I've been able to 'slip under the radar' and use Firefox/Thunderbird at work for some time now, removing the blight of Outlook from my life (saying "look, the data on this computer is *important* to me and my client" has got me by so far).
However, I'm working in a strongly MS environment and I catch fire for not being compatible with some of the Outlook/Exchange collaborative stuff.
Not being a programmer, I understand that this story is good news for me in some undefined way: can someone put in simple terms how I will be able to make use of this? Do I have to change to Ximian to benefit? Can I go ahead and use this code myself somehow? Is it likely that someone will integrate it into Thunderbird/Firefox somehow?
As a non-programmer, I love observing this pattern:
High number SlashUser (707,653) posts a flame-y criticism of MS using a bunch of technical terms, just to prove how MS would be so much better off if he (I'm guessing there) was in Gates's job. Add loads of white space to get attention. And nasty spelling.
Crowds of low number SlashUsers (sub 100,000) toast them for massive technical errors.
I know for a fact that many of my favorite albums only got made because 'people' were prepared to put faith and money *up front* in recording an album (My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, etc, etc).
Those people were the record industry, major *and* independent - it's not just Michael Jackson albums that cost a fortune - if you don't think your favorite musicians benefited from that nasty 'fucked' industry, think harder.
I visited Madras in 1997. While I was there I walked up to a temple overlooking the city - you had to climb up a 1000 steps or whatever to get there, so by the time you reach the top, you're a fair way out of the city. Sorry, but I don't remember the specific names.
Anyway, over the other side of this hill, facing away from the city is what you might call 'the ghetto' - low quality ad-hoc housing built from metal sheeting. Kind of the place you don't feel totally comfortable wandering around.
A kid approaches us (probably 12-14yrs old) and asks us who we are, where we're from. He speaks good english and is chatty. He points out his house below us - it's basic living. We make small talk.
After I while I ask him - '...so - what do you want to do when you grow up?'
'I'm going to be a C++ programmer'
I'm shocked and impressed. 'Wow. You have a computer?' I look at his house again. It may have electricity.
'No, I have a book. But I'm learning.'
-with that kind of enterprise and foresight, I can never begrudge an out-sourced Indian programmer his living.
Well, I think the current business plan stemmed from fear of a commodity market. I read the reason that Lego moved to more and more complex sets with 'themes' is that their original patent on the Lego block expired in 1978.
So, in theory, there's nothing at all to stop you setting up a factory producing Lego-compatible blocks. To counter this, Lego tried to build 'brand value' by having more and more specialized sets - making it harder to compete with 'real' Lego.
Making just standard 4x2 blocks has very little 'added-value' over blocks anyone else could make - I wonder what their plan is now? Better instruction sheets?
Empirical science rules - I was explaining to a friend who'd never skipped stones how to hold and throw them, from, I guess, 18 years of experience.
And if I picture how I hold the stone, I'll bet it's pretty much exactly 20degrees, with as much spin as possible. Probably what my old da' showed me. The human brain amazes me.
the 'aviation engineer' in question is Barnes Wallace. The 'Bouncing Bomb' was used in the successful attacks to flood the industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany, by destroying the reservoir dams. He chose 220mph, rather than 25mph. I guess the stalling speed of a Lancaster bomber is a little high for that.
I've skipped stones (at a precise 20degrees) at Ladybower reservoir in Derbyshire, UK, where the practise flights were made - like many WW2 bombing operations, there was no attention to 'collateral damage':
Guardian Unlimited Two dams out of the three targeted - the Mohne and Eder - were breached. Thirteen hundred civilians were killed, including nearly 500 slave labourers from the Ukraine - mostly women. Local towns were flooded, trains washed off their tracks and six electricity stations put out of action.
what's with everyone asking this story to be pulled? It might be a bizarre opinon, but it's interesting (350 comments and counting) and I've learnt a load of interesting stuff from the comments.
plus - I like that Slashdot Editors leave their mistakes to be seen. They'd leave yours. I hope that the reason that they don't *ever* pull stories is that that is a useful principle next time Microsoft leans on them to take comments down.
It's a sad state of affairs indeed. But the shelves in my local book store are crammed with the novels that give SF a bad name.
I'm also totally aware that Banks, Stephenson, Clarke at el write good books by any standard, but I can understand why other authors would want to disassociate themselves.
Solutions? How about creating a new name for creative, literate SciFi?
It worked for "Graphic Novels", right?
I'm aware this is snobby, but it also happens to be true. It's those covers, man, I can't go near them. Any ideas for a name?
Liked it too: but 'low-budget'? A lot of money went on that modish DV grainy look.
28 Days Later's $15m budget is actually pretty darn huge for a movie made outside Hollywood, y'know.
Low budget film making is PI ($60,000), Clerks ($27,000) and El Mariachi ($7,000!) That's why you'll never see a non-US movies action movie compete in the US marketplace unless they were forced to include good plot, characters, acting, etc, etc...
