Of course, government's decisions are often based not on what they are supposed to be based (the good of the people) but on various stupid details of its bureaucracy's functionality, lobbying, etc. However that certainly beats companies' decisions that are always based on the short-term profit goals, sometimes on internal bureaucracy, politics, etc. and NEVER involve anything related to the good of the people in a long term. Worse yet, those companies whose lifetime approaches the timeframe of a lomg scientific or engineering projects are often more infested with inefficient bureaucracy than the government.
No, they come back and tell me they can't get anything done the way they want to; or are missing some feature or another; or do not want to learn a new Office suite.
There is absolutely no learning involved.
Rarely, but even still sometimes, they cannot share materials with other business the way they would like
Translation: what I have said before -- someone asked them if they have MS Office and you forgot to tell them to say "yes"
or they can't take it home which is another thing.
WHAT???????? Of course, they can take OpenOffice home. It's free.
But that "compatibility" issue isn't as prevalent as the resistance to change, I think.
There is no change that they will see. The only
problem is that you haven't explained it to them -- but then if they actually worked with OpenOffice and then asked for another computer with MS Office, it would be absolutely pointless, therefore I think that either:
you are lying
they have not actually used it -- either because they didn't use computers at all, or because you didn't bother to tell them what OpenOffice is
It means that NOTHING that involves prolonged scientific research engineering projects can be done by private companies.
The company -- any company -- can't live forever, the limit differs depending on industry and company's various details, but company that lives for too long becomes way too powerful to prevent it from becoming a danger to the rest of society. Usually before that happens company dies (or becomes irrelevant) for all kinds of reasons, and if it doesn't happen, government has to force it to shut down through antitrust law. As more companies will be created, and more of them will become destructive, governments may be forced to create other kinds of laws or even methods of its enforcement, and companies' life will be still limited.
This brings us to the main problem -- as long as project's duration before becoming profitable exceeds company's reasonable lifetime, government has to handle the project until it will create something that companies can use. This means, to have sustainable progress in the areas that require long-term projects, we need a government (or governments) that can handle them.
This kind of government can't be small, or too concerned with the welfare of the companies that exist at its time -- after all, when a project will become commercially usable all those companies will be dead, and new companies will pick it up. This is absolutely contrary to the ideology of pretty much everything that is in power (republicans, democrats) or anywhere close to it (libertarians) in this country, but this is the only way to overcome various problems that can be only solved with long-term projects. Humans as a whole will benefit from it.
If they are civil, how an organization that is not in any way related to the original copyright infringement can seek any damages? Their lawsuit would be pointless, they have to go to original copyright holders and ask them to sue -- something that is very unlikely to succeed being a horrendous waste of money.
If criminal, "anti-pirates" have obtained an information about alleged crime, and withholding it from authorities and demanding payment from alleged perpetrators to continue witholding it. Sounds like they have already commited a crime of extortion.
I am not sure if Danish law works the same way, however those things are usually pretty similar everywhere.
If they don't they are not sysadmins. What they may lack is experience with particular vendors' equipment, however that is usually nonessential, and is remedied by reading a book. If a company does not understand this, a decent sysadmin wouldn't want to work for it. Where would shitty one-trick-pony sysadmins should work, I have no idea, my advice to them is to kill themselves so others won't suffer from their stupidity and incompetence.
I understand that US is in recession, and people are desperate, but this just isn't worth it -- when quality is lost, it's extremely difficult to get it back, so unless someone is comfortable with encouraging the start of another Dark Ages at no benefit for himself whatsoever, he should not try to chase narrowminded job definitions written by HR drones and PHBs but look for a job where no one will doubt his qualification.
Things like RAD has helped a lot of customers in formulating their needs. This is another step into the realisation that users are not really aware of what they want.
This is what RAD was intended for. Unfortunately it was only used to produce final product of substandard quality, not for prototype. The moral of the story is: make crap, and more crap will follow, so better just don't make it at all.
All arguments for or against MS aside; unless it is a government office or small business with little means to acquire the software; I don't go many places where they aren't running at least Office 97 or MS Works. I set things up with older word processors or Open Office for a couple of home offices and such; but they call me a week later asking how much it will cost them for Office or if they buy a new computer can they get it included.
