When they announced this, I didn't really see the point.
I'm not buying new music from my iPhone (because I don't have one) and expecting it to show up on my computer... I'm not buying songs on my computer either. Pretty much all of my music is ripped straight from CDs I've bought, and my music library is currently > 70GB.
So, if I need to update my iPods or my iPad, I just plug them into my computer. My iPod classic holds the entire library anyway, and my smaller iPod and iPad get sync'd with what I tell them. At a certain point, the 16GB or so of music they each have is days worth, so it's not like I run out.
I'm obviously not the target audience for this (not least of which because I'm not willing to pay)... but I don't know the benefit of having my music "in the cloud". The only cloud stuff I've ever used is DropBox, and even after a few months, I barely used that anymore.
Having said that, I'm sure that for someone this is a highly useful feature... but I think you'd have to be purchasing content on the go a lot more than I can even conceive of.
And, of course, the thing to remember about Numb3rs is they didn't really have a genius mathematician who solved all of these problems. Much of the math was solid-sounding, but generally they weren't afraid to use math like Star Trek used tachyons and just make stuff up.
So, the fact that real statisticians identified this is in no way lessened by anything you saw in Numb3rs.
Also, Superman doesn't really live in New York City, and Jack Bauer isn't a real guy. Oh, and there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.
Sorry to disappoint, but you're talking about fiction on TV.
If you gave the data to Facebook, it was never private in the first place.
Valid point, but there are some places which have data privacy laws Facebook will be bound to... and those laws likely say that there's limited things Facebook can do with certain data. I think in some countries, this would likely run afoul of that.
However, for the rest of us, it might be fun to game the system and flood it with a bunch of stuff to drive things crazy... "Romney wears womens underwear", "Barak Obama wipes his nose on tablecloths" or other random things might at least poison the well.
They may be going to give it away no matter what you do, but that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it.
Yup, there we go... "Facebook To Share Private Data"... it doesn't matter who at this point, because eventually it becomes "everybody".
Facebook is going to share your private data eventually. They're going to do it as often as they can get away with, and for as much money as it nets them.
Their privacy statement is meaningless, and they don't care about such things... so, if anybody has the private information for Zuckerburg and the other trolls running Facebook... start putting it on every public forum that you can find.
Soon, if not already (as we've seen with this) we will truly have thought-crime, and the government will simply monitor you to ensure you're not a communist or a dissenter..
Post a status saying that you think a certain member of congress is a douchebag? Maybe a little visit from the feds to give you a little re-education... I never thought I'd truly live to see the Orwellian future.
You jest, but companies do require those skillsets.
I spend over a decade primarily as a coder. Since then I've been out in the consulting industry.
The last project I was working on made me really see the value of a good PM, and made me realize it's a skillset I need to flesh out a little. The majority of PMs I've see area hinderance to getting the job done... but on an enterprise-wide roll out of a software upgrade, consisting of a lot of environments, and a lot of machines (and manpower involved), having a PM who could actually steer the project, get it done on time and on budget, and actually accomplish the goals... well, let me say he was the first PM to truly gain my respect.
He knew that it was his job to clear the path so that me and the other people on the ground could get our job done, and he had a genuine plan as to how we'd build it. The end result was a successful project, happy clients, and a reference project that made the people who signed off on the money feel they'd received value for money. Literally, the best PM I've ever worked with.
By the time you're talking about projects with really huge scales and timelines on the order of a year or so... the skillset is absolutely necessary. And if you have someone who has done this stuff for real, they tend to better understand what's involved (which is why the managers I've had who used to code are better than the ones who have only ever been managers).
Nobody says you need to be a PHB, but there's nothing wrong with competent people moving into management -- they can at least bring some experience and insight to the role.
Almost anybody I've ever known who has moved onto being the lead architect isn't handling much (if any) code anymore. You're operating at a different level... the overall design, the components that make it up, and working with the dev team to sort out problems. And, of course, working to define the requirements, use cases, and all of the other stuff like that.
Which is fine, but from what I've seen you can stay as an actual Programmer for so long, and then people expect you to move into architect/management roles to oversee the people who now do the coding. Your job becomes big-picture kind of stuff. Sometimes they look at someone of a certain age who is still writing code and wonder why you're still doing that.
If you're looking to solve new and interesting problems without feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over... well, maybe what you want to do be doing it is working with a consulting company? The breadth and depth of your experience gets used for many different problems, it definitely changes often, and you get called in to help clients solve problems and develop solutions
Not saying consulting is for everyone, or that it's even the best choice out there... but when I 'graduated' from a previous job as a programmer and got into consulting, I found I got to work on different projects, provide different insights into them, and then work towards the overall solution.
If you've been doing the kind of dev work you describe for long enough, there's a remarkable amount of soft skills you've likely picked up that are very marketable... you don't need to know everything about everything, but knowing a lot about a lot of things actually makes you quite useful as a generalist skillset, with the ability to delve deeper when the need/occasion arises.
As a motorcycle commuter, this certainly ensures my death.
Along with cyclists, pedestrians, other motor vehicles... I'm just waiting for the day some idiot plows through a crosswalk because he was playing video games on his windshield.
Providing information not specifically relevant to actually driving just sounds like a really bad idea. Stick to information that can actually help, sure, but some of the examples cited in the summary just sound absurd. Finding a free table at a cafe? Not a good idea.
Hell, some coffee shops with drive-thru windows are a traffic hazard as everyone tries to get in/out of the parking lot end up driving like absolute idiots. Why someone coming out of a parking lot with a fresh coffee thinks the 80kph traffic needs to stop for them is beyond me. At one point, the city tried to limit where they could open up new stores... and they actually sued the city for interfering with their business; meanwhile the city has had to install traffic lights to prevent accidents at their stores.
Simply point your hand at them, and the icons open to show real-time information: when that bridge over there was built, what band is playing at that nightclub on the left, whether that new cafe up the street has any tables available. Wave your hand again, and you've made a restaurant reservation
I don't want that crap while I'm driving... I want to know my route, if there's construction delays, if there's been an accident up ahead... you know, stuff pertinent to the actual act of driving a motor vehicle.