Well, I think the system sucks, but the benefits are pretty clear (for the industry) - take, a 'foreign movie' such as "28 Days Later" as an example.
released in Nov 2002 in the UK, it took until late June 2003 for it to find a release in the US. The DVD was released in the UK in May 2003. US distributors will typically wait a long time to gauge how a movie does overseas before they risk it on US audiences.
this happens all the time - more often in reverse too: finding Nemo was on DVD in the US before it was released to theaters in all the major European markets.
It doesn't take a genius to see that releasing a DVD onto the market before the movie is a risky thing to do without region encoding.
It'll likely disappear in any case: the reasons to do this are disappearing, and mainly because of the threat of Kazaa piracy rather than DVD modding.
Releases like Matrix Revolutions proved that the distribution and promotion can support even a crap movie well enough to release it simultaneously across the world, and this is the way things'll go pretty soon.
I'd expect region encoding to disappear pretty soonish if this pattern really does catch on, but I worry that it'll be the little(r) guys (28 Days Later) that might catch the pain if so.
- and, according to the news this Wednesday, stem cells can be turned directly into sperm, ready for fertilizing an egg....so banking stem cells really is your ticket to immortality. How many Stanley's would you like?
yep, but the problem with this idea is that everyone in the world, excepting you and the rest of Slashdot, can be sold into thinking they want it.
Do you want the end of computer viruses? Do you want your personal details to be really safe? Do you want this on a system that looks exactly like that system you've been using for years?
I like what I understand to be the Torvalds approach - this is going to happen anyway. maybe it's not a bad thing. maybe we can do it too, better, and stop it being a Microsoft lockout.
fair enough. I was really objecting to the lazy (offtopic) addition of the 'now if only...' comment to a slashdot story that didn't really need it. I'll count to ten next time.....
arghhhh! excuse the troll-ish venting, but I can't *stand* this lazy "modern music is crap" line that gets tagged to every story about the music industry. Do you realise how old you sound?
Don't blame the music industry for your lack of effort to find good new music - there's so much of it out there it hurts that I can't afford it all (or don't have the bandwidth to download it all;). Yes, Warner Music and BMI don't tend to release exciting new artists, but did you try looking at Rough Trade, Warp, even the wonderfully -named Sympathy for the Music Industry (hah!) records?
Here a couple of helpful pointers: Read: The Wire magazine (http://www.thewire.co.uk/) Listen:John Peel's radio show on Radio 1 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/) -a nd stop insulting the hundreds of creative, passionate artists with that old cliche.
...The exact reason, I'm guessing, behind the titles on the last Aphex Twin album 'Drukqs' - which he claimed he was only releasing because someone had had access to the files and could be sharing them on P2P networks. Try searching for these rocking tunes without the names in front of you:
I'll bite: How about the Securities and Exchange Commision? Do they count?
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/29171.html
"...new figures filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA revealing that in the three months leading up to the end of December (2002), it lost $348 million on its Xbox division, on revenues of $1.28 billion."
that's in THREE months - i.e. $1.4 billion lost annually. I realise that doesn't prove they lose per unit sold, but if they are making a profit, that's a staggering amount to be paying for payroll, R&D etc.
in contrast, this is about quarter of the operating profit made from selling Windows over the same period - so it is verging on a significant loss, even for MS.
The loss-per-unit figures are usually speculation, mainly because there's no reason on earth MS would discuss it's BOM cost or individual components with anyone else. However, serious analysts believe that MS loses about $150 per box e.g.:
"The costs of goods for every Xbox amount to $325, according to the source. That means that Microsoft is currently losing at least $150 on every box, and probably more due to shipping, advertising, development overhead, and return costs. Microsoft sells the box wholesale to retailers for $175. Microsoft would have to sell a lot more than three games apiece to break even.
By contrast, Sony is believed to be losing only a small amount of money on the PlayStation 2, which costs an estimated $185 to manufacture."
Slashdot Mirror
I've been able to 'slip under the radar' and use Firefox/Thunderbird at work for some time now, removing the blight of Outlook from my life (saying "look, the data on this computer is *important* to me and my client" has got me by so far).
However, I'm working in a strongly MS environment and I catch fire for not being compatible with some of the Outlook/Exchange collaborative stuff.
Not being a programmer, I understand that this story is good news for me in some undefined way: can someone put in simple terms how I will be able to make use of this? Do I have to change to Ximian to benefit? Can I go ahead and use this code myself somehow? Is it likely that someone will integrate it into Thunderbird/Firefox somehow?
Apologies for not being a programmer....
