The way to deal with it is vote with your dollars.
Unfortunately, this will not work. If that were the case, then only cars that don't need to advertise are the only viable ones to buy (Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Bentley, etc) And even those may advertise in higher dollar markets that I'm simply not a member of.
However, money protests may work if people demand their money back after watching an advertiser supported movie. I simply refuse to pay a rental fee for any rented movie that has ads that are blocked out by the remote. That has got to be one of the most annoying things out there. I hear that Disney does that with thier store bought DVDs.
I believe that there are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough real jobs to fill them. Its getting to the point that I feel like I'm being accosted by a begger everywhere I go, but the people begging are typically people that have more money than I do. Salesmen lying to me and badgering me all the time. Telemarketers. SPAM. Billboards. Ads are _everywhere_. Baseball has greenscreened the infield to overlay different ads, because one was not enough. Tickmaster shoves more ads down my throat and these people are a monopoly in providing different random (I love those 2 terms together) numbers to people, and asking me to PAY MORE for printing the damn tickets on my own printer and paper. Ads have been integrated into movies for some time as called "product placement" ads. I only see people drinking Dunken Doughnuts coffee in movies. Sometimes they are downright distracting to the point that I think I can hear the marketing dweebie from the paying company in the background yelling "Please keep the product label visable at all times!"
Oh, and with the MPAA. Go for it. What are you going to sue for? What are you going to get? I've never downloaded a movie off of the net because I consider it a waste of time. If I really want a movie that bad, I'll pay the $20 at a store for it.
It is about time that the members of the ??AA groups start thinking about what they are going to do about their stupid antiquated business model. Its not that difficult, but I guess these people are simply that stupid. There is supply and demand and cost is relative to that supply and demand. The demand appears to be there. I mean people spend a great amount of time downloading low quality crap all the time where the downloads don't finish, the quality is worse than they thought, the movie just sucks, and so on. If these people can't figure out a way to entice people to pay something for their product, then they deserve to go out of business like all other businesses that can't make it.
Patents take time and money to get, something a lot of people don't have time or money to do.
And even more time and money to enforce. There are no government protections for patented items, its all done in civil court.
I do believe that there should be copyright, but I also think that it should autoexpire after some given period of time and fall into the public domain.
That way a great great great great great grandson/daughter does not have entitlement to copyright royalties for something that their great great great great great grandmother/father did.
Some plugins are useful - stuff like video plugins aren't terrible. Flash has it's place too. Sometimes you actually want to watch those terribly stupidly funny Flash movies you find.
Yes, I will say that they can be useful, but by default I browse without them, and for a reason.
Plugins simply are not part of the web. I use too many different systems (hardware and OSwise) and its important for me to just be able to look at a webpage without being told to get a newer (often nonexistant) version of plugin X.
Other plugins are just stupid though. Acrobat comes to mind... I like how OS X handles PDFs on the internet - download them to the download location, and open them (if you set it to auto-open files it deems "safe" - PDFs, disk images, documents, etc.). Much nicer, in my opinion, than the open-it-in-the-browser-window way.
Yup. I don't auto open anything. Its too simple to just right or control click in the download window when its done and select "open". I remember when the Acrobat plugin forgot to include the "save" feature. That was a glaring omission.
I say keep plugins off the web. You think adware, malware, and spyware is bad in windows now? Wait until it gets more cross platform with the next killer "plugin".
The Windows XP code base includes all of the extraneous crap that gets bundled with and on top of the kernel.
The "Linux" code base just includes the kernel.
MS gets dinged all the time (at least by us UNIX guys) for what crud they put into the kernelspace, and much of that "extraneous crap" has caused a number of security and stability issues over the years.
Windows and Linux are fundamentally different in design and purpose. And I do believe that most of the "extraneous crap" code should be included in the kernel lines of code count if it runs in kernel space.
Torrents (AFAIK) don't download in random order but close enough for a simple explanation. They certainly do not download from beginning to end. One fix might be to dl in dynamic chunks that where the chunks are in order, but within the chunk it may not be in order. By dynamic, I mean that the chunk size could be dynamic according to the speed of the dl.
