Unfortunately, a quick look at history will show that it will not ultimately "only be used" for anti-terrorism.
Witness RICO. (in my understanding) It was initially created to help counter-balance the use of high-priced lawyers by Mafiosa during the giant mafia stings of the 80's. It was pitched as THE solution for fighting organized criminals and their money. Now it's being bandied about in ways that was never in its intention. Now, that may be a poor example, but what about forfeiture laws in general?
If you travel with large sums of cash and are pulled over for whatever reason in whatever part of the country, that cash is likely to disappear. All because a "dog" alerted to your money. It doesn't matter if that money is legitimate or not; good luck getting it back. Sure, it sounds great: We taking away the incentive for doing illegal things and we justify it every day "Well, why the hell else would he have $200k in cash in his car?" when the truth is, we're innocent before being proven guilty, and the appeals process is practically nonexistent. If only used against drug dealers, then maybe it's a good practice. (of course, we get into the whole Prohibition debate from there). But this is something that happens every day to people who are innocent (or at least claim to be), and our country was founded on principles exactly opposite of that.
And it's not just newspapers. While I agree that most magazines are fluff, I certainly love to have stacks of various journals (usually biology/science/astronomy related) around that I can peruse on a lazy Sunday afternoon and not have to worry about if the image server is down, the website address has changed, or the search is working on a particular site. I can't count the number of times when I've googled for something, gone to the site and get a glarin "Bandwidth exceeded", or 404 not found, or no pictures (just ugly red X's), etc.
I'd love if all journals/newspapers also did a complete "digitization" of their materials and released a yearly compendium on CD/DVD (just for quick searches), but nothing still quite beats the actual FEEL of reading a good paper-based product.
Who said nobody's buying? Many music companies recorded recorded profits last year. SOMEONE is buying that music, at the prices they dictate. If anything, it sounds like everyone is buying except for a small minority, but because they (the non-payers) are being dicks about it (sharing), it encourages other people to look into it. If it's free and no one's getting sued, what's the real discentive besides ethics (which people like the ones who are getting sued are throwing to the curb)?
If a person wants free music, then I suggest they start buying pepsi, or go learn how to play an instrument and make their own. That way, if you want to share your music with everyone else, it's your right to do so. But don't pretend that you have some sort of right to determine how best to distribute someone else's copyrighted material.
Having said that, I'm all for copyright expiration reform.
I'm more all about On-Demand TV. Keep a large back-catalog of your shows. This way, when I stumble onto something like Battlestar Galactica in the middle of the season, I can immediately go grab the episodes I missed on my TiVo so I don't have to pray and worry about the series getting cancelled. See Firefly.
I don't think DVD sales will suffer much because I've seen all kinds of quality rips on *torrent, which is nice when I want to "preview" a show to see if I like it. But I'll still buy the DVD set, just as I still buy CD's after checking out stuff via limewire or whatever. But that's entirely an unqualified/uneducated guess.
I think the federal government gives tax breaks and other incentives to companies that employ people with disabilities, etc. This is why when you get hired at some places, your boss takes you into a room and dials a phone number and hands you the phone and you have to answer a bunch of questions... They're checking to see if they're eligible for a tax break.:)
Yes. if they didn't, they wouldn't advertise. Look at the spammers. They send out 10 million spams, with less than a 1% respond rate. That's still, what, 100k people? And they profit anywhere from $10-100 (or more) per sale? You do the math.
Personally, I like the Google Ads. I've clicked on them. I like ads that fit in with the purpose of the site. I've clicked on them. And I've bought stuff, on occasion.
Which is, for the most part, ads like those on/. and several small sites I frequent I don't mind because they're rather non-obtrusive and easily scrolled past. The new breed of ads, however, don't seem to be "effective" advertising, but are counting on users to "accidentally" click on them to get the click-through count up. That's what sucks.:(
Anyone else feel like this when the "door nazi" at BestBuy/other chain steps in front of you and demands to see your receipt? Treating your customers like they're potential criminals is no way to gain loyalty.
Personally, I don't really give a fuck about an iMVS potential. Sure, it might be nifty, but I'd rather have real TV-On-Demand. Any episode of whatever show at the press of a (few) buttons. Dump the episode to the iPod Video, take it over to a friend's house and watch it sittin on their couch. it'd almost be like swapping VHS tapes of shows from years ago, although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to just leave my iPod Video laying around just anywhere. Plus, not only could Apple provide potentially better statistics in key market segments (the market segment that buys TiVo typically has money) than Nielson, hell, they could probably forgo the subscription fees in return for advertiser profile ratings.