As a non-programmer, I love observing this pattern:
High number SlashUser (707,653) posts a flame-y criticism of MS using a bunch of technical terms, just to prove how MS would be so much better off if he (I'm guessing there) was in Gates's job. Add loads of white space to get attention. And nasty spelling.
Crowds of low number SlashUsers (sub 100,000) toast them for massive technical errors.
Sweet.
Slashdot: my favourite spectator sport....
Why stop there?
Wow: Win 3.1 screens would run so fast - I hope it has that skin too....
Hey? Why not just use the DOS prompt:
>MS-DOS 10.0
>2,048,000K RAM Free
>
>
I hope you're not right. I really do.
I know for a fact that many of my favorite albums only got made because 'people' were prepared to put faith and money *up front* in recording an album (My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk, etc, etc).
Those people were the record industry, major *and* independent - it's not just Michael Jackson albums that cost a fortune - if you don't think your favorite musicians benefited from that nasty 'fucked' industry, think harder.
Help me out - what does 'troubled' mean in that sentence:
is it:
a) we recognise your concerns and, by golly, you might be right. That's sure troubling.
b) I am troubled that you would express your disatissfaction and unpatriotic opinions. Isn't the FBI paid to watch these people?
I visited Madras in 1997. While I was there I walked up to a temple overlooking the city - you had to climb up a 1000 steps or whatever to get there, so by the time you reach the top, you're a fair way out of the city. Sorry, but I don't remember the specific names.
Anyway, over the other side of this hill, facing away from the city is what you might call 'the ghetto' - low quality ad-hoc housing built from metal sheeting. Kind of the place you don't feel totally comfortable wandering around.
A kid approaches us (probably 12-14yrs old) and asks us who we are, where we're from. He speaks good english and is chatty. He points out his house below us - it's basic living. We make small talk.
After I while I ask him - '...so - what do you want to do when you grow up?'
'I'm going to be a C++ programmer'
I'm shocked and impressed. 'Wow. You have a computer?' I look at his house again. It may have electricity.
'No, I have a book. But I'm learning.'
-with that kind of enterprise and foresight, I can never begrudge an out-sourced Indian programmer his living.
Kerala also has an elected communist state government - and a literacy level of over 90%.
Well, I think the current business plan stemmed from fear of a commodity market. I read the reason that Lego moved to more and more complex sets with 'themes' is that their original patent on the Lego block expired in 1978.
So, in theory, there's nothing at all to stop you setting up a factory producing Lego-compatible blocks. To counter this, Lego tried to build 'brand value' by having more and more specialized sets - making it harder to compete with 'real' Lego.
Making just standard 4x2 blocks has very little 'added-value' over blocks anyone else could make - I wonder what their plan is now? Better instruction sheets?
Empirical science rules - I was explaining to a friend who'd never skipped stones how to hold and throw them, from, I guess, 18 years of experience.
And if I picture how I hold the stone, I'll bet it's pretty much exactly 20degrees, with as much spin as possible. Probably what my old da' showed me. The human brain amazes me.
the 'aviation engineer' in question is Barnes Wallace. The 'Bouncing Bomb' was used in the successful attacks to flood the industrial Ruhr Valley in Germany, by destroying the reservoir dams. He chose 220mph, rather than 25mph. I guess the stalling speed of a Lancaster bomber is a little high for that.
I've skipped stones (at a precise 20degrees) at Ladybower reservoir in Derbyshire, UK, where the practise flights were made - like many WW2 bombing operations, there was no attention to 'collateral damage':
Guardian Unlimited
Two dams out of the three targeted - the Mohne and Eder - were breached. Thirteen hundred civilians were killed, including nearly 500 slave labourers from the Ukraine - mostly women. Local towns were flooded, trains washed off their tracks and six electricity stations put out of action.
what's with everyone asking this story to be pulled? It might be a bizarre opinon, but it's interesting (350 comments and counting) and I've learnt a load of interesting stuff from the comments.
plus - I like that Slashdot Editors leave their mistakes to be seen. They'd leave yours. I hope that the reason that they don't *ever* pull stories is that that is a useful principle next time Microsoft leans on them to take comments down.
It's a sad state of affairs indeed. But the shelves in my local book store are crammed with the novels that give SF a bad name.
I'm also totally aware that Banks, Stephenson, Clarke at el write good books by any standard, but I can understand why other authors would want to disassociate themselves.
Solutions? How about creating a new name for creative, literate SciFi?
It worked for "Graphic Novels", right?
I'm aware this is snobby, but it also happens to be true. It's those covers, man, I can't go near them. Any ideas for a name?
Liked it too: but 'low-budget'? A lot of money went on that modish DV grainy look.
28 Days Later's $15m budget is actually pretty darn huge for a movie made outside Hollywood, y'know.
Low budget film making is PI ($60,000), Clerks ($27,000) and El Mariachi ($7,000!) That's why you'll never see a non-US movies action movie compete in the US marketplace unless they were forced to include good plot, characters, acting, etc, etc...
oh, hang on.....
