i get this site disliking Gates due to the anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior that MS has been guilty of in the past -- but how much of that actually occurred under Balmer's tenure as CEO?
He sounds like a jackass on his own accord -- but the level of disdain people have for him, is that because of things he did/enabled -- or did the stink of MS / Gates simply rub off on him ?
I live in Oregon, Oracle was working on our ACA portal, it has cost a fortune and is taking forever.
At any rate though, I think that transparency in government is a good thing. With a bridge or a road, we see the budget, and we see the final results. We see the relative quality, and where it's breaking down.
With software, we see a price tag (loosely based on reality) and we see superficially how it performs -- otherwise it's a black box (or in Oracle's case, a black hole). With FOSS, whatever code the government produces could be vetted, improved, forked -- and/or reused on other projects. We, the public paid for it, shouldn't it be publicly available?
Overall it doesn't seem so much like a horrible idea to me.
Why should there be software patents to begin with? and of the rest of these fucking patents, how many are non-obvious and/or without prior art?
Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain, they were not intended to be a cudgel to keep the little guys from playing.
With commodity hardware what it is, there should be thousands of cell phone manufacturers. (or hundreds? either way, vastly more than what we have today)
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes.:(
The only place he'd ever get repatriated to is Leavenworth (if they're being generous) or Gitmo (if they aren't).
Poking the bear is bad enough, making the bear feel foolish (while continuing to poke) is unforgivable. In this case, the bear is not Russia.:(
If they let him go free, or off with a light sentence, he'll have a new career as a public speaker, or activist against the NSA and surveillance. No way the government would allow that sentiment to have a publicly acceptable mouth piece.
also what your suggesting would possibly lead to a 'monoculture' and halt evolution in it's tracks (kind of an important thing for humans on a strange, alien world)
well this kind of delves into the matrix type stuff... but if the child was raised perpetually within some kind of simulation -- would the skills, sensations, and muscle memory translate into reality? (assuming they didn't know they were in a simulation, and their muscles were subjected to simulated forces mimicking what was going on in the simulation)
dude. your argument is basically this : "hEartbleed was a serious bug in FOSS. therefore FOSS is bad". So periodically FOSS has a serious bug. okay.
I'm not even going to bother trying to reference all the recent events involving Adobe, MS, or Apple having quite serious bugs in their proprietary code. A similar bug could have just as easily have happened to a closed source shop. As long as humans are writing the code, it's a possibility.
The thing is, companies with licensing revenue have every incentive in the world to machinate lock-in. And with lock-in comes higher prices, both for support and the software itself.
By all means use the best tool for the job, but retaining some optionality for the future is a valuable thing.
I'd rather keep the risk of another bug like heartbleed than deal with vendor lock-in, ever increasing licensing costs, compliance costs, potential BSA raids, and frequent zero day exploits. =/
Yes, and a lot of highly creative people have more than a twinge of mental illness. (Hemingway, Picasso, Poe etc)
There is a difference between being unable to filter vs having an eidetic memory (has having an eidetic memory even been proven as a real phenomenon -- compared to simply an 'exceptional' memory?).
Example: I can remember what tie i wore to my sister's graduation years ago -- if i think about it. A lack of filtering would be unable control what pops into my head at any given moment.
Seriously has Apple ever done anything that puts branding and perception over Reality? Distortion of this kind is pretty much a Field that they invented.
(or they were getting flack over not having any minority execs, and with this deal Dr. Dre is now a VP @ Apple right?)
isn't schizophrenia related to the minds inability to filter out stimuli? That would be a pretty good indication of what 'total recall' would do to us.
There's a ton of people out there who have trouble with things like finding files after they're downloaded, let alone connecting the kindle via USB, and dragging and dropping said download onto the kindle (or using caliber, if they've even heard about it)
Which is another kettle of fish entirely -- but you're right, loading books via usb (using caliber or not) eliminates amazon's control.. but in the end, ease of use and convenience will win every time. And give it time, Amazon will do everything in their power to eliminate non-amazon sources of ebooks. (hell, i'm surprised they still allow mobi).
Yeah, wanting a hardware keyboard on a cell phone isn't a bad thing. Sometimes function > form. My suspicion is that the old buggy whip meme used in this context is by an iphone worshiping ladyboy in a fedora.
Physical keyboards are nice in the sense that you have some god damn feedback about where you're thumbs are on the keyboard. there are occasions you'd like to be able to type something in a search box or dial a number without having to look at the phone. an onscreen keyboard doesn't do this.