Actually, I see a LOT of piracy amongst the casual DVD crowd. A girl here at work passed me a list the other day.. $5 each for all the "latest" DVD releases, plus a bunch of stuff I recognized as poor-rips (telesyncs?) from the theaters (and music CD's, too.. She said he'd borrow from the library and rip those). I tried not being an asshole, but informed her I didn't agree with the practice. She quit showing me the list, but I see her bring in stacks of DVDs for the other folks that don't care. At a laundromat I went to regularly, the attendent had a laptop setup with a firewire DVD-R and would burn movies for his "customers" while they did laundry for $5 each. And so on and so on. It surprised me to see it that blatant and widespread.
What i got out of the TCO question was mainly: It depends. Microsoft can't give a completely broad answer to every TCO issue that comes to light, each TCO scenario is done scenario by scenario, situation by situation. In some situations, Linux will be great for a given need. In others, Windows would be better.
Security issues are hard to project into TCO because, frankly, they're not altogether predictable. Linux could end up very expensive if a major worm were to exploit some current unknown vulnerability (and the Open Source folks like to point out that with the source freely available, this makes it that much more likely those vulnerabilities will be found and patched quickly) to the extent Windows has been hit. He actually encouraged people to try to come up with a way to model projected TCO costs for security that would work for any platform, which is really nifty. In other words, instead of dodging the question, he actually said "You know, we don't know and the various consulting and analyst firms we've talked to don't know either, but we're working on it, and we're open to solutions."
it's interesting to note that even the hardcore HP calculator folks would rather buy an old one off of ebay for $insane_cash than buy one of the new TI wanna-be plastic ones. Nothing against TI (I have one, I like it, but that's because colleges use textbooks that use it.. I smell.. money being exchanged somewhere...), but most of my engineering friends tell me the HP is "where it's at".:P
Because, overwhelmingly, no one really cares but a handful of people. The days of hand-tweaked, ASM optimized code are pretty much over for consumer code. Yes, there will always be a market, but it is ever diminishing with the size of market expanding. To use analogies, look at furniture. Go to just about any furniture "gallery" positioned for the great American unwashed and you'll find several hundred, almost identical mass-produced fat-ass-cliners, some with machine stitched leather, some with vinyl, some with cloth, etc. Dressers and other cabinetry are stapled, nailed, screwed and glued with machine precision accuracy. The demand for hand-built, crafted furniture has dropped tremendously (and the prices for these craft pieces seems to have gone up.. ). Yes, a "hand-tweaker" coder will probably find work with a small shop somewhere, or create their own consultancy for constituents who demand that kind of programming, and chances are that coder will make quite a bit more than the average, churn and burn programmer (people like me), but for the overwhelming majority, it's overkill.
(Here's a simple cost analysis: We can pay this guy $100k/year to do hand-optimized tweaks on this code that then becomes a liability for future maintanence if that coder dies, quits, or whatever. Or, we could add another stick of $100 RAM, and buy a new processor next year for a fraction of his cost and get a similar performance bump... The math doesn't add up...)
Wrong Show.. Voyager had a female captain, Enterprise has Scott Bakula. But that's besides the point.
The original series had KIRK. Kirk cannot be compared to any other captain in the ST universe because Kirk's Prime Directive was to seek and and find new alien civilizations and determine if "all the parts fit", if you know what I mean.
Kirk was THE MAN. Kirk GOT LAID. Kirk had his priorities straight. Kirk was the pimp-daddy of all pimp daddies.
$50 just to come look at it and determine if I can do anything about it, $50/hour after that (first hour is free). I know some folks that charge more ($75-100 just for the housecall).
What you need, then, is to start employing "geeks" as astronauts. Think about it.
Need to keep a "geek" occupied for months on end? Give him a computer and a copy of half-life or something. Hell, better yet, get a couple coders who would just love to "get paid" to write software without interruption for the next 8 months?
Just think: A development PC, a couple hundred cases of Mt. Dew, IRC, and maybe some hand lotion and that's all you'd need. Now, getting them out of the damn spacecraft once they hit the planet would be a different story altogether...