A kick ass technology would be to put a swarming like technology into a transparent caching web proxy server. Typically this would be installed by the ISP or at the outside edge of a network where the UL and DL speeds are symetric and FAST.
#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks.
This is mute. Mac and Sun are proprietary and although they are always dying, they still exist and both have money in the bank. The percentage of time that most Altix nodes will be attached to a monitor is probably << 0.1% Now the reliablility of these machines is still in question and a valid argument against SGI.
#2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in.
The GPU thing is a very valid reason. I've heard a number of people that worked with workstations that have switched to a PC because a graphics card for $400 is as good or better than a "workstation" graphics card that costs often thousands of dollars. Also the PC market has a fairly rapid product cycle and upgrades are cheap and easy. Buying a new graphics card (or even a completly new PC) every year is often cheaper than the maintence contracts for a workstation.
#3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that. i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
$80,000 or $16,000/CPU is ridiculously expensive. I have paid about 30% of that for 6Gigs of RAM and using Itanium processors. A Cray XD1 has a list price of $40,000 for an entry-level 12-CPU chassis with 2.2 GHz Opteron 248 processors, 1 GB of memory per processor, a 73 GB disk for each dual-processor SMP node, and the standard 2 GB/s/processor interconnect.
SGI's current offerings on their Altix systems is abour $4-6k per CPU.
What if you had a friend traveling over there, that had to get in touch with you? Or someones company switches hosting to a.cn company. Or a mail gets relayed through a.cn mail server as the regular one is down for maintainence?
Any friend of mine would use a reliable and known email server either via some kind of webmail feature or by sshing into a box back in the USofA.
Being how much China censors thier internet, I would not count email being reliably sent from there under any conditions.
For some people a reliable and failsafe system is all that matters, and they will gladly pay 2x to 5x of your base TCO to ensure this.
TCO is bullshit unless done with X systems in parallel and measured at the end of the systems lifetime, and then its still bullshit because its now an anecdotal study.
Another Mastercard ad ripoff:
- Price of a Linux licence $0. - Price of a cheap PC $200 - Price of having your data in the morning - priceless.
or
- Price of a Windows licence $200. (I'm guessing, I have no clue) - Price of a cheap PC $200 - Price of having your data in the morning - priceless.
Although its fairly new, slashdot added autolinking urls with the <url:http://example.com> special tag. Its worth using instead of copying and pasting a url and having slashcode add spaces in it and fudge it up.
See my journal for a rant on Microsoft FUD ads found on slastdot and TCO estimates.
TCO can only be measured post hoc, hence the term Total Cost of Ownership. I would prefer all studies like this to refer to ECO (Estimated Cost of Ownership) versus TCO.
One thing that gets ignored in most every cost study is the decommission and migration cost at the end of life for the system.
I bring this up, because it is very difficult and expensive to migrate from a Windows platform. In my experience, I can easily switch from Solaris, Linux, AIX, and OS X or some other UNIX variant because they adhere to open standards (for the most part). When one is in MS land, things get difficult to escape from their ways of doing things.
I run spamassassin, and I have a rule to score URLs that reverse back to Chinese or Korean netblocks.
Over 50% of the tagged spams hit this rule. Now if these mails were actually sent from China or Korea, that is a different story (and a different rule:). I know its a cheap and easy way to send spam from compromised Windows machines that can be located anywhere in the world, but many of these drone machines are probably sending mails from Chinese and Korean people.
I know there will be a dozen predictable responses to this, deriding System X, Virginia Tech, Apple, Mac OS X, linpack, Top 500, and coming up with one excuse after another. But won't anyone consider the possibility that these Mac OS X clusters are worth something?
Your right!
1st, System X or the "Big Mac" was thrown together so that people like us would talk about it and to get a good standing for the November 2003 top 500 list. They did an excellent job at this.
Now for some reality. The system is not yet operational.
When it was first thown together, everyone "in the know" and myself questioned how this was going to work without a reliable memory subsystem, and the VT people responded that they were going to write software to correct any hardware errors, and we said OK, whatever. Then, they said, hmm, we kinda needa a reliable memory subsystem, so lets rip out all 1,100+ machines and start over with these new Xserve boxes that have ECC memory in them.