Did they actually have problems, or did they just get asked by someone if they have Microsoft Office, answered "no" because you did not explain them what OpenOffice is, and panicked? I guess, if they are going to buy a new computer just to use MS Office, it's your fault for not explaining what they are getting, not their.
It's not ridiculous to ask for 100% (or at least 99 and 44/100ths percent) compatibility with MS-Word.
This is already done in OpenOffice.
Like it or not, MS-Word is the standard in business. If you're going to work in the business world, you at the very least need to read and produce docs in MS-Word format.
The standard must, and will be changed. Until that will happen, conversion to Word is a sufficient temporary measure.
"Almost" ain't good enough to get an application accepted. People will just see that documents created by said app look like crap in MS-Word (or, worse, can't even be opened in Word!) and will disregard the app as "not good enough".
Documents converted to MS Word format look JUST FINE for any imaginable purpose already. Demanding pixel-for-pixel compatibility is ridiculous, it has nothing to do with purpose and usability of the document.
I think you misunderstand the users' requirements. They don't want an Open Source / Free Software office suite that has all the functionality of MS-Office, but a different file format. They want drop-in compatibility, so they can read and produce documents from and for users of the de facto standard. And telling your customers/clients "switch to this relatively unknown program" isn't a solution.
There NEVER will be a complete drop-in compatibility as long as Microsoft does not publish its formats. However everything works for any imaginable purpose, and the program is free as both speech and beer. It's absolutely ridiculous for any large organization not to switch to it, as the benefits are obvious, and shortcomings are largely from the realm of FUD. If someone does not like OpenOffice formats, he can use export to PDF, and if he needs to allow editing and re-editing, why is he so obsessed with formatting?
An aside: While job hunting this past summer, I sent my resume around as HTML. I had more than one potential employer ask, "Can you send this to me in Word format instead?" Never mind the fact that MS-Word will happily open an HTML file, these epsilon-minus HR drones couldn't deal with it if it they couldn't double-click and have Word open right up. I would not have wanted to send an OpenOffice DOC file that looked crummy in honest-to-goodness MS-Word. And, now that I'm employed again, I would not like to send an OpenOffice DOC file to a customer.
If someone has problems with _that_, he is either:
Imaginary person created for the purpose of FUD.
A complete moron that would never understand what is in the document.
Completely brainwashed by Microsoft and a danger for society.
In either case you should be thankful that they don't read your resume, but the point is moot because any resume will convert perfectly from OpenOffice to Word format.
Do I think it's possible to create an open source app with 100% file compatibility with MS-Word? No, not until there's an open document format supported by MS-Word, one which has all the features of a Word document. Which probably means never, which probably means that OpenOffice will always occupy the same niche as Corel's WordPerfect office suite. The secondary players will compete with each other, but without 100% MS-Office support none will ever touch the 500lb. gorilla.
Microsoft did not achieve dominance by being completely compatible with its competitors. This meabs that products that use open formats will not have to do that either. They already are easier to obtain, they cost nothing to install (and no, they don't require "training" either), so the only thing that keeps Microsoft being 500lb. gorilla (that is actually 5lb. cardboard cut-out of a 500lb. gorilla) is inertia and people like you who most likely never bothered to see what they are criticizing. Inertia is not forever, and Microsoft has only two products that give it profit -- Windows and Office. If we will manage to replace Office in a large enough segment of computer-using population, Microsoft will choke and die no matter what else will happen, so we should rather work on that. Even if it will take punching every Microsoft-lover in the face.
We had our text format that were, and still are, the best possible representation of text, easily readable by both humans and programs (grep, awk, perl, erc.) -- they demanded features of their beloved MS Office and reading their Office files.
We made, just for their sorry asses (because we don't use such a thing by ourselves) all kinds of lightweight Office-style programs -- they demanded feature-by-feature equivalence even though most of them have no idea what those features are.
We achieved feature equivalence by creating horrendously bloated programs, almost as bloated as MS Office, and those things are still available for them for free -- they demanded compatibility with.doc format.
We have made filters that produce.doc format as good as one who does not have actual bugs from Microsoft code to include in his own one, can produce -- and now they have audacity to whine about results?