If you start giving the average driver this kind of crap, you're going to get more road hazards as someone idiot is waving his hand at his windshield trying to pre-order a double, skinny, tall, machiato with extra foam before he gets to Starbucks (and, no, I don't care if any of those words actually apply to Starbucks)... from what I can tell, most drivers can barely focus on the act of driving, they don't need their car to be some information/entertainment hub.
With more places moving ahead with distracted driving laws, do car companies really want to be putting in this kind of stuff? This just sounds really dangerous and stupid to me.
Sure, in-car GPS is a huge boost to driving... but looking up when a bridge was constructed or making restaurant reservations? Sorry, but that's not something you should be doing while driving.
Wait, you think that NAT is a good thing? Well I suppose there has to be one. NAT solves ONE problem: more devices than public IPs. Any perceived security benefits are purely incidental and can be solved (better) by a firewall.
Yeah, and my firewall/router currently does both for me.
Which means I can use one of the internal-only address ranges to layout my home network, be secured behind a firewall, and not have my network layout be made obvious to anyone else. Which is good, because I have two different sub-nets and two different wifi hotspots in my house.
Since I only get one public IP from my ISP, that covers exactly what I need. I'm sure the greedy bastards would like to charge me for each computer I have, but tough.
Are you implying there's a downside to NAT for a home user? For smaller networks, being behind a NATed, firewalled connection gives me exactly what I need... and, let's be honest, IPv6 has been about to become widespread for slightly longer than the "year of the Linux desktop" has been imminent.
Tell us, how is NAT a bad thing? So far you've just sneered at it -- from my perspective, it solves the problem it's meant to. And I can't even begin to tell you the number of large corporations I've worked at with computers all addressed within these ranges. Not having them routable to the rest of the planet is actually a useful thing.
There's a reason we use GUI's now a days - it's better for some stuff.
Some stuff, sure. But, if you maintain clusters of machines or need to do hugely repetitive tasks, a GUI can actually be a hinderance.
I have seen applications in which you might be administering literally hundreds of items, if not thousands... for some maintenance tasks, you end up manually going through a GUI for hundreds of items one at a time to make a change. Which is boring, repetitive, and error prone. One of the advantage of doing things GUI-less is that it allows for automation of tasks more than a GUI.
Almost anything you need to run at a corporate level where you have a lot of them works way better if you can automate it... I have seen people trying to make changed to a large number of SAN allocated volumes, and it's painful to watch someone go through the steps with a GUI, and it's a lot more error prone.
If you're talking about a single, stand-alone piece of software that doesn't devolve into having hundreds (if not thousands) of items to control, sure, a GUI is great... but if you ever have to update hundreds of items at a time, the GUI paradigm can fall apart completely. I once had a task to do in which I had to modify around 75 things... it took me about 4 hours of "click button, wait, click next button, wait" and made me want to kill the developers who had written it. Partly because there was no multi-select, and partly because if it was scriptable it would become an easy maintenance task -- without it, it's painful. And, it's not like they couldn't anticipate people would need to do this often and to a large number of items.
Even for some routine maintenance I need to do on some machine clusters, it's easier to write a batch script and use "sc" to start and stop services.. because I need to shut down and disable the exact same service on 15-20 machines, I need to do it right now, and I need to get them all down as close as possible. Logging into each machine and shutting these services down with Task Manager... well, that's pretty much a time sink. Then when I need to start them all up, I've got a corresponding script. These are tasks that we do approaching daily in one or more clusters.
For years Windows has had the "GUI only" paradigm for most applications... pushing more applications to be scriptable and run headless will go a long way to making many administrative tasks much easier to handle. It may take a bit of a learning curve, but being able to automate certain tasks eventually becomes a huge time save (so it saves money), and is a lot more consistent (which also saves money).
I applaud Microsoft starting to push application developers towards this... because the sheer amount of items I've seen which can benefit from this has convinced me that we must spend countless man hours of someone clicking through a GUI when a script could do it in a few minutes. That tends to be hugely lost productivity that people could be spending doing other tasks.
It's funny how many Pogues videos have a RIP Shane comment on them.
Everybody just sort of assumes he's dead by now.
Well, because he's always had a bit of an out of control persona... and, really, if you look at pictures of him he's never looked like the healthiest person alive.
He's just so famous for being utterly trashed on stage, or getting beaten up in pubs... one just assumes he's dead by now. Glad he's not, but it's easy to see how people might assume he is.
Pure conjecture based on personal bias. Let's ask some multinational mega corporations who've actually seen the patents
Why, yes.... why don't we look at the information Barnes and Noble made public, and the detailed analysis done by Groklaw on the topic? That will be fun.
Why don't you educate yourself a little on the topic before you blindly go about accusing me of personal bias and an uninformed opinion... because clearly you're lacking a lot of information yourself.
So, let's look at the analysis by people who know more about law than you or I:
But now I'll show you the other exhibits, Exhibits A, B, D, E and F, so you can get the full picture of what Barnes & Noble is accusing Microsoft of doing. Take a look especially at Exhibit D, where there is a long detailing of the incredibly insignificant patents Microsoft has the nerve to use against Android, claiming control of the entire operating system with what is pretty much a handful of stupid patents no one really needs or which are so trivial that the fees it claims become outrageous. At least that is Barnes & Noble's position. It made my blood boil to read it. As always, if you shouldn't look at patents, don't click to read the rest of the article.
Maybe it's you who knows less about this than you think? Because most of these patents are trivial, likely invalid, and the claims being made by Microsoft don't hold water. Like this little nugget:
In sum, Barnes & Noble maintains that the '372 patent inadequately describes a technique for downloading and displaying an electronic document having an embedded background image, and is anticipated and unpatentable in any event because the very functionality it purports to claim was already provided by a prior art Netscape browser before Microsoft filed its patent application.