This system has not come up yet with the new Xserves, according to their website.
Now, I'm going to make a comment on Linpack. Linpack, like all good benchmarks are really good at measuring that benchmark's performance. Linpack is a good benchmark, but it is also a benchmark that does not require much RAM per node to run. Some applications do need a good amount of RAM/node to run and being that RAM costs $$, the cost adds up very quickly, and the cost/cpu/teraflop goes down accordingly.
With the comparison between System X and Tungsten NCSA cluster. Personally, I don't know why the Tungsten cluster cost more because the Mac cluster has more RAM/node and each node should have been cheaper in general. The NCSA cluster uses Myrinet which I know is expensive, but I do not know that in comparison to the Infiniband equipment on the Macs. Supposedly, the Infiniband interconnects were what got System X on the top500 list with such good results, or at least that is what the head of the project told me.
Although its popular here on slashdot because many of the readers are younger and inexperienced (and have no money) that they praise anything that costs less and extra brownie points go towards an underdog like AMD or Linux, however in the real world people actually will pay extra for something to ensure that it works. Working equipment may seem superfluous to the dorm room Linux guru, but trust me, I know what its like to work with equipment that cost about $1 mil and it doesn't work. We could have gone with the 2nd bidder at $1.2 mil and it would have worked. Yes, we "saved" $200,000, but we also wasted well over $500,000 when one considers that over 50% of the equipment is faulty and many people's time has been wasted.
You are dealing with a Windows admin. For many of them, the common reason for everything is that the problem is someone else's fault....
In my experience, windows admins and people that use windows a lot, are just supersticious people. Why? Because the operating system they use makes no sense. To watch a "windows guru" use thier computer by clicking things like "OK" "Apply" over and over again just "to make sure", and the extra "clicking around" almost makes me dizzy. The OS eats mouse events, it behaves differently when program X is running, it is most often loaded with spyware and adware, how is anyone able to get some sort of baseline except for reinstalling all the time (with the computer disconnected from the network).
6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.
Their browser still sucks and is insecure, and I doubt it will be recommended by the college (and everyone else in the know) with the "donation".
Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
Although the physical demands are not that great, its not different of a physical activity than horse racing, bowling, curling, sailing, or darts (or dog shows for those that really, really, really stretch it:).
The key is competition, and alghough I'm not a NASCAR fan, its pretty impressive how Dale Ernheart (sp?) or Richard Petty simply seemed to win more than the other 40 or so drivers a good amount of the time. The cars are aguably very similar in performance, and even where the differences do happen with the cars, it also seems to work out that the best drivers also coincindentally have the best cars and crew.
Equipment is an important part of most sports. The best tennis player in the world could not compete with a raquet from the 70s. I would bet that he would not make it past the 1st round.
the fact remains that there is, at least in this very real situation that happens a lot - there is a demand that is not met, because the traditional distribution method provides no way that a profit can be generated, due to lack of quantity. Is this really the internet's fault?
No, of course not. The thing that kills me is that, no, there is no legal way to get cheap low quality music except for iTunes. This is about it. Too bad that iTunes and the iPod are failing business models and Apple is about to go out of business -- oh wait, thats right, they are doing quite well.
These monolithic corps are so big and stuck in thier ways of doing things that worked up to the late 90s and havn't yet realized that is is now almost 2005.
I have always praised TV Guide for embracing and adapting to the times with thier TV guide channel, thier adaptation and partnership with some digital cable services, their online web offerings, and yes, they still print the dead tree TV Guides as well. I don't particurlarly care for thier products, but they are not going around suing people that cancel their magazine subscriptions.
What is going to become of TV once it is all "on demand"? Is the current advertiser supported model going to continue? Keep in mind that the current TV ad based model is based on the assumption that the people are "forced" to watch the commercials. I guess.
I think this is the age of the "little guy". Just about any bozo can put up a website now. Its much more difficult to create a national TV station, or even just one program on an existing network.