Did anyone try to understand how ridiculous the situation is now? There are perfectly usable, full replacements for MS Office programs, users can get them for free, developers can stick their code into them, everything works perfectly, and the very worst things that may happen are that MS Office will put wrong margin at the document exported from OpenOffice, or OpenOffice won't run MS Office virus.
WHAT THE [SKIPPED] DO THEY EXPECT NOW? That we will pay them for using our software? That OpenOffice will come with free version of MS Office, signed by Gates, and a box set of DVDs with all Ballmer's drunk dances and speeches? Or are they planning to pay Microsoft $300-$500 every two years until someone will get so fed up with this that he will blow up the Microsoft "campus" in Redmond?
This is absolutely ridiculous -- people that now demand complete compatibility with MS Office lost all traces of shame and decency, and if they have any they should just take our gift and shut up. Thanks are optional.
...are more suitable for technical and business discussions -- you still can have a populartiy-contest atmosphere on IRC, but it won't depend on people's habits of moving their eyes and other irrelevant and easy to skew by minor external factors and individual peculiarities things.
Apparently the weird design of this particular heatsink (fins on the CPU _and_ at the end of heat pipes) is not intended originally -- it's a modified heatsink that is supposed to have beem "folded in half" with noth heatsinks directly on the CPU, and heat pipes moving heat from the lower heatsink to the upper one. In the design that they have now lower fins are useless because all heat they dissipate heats the air and ends up decreasing the efficiency of the large heatsink at the end of the case.
The heat pipes are effective because they allow to not just pull the heat but to distribute it over a larger area of the large heatsink -- regular heatsinks have the limit on their size because the farther the fin is from the CPU, the less is the difference in the temperature between the fin and the air, so heat exchange is slower. Heat pipes move the heat to the remote pieces of the heatsink and distribute it more evenly, thus keeping it efficient regardless of the size. This was the idea of the original heatsink (a "sandwich" made of small lower heatsink and larger upper one with heat pipes between them) and it works on this one, even though four pipes is probably excessive, and lower fins are not doing anything useful.
Because Microsoft does not lose money to pirates -- it loses money to Intel and Nvidia that make the hardware. The whole operation is a loss machine to begin with, and will be for quite a while.
"Cheating" is pretty much bullshit -- if they cared they would demand games to be more cheating-proof. It's not that difficult to limit information sent to clients so "transparent walls" will show empty rooms, and messing with updated data will be pointless because server recalculates it. In any case invisible chips or proxy hacks are likely to appear. Microsoft only loses money on this -- users that can't use service aren't going to pay for it, and likely to make their networks -- and thanks to Microsoft's assholeness those networks will have to allow ONLY modded boxes because it's easier to make PC game run on a modded box than to reproduce Microsoft's protocol. That will leave Microsoft with their loss of $150-$200 as the final result of the sale.
So in the end it's the same thing as with Netscape -- Microsoft directs its attacks against people that enrage Gates (how dared they mod the Xbox to run the archrival system!!!), as opposed to doing something that actually profits the company. Judging for their numbers, only Windows and Office actually bring them money, everything else may look like a "strategic development" but now it seems more like a playground where two freaks at the top of the company exercise various ways of spitting into their customers' faces.
I don't think, at this price it's anything other than a desktop PC with a remote control. I have a PC (running Linux) that does pretty much the same except for PVR (that it will soon anyway), but I don't pretend that it's a new kind of device, it's a PC that happens to be used to watch movies and TV, and this is why it has (in my case) a projection screen instead of a regular monitor, but that's it.
While company calls it optical phased array, "array" only works with linearly increasing electric field, what turns it into just another case of diffraction, with "waveguides" being more like segments of diffracting material changing their properties each as a whole when electric field is applied (as opposed to pressure being applied in other devices). It would be more impressive if the device was purely optical -- if some material changed its properties based on the light applied to it, and bent another beam because of that change.
AFAICS, Gimp's only major shortcoming is in printing. I generally need a little more control over my printouts than a standard "Print X Copies to Printer Y [OK]" box.
Then change the printer type from "Postscript" to whatever hardware you use, and discover that gimp-print will do all that stuff better than Windows drivers would (not necessarily faster though).