Or this
The '536 and '853 patents relate to another minor feature, namely simulating mouse inputs using non-mouse devices. The '853 patent misrepresented the state of the art at the time the patent was filed by stating that "a need exists for permitting a user to perform all operations of a mouse-type device using a stylus." This, however is demonstrably incorrect. The '536 and '853 patents were filed in November 2000. Long before that time, numerous systems had been developed that enabled computer users to simulate mouse behavior with touch input devices.
But, hey, you feel free to believe everything Microsoft says as infallible truth. Unless you have facts, you're the one talking out of your ass.
I have a reasonable degree of confidence that these claims have been looked at, and there is strong reason to believe that much of what is being claimed falls into the category of really weak (and sketchy) patents.
How does that mean the patent system is broken? Microsoft is just collecting royalties on technology they invented and developed.
That's one theory... but since Microsoft has never publicly identified all of the patents, just how many of them would be valid, and how many of them would be technology which had been invented by someone else?
You have to figure, pretty much anything which had been in Berkely UNIX shouldn't be patentable because we all know about it... anything which was widely taught in schools and in text books shouldn't be patentable because it was common knowledge and available to any "skilled practitioner"... anything which had been implemented in another OS before MS had it shouldn't be patentable because of prior art.
If this is truly technology that Microsoft solely created from scratch, then maybe... but if they copied something else that had been done before (which, isn't exactly unprecedented) then all they've done is co-opt someone else's invention by patenting it first.
so that other companies can use technology invented by other companies who would otherwise keep the details secret.
My problem is that MS wants to have their cake and eat it too... they regularly insinuate that Linux violates its patents, but they won't say which ones are being violated. So, they are keeping it secret and then suing over it.
So, Microsoft patents stuff that might make many of us want to march on the Patent Office with torches and pitchforks because we learned it in first year CS class.
I'm sorry, but the USPTO is staffed with morons who are pushing through patents and collecting fees for it, Microsoft hasn't offered up full public disclosure to which patents are being infringed, and, let's face it, just because Microsoft has more lawyers doesn't mean they're playing within the rules of the game.
So, on face value... I don't have enough information to know what they claim is being violated, and I don't have enough trust in any large corporation to take them at their word.
But we all know that absolutely stupid things get granted patents, and those often cover things that have been around for a long time and had already been done by someone else.
So, unless you have any actual information to suggest all of these patents are 100% MS invented, and wouldn't be invalidated by a court challenge... you're just assuming they're all good. For those of us who remember the MS of the 80's... well, I'm not willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt on this.
So, Microsoft is getting paid for every Android device sold in the US...
And people think the patent system isn't broken.
I wish we had a clear list of the patents Microsoft is asserting are being infringed, because from TFA:
Microsoft has also sought licensing deals from vendors whose products run Linux, which the software maker also claims violates its patents.
That's just sad, really... you can't build anything without paying Microsoft for the privilege of not getting sued. I'm betting a good deal of those patents are likely stupid things that had been in other operating systems before MS copied and patented them.
It's a good idea, but very hard to pull off in practice.
Why? Well, most customers are basically afraid of cables. If you have a technical solution for that you may have a business.
If you're talking about a modern TV and a recent media box... an HDMI cable is pretty easy even for the average person.
If all you have is a TV and a media device (which is going to cover the people who are afraid of cables), you have one cable from your device to your TV.
I want to be able to attach smart stuff to the TV...smart stuff I choose.
I agree with this... I recently bought a new TV; it's a nice TV but it's got no wifi or any of that stuff. And, I didn't want any of that... it's just a monitor really, the fact that it has speakers or knows how to change channels isn't even being used.
But, my AppleTV allows me to connect and stream all of the stuff in my iTunes. Nothing you couldn't do with Slingbox or Windows Media Player or a lot of other products on the market... just a wireless media device.
It cost 1/10th to buy the Apple TV as the cost of the TV, so to me it's the more replaceable part so it makes more sense to not have it as part of the TV... and it's cheaper and easier to upgrade and replace.
I'm reminded of my wife's last car, which had in-dash GPS navigation... which was cool because at the time it was new. But, as the maps got out of date and we looked at updating it... the DVD with updated maps from GM would have cost almost 3x the price of a consumer GPS you could pick up at any electronics store. It wasn't worth trying to upgrade the one installed in the car; the technology was pretty much obsolete.
So, me I'd rather have a device external to the TV which is more readily upgraded than have the functionality in the TV... and since my last TV lasted almost a decade, I expect I'm at least 5-7 years away from replacing this one. Which means anything they're planning now will have completely changed by the next TV.
And, I also discovered the added cool factor that I can control my AppleTV from my iPad... so I would say to any company making a media extender... make an Android or iOS app for your device... being able to use your smart phone/tablet to control your media center is way cooler than just the remote that comes with it. If they're already both on your wifi network, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to communicate. I can control my AppleTV and the iTunes on my computer from anywhere in the house, and the native app means I can do more than I can with the remote that it came with.
Putting this into the TV just adds cost to the TV, and opens you up for some functionality which has become obsolete which you can't readily update... spend the extra money on an external device, they've gotten quite cheap now, and they are likely a little more general purpose than what will be in the TV.
Lower interest rates. Print money. Buy stuff with printed money. Lower interest rates. Print money. Buy stuff with printed money.
Put it in a loop, you'll get all of your Nobel prize winning 'economists'.
That may be the second thing we agree on today... I also think Greenspan was an idiot who mostly just seemed to sound like Ayn Rand.
Sadly, I just don't agree with the Libertarian models of economics either.. they're far to simplistic, and rely on assumptions I'm not convinced can be justified.
Oooh, they're independent because they say so... I'm sorry, but what about them makes me believe that?
Is it that they get funding from Exxon? How about Philip Morris? How about the fact that they're well known shills for Microsoft?
I'm sorry, but you keep citing groups who are either shills for your beliefs, or the people who espouse them... so I accuse you of circular logic and sleight of hand. These guys get together into a little self congratulatory circle jerk to put out papers that espouse their point of view, and then use them as sources for when they're later espousing their point of view.