I would love it if Matt Stone and Trey Parker separated from Cartoon Network, and just charged for the first week or so after creating an episode and distributing it as a kick ass fast torrent from their website for a price, and then after the week, its done. Actually, the first South Park that I ever saw was the Jesus and Christmas one from '97 or so that a friend downloaded over his modem. I own seasons 1-3 on DVD (need to get 4) and the movie, and I watch it, especially when a new episode comes out. It can be freely distributed. Maybe I'm just a stupid hippie, but this is like how the Grateful Dead did their concerts by allowing people to freely trade copies of thier concerts. Also, keep in mind that the Grateful Dead are the most sucessful rock band ever. And they still are making between 2 and 3 mil a year per band member after almost 40 years of being in the business. Few entertainers can bost such a carreer, but then again few have worked that hard either.
How about if a new ISP, say Time-Warner-AOL, charged a little more than a "regular" ISP, with the catch that you are free to download any of the Time-Warner content with your monthly payment. Nah, that would never work.
So children, lets keep this in the "High Courts", and keep pretending its 1997, while completely ignoring reality and pissing everybody off. Its more fun that way.
The intent of copyright is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences by extending to creators of a work the right to control its distribution. This is no different today than it was in times past.
History does not support this. Think of the Renaissance period.
Copyright like many things that we accept as "alwas been there" is a very new human phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
The way to deal with it is vote with your dollars.
Unfortunately, this will not work. If that were the case, then only cars that don't need to advertise are the only viable ones to buy (Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Bentley, etc) And even those may advertise in higher dollar markets that I'm simply not a member of.
However, money protests may work if people demand their money back after watching an advertiser supported movie. I simply refuse to pay a rental fee for any rented movie that has ads that are blocked out by the remote. That has got to be one of the most annoying things out there. I hear that Disney does that with thier store bought DVDs.
I believe that there are simply too many mouths to feed and not enough real jobs to fill them. Its getting to the point that I feel like I'm being accosted by a begger everywhere I go, but the people begging are typically people that have more money than I do. Salesmen lying to me and badgering me all the time. Telemarketers. SPAM. Billboards. Ads are _everywhere_. Baseball has greenscreened the infield to overlay different ads, because one was not enough. Tickmaster shoves more ads down my throat and these people are a monopoly in providing different random (I love those 2 terms together) numbers to people, and asking me to PAY MORE for printing the damn tickets on my own printer and paper. Ads have been integrated into movies for some time as called "product placement" ads. I only see people drinking Dunken Doughnuts coffee in movies. Sometimes they are downright distracting to the point that I think I can hear the marketing dweebie from the paying company in the background yelling "Please keep the product label visable at all times!"
Oh, and with the MPAA. Go for it. What are you going to sue for? What are you going to get? I've never downloaded a movie off of the net because I consider it a waste of time. If I really want a movie that bad, I'll pay the $20 at a store for it.
It is about time that the members of the ??AA groups start thinking about what they are going to do about their stupid antiquated business model. Its not that difficult, but I guess these people are simply that stupid. There is supply and demand and cost is relative to that supply and demand. The demand appears to be there. I mean people spend a great amount of time downloading low quality crap all the time where the downloads don't finish, the quality is worse than they thought, the movie just sucks, and so on. If these people can't figure out a way to entice people to pay something for their product, then they deserve to go out of business like all other businesses that can't make it.
Patents take time and money to get, something a lot of people don't have time or money to do.
And even more time and money to enforce. There are no government protections for patented items, its all done in civil court.
I do believe that there should be copyright, but I also think that it should autoexpire after some given period of time and fall into the public domain.
That way a great great great great great grandson/daughter does not have entitlement to copyright royalties for something that their great great great great great grandmother/father did.
Some plugins are useful - stuff like video plugins aren't terrible. Flash has it's place too. Sometimes you actually want to watch those terribly stupidly funny Flash movies you find.
Yes, I will say that they can be useful, but by default I browse without them, and for a reason.
Plugins simply are not part of the web. I use too many different systems (hardware and OSwise) and its important for me to just be able to look at a webpage without being told to get a newer (often nonexistant) version of plugin X.
Other plugins are just stupid though. Acrobat comes to mind... I like how OS X handles PDFs on the internet - download them to the download location, and open them (if you set it to auto-open files it deems "safe" - PDFs, disk images, documents, etc.). Much nicer, in my opinion, than the open-it-in-the-browser-window way.