There are two possible models that shareholders can use. First is what you describe, long-term growth when company expands and improves by means and processes that allow this process to continue indefinitely, or at least until market saturation, massive crisis, war or other circumstances that change the situation drastically. Then system can work, both shareholders and employers are ok.
Another strategy is "pump and dump" -- shareholders look for increase in company's credibility and stock price until some point, then leave in hordes to do the same thing with another company. Then they are only interested in short-term figures that will give the desired stock price spike, and if management delivers that, they are satisfied. If they also prepare parachutes for the upper management, and allow it to leave failing company to the greener pastures of future victims of this strategy, management does not complain either. Employees however are screwed.
Both strategies can be successful, and there is nothing in the market mechanism that encourages the first over second. Worse yet, first may be more risky because eventually a successful company faces market saturation, crisis, war, etc., yet pumping and dumping multiple companies over a short term may work as long as the stock market exists.
This would work if the amount of work was proportional to demand for product (and therefore revenue). But we know that any computer-related job, be it system administration or software development, usually has some "base" amount of work that should be performed no matter how many users are there, and small, often zero, amount of increase per user. This means, no matter what is the conditions of the economy, company, customers, etc., large amount of work should be performed, just the company may not have resources to support it. So if people are overworked it doesn't automatically mean that the situation is improving, it may mean that the company can't support the core of its functionality by reasonable means.
...every so often discovers some minor details of things that he was supposed to know BEFORE starting any software-related work, and publishes his discoveries on his site with large amount of drivel, usually inspired by his troubled childhood at Microsoft.
Subsection (c) establishes new labeling requirements for these non-standard compact discs. Among other things, a label prominently affixed to the front of the packaging must notify a consumer that the disc might not play properly in ordinary consumer electronics products and might not be recordable to the hard drive of a personal computer.
The label must be at least 120mm in diameter, and consist of full-size reproduction of the image presently located at http://goatse.cx and a black text "J4ck v413n7i 0wnz joo!" in 20mm high and 12mm wide letters in Helvetica font with at least 1mm wide lines, repeated three times 5mm from the rim of the label.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, government's decisions are often based not on what they are supposed to be based (the good of the people) but on various stupid details of its bureaucracy's functionality, lobbying, etc. However that certainly beats companies' decisions that are always based on the short-term profit goals, sometimes on internal bureaucracy, politics, etc. and NEVER involve anything related to the good of the people in a long term. Worse yet, those companies whose lifetime approaches the timeframe of a lomg scientific or engineering projects are often more infested with inefficient bureaucracy than the government.
No, they come back and tell me they can't get anything done the way they want to; or are missing some feature or another; or do not want to learn a new Office suite.
There is absolutely no learning involved.
Rarely, but even still sometimes, they cannot share materials with other business the way they would like
Translation: what I have said before -- someone asked them if they have MS Office and you forgot to tell them to say "yes"
or they can't take it home which is another thing.
WHAT???????? Of course, they can take OpenOffice home. It's free.
But that "compatibility" issue isn't as prevalent as the resistance to change, I think.
There is no change that they will see. The only problem is that you haven't explained it to them -- but then if they actually worked with OpenOffice and then asked for another computer with MS Office, it would be absolutely pointless, therefore I think that either:
Either is your fault.
Okay. What we need to do is find a group of people with the capability to go into space, and start oppressing them.
That's Russians.
It means that NOTHING that involves prolonged scientific research engineering projects can be done by private companies.
The company -- any company -- can't live forever, the limit differs depending on industry and company's various details, but company that lives for too long becomes way too powerful to prevent it from becoming a danger to the rest of society. Usually before that happens company dies (or becomes irrelevant) for all kinds of reasons, and if it doesn't happen, government has to force it to shut down through antitrust law. As more companies will be created, and more of them will become destructive, governments may be forced to create other kinds of laws or even methods of its enforcement, and companies' life will be still limited.
This brings us to the main problem -- as long as project's duration before becoming profitable exceeds company's reasonable lifetime, government has to handle the project until it will create something that companies can use. This means, to have sustainable progress in the areas that require long-term projects, we need a government (or governments) that can handle them.
This kind of government can't be small, or too concerned with the welfare of the companies that exist at its time -- after all, when a project will become commercially usable all those companies will be dead, and new companies will pick it up. This is absolutely contrary to the ideology of pretty much everything that is in power (republicans, democrats) or anywhere close to it (libertarians) in this country, but this is the only way to overcome various problems that can be only solved with long-term projects. Humans as a whole will benefit from it.
