WOW! This is IT! Thinner and larger storage capacity both? This is the breakthrough! However did those Microsoft boys do it?
I'm buying one for my granddaughter. True, she already has two iPods (don't ask), but she won't want them once she hears about this! I sure hope Microsoft can meet the demand. I wonder if any of the stores are taking pre-orders now? I wouldn't want to pay $800 to get one on eBay, but, gosh, when all of her friends have them and are squirting songs to each other, I can't let her be the one to be left out.
Actually, if she has two iPods I'd better get her two Zunes.
And just the other day, my wife was saying to me "If Microsoft ever makes a Zune that is thinner and has a larger storage capacity I'd like you to get one for me."
It really sounds almost perfect, but I wonder... do you suppose... there will be new colors, too? Maybe a triple-shot!
This certainly puts the lie to all those rumor sites that were saying the next Zune would be thicker and have less storage.
Every time I read about improvements in traction batteries I get angry at the way they missed their opportunity. If they had just kept manufacturing the EV-1 and selling it to the long waiting list of buyers, they could be riding the wave of improving battery technology.
Probably 80% of the cars I see on the road during that drive are commuting less than a hundred miles round trip.
To date, I've seen exactly one EV-1 on the road.
It was about five years ago that I saw my first Prius on the road. It was two years ago that I bought mine. I used to honk and wave to the other Priuses I saw. Now I can't even count the number I see on my commute.
If GM had developed the Prius in 2001, they probably would have cancelled them and crushed them in 2002 for "lack of demand."
Of the people I know who have recently bought big-screen flat-panel sets: one of them invited us to watch a movie with them. They didn't perform any deliberate setup steps. They popped the DVD in and played it. It happened to be a 4:3 "full screen" DVD, and their settings, whatever they were, simply stretched it to fill a 16:9 screen. They seemed unaware of any issues with this. After about five minutes I was going bonkers and finally got up the courage to ask them whether they could change the setting. They pushed a few buttons on their remote, got a few all-black screens and error messages, and finally put it back the way it was and told me to stop being so picky. (I settled for moving my chair way to the side...)
Another couple I know recently bought what called a "high definition" set. They were proud of having gotten a good deal on it. They mostly used it to watch DVDs and standard-definition broadcasts. They thought the picture was great. When they weren't around, I, curious to see whether HDTV was really the mind-blowing experience it was supposed to be, tuned the set to the local NPR affiliate. The picture looked good but not all that great... not the sort of 35mm cinema experience I was expecting. On closer inspection I saw that something on the set's faceplate said something like "Enhanced Definition" or "Enhanced Digital" or something like that. I sneaked out their instruction booklet and leafed through it. It wasn't a high-definition set at all. It was a regular set with some kind of electronic sharpening effect. They didn't know and didn't care. I didn't tell them.
I don't think the average consumer understands high definition or cares about it. They buy a set, the picture looks "good" because of technology improvements--the perfect geometry, high brightness, and high contrast of solid state screens compared to picture tubes... and because it's digital, and their cable company's analog signals were crap.
They will probably buy HD DVD or Blu-Ray players someday, but they'll hardly know that they are buying them. They'll buy them when high definition essentially comes for free: when the nice-looking name-brand high-quality $129.95 players just happens to include high definition, and the only ones that don't are $39.95 el-cheapo deluxe models. They'll probably refer to them as "DVD players." And as long as they pop a disk in it and it plays, they probably won't even notice whether it's high or low definition... any more than my friends noticed whether the DVD they rented was 4:3 or 16:9.
Goodness, I think I've read how many articles about this in the past couple of years? Six? Ten? They all have little glitches, like only working from one point of view, or only at one wavelength (frequently not a visible wavelength), or being pure simulations that have not even been tried in the laboratory yet. Many of them don't sound like "cloaks" at all, but like huge physical plants of machinery surrounding the object to be "cloaked."
But they're all "promising" and they all "take a step toward" something that "could" be an invisibility cloak.
I don't say it's necessarily all bogus, but I have to wonder seriously what the huge drumbeat of publicity is all about. Reminds me of cold fusion a few years ago.