Yup. I don't auto open anything. Its too simple to just right or control click in the download window when its done and select "open". I remember when the Acrobat plugin forgot to include the "save" feature. That was a glaring omission.
I say keep plugins off the web. You think adware, malware, and spyware is bad in windows now? Wait until it gets more cross platform with the next killer "plugin".
The Windows XP code base includes all of the extraneous crap that gets bundled with and on top of the kernel.
The "Linux" code base just includes the kernel.
MS gets dinged all the time (at least by us UNIX guys) for what crud they put into the kernelspace, and much of that "extraneous crap" has caused a number of security and stability issues over the years.
Windows and Linux are fundamentally different in design and purpose. And I do believe that most of the "extraneous crap" code should be included in the kernel lines of code count if it runs in kernel space.
Linux software ... contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code
:)
I hope they submitted a patch
Torrents (AFAIK) don't download in random order but close enough for a simple explanation. They certainly do not download from beginning to end. One fix might be to dl in dynamic chunks that where the chunks are in order, but within the chunk it may not be in order. By dynamic, I mean that the chunk size could be dynamic according to the speed of the dl.
A kick ass technology would be to put a swarming like technology into a transparent caching web proxy server. Typically this would be installed by the ISP or at the outside edge of a network where the UL and DL speeds are symetric and FAST.
run openssl speed on a dual G5 vs. a single Xeon - the Xeon will be multiple times as fast
In all fairness, openssl has many hand written assembler routines for x86.
The whole 'UNIX workstation' market is gone.
No, its just changed.
#1. Their machines are still propietary. they are using their using Altix system but require an ATI FireGL card. ummm.. no thanks.
This is mute. Mac and Sun are proprietary and although they are always dying, they still exist and both have money in the bank. The percentage of time that most Altix nodes will be attached to a monitor is probably << 0.1% Now the reliablility of these machines is still in question and a valid argument against SGI.
#2. we are now using exclusively windows and linux. my machine(our machines) run faster, smoother and have the latest openGL libraries, functionality. when we want to get a new GPU we get one, take out the old card and plug the new one in.
The GPU thing is a very valid reason. I've heard a number of people that worked with workstations that have switched to a PC because a graphics card for $400 is as good or better than a "workstation" graphics card that costs often thousands of dollars. Also the PC market has a fairly rapid product cycle and upgrades are cheap and easy. Buying a new graphics card (or even a completly new PC) every year is often cheaper than the maintence contracts for a workstation.
#3. $$$$.. and lots of it. lets say you want to get a cluster with 5 CPU's, along with a host node. each node has a Geforce 6800, 4GB of RAM, 3.6 Ghz CPU's, you buy the software for it, and all the outs and ins of the system. on average this system will cost you $80,000. to buy one SGI box that is inferior to this cluster, even a small SGI supercomputer would not outperform it plus just the MAINTENANCE on this SGI will cost you $80,000 or more per year. this is what it would cost to REPLACE your old cluster after just one year with the latest graphics cards, latest processors and you still have maintenance that costs nothing compared to that. i think we can all agree what the obvious choice of computing power is.
$80,000 or $16,000/CPU is ridiculously expensive. I have paid about 30% of that for 6Gigs of RAM and using Itanium processors. A Cray XD1 has a list price of $40,000 for an entry-level 12-CPU chassis with 2.2 GHz Opteron 248 processors, 1 GB of memory per processor, a 73 GB disk for each dual-processor SMP node, and
the standard 2 GB/s/processor interconnect.
SGI's current offerings on their Altix systems is abour $4-6k per CPU.
Or was it a case of the UNIX workstation companies not evolving quickly enough to mach price/performance?
Supply and demand set a market as a function of price price.
What if you had a friend traveling over there, that had to get in touch with you? Or someones company switches hosting to a .cn company. Or a mail gets relayed through a .cn mail server as the regular one is down for maintainence?
Any friend of mine would use a reliable and known email server either via some kind of webmail feature or by sshing into a box back in the USofA.
Being how much China censors thier internet, I would not count email being reliably sent from there under any conditions.
TCO is all that matters.