If they are civil, how an organization that is not in any way related to the original copyright infringement can seek any damages? Their lawsuit would be pointless, they have to go to original copyright holders and ask them to sue -- something that is very unlikely to succeed being a horrendous waste of money.
If criminal, "anti-pirates" have obtained an information about alleged crime, and withholding it from authorities and demanding payment from alleged perpetrators to continue witholding it. Sounds like they have already commited a crime of extortion.
I am not sure if Danish law works the same way, however those things are usually pretty similar everywhere.
If they don't they are not sysadmins. What they may lack is experience with particular vendors' equipment, however that is usually nonessential, and is remedied by reading a book. If a company does not understand this, a decent sysadmin wouldn't want to work for it. Where would shitty one-trick-pony sysadmins should work, I have no idea, my advice to them is to kill themselves so others won't suffer from their stupidity and incompetence.
I understand that US is in recession, and people are desperate, but this just isn't worth it -- when quality is lost, it's extremely difficult to get it back, so unless someone is comfortable with encouraging the start of another Dark Ages at no benefit for himself whatsoever, he should not try to chase narrowminded job definitions written by HR drones and PHBs but look for a job where no one will doubt his qualification.
Things like RAD has helped a lot of customers in formulating their needs. This is another step into the realisation that users are not really aware of what they want.
This is what RAD was intended for. Unfortunately it was only used to produce final product of substandard quality, not for prototype. The moral of the story is: make crap, and more crap will follow, so better just don't make it at all.
All arguments for or against MS aside; unless it is a government office or small business with little means to acquire the software; I don't go many places where they aren't running at least Office 97 or MS Works. I set things up with older word processors or Open Office for a couple of home offices and such; but they call me a week later asking how much it will cost them for Office or if they buy a new computer can they get it included.
Did they actually have problems, or did they just get asked by someone if they have Microsoft Office, answered "no" because you did not explain them what OpenOffice is, and panicked? I guess, if they are going to buy a new computer just to use MS Office, it's your fault for not explaining what they are getting, not their.
It's not ridiculous to ask for 100% (or at least 99 and 44/100ths percent) compatibility with MS-Word.
This is already done in OpenOffice.
Like it or not, MS-Word is the standard in business. If you're going to work in the business world, you at the very least need to read and produce docs in MS-Word format.
The standard must, and will be changed. Until that will happen, conversion to Word is a sufficient temporary measure.
"Almost" ain't good enough to get an application accepted. People will just see that documents created by said app look like crap in MS-Word (or, worse, can't even be opened in Word!) and will disregard the app as "not good enough".
Documents converted to MS Word format look JUST FINE for any imaginable purpose already. Demanding pixel-for-pixel compatibility is ridiculous, it has nothing to do with purpose and usability of the document.
I think you misunderstand the users' requirements. They don't want an Open Source / Free Software office suite that has all the functionality of MS-Office, but a different file format. They want drop-in compatibility, so they can read and produce documents from and for users of the de facto standard. And telling your customers/clients "switch to this relatively unknown program" isn't a solution.
There NEVER will be a complete drop-in compatibility as long as Microsoft does not publish its formats. However everything works for any imaginable purpose, and the program is free as both speech and beer. It's absolutely ridiculous for any large organization not to switch to it, as the benefits are obvious, and shortcomings are largely from the realm of FUD. If someone does not like OpenOffice formats, he can use export to PDF, and if he needs to allow editing and re-editing, why is he so obsessed with formatting?
An aside: While job hunting this past summer, I sent my resume around as HTML. I had more than one potential employer ask, "Can you send this to me in Word format instead?" Never mind the fact that MS-Word will happily open an HTML file, these epsilon-minus HR drones couldn't deal with it if it they couldn't double-click and have Word open right up. I would not have wanted to send an OpenOffice DOC file that looked crummy in honest-to-goodness MS-Word. And, now that I'm employed again, I would not like to send an OpenOffice DOC file to a customer.
If someone has problems with _that_, he is either:
In either case you should be thankful that they don't read your resume, but the point is moot because any resume will convert perfectly from OpenOffice to Word format.