Hey, '''I''' have a promising approach that is a step toward something that could be perpetual motion, and I have diagrams and computer animations to prove it. Anyone want to fund my research?
(Sorry, accidentally hit "OK" when my article was in an unusually incoherent state... let's try again...)
When Jobs said that recording companies ought to eliminate DRM, the press reported that "Executives at the major labels dismiss Jobs' challenge, saying that eliminating DRM isn't going to happen," while Reindorp, "dismisses Jobs' remarks as 'Irresponsible.'"
Turnaround is FairPlay... so Jobs ought to suggest that it was irresponsible for Reindorp to speculate that Microsoft might engage in predatory pricing.
I mean, when Jobs irresponsible for said that recording companies ought to eliminated DRM, the press reported that "Executives at the major labels dismiss Jobs' challenge, saying that eliminating DRM isn't going to happen," and Reindorp, "dismisses Jobs' remarks 'irresponsible.'"
Turnaround is FairPlay... so Jobs ought to suggest that it was irresponsible for Reindorp to speculate that Microsoft might engage in predatory pricing.
I don't know how we can get out of the vicious circle of declining expectations.
I know nobody believes it, but there was a time when beta versions were called betas, and Version 1.0 meant a product that was finally finished, SQA-ed, and working.
Users have a right to a version 1.0 that works. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "hey, what do you expect, it's version 1.0" wouldn't be tolerable in any other product.
I don't see how this is fundamentally different from a 1950's family physician looking a fluoroscope and "seeing" with X-rays. Or, for that matter, an ordinary set of car rear-view and side mirrors, which give us "eyes in the back of our heads." Or a neurophysiologist connecting his electrodes to an amplifier and speaker, as well as watching an oscilloscope trace.
This sort of sensory augmentation is hardly a new idea.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
It seems to be increasingly evident that a cell phone that makes no use of ones' hands nevertheless consumes attention that would otherwise be allocated to driving, and I suspect this is true of every other input modality.
Attentionis a limited resource. You might as well present the information on an ordinary viewing screen that occupies part of the field of view. However you present it, you can't add more information without blocking your "view" of information you'd otherwise be processing.
These "title-A-won't-play-on-brand-B" stories are common. But why? This is essentially a phenomenon of the DVD era. Or, rather, there are three phases to the history:
Phase A: Pre-recordable-CD. Everything worked. An individual cassette jamming in a player? Sure. A bad pressing or a warped LP? It happened. A bad CD? Prior to copy protection, I encountered _maybe_ one in fifteen years of buying them. But an across the board disaster, like the latest hit title failing to play at all in a popular brand of player? Never.
Phase B: Media incompatibility with recordable media. I've never seen a CD (one bearing the Compact Disc logo, not a copy-protected not-quite-CD) fail to play. But I've frequently encountered the burned CD-R that plays on some players but not all. The CD-RW that says it will play on "most modern" players, etc. And DVD's, hey, the instructions for burning System Restore disks on the computer my wife just bought say--WITHOUT EXPLANATION--only to use DVD+R's, "even if your DVD writer is capable of burning other formats."
Phase C: Popular, commercial entertainment titles on mass-produced non-recordable media that fail to play in large numbers of popular, commercial players.
Why is this happening? Are the vendors now just giving lip service to standards, and are unable to produce a title that will play on everything unless they procure everything and test on everything?
Speaking as a certified Macintosh fanboy who bought his first Mac in February, 1984... gimme a break. If there's anything more boring than an Apple-is-doomed story, it's a Microsoft-is-doomed story.
(Yes, I know he says Microsoft is not going to die... then at the end he says "Nothing lasts forever. The bloom is coming off the rose on Microsoft. I would never put it past the software giant to come up with a way to remake itself in a better light. But the current course doesn't appear to me to lead in that direction. As much as Apple is doing things right, Microsoft is doing things wrong." How is that anything but a weasel-worded version of "Microsoft is doomed?")
Speaking as a certified Macintosh fanboy, Microsoft copies the Apple OS a lot... and, you know what? Apple has, for a long time, been returning the favor. The two companies borrow ideas from each other promiscuously, and only the blinkered view of the fans of each camp prevents them from seeing it. Of course, one idea Mac OS 9 borrowed from Windows was making windows resizable by dragging at all four edges. I just wish Mac OS X had borrow that from Mac OS 9!