For some people a reliable and failsafe system is all that matters, and they will gladly pay 2x to 5x of your base TCO to ensure this.
TCO is bullshit unless done with X systems in parallel and measured at the end of the systems lifetime, and then its still bullshit because its now an anecdotal study.
Another Mastercard ad ripoff:
- Price of a Linux licence $0.
- Price of a cheap PC $200
- Price of having your data in the morning - priceless.
or
- Price of a Windows licence $200. (I'm guessing, I have no clue)
- Price of a cheap PC $200
- Price of having your data in the morning - priceless.
One could have typed an extra six characters and of had a working link:
o ws_tco_comparison.pdf
http://www.cybersource.com.au/about/linux_vs_wind
Although its fairly new, slashdot added autolinking urls with the <url:http://example.com> special tag. Its worth using instead of copying and pasting a url and having slashcode add spaces in it and fudge it up.
See my journal for a rant on Microsoft FUD ads found on slastdot and TCO estimates.
TCO can only be measured post hoc, hence the term Total Cost of Ownership. I would prefer all studies like this to refer to ECO (Estimated Cost of Ownership) versus TCO.
One thing that gets ignored in most every cost study is the decommission and migration cost at the end of life for the system.
I bring this up, because it is very difficult and expensive to migrate from a Windows platform. In my experience, I can easily switch from Solaris, Linux, AIX, and OS X or some other UNIX variant because they adhere to open standards (for the most part). When one is in MS land, things get difficult to escape from their ways of doing things.
I run spamassassin, and I have a rule to score URLs that reverse back to Chinese or Korean netblocks.
Over 50% of the tagged spams hit this rule. Now if these mails were actually sent from China or Korea, that is a different story (and a different rule
I know there will be a dozen predictable responses to this, deriding System X, Virginia Tech, Apple, Mac OS X, linpack, Top 500, and coming up with one excuse after another. But won't anyone consider the possibility that these Mac OS X clusters are worth something?
Your right!
1st, System X or the "Big Mac" was thrown together so that people like us would talk about it and to get a good standing for the November 2003 top 500 list. They did an excellent job at this.
Now for some reality. The system is not yet operational.
When it was first thown together, everyone "in the know" and myself questioned how this was going to work without a reliable memory subsystem, and the VT people responded that they were going to write software to correct any hardware errors, and we said OK, whatever. Then, they said, hmm, we kinda needa a reliable memory subsystem, so lets rip out all 1,100+ machines and start over with these new Xserve boxes that have ECC memory in them.
This system has not come up yet with the new Xserves, according to their website.
Now, I'm going to make a comment on Linpack. Linpack, like all good benchmarks are really good at measuring that benchmark's performance. Linpack is a good benchmark, but it is also a benchmark that does not require much RAM per node to run. Some applications do need a good amount of RAM/node to run and being that RAM costs $$, the cost adds up very quickly, and the cost/cpu/teraflop goes down accordingly.
With the comparison between System X and Tungsten NCSA cluster. Personally, I don't know why the Tungsten cluster cost more because the Mac cluster has more RAM/node and each node should have been cheaper in general. The NCSA cluster uses Myrinet which I know is expensive, but I do not know that in comparison to the Infiniband equipment on the Macs. Supposedly, the Infiniband interconnects were what got System X on the top500 list with such good results, or at least that is what the head of the project told me.
Although its popular here on slashdot because many of the readers are younger and inexperienced (and have no money) that they praise anything that costs less and extra brownie points go towards an underdog like AMD or Linux, however in the real world people actually will pay extra for something to ensure that it works. Working equipment may seem superfluous to the dorm room Linux guru, but trust me, I know what its like to work with equipment that cost about $1 mil and it doesn't work. We could have gone with the 2nd bidder at $1.2 mil and it would have worked. Yes, we "saved" $200,000, but we also wasted well over $500,000 when one considers that over 50% of the equipment is faulty and many people's time has been wasted.
You are dealing with a Windows admin. For many of them, the common reason for everything is that the problem is someone else's fault....