Just because something is old does not make it automatically inferior.
Is the kindle really sucky though? it's a simple device that was designed and engineered to do one thing very well, deliver content purchased from amazon quickly and easily. (Ok it does two things, it lets you read books also.)
In all seriousness though, my Luddite father is an avid reader, and even he loves his Paperwhite. If someone like him (who asks 'do i right click or left click?' when opening a file) enjoys using a kindle, it clearly is doing its job.
As parent said though, Amazon does have a vice-like grip on the content, and regardless of the Kindle sucking or not, they'll win as a result.
The other key advantage they have is the delivery of the content. Having used other e-readers before, nothing comes close to the ease of loading stuff on the Kindle. (1 click, send-to-kindle, whispernet etc) Which is especially important to retain people like my pops as customers.
If you lump laptops and desktops together, I don't think it's time to say those days are 'over'. It's just when:
the hardware you can get for 400 dollars at Walmart is relevant for running 99% of all the applications the average user wants the hardware you can get for $900 dollars can pretty much run the next 4-5 years worth of games at pretty much maximum resolution and quality There is virtually no incentive to upgrade.
Compare this to the late 90's and early 2000's Year on year the performance gains of GPU's and CPU's was pretty much exponential. A computer could very much be outdated within a year.
N=1 example, my family bought a 486/66 with 8 megs of ram in 1995. By 1998 we upgraded to a Pentium 233 (MMX? fuzzy on the exact specs) with 32MB of ram, and some kind of Riva video card. Nowadays a 3 year old computer could likely play just about any game you throw at it, and the latest OS.
People (and especially businesses) are not buying new PC's because they don't need to upgrade.
Which is sad because the country has quite a bit of history, and from everything I've heard the residents are actually a friendly and cordial people -- unless it's a lynch mob whipped up by the propaganda machine:(
Slashdot Mirror
i get this site disliking Gates due to the anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior that MS has been guilty of in the past -- but how much of that actually occurred under Balmer's tenure as CEO?
He sounds like a jackass on his own accord -- but the level of disdain people have for him, is that because of things he did/enabled -- or did the stink of MS / Gates simply rub off on him ?
I live in Oregon, Oracle was working on our ACA portal, it has cost a fortune and is taking forever.
At any rate though, I think that transparency in government is a good thing. With a bridge or a road, we see the budget, and we see the final results. We see the relative quality, and where it's breaking down.
With software, we see a price tag (loosely based on reality) and we see superficially how it performs -- otherwise it's a black box (or in Oracle's case, a black hole). With FOSS, whatever code the government produces could be vetted, improved, forked -- and/or reused on other projects. We, the public paid for it, shouldn't it be publicly available?
Overall it doesn't seem so much like a horrible idea to me.
Why should there be software patents to begin with?
and of the rest of these fucking patents, how many are non-obvious and/or without prior art?
Patents were intended to promote competition and a viable public domain, they were not intended to be a cudgel to keep the little guys from playing.
With commodity hardware what it is, there should be thousands of cell phone manufacturers. (or hundreds? either way, vastly more than what we have today)
When rent seeking companies succeed, they are taking away from the public. I think that gets forgotten sometimes. :(
That's true. Or read about how the taxi taking to the Moscow airport was found at the bottom of a river.
The only place he'd ever get repatriated to is Leavenworth (if they're being generous) or Gitmo (if they aren't).
Poking the bear is bad enough, making the bear feel foolish (while continuing to poke) is unforgivable. In this case, the bear is not Russia. :(
If they let him go free, or off with a light sentence, he'll have a new career as a public speaker, or activist against the NSA and surveillance. No way the government would allow that sentiment to have a publicly acceptable mouth piece.
also what your suggesting would possibly lead to a 'monoculture' and halt evolution in it's tracks (kind of an important thing for humans on a strange, alien world)
well this kind of delves into the matrix type stuff... but if the child was raised perpetually within some kind of simulation -- would the skills, sensations, and muscle memory translate into reality? (assuming they didn't know they were in a simulation, and their muscles were subjected to simulated forces mimicking what was going on in the simulation)
it would be the most fabulous planet ever.
if you pirate CP, you're doing the world two favors!
Adobe.
dude. your argument is basically this : "hEartbleed was a serious bug in FOSS. therefore FOSS is bad". So periodically FOSS has a serious bug. okay.
I'm not even going to bother trying to reference all the recent events involving Adobe, MS, or Apple having quite serious bugs in their proprietary code.