The fact that you're citing a vitriol filled, libertarian biased think tank who sees the world through the lens they wish to see it doesn't make any of what you're citing as facts.
In fact, if you're going to continue to rely on a biased organization who exists to provide position papers to support its sponsors... well, then you have so thoroughly drunk the kool aid as to have become someone who believes in the dogma, and has left rational thought behind him.
Sorry man, but the "Independent Institute" is a political tool of a conservative agenda. As such, I simply won't take anything they put forth as fact, but propaganda.
Here is a Congressional hearing that did look at that question as well, those guys are definitely more knowledgeable about it than you are and they say FDIC was created to ensure that banks didn't have to compete on quality of service, that people would specifically have the moral hazard of not caring which bank to lend their money to
I'm sorry, but you're citing a video in which Ron Paul is making claims and offering his assertions as fact... of course he's saying what you want him to say, but that has nothing to do with the reasons FDIC were created.
At the time of its adoption in 1933, deposit insurance had a record of experiments at the state level extending back to 1829. New York was the first of 14 states that adopted plans, over a period from 1829 to 1917, to insure or guarantee bank deposits or other obligations that served as currency. The purposes of the various state insurance plans were similar: to protect communities from the economic disruptions caused by bank failures; and to protect depositors against losses. In the majority of cases the insurance plans eventually proved unworkable. By early 1930, the last of these plans had ceased operations.
At the federal level, deposit insurance had a legislative history reaching back to 1886. A total of 150 proposals for deposit insurance or guaranty were made in Congress between 1886 and 1933. Many of these proposals were prompted by financial crises, though none was as severe as the crisis that developed in the early 1930s. The events of that period finally convinced the general public that measures of a national scope were needed to alleviate the disruptions caused by bank failures.
From the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 to the end of 1933, about 9,000 banks suspended operations, resulting in losses to depositors of about $1.3 billion. The closure of 4,000 banks in the first few months of 1933, and the panic that accompanied these suspensions, led President Roosevelt to declare a bank holiday on March 6, 1933. The financial system was on the verge of collapse, and both the manufacturing and agricultural sectors were operating at a fraction of capacity.
The crisis environment led to the call for deposit insurance. Ultimately, the force of public opinion spurred Congress to enact deposit insurance legislation. The Banking Act of 1933, which created the FDIC, was signed by President Roosevelt on June 16, 1933.
By almost any measure, the FDIC has been successful in maintaining public confidence in the banking system. Prior to the establishment of the FDIC, large-scale cash demands of fearful depositors were often the fatal blow to banks that otherwise might have survived. Widespread bank runs have become a thing of the past and no longer constitute a threat to the industry. The money supply both on a local and national level has ceased to be subject to contractions caused by bank failures. The liquidation of failed bank assets no longer disrupts local or national markets and a significant portion of a community's assets are no longer tied up in bankruptcy proceedings when a bank fails.
Just because Ron Paul says it, doesn't make it true.. it's in support of his ideological position, which, based on your sig is the same as your own. In my opinion, he spouts the same drivel as a lot of similar people... I think he's a crank like Ayn Rand.
Retroactively saying it was to prevent the need for banks to compete on quality of service is revisionist history at best, and an outright lie at worst. It was created because banks were failing and wreaking havoc on the economy.
Finding an American congressman who blindly believes in deregulation and a free market is easy... but I've yet to see any evidence that what these people are claiming works. In fact, it's the la
Take the banking fiasco. FDIC! Federal insurance that says that if you put your money in the bank we guarantee that you are not going to lose it. Take away that insurance and people are going to behave differently. With it banks can not compete on safety. They can only compete on rates and free stuff. Is it surprising what we got? Without the FDIC banks could compete on safety of your money. Those that do not want safety can not have it.
And your lack of understanding of why FDIC exists in the first place doesn't make you correct.
See, after the Great Depression when banks basically gambled away the money people deposited, people figured out that without some controls and regulations, it would just happen again.
Unfortunately, starting with Reagan and going forward, people gradually removed the regulations on the banking industry. So, the junk debt which got passed off as AAA became everyone else's problem -- not just the people who had knowingly given risky debt.
So, the exact same market failure occurred in the 30's as recently.... an unregulated banking industry is basically a ponzi scheme, precisely because all the market is interested in doing is maximizing short term profit, and making sure other people carry the risk. It is just an incentive to rip people off -- essentially the whole world paid for a bunch of greedy American banks to foist off their bad debt while pretending it was secured/safe debt. It was essentially like kiting checks, only on a global scale.
A free market would never create a safer banking system... you believe that, I'm sure... but there is no actual evidence to believe that this wonderful unicorn you think of as the market arrives at good solutions. In fact, it's hard not to reach the opposite conclusion.
Citing an example of why the regulations were put there in the first place, and showing why the removal of them led to the same abysmal failure isn't successfully defending your point... it's using an example of failure to attempt to prove something else. That's like saying that murder laws don't serve any purpose, and then showing the murder rate would go up if you didn't have a law against it.
In free market monopolies don't exist, only economies of scale, only companies that provide good product at good price, otherwise others enter the market with new ideas, tech and better prices.
See, there never has been what you term a truly free market... so anytime someone says that is how it works, I am forced to conclude you're telling me about your religion -- there's no proof of it, only your assertion. You believe it, but I don't believe for a minute it's the natural 'fact' you seem to.
Name one market that has ever existed in the world that was truly free, and didn't more or less devolve into the strong screwing over the weak? There have always been governments and rules, and people have always tried to be the only game in town.
I think your free market is a myth, and I think the lovely outcomes people ascribe to it are pure fantasy with no real evidence.
What I do know is that governments interfere with private individuals making private decisions and they end up destroying the markets.
What I know is that the markets are inherently flawed, don't produce the optimal results people like you claim they do, and would have been abused by people trying to gain the upper hand. And they always have.
They don't naturally arrive at optimal solutions, the freedom to choose with good information never materializes, and some greedy bastard will always lie, cheat, steal, and resort to violence to gain an upper hand... but you seem to think that's the optimal method of how such things work.