"You might think that no one would want to see a lawyer or doctor who had lost a malpractice case, but if that was the case the majority of physicians in the US would not be practicing today."
Majority of physicians That's nonsense. In Massachusetts, and probably many other states, you can look this up online.
My personal physician, Dr. X, "has not made a payment on a malpractice claim in Massachusetts in the past ten years." Of two surgeons who have operated on me in the last year, one of them,
Dr. Y, a very-high-volume practitioner in a specific specialty, "has not made a payment on a malpractice claim in Massachusetts in the past ten years." A listing for a different doctor in this same specialty says: Number of MA Physicians Licensed in this Specialty: 166; Number Who Made Malpractice Payments in the Last Ten Years: 24 (14.4 %).
For Dr. Z, a general surgeon, it says Number of MA Physicians Licensed in this Specialty: 1171; Number Who Made Malpractice Payments in the Last Ten Years: 129 (11 %); Number of Payments for this Doctor: 1 Payment Details for this Doctor: Date 4/8/1999; Category of Payment: Average
Is it extremely rare for a doctor to have made a single malpractice payment? No. Have a majority of doctors made them? No. Are malpractice-free careers common? Yes.
Windows 3.0 was, at the time, prettier than OS/2, friendlier than OS/2, nimbler than OS/2, ran on small configurations than OS/2, was more compatible than OS/2... and shipped with about a dozen nice little applets like Windows Write that OS/2 didn't ship with. ToolBook, too, if I remember correctly.
The applets, are for me, the proof. If Microsoft believed OS/2 was the future, why couldn't it spare a few developers to put some of the trimmings on it that would make it appeal to non-corporate users?
Microsoft devoted what must have been significant resources to making Windows 3.0 more appealing than OS/2. Why should it have been "stunned" when it sold better than OS/2?
Maybe the parts of the company that were working on OS/2 believed it was the future, when the higher-ups had really placed their bets somewhere else. Things like that happen in big companies.
OK, on to totally off-topic random rambles down memory lane.
One of my early experiences at UW was walking down University Avenue on a Friday evening, past a bar, and saying to my companion "What sort of a bar is this?" At that exact instant, three students come staggering out the door, and one of them bends over and barfs right there on the sidewalk. Without missing a beat, my companion says: "That sort of a bar."
It was really amazing. You could drive around on the county highways and pass one cornfield with a sign in it saying "Re-elect Gordon Roseleip" and a few miles later pass one with a sign in it saying "Bring the troops home." (Roseleip was a colorful and very right-wing character whose campaign literature featured a Bible and a picture of a rose. He was always fulminating about the University and why professors were never in when he called them and did they work a forty-hour week and if not why not, and was particularly exercised about professors who earned more than the Governor. Best quote: "Now this professor, Har Gobind Khorana, who ever heard of him?")
Only if there was some reason for Apple to care about this.
As far as I know, Apple never so much as wrote any letters to the trade publications asking for corrections, or ran ads trumpeting it as the best-selling software package or anything like that. If they didn't even want to do that, why on earth would they revamp their distribution channels just to change a number that someone else was calculating in an irresponsible and faulty way?
This was during the days when Apple supported its independent dealer network pretty strongly, and I think it's very likely that their dealer network liked being the sole channel for AppleWorks and probably would have gotten pissed off if Apple had made it available through (say) Corporate Software. Which probably wouldn't have sold many to its customers anyway, as they were predominantly big corporations and Apple was mostly selling to individual consumers.
As in, "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
When are people going to figure out that a "false positive" is not a nuisance, it's a death blow to any proposed technology--unless the risk of false positives is orders of magnitude lower than the actual frequency of the rare event being detected?
Doesn't anyone ever read Æsop's fable about the boy who cried wolf?