A similar bug could have just as easily have happened to a closed source shop. As long as humans are writing the code, it's a possibility.
The thing is, companies with licensing revenue have every incentive in the world to machinate lock-in. And with lock-in comes higher prices, both for support and the software itself.
By all means use the best tool for the job, but retaining some optionality for the future is a valuable thing.
I'd rather keep the risk of another bug like heartbleed than deal with vendor lock-in, ever increasing licensing costs, compliance costs, potential BSA raids, and frequent zero day exploits. =/
Yes, and a lot of highly creative people have more than a twinge of mental illness. (Hemingway, Picasso, Poe etc)
There is a difference between being unable to filter vs having an eidetic memory (has having an eidetic memory even been proven as a real phenomenon -- compared to simply an 'exceptional' memory?).
Example: I can remember what tie i wore to my sister's graduation years ago -- if i think about it. A lack of filtering would be unable control what pops into my head at any given moment.
Don't worry, the NSA is already monitoring their communications, and getting a headstart on foreign-foreign intelligence gathering.
Hah. His wiki entry reminds me of Jason Schwartz's character from "I 3 Huckabees". (IE, he wrote it about himself)
Seriously has Apple ever done anything that puts branding and perception over Reality? Distortion of this kind is pretty much a Field that they invented.
(or they were getting flack over not having any minority execs, and with this deal Dr. Dre is now a VP @ Apple right?)
isn't schizophrenia related to the minds inability to filter out stimuli? That would be a pretty good indication of what 'total recall' would do to us.
There's a ton of people out there who have trouble with things like finding files after they're downloaded, let alone connecting the kindle via USB, and dragging and dropping said download onto the kindle (or using caliber, if they've even heard about it)
Which is another kettle of fish entirely -- but you're right, loading books via usb (using caliber or not) eliminates amazon's control.. but in the end, ease of use and convenience will win every time. And give it time, Amazon will do everything in their power to eliminate non-amazon sources of ebooks. (hell, i'm surprised they still allow mobi).
Yeah, wanting a hardware keyboard on a cell phone isn't a bad thing. Sometimes function > form. My suspicion is that the old buggy whip meme used in this context is by an iphone worshiping ladyboy in a fedora.
Physical keyboards are nice in the sense that you have some god damn feedback about where you're thumbs are on the keyboard. there are occasions you'd like to be able to type something in a search box or dial a number without having to look at the phone. an onscreen keyboard doesn't do this.
Just because something is old does not make it automatically inferior.
Is the kindle really sucky though? it's a simple device that was designed and engineered to do one thing very well, deliver content purchased from amazon quickly and easily. (Ok it does two things, it lets you read books also.)
In all seriousness though, my Luddite father is an avid reader, and even he loves his Paperwhite. If someone like him (who asks 'do i right click or left click?' when opening a file) enjoys using a kindle, it clearly is doing its job.
As parent said though, Amazon does have a vice-like grip on the content, and regardless of the Kindle sucking or not, they'll win as a result.
The other key advantage they have is the delivery of the content. Having used other e-readers before, nothing comes close to the ease of loading stuff on the Kindle. (1 click, send-to-kindle, whispernet etc) Which is especially important to retain people like my pops as customers.
growing smaller and smaller...
But what you just described is how MS envisions the Surface being used.
If you lump laptops and desktops together, I don't think it's time to say those days are 'over'. It's just when:
the hardware you can get for 400 dollars at Walmart is relevant for running 99% of all the applications the average user wants
the hardware you can get for $900 dollars can pretty much run the next 4-5 years worth of games at pretty much maximum resolution and quality
There is virtually no incentive to upgrade.
Compare this to the late 90's and early 2000's Year on year the performance gains of GPU's and CPU's was pretty much exponential. A computer could very much be outdated within a year.
N=1 example, my family bought a 486/66 with 8 megs of ram in 1995. By 1998 we upgraded to a Pentium 233 (MMX? fuzzy on the exact specs) with 32MB of ram, and some kind of Riva video card. Nowadays a 3 year old computer could likely play just about any game you throw at it, and the latest OS.
People (and especially businesses) are not buying new PC's because they don't need to upgrade.
how does one make the joke?
Which is sad because the country has quite a bit of history, and from everything I've heard the residents are actually a friendly and cordial people -- unless it's a lynch mob whipped up by the propaganda machine :(
or in kim's case.. having something thrust.. oh nevermind. using a 'leaked' sex tape as a vehicle to stardom is just pathetic.
i thought on this site at least we were above the 'think of the children' stuff. :(