It really does depend on the situation as a whole. If my boss told me to procure new units based on whatever criteria set by whomever, and that I was responsible for said purchase, and then the boss OVERRIDES my decision without prior discussion with me (but is more than glad to discuss it with the vendor...), then I'd say you've got more serious problems at hand. You're being set-up for failure, you can't make the right decisions because someone else is going to change your decision, but ultimately they'll make the blame stick on you if the shit hits the fan. You can't be a "team player" if the coach doesn't put you in the game unless he needs someone to blame...
Isn't JNI basically what you use when you want to write a "java native" driver for your custom hardware (I'm thinking x10 and what not)? (But then you'd have to port the JNI to every platform you wanted to support, right?)
Isn't that pretty much what the Amiga was doing a couple decades ago? The CPU was merely a traffic cop, directing other specialized units to actually do the real work? If so, they're a bit late to the party, eh?
The movie was horrible. The book was B-class sci-fi for me. It was non-traditional in that it covered the whole "save the earth, blow shit up" way, but then diverted into some sort of lesson on economics. The mission earth series was hilarious in some probably-not-so-intentional ways.
That's kinda why I put a router/firewall (Linksys) between myself and the bad ol' internet and the first thing I do with a new machine is download the patches. It's ridiculous, to an extent, but I learned the hard way when I got hit with NIMDA while downloading the patch for that.
Isn't that the way AOL and Compuserver basically gained their gigantic subscriber lists? The way that some people can't distinguish what's "AOL" content, and what's the "internet"?
but note to you amateur photoshop n00bs (including myself): Just because you see it in these great pics, Lens flare is *never* cool. Put that filter away!
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Unfortunately, a quick look at history will show that it will not ultimately "only be used" for anti-terrorism.
Witness RICO. (in my understanding) It was initially created to help counter-balance the use of high-priced lawyers by Mafiosa during the giant mafia stings of the 80's. It was pitched as THE solution for fighting organized criminals and their money. Now it's being bandied about in ways that was never in its intention. Now, that may be a poor example, but what about forfeiture laws in general?
If you travel with large sums of cash and are pulled over for whatever reason in whatever part of the country, that cash is likely to disappear. All because a "dog" alerted to your money. It doesn't matter if that money is legitimate or not; good luck getting it back. Sure, it sounds great: We taking away the incentive for doing illegal things and we justify it every day "Well, why the hell else would he have $200k in cash in his car?" when the truth is, we're innocent before being proven guilty, and the appeals process is practically nonexistent. If only used against drug dealers, then maybe it's a good practice. (of course, we get into the whole Prohibition debate from there). But this is something that happens every day to people who are innocent (or at least claim to be), and our country was founded on principles exactly opposite of that.
And it's not just newspapers. While I agree that most magazines are fluff, I certainly love to have stacks of various journals (usually biology/science/astronomy related) around that I can peruse on a lazy Sunday afternoon and not have to worry about if the image server is down, the website address has changed, or the search is working on a particular site. I can't count the number of times when I've googled for something, gone to the site and get a glarin "Bandwidth exceeded", or 404 not found, or no pictures (just ugly red X's), etc.
I'd love if all journals/newspapers also did a complete "digitization" of their materials and released a yearly compendium on CD/DVD (just for quick searches), but nothing still quite beats the actual FEEL of reading a good paper-based product.
Let's put it this way:
I still buy *new* indie stuff on VINYL.
It's not "just" the music, per se. It's the label, the artwork, the case.
Unfortunately, it seems most everyone is selling CDs for $15-17 these days, so I haven't been buying.
Who said nobody's buying? Many music companies recorded recorded profits last year. SOMEONE is buying that music, at the prices they dictate. If anything, it sounds like everyone is buying except for a small minority, but because they (the non-payers) are being dicks about it (sharing), it encourages other people to look into it. If it's free and no one's getting sued, what's the real discentive besides ethics (which people like the ones who are getting sued are throwing to the curb)?
If a person wants free music, then I suggest they start buying pepsi, or go learn how to play an instrument and make their own. That way, if you want to share your music with everyone else, it's your right to do so. But don't pretend that you have some sort of right to determine how best to distribute someone else's copyrighted material.
Having said that, I'm all for copyright expiration reform.
Hrm.