Polycarbonate plastic is just the generic name for Lexan®, and if you follow that link you'll notice that GE mentions many uses besides DVD's: automotive lenses, "blow molding," eyewear, water bottles, structural foam, etc. The example they show in the picture is a cell phone. I believe the original iMacs (the CRT-based ones) had Lexan housings. The company I work for uses Lexan strips to protect a surface where thin metal plates slide over and would otherwise scrap a painted shelf. The stuff is used everywhere.
After customs inspectors have wasted two or three days opening crates of various products with tough molded Lexan housings, they'll forget the whole silly business.
During the 1980s, the computer trade press ran top-forty-like software sales ranking charts. About a year after the release of Lotus 1-2-3, it occupied #1 slot and did so, regularly as clockwork, month after month. It became a unchallenged truism that 1-2-3 was the best-selling software title, perhaps of all time.
Gradually, it transpired that this simply wasn't true. The best-selling software title was, in fact, AppleWorks, a spreadsheet/word processor/"database" for the Apple II line.
What had happened was very simple. Apple sold AppleWorks directly. The only place you could buy it off the shelf (which at that time was still an important sales channel) was at an Apple dealer. That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
But of the published figures were based on sales by Corporate Software, Incorporated. Since AppleWorks was never sold by Corporate Software or any other third party, it was literally off the charts.
I'm not even sure I'm joking. I'm a certified Apple fanboy, but a friend of mine prefers Windows. She does admire the Mac Mini, though, and is frustrated that no mainstream PC vendor seems to provide anything in the same form factor.
It wouldn't be absolutely insane to buy a Mac Mini just to run Windows, and if you could get Apple to sell you a naked machine and deduct the retail price of Mac OS X... or, hell, deduct $10, ten bucks is still ten bucks... it would be even more attractive.
Oh, for the days when the government understood that bundling an OS with hardware was anticompetitive.
(In the end my friend settled for an HP Pavilion Slimline, about the same general hardware characteristics, except for a bigger hard drive--which she doesn't need--in an almost equally unexpandable package that's about three times as large and heavy as a Mac Mini).
But it does deny access to paying customers... some of Microsoft's biggest and best customers.
So Microsoft needs to put in a backdoor so that their support professionals can take care of those customers over the phone.
But if you're telling hundreds of people about a backdoor, sooner or later it will leak.
So Microsoft will need to patch the backdoor.
But if they do that, once again, they'll be screwing their best customers.
So they'll need to open another backdoor. Quite possibly the new backdoor will be opened by the very same patch that closes the SkipRearm backdoor.
Microsoft doesn't benefit from this. Microsoft's customers don't benefit from it. The only people who benefit from it is the computer trade press and Slashdot, which is assured of an endless stream of news stories to talk about.
I was working at a Fortune 500 minicomputer company in 1991, and the corporate law office sent around a memo that was posted on every department's bulletin board. It read something like this:
"Many progammers believe that software cannot be patented. The message of this memo is simple. They are wrong:" and then, in 144-point type that could be read from across the room:
"IT CAN BE."...and then continued with what to do if you thought you had a patentable idea.
Similar things were probably happening in any large company where software was being developed and the lawyers were awake.
it will transpire that...Los Alamos National Laboratory misplaced a notebook full of top-secret data in which the encryption had never been turned on......a Microsoft executive lost a notebook full of plans for dirty ways to undermine Open Source, after sticking Post-It note to the screen to remind him of his wife's birthday, which he used as his password......all the scientific data from a major NASA mission costing $1.63 billion were stored on a contractor's laptop, who had encrypted all of it, chosen a good password, never wrote it down, and got hit by a bus without telling it to anyone......but NASA was able to recover the data by asking the FBI, which knew the backdoor and had been reading every NASA contractor's hard drive without a warrant.
Slashdot Mirror
WOW! This is IT! Thinner and larger storage capacity both? This is the breakthrough! However did those Microsoft boys do it?
I'm buying one for my granddaughter. True, she already has two iPods (don't ask), but she won't want them once she hears about this! I sure hope Microsoft can meet the demand. I wonder if any of the stores are taking pre-orders now? I wouldn't want to pay $800 to get one on eBay, but, gosh, when all of her friends have them and are squirting songs to each other, I can't let her be the one to be left out.
Actually, if she has two iPods I'd better get her two Zunes.
