had the things pop up when a normal show plays.
So it became obvious that it's the advertisers that cover the cost of the magazine. This was made further apparent when I had the "opportunity" to subscribe to a technical journal - one of those 12-page pamphlet dealies with monochrome ink and no ads, for the cost of $95 per year. No freaking way! But that's the price you have to pay if you don't want ads.
So it occured to me - why do they even sell these things at all? I mean, if they're selling ad prices based on pairs of eyes reading the ads, why not just give the things away to ensure the most pairs?
And this is what's happened, sorta. I'm currently getting a few technical publications for free - I got an actually useful spam ad from Fawcette and ever since I've been getting Visual Studio magazine for free. Actually, it's been over a year now so I guess they renewed me for free, too.
The only snag is that the advertising is only worth it if the target demographic is right. So it's been a given for many years now that people who subscribe to a magazine like the topic the magazine is about, so that's how the advertising models work. The 350,000 people who pay $30 a year to get PC Gamer make it such that the advertisers think it's worth it to target those subscribers. I had to fill out a survey to get VS Magazine, so that's how they can justify to advertisers that developers are really reading it. I could find a free sewing magazine out there but I don't sew, so it would be useless for everyone involved.
The only flaw in this logic is that I don't think they actually deny people the free magazines. I found a magazine from Fawcette called "The .NET Magazine", so I signed up for it and took the survey. It became obvious that this isn't a magazine for developers, it's a magazine for the head of the IT purchasing department. So when asked questions like "how much money in hardware purchasing decisions do you make" I answered $0. Same for how much software, etc. I still got the magazine and since then they've had the good sense to rename it "Windows Server System Magazine".
The average person however probably knows half a dozen people who are "good at computers" and they like to pick these peoples' brains at dinner or something. So the odds of knowing someone who would be able to un-spyware your system is much greater. So why pay $50 an hour to someone when your nephew Timmy can do the same thing for cookies?
Indeed. Many developers won't take that risk so that's why a lot of games are so mediocre. It is a risk though, so the developer that puts out Everquest gets paid big when the game works out and Dynamix gets fired when Tribes 2 fizzles. The flip side of innovation is when people don't want it (see Shenmue)
You got it wrong.
Dynamix: Tribes 2 isn't ready, we need to delay it.
Vivendi: Release the game now.
Dynamix: It's not ready.
Vivendi: When will it be ready?
Dynamix: Six months from now.
Vivendi: You said that six months ago. And six months before that. And six months before that. We've missed two Christmas seasons now and sunk umpteen million dollars into this game. You told us it would be our next Half-Life. We told you that was great since those fuckers from Valve won't even return our phone calls. Now would you please finish the function you're working on and give us the fucking thing? You can keep working, we'll call it a patch. Oh, and please for your sake hope that you get that patch right the first time.
(later)
Vivendi: This game sucks. No ones buying it, and those who did are returning it.
Dynamix: We told you the game wasn't ready.
Vivendi: And WE told YOU that the game was supposed to be ready over a year and a half ago when you said it would be. No one's buying the game since you guys can't even patch, let alone code. Oh, and great idea taking a game which people were seriously hardcore about and changing or removing everything they liked. Did any of you ever even test this thing on XP? And don't give me the excuse of "the lead programmers left". Now we're going to be lucky to break even on this, we didn't sell any copies of Half-Life: Titanium Edition and the stockholders want someone's heads. You're fired.
And DOOM 3? You're right in that it's "almost the same game with but with better graphics and new maps". And people shit on it. A lot. I loved it, personally. I'm like that - I can have multiple good games in my life. But all people did was complain that it had the same 1993 game mechanics as DOOM, only with better graphics.
Ultimately though Tribes will go down as a pseudo-sports FPS game and as EA learned with Madden - the only way to keep the masses happy is to come out with basically the same game over and over, just improved graphically.
Well, I use one of those "you can have up to eight phones" deals from Uniden and we have three phones on the one line. But I also went to Wal-Mart and bought one of their $4 specials since the entire system is useless if the power goes out. Go ahead and use cordless phones - just be sure to have one that's not.
I think this is what Apple finally realized with the Mac Mini. They'll never get people en masse to go to the Mac cold turkey, but by giving them an affordable option, there's a lot of people who might try it since there's a way out (they can just write off the $500).
I guess the better question is - what percentage of Mac Mini purchasers continue to use it actively and don't eventually write it off as a bad investment? And how many of them swear off Windows?
Scientology's religious cult status is of course merely a ruse to keep their practices from being considered medicine (and regulated as such) and it means their money isn't taxed the same (at all?)
What I want to know is this - who at Scientology is in on the gag? I would imagine the new recruits are true believers as are the people right above them. Are the people at the top, as I would imagine, in on the gag? Surely they're not believers, too. Surely they're aware that the entire thing is a money making sham. And how far down does it go? How many people at the top of Scientology are fully aware of what's really going on? How far down in the organization do you have to go to find people who are brainwashed?