Filesystem?
I'm thinking like old BeOS's DB-style filesystem with searchable metatags, etc.
I really don't know how they would pull it off, but...
I'm more all about On-Demand TV. Keep a large back-catalog of your shows. This way, when I stumble onto something like Battlestar Galactica in the middle of the season, I can immediately go grab the episodes I missed on my TiVo so I don't have to pray and worry about the series getting cancelled. See Firefly.
I don't think DVD sales will suffer much because I've seen all kinds of quality rips on *torrent, which is nice when I want to "preview" a show to see if I like it. But I'll still buy the DVD set, just as I still buy CD's after checking out stuff via limewire or whatever. But that's entirely an unqualified/uneducated guess.
I think the federal government gives tax breaks and other incentives to companies that employ people with disabilities, etc. This is why when you get hired at some places, your boss takes you into a room and dials a phone number and hands you the phone and you have to answer a bunch of questions... They're checking to see if they're eligible for a tax break. :)
It's true. Shrinkage is more damaging to corporate bottom lines than shoplifting, for the most part. However, it doesn't address other things:
:)
1) What if the door checker is "in on" the scam, too? Hey, 1/3 of $$$$ is still > 0.
2) It's not my responsibility to screen and background check their employees.
3) Amazon.com gets most of my business now for CD's, and newegg for my computer componets.
I only go to BestBuy when I need something more immediate, but it still irks me.
Yes. if they didn't, they wouldn't advertise. Look at the spammers. They send out 10 million spams, with less than a 1% respond rate. That's still, what, 100k people? And they profit anywhere from $10-100 (or more) per sale? You do the math.
/. and several small sites I frequent I don't mind because they're rather non-obtrusive and easily scrolled past. The new breed of ads, however, don't seem to be "effective" advertising, but are counting on users to "accidentally" click on them to get the click-through count up. That's what sucks. :(
Personally, I like the Google Ads. I've clicked on them. I like ads that fit in with the purpose of the site. I've clicked on them. And I've bought stuff, on occasion.
Which is, for the most part, ads like those on
Anyone else feel like this when the "door nazi" at BestBuy/other chain steps in front of you and demands to see your receipt? Treating your customers like they're potential criminals is no way to gain loyalty.
Personally, I don't really give a fuck about an iMVS potential. Sure, it might be nifty, but I'd rather have real TV-On-Demand. Any episode of whatever show at the press of a (few) buttons. Dump the episode to the iPod Video, take it over to a friend's house and watch it sittin on their couch. it'd almost be like swapping VHS tapes of shows from years ago, although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to just leave my iPod Video laying around just anywhere. Plus, not only could Apple provide potentially better statistics in key market segments (the market segment that buys TiVo typically has money) than Nielson, hell, they could probably forgo the subscription fees in return for advertiser profile ratings.
Actually, I see a LOT of piracy amongst the casual DVD crowd. A girl here at work passed me a list the other day.. $5 each for all the "latest" DVD releases, plus a bunch of stuff I recognized as poor-rips (telesyncs?) from the theaters (and music CD's, too.. She said he'd borrow from the library and rip those). I tried not being an asshole, but informed her I didn't agree with the practice. She quit showing me the list, but I see her bring in stacks of DVDs for the other folks that don't care. At a laundromat I went to regularly, the attendent had a laptop setup with a firewire DVD-R and would burn movies for his "customers" while they did laundry for $5 each. And so on and so on. It surprised me to see it that blatant and widespread.
What i got out of the TCO question was mainly: It depends.
:)
Microsoft can't give a completely broad answer to every TCO issue that comes to light, each TCO scenario is done scenario by scenario, situation by situation. In some situations, Linux will be great for a given need. In others, Windows would be better.
Security issues are hard to project into TCO because, frankly, they're not altogether predictable. Linux could end up very expensive if a major worm were to exploit some current unknown vulnerability (and the Open Source folks like to point out that with the source freely available, this makes it that much more likely those vulnerabilities will be found and patched quickly) to the extent Windows has been hit. He actually encouraged people to try to come up with a way to model projected TCO costs for security that would work for any platform, which is really nifty. In other words, instead of dodging the question, he actually said "You know, we don't know and the various consulting and analyst firms we've talked to don't know either, but we're working on it, and we're open to solutions."