And just the other day, my wife was saying to me "If Microsoft ever makes a Zune that is thinner and has a larger storage capacity I'd like you to get one for me."
It really sounds almost perfect, but I wonder... do you suppose... there will be new colors, too? Maybe a triple-shot!
This certainly puts the lie to all those rumor sites that were saying the next Zune would be thicker and have less storage.
...become sophomoric from too much contact with sophomores?
Goodness, couldn't some adult have stopped all this--by calming down the principal--before it went overboard?
Every time I read about improvements in traction batteries I get angry at the way they missed their opportunity. If they had just kept manufacturing the EV-1 and selling it to the long waiting list of buyers, they could be riding the wave of improving battery technology.
Probably 80% of the cars I see on the road during that drive are commuting less than a hundred miles round trip.
To date, I've seen exactly one EV-1 on the road.
It was about five years ago that I saw my first Prius on the road. It was two years ago that I bought mine. I used to honk and wave to the other Priuses I saw. Now I can't even count the number I see on my commute.
If GM had developed the Prius in 2001, they probably would have cancelled them and crushed them in 2002 for "lack of demand."
Of the people I know who have recently bought big-screen flat-panel sets: one of them invited us to watch a movie with them. They didn't perform any deliberate setup steps. They popped the DVD in and played it. It happened to be a 4:3 "full screen" DVD, and their settings, whatever they were, simply stretched it to fill a 16:9 screen. They seemed unaware of any issues with this. After about five minutes I was going bonkers and finally got up the courage to ask them whether they could change the setting. They pushed a few buttons on their remote, got a few all-black screens and error messages, and finally put it back the way it was and told me to stop being so picky. (I settled for moving my chair way to the side...)
Another couple I know recently bought what called a "high definition" set. They were proud of having gotten a good deal on it. They mostly used it to watch DVDs and standard-definition broadcasts. They thought the picture was great. When they weren't around, I, curious to see whether HDTV was really the mind-blowing experience it was supposed to be, tuned the set to the local NPR affiliate. The picture looked good but not all that great... not the sort of 35mm cinema experience I was expecting. On closer inspection I saw that something on the set's faceplate said something like "Enhanced Definition" or "Enhanced Digital" or something like that. I sneaked out their instruction booklet and leafed through it. It wasn't a high-definition set at all. It was a regular set with some kind of electronic sharpening effect. They didn't know and didn't care. I didn't tell them.
I don't think the average consumer understands high definition or cares about it. They buy a set, the picture looks "good" because of technology improvements--the perfect geometry, high brightness, and high contrast of solid state screens compared to picture tubes... and because it's digital, and their cable company's analog signals were crap.
They will probably buy HD DVD or Blu-Ray players someday, but they'll hardly know that they are buying them. They'll buy them when high definition essentially comes for free: when the nice-looking name-brand high-quality $129.95 players just happens to include high definition, and the only ones that don't are $39.95 el-cheapo deluxe models. They'll probably refer to them as "DVD players." And as long as they pop a disk in it and it plays, they probably won't even notice whether it's high or low definition... any more than my friends noticed whether the DVD they rented was 4:3 or 16:9.
Goodness, I think I've read how many articles about this in the past couple of years? Six? Ten? They all have little glitches, like only working from one point of view, or only at one wavelength (frequently not a visible wavelength), or being pure simulations that have not even been tried in the laboratory yet. Many of them don't sound like "cloaks" at all, but like huge physical plants of machinery surrounding the object to be "cloaked."
But they're all "promising" and they all "take a step toward" something that "could" be an invisibility cloak.
I don't say it's necessarily all bogus, but I have to wonder seriously what the huge drumbeat of publicity is all about. Reminds me of cold fusion a few years ago.
Hey, '''I''' have a promising approach that is a step toward something that could be perpetual motion, and I have diagrams and computer animations to prove it. Anyone want to fund my research?
(Sorry, accidentally hit "OK" when my article was in an unusually incoherent state... let's try again...)
When Jobs said that recording companies ought to eliminate DRM, the press reported that "Executives at the major labels dismiss Jobs' challenge, saying that eliminating DRM isn't going to happen," while Reindorp, "dismisses Jobs' remarks as 'Irresponsible.'"