Me, I think it's just glorified anarchy that's been elevated to a status where people worship it as if it was the most morally perfect outcome we could ever hope for -- if you apply the morality of a free market to a society, you get a very bleak future of selfish behavior and sacrificing every body else for your own gain. 'Enlightened self interest' translates into "fuck everyone else, give me mine".
Of-course governments created the moral hazard by removing legal liability from corporations
That may be the only point we agree on... of course, I don't think the solution is to remove the regulations. I think it's to remove the freedom from liability they enjoy now.
If we magically went to an unregulated, free market tomorrow... I'm betting it would take centuries (if at all) to reach any form of equilibrium in which the behavior of companies was regulated by the market. And, since no such economy has ever existed for that long, you will get the exact opposite results that people claim that system would produce.
Kodak were so intent on protecting their film business they never took digicams seriously and ruined their own business by crippling their own cameras. They deserve to die, no-one killed them, it was suicide.
Not true at all, not when you have so called 'anti-trust' legislation thrown against you by the government
I've read that article... and, quite honestly, it sounds like a legitimate applilcation of anti-trust legistlation...
Kodak also asked the Court to rule that the market for a single brand of a product or service -- such as its own replacement parts -- can never be a "market" for assessing monopoly behavior under the Sherman Act.
"We disagree," Justice Blackmun said, adding that "the relevant market for antitrust purposes is determined by the choices available to Kodak equipment owners," who must use Kodak parts.
That's like saying that I can't legally have someone else service my car because GM has forbade it. It's my property, and I can employ who I like to repair it. GM doesn't have the right to restrict that, and neither did Kodak
The only thing we know for sure is that when government interferes with market, it causes failure.
Blah blah blah... corporations would fuck us all over if someone didn't keep an eye on them. Don't believe me? Go feed your children some melamine laced baby formula.
The all wonderful free market is a philosophical ideal to some people... to the rest of us, it's a mechanism which if not controlled will lead to horribly bad results. And, quite frankly, even with controls it does.
But, I can tell that you kneel at the altar and think it's infallible... so, whatever... I completely disagree with you.
maybe they can drag down some of those who helped put them in this spot in the process
I'm sorry, but only Kodak put Kodak into this spot... they've staunchly refused/failed to move forward, have rested on their laurels while the industry changed around them... and to be honest, they've made abysmally low quality consumer stuff for years.
My wife's parents now have their second Kodak camera... truthfully, it's a POS, but they don't use it much and is simple for them to use. We bought a photo printer that died in a few weeks. The one we returned it for died a few weeks after that. Utter garbage.
I have no sympathy for Kodak. I mourned the loss of Kodachrome, but that was more nostalgia. Seriously, Kodak hasn't made anything of value in years... and I currently own something like 5 or 6 cameras, so it's not like I'm not in the market for things you'd think they'd be making.
This is just the dying throws of a company who has failed to remain relevant in a changing environment.
Slashdot Mirror
When they announced this, I didn't really see the point.
I'm not buying new music from my iPhone (because I don't have one) and expecting it to show up on my computer ... I'm not buying songs on my computer either. Pretty much all of my music is ripped straight from CDs I've bought, and my music library is currently > 70GB.
So, if I need to update my iPods or my iPad, I just plug them into my computer. My iPod classic holds the entire library anyway, and my smaller iPod and iPad get sync'd with what I tell them. At a certain point, the 16GB or so of music they each have is days worth, so it's not like I run out.
I'm obviously not the target audience for this (not least of which because I'm not willing to pay) ... but I don't know the benefit of having my music "in the cloud". The only cloud stuff I've ever used is DropBox, and even after a few months, I barely used that anymore.
Having said that, I'm sure that for someone this is a highly useful feature ... but I think you'd have to be purchasing content on the go a lot more than I can even conceive of.
And, of course, the thing to remember about Numb3rs is they didn't really have a genius mathematician who solved all of these problems. Much of the math was solid-sounding, but generally they weren't afraid to use math like Star Trek used tachyons and just make stuff up.
So, the fact that real statisticians identified this is in no way lessened by anything you saw in Numb3rs.
Also, Superman doesn't really live in New York City, and Jack Bauer isn't a real guy. Oh, and there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy.
Sorry to disappoint, but you're talking about fiction on TV.
Valid point, but there are some places which have data privacy laws Facebook will be bound to ... and those laws likely say that there's limited things Facebook can do with certain data. I think in some countries, this would likely run afoul of that.
However, for the rest of us, it might be fun to game the system and flood it with a bunch of stuff to drive things crazy ... "Romney wears womens underwear", "Barak Obama wipes his nose on tablecloths" or other random things might at least poison the well.
They may be going to give it away no matter what you do, but that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it.
Yup, there we go ... "Facebook To Share Private Data" ... it doesn't matter who at this point, because eventually it becomes "everybody".
Facebook is going to share your private data eventually. They're going to do it as often as they can get away with, and for as much money as it nets them.
Their privacy statement is meaningless, and they don't care about such things ... so, if anybody has the private information for Zuckerburg and the other trolls running Facebook ... start putting it on every public forum that you can find.
Soon, if not already (as we've seen with this) we will truly have thought-crime, and the government will simply monitor you to ensure you're not a communist or a dissenter..
Post a status saying that you think a certain member of congress is a douchebag? Maybe a little visit from the feds to give you a little re-education ... I never thought I'd truly live to see the Orwellian future.
You jest, but companies do require those skillsets.
I spend over a decade primarily as a coder. Since then I've been out in the consulting industry.
The last project I was working on made me really see the value of a good PM, and made me realize it's a skillset I need to flesh out a little. The majority of PMs I've see area hinderance to getting the job done ... but on an enterprise-wide roll out of a software upgrade, consisting of a lot of environments, and a lot of machines (and manpower involved), having a PM who could actually steer the project, get it done on time and on budget, and actually accomplish the goals ... well, let me say he was the first PM to truly gain my respect.