In my experience, windows admins and people that use windows a lot, are just supersticious people. Why? Because the operating system they use makes no sense. To watch a "windows guru" use thier computer by clicking things like "OK" "Apply" over and over again just "to make sure", and the extra "clicking around" almost makes me dizzy. The OS eats mouse events, it behaves differently when program X is running, it is most often loaded with spyware and adware, how is anyone able to get some sort of baseline except for reinstalling all the time (with the computer disconnected from the network).
6) They'll donate to the school - either kiosk computers with just IE, some web system that only works with IE, or enough general funds for new computers or a Steven Ballmer Building so that they'll retract their statement or never do something like that again.
Their browser still sucks and is insecure, and I doubt it will be recommended by the college (and everyone else in the know) with the "donation".
thanks for sharing
- Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
- An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
Although the physical demands are not that great, its not different of a physical activity than horse racing, bowling, curling, sailing, or darts (or dog shows for those that really, really, really stretch itThe key is competition, and alghough I'm not a NASCAR fan, its pretty impressive how Dale Ernheart (sp?) or Richard Petty simply seemed to win more than the other 40 or so drivers a good amount of the time. The cars are aguably very similar in performance, and even where the differences do happen with the cars, it also seems to work out that the best drivers also coincindentally have the best cars and crew.
Equipment is an important part of most sports. The best tennis player in the world could not compete with a raquet from the 70s. I would bet that he would not make it past the 1st round.
the fact remains that there is, at least in this very real situation that happens a lot - there is a demand that is not met, because the traditional distribution method provides no way that a profit can be generated, due to lack of quantity. Is this really the internet's fault?
No, of course not. The thing that kills me is that, no, there is no legal way to get cheap low quality music except for iTunes. This is about it. Too bad that iTunes and the iPod are failing business models and Apple is about to go out of business -- oh wait, thats right, they are doing quite well.
These monolithic corps are so big and stuck in thier ways of doing things that worked up to the late 90s and havn't yet realized that is is now almost 2005.
I have always praised TV Guide for embracing and adapting to the times with thier TV guide channel, thier adaptation and partnership with some digital cable services, their online web offerings, and yes, they still print the dead tree TV Guides as well. I don't particurlarly care for thier products, but they are not going around suing people that cancel their magazine subscriptions.
What is going to become of TV once it is all "on demand"? Is the current advertiser supported model going to continue? Keep in mind that the current TV ad based model is based on the assumption that the people are "forced" to watch the commercials. I guess.
I think this is the age of the "little guy". Just about any bozo can put up a website now. Its much more difficult to create a national TV station, or even just one program on an existing network.
I would love it if Matt Stone and Trey Parker separated from Cartoon Network, and just charged for the first week or so after creating an episode and distributing it as a kick ass fast torrent from their website for a price, and then after the week, its done. Actually, the first South Park that I ever saw was the Jesus and Christmas one from '97 or so that a friend downloaded over his modem. I own seasons 1-3 on DVD (need to get 4) and the movie, and I watch it, especially when a new episode comes out. It can be freely distributed. Maybe I'm just a stupid hippie, but this is like how the Grateful Dead did their concerts by allowing people to freely trade copies of thier concerts. Also, keep in mind that the Grateful Dead are the most sucessful rock band ever. And they still are making between 2 and 3 mil a year per band member after almost 40 years of being in the business. Few entertainers can bost such a carreer, but then again few have worked that hard either.
How about if a new ISP, say Time-Warner-AOL, charged a little more than a "regular" ISP, with the catch that you are free to download any of the Time-Warner content with your monthly payment. Nah, that would never work.
So children, lets keep this in the "High Courts", and keep pretending its 1997, while completely ignoring reality and pissing everybody off. Its more fun that way.
The intent of copyright is to encourage progress in the arts and sciences by extending to creators of a work the right to control its distribution. This is no different today than it was in times past.
History does not support this. Think of the Renaissance period.
Copyright like many things that we accept as "alwas been there" is a very new human phenomenon.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
In case anyone does not know, Nicholson found out in adulthood that his "sister" was really his mother. She had Nick when she was in HS or something.
Lovely quote.
I wonder how long it will take before companies are able to pay for their 'suggestions' to show up at the top of the list.
Google will take your money for any keyword. Plus I believe that ebay has already bought every word in the dictionary (or not).