Turnaround is FairPlay... so Jobs ought to suggest that it was irresponsible for Reindorp to speculate that Microsoft might engage in predatory pricing.
I mean, when Jobs irresponsible for said that recording companies ought to eliminated DRM, the press reported that "Executives at the major labels dismiss Jobs' challenge, saying that eliminating DRM isn't going to happen," and Reindorp, "dismisses Jobs' remarks 'irresponsible.'"
Turnaround is FairPlay... so Jobs ought to suggest that it was irresponsible for Reindorp to speculate that Microsoft might engage in predatory pricing.
I don't know how we can get out of the vicious circle of declining expectations.
I know nobody believes it, but there was a time when beta versions were called betas, and Version 1.0 meant a product that was finally finished, SQA-ed, and working.
Users have a right to a version 1.0 that works. Shrugging your shoulders and saying "hey, what do you expect, it's version 1.0" wouldn't be tolerable in any other product.
...rather than intelligent design.
I don't see how this is fundamentally different from a 1950's family physician looking a fluoroscope and "seeing" with X-rays. Or, for that matter, an ordinary set of car rear-view and side mirrors, which give us "eyes in the back of our heads." Or a neurophysiologist connecting his electrodes to an amplifier and speaker, as well as watching an oscilloscope trace.
This sort of sensory augmentation is hardly a new idea.
The thing I want to know is: is there any way to increase the bandwidth with which the brain can process incoming information? I seriously doubt it.
It seems to be increasingly evident that a cell phone that makes no use of ones' hands nevertheless consumes attention that would otherwise be allocated to driving, and I suspect this is true of every other input modality.
Attentionis a limited resource. You might as well present the information on an ordinary viewing screen that occupies part of the field of view. However you present it, you can't add more information without blocking your "view" of information you'd otherwise be processing.
These "title-A-won't-play-on-brand-B" stories are common. But why? This is essentially a phenomenon of the DVD era. Or, rather, there are three phases to the history:
Phase A: Pre-recordable-CD. Everything worked. An individual cassette jamming in a player? Sure. A bad pressing or a warped LP? It happened. A bad CD? Prior to copy protection, I encountered _maybe_ one in fifteen years of buying them. But an across the board disaster, like the latest hit title failing to play at all in a popular brand of player? Never.
Phase B: Media incompatibility with recordable media. I've never seen a CD (one bearing the Compact Disc logo, not a copy-protected not-quite-CD) fail to play. But I've frequently encountered the burned CD-R that plays on some players but not all. The CD-RW that says it will play on "most modern" players, etc. And DVD's, hey, the instructions for burning System Restore disks on the computer my wife just bought say--WITHOUT EXPLANATION--only to use DVD+R's, "even if your DVD writer is capable of burning other formats."
Phase C: Popular, commercial entertainment titles on mass-produced non-recordable media that fail to play in large numbers of popular, commercial players.
Why is this happening? Are the vendors now just giving lip service to standards, and are unable to produce a title that will play on everything unless they procure everything and test on everything?
Heaven help me if we ever have digital motor oil.
Speaking as a certified Macintosh fanboy who bought his first Mac in February, 1984... gimme a break. If there's anything more boring than an Apple-is-doomed story, it's a Microsoft-is-doomed story.
(Yes, I know he says Microsoft is not going to die... then at the end he says "Nothing lasts forever. The bloom is coming off the rose on Microsoft. I would never put it past the software giant to come up with a way to remake itself in a better light. But the current course doesn't appear to me to lead in that direction. As much as Apple is doing things right, Microsoft is doing things wrong." How is that anything but a weasel-worded version of "Microsoft is doomed?")
Speaking as a certified Macintosh fanboy, Microsoft copies the Apple OS a lot... and, you know what? Apple has, for a long time, been returning the favor. The two companies borrow ideas from each other promiscuously, and only the blinkered view of the fans of each camp prevents them from seeing it. Of course, one idea Mac OS 9 borrowed from Windows was making windows resizable by dragging at all four edges. I just wish Mac OS X had borrow that from Mac OS 9!