Well, I think the system sucks, but the benefits are pretty clear (for the industry) - take, a 'foreign movie' such as "28 Days Later" as an example.
released in Nov 2002 in the UK, it took until late June 2003 for it to find a release in the US. The DVD was released in the UK in May 2003. US distributors will typically wait a long time to gauge how a movie does overseas before they risk it on US audiences.
this happens all the time - more often in reverse too: finding Nemo was on DVD in the US before it was released to theaters in all the major European markets.
It doesn't take a genius to see that releasing a DVD onto the market before the movie is a risky thing to do without region encoding.
It'll likely disappear in any case: the reasons to do this are disappearing, and mainly because of the threat of Kazaa piracy rather than DVD modding.
Releases like Matrix Revolutions proved that the distribution and promotion can support even a crap movie well enough to release it simultaneously across the world, and this is the way things'll go pretty soon.
I'd expect region encoding to disappear pretty soonish if this pattern really does catch on, but I worry that it'll be the little(r) guys (28 Days Later) that might catch the pain if so.
- and, according to the news this Wednesday, stem cells can be turned directly into sperm, ready for fertilizing an egg. ...so banking stem cells really is your ticket to immortality. How many Stanley's would you like?
yep, but the problem with this idea is that everyone in the world, excepting you and the rest of Slashdot, can be sold into thinking they want it.
Do you want the end of computer viruses? Do you want your personal details to be really safe? Do you want this on a system that looks exactly like that system you've been using for years?
I like what I understand to be the Torvalds approach - this is going to happen anyway. maybe it's not a bad thing. maybe we can do it too, better, and stop it being a Microsoft lockout.
fair enough. I was really objecting to the lazy (offtopic) addition of the 'now if only...' comment to a slashdot story that didn't really need it. I'll count to ten next time.....
arghhhh! excuse the troll-ish venting, but I can't *stand* this lazy "modern music is crap" line that gets tagged to every story about the music industry. Do you realise how old you sound?
a nd stop insulting the hundreds of creative, passionate artists with that old cliche.
Don't blame the music industry for your lack of effort to find good new music - there's so much of it out there it hurts that I can't afford it all (or don't have the bandwidth to download it all;). Yes, Warner Music and BMI don't tend to release exciting new artists, but did you try looking at Rough Trade, Warp, even the wonderfully -named Sympathy for the Music Industry (hah!) records?
Here a couple of helpful pointers:
Read: The Wire magazine (http://www.thewire.co.uk/)
Listen:John Peel's radio show on Radio 1
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/)
-
You clearly have never had dealings with SBC. My god. I'm convinced appalling service is part of their business plan.
...so... did taping a piece of wire to the flight attendant work or not?
...The exact reason, I'm guessing, behind the titles on the last Aphex Twin album 'Drukqs' - which he claimed he was only releasing because someone had had access to the files and could be sharing them on P2P networks. Try searching for these rocking tunes without the names in front of you:
Beskhu3epnm
Kladfvgbung Micshk
Petiatil Cx Htdui
etc, etc....
anyone care to mod this up? At least it's accurate, unlike the previous post.
two years? well, I guess that means you were happy running your everyday mail on Mozilla 0.9.something, so Tb0.1 shouldn't be *that* scary...
I'll bite: How about the Securities and Exchange Commision? Do they count?
1 .html
x 06 2402.html
From http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/2917
"...new figures filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the USA revealing that in the three months leading up to the end of December (2002), it lost $348 million on its Xbox division, on revenues of $1.28 billion."
that's in THREE months - i.e. $1.4 billion lost annually. I realise that doesn't prove they lose per unit sold, but if they are making a profit, that's a staggering amount to be paying for payroll, R&D etc.
in contrast, this is about quarter of the operating profit made from selling Windows over the same period - so it is verging on a significant loss, even for MS.
The loss-per-unit figures are usually speculation, mainly because there's no reason on earth MS would discuss it's BOM cost or individual components with anyone else. However, serious analysts believe that MS loses about $150 per box e.g.:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0624/xbo
"The costs of goods for every Xbox amount to $325, according to the source. That means that Microsoft is currently losing at least $150 on every box, and probably more due to shipping, advertising, development overhead, and return costs. Microsoft sells the box wholesale to retailers for $175. Microsoft would have to sell a lot more than three games apiece to break even.
By contrast, Sony is believed to be losing only a small amount of money on the PlayStation 2, which costs an estimated $185 to manufacture."
either way, it ain't a money spinner.
"The whole project goes under the acronym Falcon - Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States."
hmmm... I think that's the most contrived acronym I have *ever* seen... was "COOL DEATH EAGLE" already taken?