Nice interview, but I still like my iBook.
it's interesting to note that even the hardcore HP calculator folks would rather buy an old one off of ebay for $insane_cash than buy one of the new TI wanna-be plastic ones. Nothing against TI (I have one, I like it, but that's because colleges use textbooks that use it.. I smell.. money being exchanged somewhere...), but most of my engineering friends tell me the HP is "where it's at". :P
Because, overwhelmingly, no one really cares but a handful of people. The days of hand-tweaked, ASM optimized code are pretty much over for consumer code. Yes, there will always be a market, but it is ever diminishing with the size of market expanding. To use analogies, look at furniture. Go to just about any furniture "gallery" positioned for the great American unwashed and you'll find several hundred, almost identical mass-produced fat-ass-cliners, some with machine stitched leather, some with vinyl, some with cloth, etc. Dressers and other cabinetry are stapled, nailed, screwed and glued with machine precision accuracy. The demand for hand-built, crafted furniture has dropped tremendously (and the prices for these craft pieces seems to have gone up.. ). Yes, a "hand-tweaker" coder will probably find work with a small shop somewhere, or create their own consultancy for constituents who demand that kind of programming, and chances are that coder will make quite a bit more than the average, churn and burn programmer (people like me), but for the overwhelming majority, it's overkill.
(Here's a simple cost analysis: We can pay this guy $100k/year to do hand-optimized tweaks on this code that then becomes a liability for future maintanence if that coder dies, quits, or whatever. Or, we could add another stick of $100 RAM, and buy a new processor next year for a fraction of his cost and get a similar performance bump... The math doesn't add up...)
Wrong Show.. Voyager had a female captain, Enterprise has Scott Bakula. But that's besides the point.
The original series had KIRK. Kirk cannot be compared to any other captain in the ST universe because Kirk's Prime Directive was to seek and and find new alien civilizations and determine if "all the parts fit", if you know what I mean.
Kirk was THE MAN. Kirk GOT LAID. Kirk had his priorities straight. Kirk was the pimp-daddy of all pimp daddies.
The rest are just pussies by comparison.
$50 just to come look at it and determine if I can do anything about it, $50/hour after that (first hour is free). I know some folks that charge more ($75-100 just for the housecall).
What you need, then, is to start employing "geeks" as astronauts. Think about it.
Need to keep a "geek" occupied for months on end? Give him a computer and a copy of half-life or something. Hell, better yet, get a couple coders who would just love to "get paid" to write software without interruption for the next 8 months?
Just think: A development PC, a couple hundred cases of Mt. Dew, IRC, and maybe some hand lotion and that's all you'd need. Now, getting them out of the damn spacecraft once they hit the planet would be a different story altogether...
It really does depend on the situation as a whole. If my boss told me to procure new units based on whatever criteria set by whomever, and that I was responsible for said purchase, and then the boss OVERRIDES my decision without prior discussion with me (but is more than glad to discuss it with the vendor...), then I'd say you've got more serious problems at hand. You're being set-up for failure, you can't make the right decisions because someone else is going to change your decision, but ultimately they'll make the blame stick on you if the shit hits the fan. You can't be a "team player" if the coach doesn't put you in the game unless he needs someone to blame...
Isn't JNI basically what you use when you want to write a "java native" driver for your custom hardware (I'm thinking x10 and what not)? (But then you'd have to port the JNI to every platform you wanted to support, right?)
Isn't that pretty much what the Amiga was doing a couple decades ago? The CPU was merely a traffic cop, directing other specialized units to actually do the real work? If so, they're a bit late to the party, eh?
The movie was horrible. The book was B-class sci-fi for me. It was non-traditional in that it covered the whole "save the earth, blow shit up" way, but then diverted into some sort of lesson on economics. The mission earth series was hilarious in some probably-not-so-intentional ways.
That's kinda why I put a router/firewall (Linksys) between myself and the bad ol' internet and the first thing I do with a new machine is download the patches. It's ridiculous, to an extent, but I learned the hard way when I got hit with NIMDA while downloading the patch for that.
Isn't that the way AOL and Compuserver basically gained their gigantic subscriber lists? The way that some people can't distinguish what's "AOL" content, and what's the "internet"?
but note to you amateur photoshop n00bs (including myself): Just because you see it in these great pics, Lens flare is *never* cool. Put that filter away!