"You might think that no one would want to see a lawyer or doctor who had lost a malpractice case, but if that was the case the majority of physicians in the US would not be practicing today."
Majority of physicians That's nonsense. In Massachusetts, and probably many other states, you can look this up online.
My personal physician, Dr. X, "has not made a payment on a malpractice claim in Massachusetts in the past ten years." Of two surgeons who have operated on me in the last year, one of them,
Dr. Y, a very-high-volume practitioner in a specific specialty, "has not made a payment on a malpractice claim in Massachusetts in the past ten years." A listing for a different doctor in this same specialty says: Number of MA Physicians Licensed in this Specialty: 166; Number Who Made Malpractice Payments in the Last Ten Years: 24 (14.4 %).
For Dr. Z, a general surgeon, it says Number of MA Physicians Licensed in this Specialty: 1171; Number Who Made
Malpractice Payments in the Last Ten Years: 129 (11 %); Number of Payments for this Doctor: 1 Payment Details for this Doctor: Date 4/8/1999; Category of Payment: Average
Is it extremely rare for a doctor to have made a single malpractice payment? No. Have a majority of doctors made them? No. Are malpractice-free careers common? Yes.
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Machines, land, buildings are property, yes.
A job is property,
no, nix, nah, nah.
--Carl Sandburg, "The People, Yes"
Windows 3.0 was, at the time, prettier than OS/2, friendlier than OS/2, nimbler than OS/2, ran on small configurations than OS/2, was more compatible than OS/2... and shipped with about a dozen nice little applets like Windows Write that OS/2 didn't ship with. ToolBook, too, if I remember correctly.
The applets, are for me, the proof. If Microsoft believed OS/2 was the future, why couldn't it spare a few developers to put some of the trimmings on it that would make it appeal to non-corporate users?
Microsoft devoted what must have been significant resources to making Windows 3.0 more appealing than OS/2. Why should it have been "stunned" when it sold better than OS/2?
Maybe the parts of the company that were working on OS/2 believed it was the future, when the higher-ups had really placed their bets somewhere else. Things like that happen in big companies.
OK, on to totally off-topic random rambles down memory lane.
One of my early experiences at UW was walking down University Avenue on a Friday evening, past a bar, and saying to my companion "What sort of a bar is this?" At that exact instant, three students come staggering out the door, and one of them bends over and barfs right there on the sidewalk. Without missing a beat, my companion says: "That sort of a bar."
It was really amazing. You could drive around on the county highways and pass one cornfield with a sign in it saying "Re-elect Gordon Roseleip" and a few miles later pass one with a sign in it saying "Bring the troops home." (Roseleip was a colorful and very right-wing character whose campaign literature featured a Bible and a picture of a rose. He was always fulminating about the University and why professors were never in when he called them and did they work a forty-hour week and if not why not, and was particularly exercised about professors who earned more than the Governor. Best quote: "Now this professor, Har Gobind Khorana, who ever heard of him?")
See this image of the prank.
For serious protest stuff, read the book Rads: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath, by Tom Bates, for a detailed and evocative picture of the Vietnam protest era.
There's also a wonderful documentary about it called "The War At Home," but I'm not sure where to track it down these days.
..."Sure, I'm paid by X, but it doesn't affect my objectivity."
Fault?
Only if there was some reason for Apple to care about this.
As far as I know, Apple never so much as wrote any letters to the trade publications asking for corrections, or ran ads trumpeting it as the best-selling software package or anything like that. If they didn't even want to do that, why on earth would they revamp their distribution channels just to change a number that someone else was calculating in an irresponsible and faulty way?
This was during the days when Apple supported its independent dealer network pretty strongly, and I think it's very likely that their dealer network liked being the sole channel for AppleWorks and probably would have gotten pissed off if Apple had made it available through (say) Corporate Software. Which probably wouldn't have sold many to its customers anyway, as they were predominantly big corporations and Apple was mostly selling to individual consumers.
As in, "aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
When are people going to figure out that a "false positive" is not a nuisance, it's a death blow to any proposed technology--unless the risk of false positives is orders of magnitude lower than the actual frequency of the rare event being detected?