He knew that it was his job to clear the path so that me and the other people on the ground could get our job done, and he had a genuine plan as to how we'd build it. The end result was a successful project, happy clients, and a reference project that made the people who signed off on the money feel they'd received value for money. Literally, the best PM I've ever worked with.
By the time you're talking about projects with really huge scales and timelines on the order of a year or so ... the skillset is absolutely necessary. And if you have someone who has done this stuff for real, they tend to better understand what's involved (which is why the managers I've had who used to code are better than the ones who have only ever been managers).
Nobody says you need to be a PHB, but there's nothing wrong with competent people moving into management -- they can at least bring some experience and insight to the role.
Almost anybody I've ever known who has moved onto being the lead architect isn't handling much (if any) code anymore. You're operating at a different level ... the overall design, the components that make it up, and working with the dev team to sort out problems. And, of course, working to define the requirements, use cases, and all of the other stuff like that.
Which is fine, but from what I've seen you can stay as an actual Programmer for so long, and then people expect you to move into architect/management roles to oversee the people who now do the coding. Your job becomes big-picture kind of stuff. Sometimes they look at someone of a certain age who is still writing code and wonder why you're still doing that.
If you're looking to solve new and interesting problems without feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over ... well, maybe what you want to do be doing it is working with a consulting company? The breadth and depth of your experience gets used for many different problems, it definitely changes often, and you get called in to help clients solve problems and develop solutions
Not saying consulting is for everyone, or that it's even the best choice out there ... but when I 'graduated' from a previous job as a programmer and got into consulting, I found I got to work on different projects, provide different insights into them, and then work towards the overall solution.
If you've been doing the kind of dev work you describe for long enough, there's a remarkable amount of soft skills you've likely picked up that are very marketable ... you don't need to know everything about everything, but knowing a lot about a lot of things actually makes you quite useful as a generalist skillset, with the ability to delve deeper when the need/occasion arises.
Along with cyclists, pedestrians, other motor vehicles ... I'm just waiting for the day some idiot plows through a crosswalk because he was playing video games on his windshield.
Providing information not specifically relevant to actually driving just sounds like a really bad idea. Stick to information that can actually help, sure, but some of the examples cited in the summary just sound absurd. Finding a free table at a cafe? Not a good idea.
Hell, some coffee shops with drive-thru windows are a traffic hazard as everyone tries to get in/out of the parking lot end up driving like absolute idiots. Why someone coming out of a parking lot with a fresh coffee thinks the 80kph traffic needs to stop for them is beyond me. At one point, the city tried to limit where they could open up new stores ... and they actually sued the city for interfering with their business; meanwhile the city has had to install traffic lights to prevent accidents at their stores.
I don't want that crap while I'm driving ... I want to know my route, if there's construction delays, if there's been an accident up ahead ... you know, stuff pertinent to the actual act of driving a motor vehicle.
If you start giving the average driver this kind of crap, you're going to get more road hazards as someone idiot is waving his hand at his windshield trying to pre-order a double, skinny, tall, machiato with extra foam before he gets to Starbucks (and, no, I don't care if any of those words actually apply to Starbucks) ... from what I can tell, most drivers can barely focus on the act of driving, they don't need their car to be some information/entertainment hub.
With more places moving ahead with distracted driving laws, do car companies really want to be putting in this kind of stuff? This just sounds really dangerous and stupid to me.
Sure, in-car GPS is a huge boost to driving ... but looking up when a bridge was constructed or making restaurant reservations? Sorry, but that's not something you should be doing while driving.
But, it could be a title ... he could be Frob, the Splutnik. :-P
Yeah, and my firewall/router currently does both for me.
Which means I can use one of the internal-only address ranges to layout my home network, be secured behind a firewall, and not have my network layout be made obvious to anyone else. Which is good, because I have two different sub-nets and two different wifi hotspots in my house.
Since I only get one public IP from my ISP, that covers exactly what I need. I'm sure the greedy bastards would like to charge me for each computer I have, but tough.
Are you implying there's a downside to NAT for a home user? For smaller networks, being behind a NATed, firewalled connection gives me exactly what I need ... and, let's be honest, IPv6 has been about to become widespread for slightly longer than the "year of the Linux desktop" has been imminent.
Tell us, how is NAT a bad thing? So far you've just sneered at it -- from my perspective, it solves the problem it's meant to. And I can't even begin to tell you the number of large corporations I've worked at with computers all addressed within these ranges. Not having them routable to the rest of the planet is actually a useful thing.
Some stuff, sure. But, if you maintain clusters of machines or need to do hugely repetitive tasks, a GUI can actually be a hinderance.
I have seen applications in which you might be administering literally hundreds of items, if not thousands ... for some maintenance tasks, you end up manually going through a GUI for hundreds of items one at a time to make a change. Which is boring, repetitive, and error prone. One of the advantage of doing things GUI-less is that it allows for automation of tasks more than a GUI.
Almost anything you need to run at a corporate level where you have a lot of them works way better if you can automate it ... I have seen people trying to make changed to a large number of SAN allocated volumes, and it's painful to watch someone go through the steps with a GUI, and it's a lot more error prone.
If you're talking about a single, stand-alone piece of software that doesn't devolve into having hundreds (if not thousands) of items to control, sure, a GUI is great ... but if you ever have to update hundreds of items at a time, the GUI paradigm can fall apart completely. I once had a task to do in which I had to modify around 75 things ... it took me about 4 hours of "click button, wait, click next button, wait" and made me want to kill the developers who had written it. Partly because there was no multi-select, and partly because if it was scriptable it would become an easy maintenance task -- without it, it's painful. And, it's not like they couldn't anticipate people would need to do this often and to a large number of items.
Even for some routine maintenance I need to do on some machine clusters, it's easier to write a batch script and use "sc" to start and stop services .. because I need to shut down and disable the exact same service on 15-20 machines, I need to do it right now, and I need to get them all down as close as possible. Logging into each machine and shutting these services down with Task Manager ... well, that's pretty much a time sink. Then when I need to start them all up, I've got a corresponding script. These are tasks that we do approaching daily in one or more clusters.