Do I think it's possible to create an open source app with 100% file compatibility with MS-Word? No, not until there's an open document format supported by MS-Word, one which has all the features of a Word document. Which probably means never, which probably means that OpenOffice will always occupy the same niche as Corel's WordPerfect office suite. The secondary players will compete with each other, but without 100% MS-Office support none will ever touch the 500lb. gorilla.
Microsoft did not achieve dominance by being completely compatible with its competitors. This meabs that products that use open formats will not have to do that either. They already are easier to obtain, they cost nothing to install (and no, they don't require "training" either), so the only thing that keeps Microsoft being 500lb. gorilla (that is actually 5lb. cardboard cut-out of a 500lb. gorilla) is inertia and people like you who most likely never bothered to see what they are criticizing. Inertia is not forever, and Microsoft has only two products that give it profit -- Windows and Office. If we will manage to replace Office in a large enough segment of computer-using population, Microsoft will choke and die no matter what else will happen, so we should rather work on that. Even if it will take punching every Microsoft-lover in the face.
We had our text format that were, and still are, the best possible representation of text, easily readable by both humans and programs (grep, awk, perl, erc.) -- they demanded features of their beloved MS Office and reading their Office files.
.doc format.
.doc format as good as one who does not have actual bugs from Microsoft code to include in his own one, can produce -- and now they have audacity to whine about results?
We made, just for their sorry asses (because we don't use such a thing by ourselves) all kinds of lightweight Office-style programs -- they demanded feature-by-feature equivalence even though most of them have no idea what those features are.
We achieved feature equivalence by creating horrendously bloated programs, almost as bloated as MS Office, and those things are still available for them for free -- they demanded compatibility with
We have made filters that produce
Did anyone try to understand how ridiculous the situation is now? There are perfectly usable, full replacements for MS Office programs, users can get them for free, developers can stick their code into them, everything works perfectly, and the very worst things that may happen are that MS Office will put wrong margin at the document exported from OpenOffice, or OpenOffice won't run MS Office virus.
WHAT THE [SKIPPED] DO THEY EXPECT NOW? That we will pay them for using our software? That OpenOffice will come with free version of MS Office, signed by Gates, and a box set of DVDs with all Ballmer's drunk dances and speeches? Or are they planning to pay Microsoft $300-$500 every two years until someone will get so fed up with this that he will blow up the Microsoft "campus" in Redmond?
This is absolutely ridiculous -- people that now demand complete compatibility with MS Office lost all traces of shame and decency, and if they have any they should just take our gift and shut up. Thanks are optional.
...are more suitable for technical and business discussions -- you still can have a populartiy-contest atmosphere on IRC, but it won't depend on people's habits of moving their eyes and other irrelevant and easy to skew by minor external factors and individual peculiarities things.
The problem is, Microsoft does not get enough revenue from Xbox to cover those expenses. That including the game licensing.
...does it STAY QUIET as the fan's bearings wear out?
Apparently the weird design of this particular heatsink (fins on the CPU _and_ at the end of heat pipes) is not intended originally -- it's a modified heatsink that is supposed to have beem "folded in half" with noth heatsinks directly on the CPU, and heat pipes moving heat from the lower heatsink to the upper one. In the design that they have now lower fins are useless because all heat they dissipate heats the air and ends up decreasing the efficiency of the large heatsink at the end of the case.
The heat pipes are effective because they allow to not just pull the heat but to distribute it over a larger area of the large heatsink -- regular heatsinks have the limit on their size because the farther the fin is from the CPU, the less is the difference in the temperature between the fin and the air, so heat exchange is slower. Heat pipes move the heat to the remote pieces of the heatsink and distribute it more evenly, thus keeping it efficient regardless of the size. This was the idea of the original heatsink (a "sandwich" made of small lower heatsink and larger upper one with heat pipes between them) and it works on this one, even though four pipes is probably excessive, and lower fins are not doing anything useful.
Because Microsoft does not lose money to pirates -- it loses money to Intel and Nvidia that make the hardware. The whole operation is a loss machine to begin with, and will be for quite a while.
...Gates' wounded ego.