Doesn't anyone ever read Æsop's fable about the boy who cried wolf?
Polycarbonate plastic is just the generic name for Lexan®, and if you follow that link you'll notice that GE mentions many uses besides DVD's: automotive lenses, "blow molding," eyewear, water bottles, structural foam, etc. The example they show in the picture is a cell phone. I believe the original iMacs (the CRT-based ones) had Lexan housings. The company I work for uses Lexan strips to protect a surface where thin metal plates slide over and would otherwise scrap a painted shelf. The stuff is used everywhere.
After customs inspectors have wasted two or three days opening crates of various products with tough molded Lexan housings, they'll forget the whole silly business.
During the 1980s, the computer trade press ran top-forty-like software sales ranking charts. About a year after the release of Lotus 1-2-3, it occupied #1 slot and did so, regularly as clockwork, month after month. It became a unchallenged truism that 1-2-3 was the best-selling software title, perhaps of all time.
Gradually, it transpired that this simply wasn't true. The best-selling software title was, in fact, AppleWorks, a spreadsheet/word processor/"database" for the Apple II line.
What had happened was very simple. Apple sold AppleWorks directly. The only place you could buy it off the shelf (which at that time was still an important sales channel) was at an Apple dealer. That AppleWorks outsold 1-2-3 should not have been much of a surprise, because it was much cheaper, and because Apple dealers frequently included in it attractively-priced bundles.
But of the published figures were based on sales by Corporate Software, Incorporated. Since AppleWorks was never sold by Corporate Software or any other third party, it was literally off the charts.
I'm not even sure I'm joking. I'm a certified Apple fanboy, but a friend of mine prefers Windows. She does admire the Mac Mini, though, and is frustrated that no mainstream PC vendor seems to provide anything in the same form factor.
It wouldn't be absolutely insane to buy a Mac Mini just to run Windows, and if you could get Apple to sell you a naked machine and deduct the retail price of Mac OS X... or, hell, deduct $10, ten bucks is still ten bucks... it would be even more attractive.
Oh, for the days when the government understood that bundling an OS with hardware was anticompetitive.
(In the end my friend settled for an HP Pavilion Slimline, about the same general hardware characteristics, except for a bigger hard drive--which she doesn't need--in an almost equally unexpandable package that's about three times as large and heavy as a Mac Mini).
It doesn't stop pirates.
But it does deny access to paying customers... some of Microsoft's biggest and best customers.
So Microsoft needs to put in a backdoor so that their support professionals can take care of those customers over the phone.
But if you're telling hundreds of people about a backdoor, sooner or later it will leak.
So Microsoft will need to patch the backdoor.
But if they do that, once again, they'll be screwing their best customers.
So they'll need to open another backdoor. Quite possibly the new backdoor will be opened by the very same patch that closes the SkipRearm backdoor.
Microsoft doesn't benefit from this. Microsoft's customers don't benefit from it. The only people who benefit from it is the computer trade press and Slashdot, which is assured of an endless stream of news stories to talk about.
It wasn't just Gates.
...and then continued with what to do if you thought you had a patentable idea.
I was working at a Fortune 500 minicomputer company in 1991, and the corporate law office sent around a memo that was posted on every department's bulletin board. It read something like this:
"Many progammers believe that software cannot be patented. The message of this memo is simple. They are wrong:" and then, in 144-point type that could be read from across the room:
"IT CAN BE."
Similar things were probably happening in any large company where software was being developed and the lawyers were awake.
it will transpire that ...Los Alamos National Laboratory misplaced a notebook full of top-secret data in which the encryption had never been turned on... ...a Microsoft executive lost a notebook full of plans for dirty ways to undermine Open Source, after sticking Post-It note to the screen to remind him of his wife's birthday, which he used as his password... ...all the scientific data from a major NASA mission costing $1.63 billion were stored on a contractor's laptop, who had encrypted all of it, chosen a good password, never wrote it down, and got hit by a bus without telling it to anyone... ...but NASA was able to recover the data by asking the FBI, which knew the backdoor and had been reading every NASA contractor's hard drive without a warrant.