For years Windows has had the "GUI only" paradigm for most applications ... pushing more applications to be scriptable and run headless will go a long way to making many administrative tasks much easier to handle. It may take a bit of a learning curve, but being able to automate certain tasks eventually becomes a huge time save (so it saves money), and is a lot more consistent (which also saves money).
I applaud Microsoft starting to push application developers towards this ... because the sheer amount of items I've seen which can benefit from this has convinced me that we must spend countless man hours of someone clicking through a GUI when a script could do it in a few minutes. That tends to be hugely lost productivity that people could be spending doing other tasks.
Well, because he's always had a bit of an out of control persona ... and, really, if you look at pictures of him he's never looked like the healthiest person alive.
He's just so famous for being utterly trashed on stage, or getting beaten up in pubs ... one just assumes he's dead by now. Glad he's not, but it's easy to see how people might assume he is.
Why, yes .... why don't we look at the information Barnes and Noble made public, and the detailed analysis done by Groklaw on the topic? That will be fun.
Why don't you educate yourself a little on the topic before you blindly go about accusing me of personal bias and an uninformed opinion ... because clearly you're lacking a lot of information yourself.
So, let's look at the analysis by people who know more about law than you or I:
Maybe it's you who knows less about this than you think? Because most of these patents are trivial, likely invalid, and the claims being made by Microsoft don't hold water. Like this little nugget:
Or this
But, hey, you feel free to believe everything Microsoft says as infallible truth. Unless you have facts, you're the one talking out of your ass.
I have a reasonable degree of confidence that these claims have been looked at, and there is strong reason to believe that much of what is being claimed falls into the category of really weak (and sketchy) patents.
That's one theory ... but since Microsoft has never publicly identified all of the patents, just how many of them would be valid, and how many of them would be technology which had been invented by someone else?
You have to figure, pretty much anything which had been in Berkely UNIX shouldn't be patentable because we all know about it ... anything which was widely taught in schools and in text books shouldn't be patentable because it was common knowledge and available to any "skilled practitioner" ... anything which had been implemented in another OS before MS had it shouldn't be patentable because of prior art.
If this is truly technology that Microsoft solely created from scratch, then maybe ... but if they copied something else that had been done before (which, isn't exactly unprecedented) then all they've done is co-opt someone else's invention by patenting it first.
My problem is that MS wants to have their cake and eat it too ... they regularly insinuate that Linux violates its patents, but they won't say which ones are being violated. So, they are keeping it secret and then suing over it.
So, Microsoft patents stuff that might make many of us want to march on the Patent Office with torches and pitchforks because we learned it in first year CS class.
I'm sorry, but the USPTO is staffed with morons who are pushing through patents and collecting fees for it, Microsoft hasn't offered up full public disclosure to which patents are being infringed, and, let's face it, just because Microsoft has more lawyers doesn't mean they're playing within the rules of the game.
So, on face value ... I don't have enough information to know what they claim is being violated, and I don't have enough trust in any large corporation to take them at their word.
But we all know that absolutely stupid things get granted patents, and those often cover things that have been around for a long time and had already been done by someone else.
So, unless you have any actual information to suggest all of these patents are 100% MS invented, and wouldn't be invalidated by a court challenge ... you're just assuming they're all good. For those of us who remember the MS of the 80's ... well, I'm not willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt on this.
So, Microsoft is getting paid for every Android device sold in the US ...
And people think the patent system isn't broken.
I wish we had a clear list of the patents Microsoft is asserting are being infringed, because from TFA:
That's just sad, really ... you can't build anything without paying Microsoft for the privilege of not getting sued. I'm betting a good deal of those patents are likely stupid things that had been in other operating systems before MS copied and patented them.
If you're talking about a modern TV and a recent media box ... an HDMI cable is pretty easy even for the average person.
If all you have is a TV and a media device (which is going to cover the people who are afraid of cables), you have one cable from your device to your TV.
I agree with this ... I recently bought a new TV; it's a nice TV but it's got no wifi or any of that stuff. And, I didn't want any of that ... it's just a monitor really, the fact that it has speakers or knows how to change channels isn't even being used.
But, my AppleTV allows me to connect and stream all of the stuff in my iTunes. Nothing you couldn't do with Slingbox or Windows Media Player or a lot of other products on the market ... just a wireless media device.
It cost 1/10th to buy the Apple TV as the cost of the TV, so to me it's the more replaceable part so it makes more sense to not have it as part of the TV ... and it's cheaper and easier to upgrade and replace.
I'm reminded of my wife's last car, which had in-dash GPS navigation ... which was cool because at the time it was new. But, as the maps got out of date and we looked at updating it ... the DVD with updated maps from GM would have cost almost 3x the price of a consumer GPS you could pick up at any electronics store. It wasn't worth trying to upgrade the one installed in the car; the technology was pretty much obsolete.
So, me I'd rather have a device external to the TV which is more readily upgraded than have the functionality in the TV ... and since my last TV lasted almost a decade, I expect I'm at least 5-7 years away from replacing this one. Which means anything they're planning now will have completely changed by the next TV.
And, I also discovered the added cool factor that I can control my AppleTV from my iPad ... so I would say to any company making a media extender ... make an Android or iOS app for your device ... being able to use your smart phone/tablet to control your media center is way cooler than just the remote that comes with it. If they're already both on your wifi network, there's no reason they shouldn't be able to communicate. I can control my AppleTV and the iTunes on my computer from anywhere in the house, and the native app means I can do more than I can with the remote that it came with.
Putting this into the TV just adds cost to the TV, and opens you up for some functionality which has become obsolete which you can't readily update ... spend the extra money on an external device, they've gotten quite cheap now, and they are likely a little more general purpose than what will be in the TV.
That may be the second thing we agree on today ... I also think Greenspan was an idiot who mostly just seemed to sound like Ayn Rand.
Sadly, I just don't agree with the Libertarian models of economics either .. they're far to simplistic, and rely on assumptions I'm not convinced can be justified.
Oooh, they're independent because they say so ... I'm sorry, but what about them makes me believe that?