"Cheating" is pretty much bullshit -- if they cared they would demand games to be more cheating-proof. It's not that difficult to limit information sent to clients so "transparent walls" will show empty rooms, and messing with updated data will be pointless because server recalculates it. In any case invisible chips or proxy hacks are likely to appear. Microsoft only loses money on this -- users that can't use service aren't going to pay for it, and likely to make their networks -- and thanks to Microsoft's assholeness those networks will have to allow ONLY modded boxes because it's easier to make PC game run on a modded box than to reproduce Microsoft's protocol. That will leave Microsoft with their loss of $150-$200 as the final result of the sale.
So in the end it's the same thing as with Netscape -- Microsoft directs its attacks against people that enrage Gates (how dared they mod the Xbox to run the archrival system!!!), as opposed to doing something that actually profits the company. Judging for their numbers, only Windows and Office actually bring them money, everything else may look like a "strategic development" but now it seems more like a playground where two freaks at the top of the company exercise various ways of spitting into their customers' faces.
Updated Price: $7900.00 Who wants the Navi? If only to call themselves Lain? buhahaha
Navi is easy to upgrade, it had no DRM, and handheld version had self-hosted development environment.
I don't think, at this price it's anything other than a desktop PC with a remote control. I have a PC (running Linux) that does pretty much the same except for PVR (that it will soon anyway), but I don't pretend that it's a new kind of device, it's a PC that happens to be used to watch movies and TV, and this is why it has (in my case) a projection screen instead of a regular monitor, but that's it.
Sorry, it should be s/diffraction/refraction/
While company calls it optical phased array, "array" only works with linearly increasing electric field, what turns it into just another case of diffraction, with "waveguides" being more like segments of diffracting material changing their properties each as a whole when electric field is applied (as opposed to pressure being applied in other devices). It would be more impressive if the device was purely optical -- if some material changed its properties based on the light applied to it, and bent another beam because of that change.
AFAICS, Gimp's only major shortcoming is in printing. I generally need a little more control over my printouts than a standard "Print X Copies to Printer Y [OK]" box.
Then change the printer type from "Postscript" to whatever hardware you use, and discover that gimp-print will do all that stuff better than Windows drivers would (not necessarily faster though).
There are two possible models that shareholders can use. First is what you describe, long-term growth when company expands and improves by means and processes that allow this process to continue indefinitely, or at least until market saturation, massive crisis, war or other circumstances that change the situation drastically. Then system can work, both shareholders and employers are ok.
Another strategy is "pump and dump" -- shareholders look for increase in company's credibility and stock price until some point, then leave in hordes to do the same thing with another company. Then they are only interested in short-term figures that will give the desired stock price spike, and if management delivers that, they are satisfied. If they also prepare parachutes for the upper management, and allow it to leave failing company to the greener pastures of future victims of this strategy, management does not complain either. Employees however are screwed.
Both strategies can be successful, and there is nothing in the market mechanism that encourages the first over second. Worse yet, first may be more risky because eventually a successful company faces market saturation, crisis, war, etc., yet pumping and dumping multiple companies over a short term may work as long as the stock market exists.
This would work if the amount of work was proportional to demand for product (and therefore revenue). But we know that any computer-related job, be it system administration or software development, usually has some "base" amount of work that should be performed no matter how many users are there, and small, often zero, amount of increase per user. This means, no matter what is the conditions of the economy, company, customers, etc., large amount of work should be performed, just the company may not have resources to support it. So if people are overworked it doesn't automatically mean that the situation is improving, it may mean that the company can't support the core of its functionality by reasonable means.
...every so often discovers some minor details of things that he was supposed to know BEFORE starting any software-related work, and publishes his discoveries on his site with large amount of drivel, usually inspired by his troubled childhood at Microsoft.
Subsection (c) establishes new labeling requirements for these non-standard compact discs. Among other things, a label prominently affixed to the front of the packaging must notify a consumer that the disc might not play properly in ordinary consumer electronics products and might not be recordable to the hard drive of a personal computer.
The label must be at least 120mm in diameter, and consist of full-size reproduction of the image presently located at http://goatse.cx and a black text "J4ck v413n7i 0wnz joo!" in 20mm high and 12mm wide letters in Helvetica font with at least 1mm wide lines, repeated three times 5mm from the rim of the label.