Is it that they get funding from Exxon? How about Philip Morris? How about the fact that they're well known shills for Microsoft?
I'm sorry, but you keep citing groups who are either shills for your beliefs, or the people who espouse them ... so I accuse you of circular logic and sleight of hand. These guys get together into a little self congratulatory circle jerk to put out papers that espouse their point of view, and then use them as sources for when they're later espousing their point of view.
The fact that you're citing a vitriol filled, libertarian biased think tank who sees the world through the lens they wish to see it doesn't make any of what you're citing as facts.
In fact, if you're going to continue to rely on a biased organization who exists to provide position papers to support its sponsors ... well, then you have so thoroughly drunk the kool aid as to have become someone who believes in the dogma, and has left rational thought behind him.
Sorry man, but the "Independent Institute" is a political tool of a conservative agenda. As such, I simply won't take anything they put forth as fact, but propaganda.
I'm sorry, but you're citing a video in which Ron Paul is making claims and offering his assertions as fact ... of course he's saying what you want him to say, but that has nothing to do with the reasons FDIC were created.
From FDIC's own site:
Just because Ron Paul says it, doesn't make it true .. it's in support of his ideological position, which, based on your sig is the same as your own. In my opinion, he spouts the same drivel as a lot of similar people ... I think he's a crank like Ayn Rand.
Retroactively saying it was to prevent the need for banks to compete on quality of service is revisionist history at best, and an outright lie at worst. It was created because banks were failing and wreaking havoc on the economy.
Finding an American congressman who blindly believes in deregulation and a free market is easy ... but I've yet to see any evidence that what these people are claiming works. In fact, it's the la
And your lack of understanding of why FDIC exists in the first place doesn't make you correct.
See, after the Great Depression when banks basically gambled away the money people deposited, people figured out that without some controls and regulations, it would just happen again.
Unfortunately, starting with Reagan and going forward, people gradually removed the regulations on the banking industry. So, the junk debt which got passed off as AAA became everyone else's problem -- not just the people who had knowingly given risky debt.
So, the exact same market failure occurred in the 30's as recently .... an unregulated banking industry is basically a ponzi scheme, precisely because all the market is interested in doing is maximizing short term profit, and making sure other people carry the risk. It is just an incentive to rip people off -- essentially the whole world paid for a bunch of greedy American banks to foist off their bad debt while pretending it was secured/safe debt. It was essentially like kiting checks, only on a global scale.
A free market would never create a safer banking system ... you believe that, I'm sure ... but there is no actual evidence to believe that this wonderful unicorn you think of as the market arrives at good solutions. In fact, it's hard not to reach the opposite conclusion.
Citing an example of why the regulations were put there in the first place, and showing why the removal of them led to the same abysmal failure isn't successfully defending your point ... it's using an example of failure to attempt to prove something else. That's like saying that murder laws don't serve any purpose, and then showing the murder rate would go up if you didn't have a law against it.
See, there never has been what you term a truly free market ... so anytime someone says that is how it works, I am forced to conclude you're telling me about your religion -- there's no proof of it, only your assertion. You believe it, but I don't believe for a minute it's the natural 'fact' you seem to.
Name one market that has ever existed in the world that was truly free, and didn't more or less devolve into the strong screwing over the weak? There have always been governments and rules, and people have always tried to be the only game in town.
I think your free market is a myth, and I think the lovely outcomes people ascribe to it are pure fantasy with no real evidence.
What I know is that the markets are inherently flawed, don't produce the optimal results people like you claim they do, and would have been abused by people trying to gain the upper hand. And they always have.
They don't naturally arrive at optimal solutions, the freedom to choose with good information never materializes, and some greedy bastard will always lie, cheat, steal, and resort to violence to gain an upper hand ... but you seem to think that's the optimal method of how such things work.
Me, I think it's just glorified anarchy that's been elevated to a status where people worship it as if it was the most morally perfect outcome we could ever hope for -- if you apply the morality of a free market to a society, you get a very bleak future of selfish behavior and sacrificing every body else for your own gain. 'Enlightened self interest' translates into "fuck everyone else, give me mine".
That may be the only point we agree on ... of course, I don't think the solution is to remove the regulations. I think it's to remove the freedom from liability they enjoy now.
If we magically went to an unregulated, free market tomorrow ... I'm betting it would take centuries (if at all) to reach any form of equilibrium in which the behavior of companies was regulated by the market. And, since no such economy has ever existed for that long, you will get the exact opposite results that people claim that system would produce.
I think the word you want is hubris.
It wasn't suicide, it was stupidity and arrogance.
I've read that article ... and, quite honestly, it sounds like a legitimate applilcation of anti-trust legistlation ...
That's like saying that I can't legally have someone else service my car because GM has forbade it. It's my property, and I can employ who I like to repair it. GM doesn't have the right to restrict that, and neither did Kodak
Blah blah blah ... corporations would fuck us all over if someone didn't keep an eye on them. Don't believe me? Go feed your children some melamine laced baby formula.
The all wonderful free market is a philosophical ideal to some people ... to the rest of us, it's a mechanism which if not controlled will lead to horribly bad results. And, quite frankly, even with controls it does.
But, I can tell that you kneel at the altar and think it's infallible ... so, whatever ... I completely disagree with you.
I'm sorry, but only Kodak put Kodak into this spot ... they've staunchly refused/failed to move forward, have rested on their laurels while the industry changed around them ... and to be honest, they've made abysmally low quality consumer stuff for years.
My wife's parents now have their second Kodak camera ... truthfully, it's a POS, but they don't use it much and is simple for them to use. We bought a photo printer that died in a few weeks. The one we returned it for died a few weeks after that. Utter garbage.
I have no sympathy for Kodak. I mourned the loss of Kodachrome, but that was more nostalgia. Seriously, Kodak hasn't made anything of value in years ... and I currently own something like 5 or 6 cameras, so it's not like I'm not in the market for things you'd think they'd be making.
This is just the dying throws of a company who has failed to remain relevant in a changing environment.