[...] Why not just be a medium sized company, making a few million dollars of profit every year with your core business? [...]
Basically, because the employees of the company, specially the management, has a mandate from the shareholders to maximise the profit. It justifies their (professional) existence, as it were. And they do it by saturating their own niche, then trying themselves in new niches. This most often results in their falling flat on their faces at some point or other, picking themselves up, and trying again, probably with a set of new people.
This is the business version of the "cycle of life", but there's no cute baby lion.
Point is though, they can't afford to tread water. They have to expand at least so much to keep up with inflation, or they're shrinking; if in addition they're not expanding enough to keep up with population expansion then they're losing market share; and so on. And if they expand only enough to account for these two factors year by year then the shareholders will be at them saying that they can do better than that, and bingo you get a new, more expansion-oriented top management. Capitalism's freaky that way.
However: the modern artists who apply themselves to CGI are just as much artists as their predecessors who drew everything by hand. Often, they can actually spend _more_ time on the nitty-gritty details of the characters, their mannerisms, the background, sideline frivolity, insider jokes, et cetera, and apart from being more "cost effective" (whatever that means when you're creating art), the result is at least equally rich as the old-style 'toons. I just mention this because I come from the prejudice that CG-film would necessarily be sterile, less "feature rich", less imaginitive, and - the horror of horrors in 'toonworld - physically acurate. None of this is true. Of course, it's a different medium, with only the end results being similar, and also, it's unlikely that anyone will sink the required money into conventional toons anymore, but the people behind the stories are the same high-class, imaginitive artists, just with a different toolset. The 'toon carriage has just become horseless, that's all.
Yes. My point was whether they actually are sending separate photons, or just faking it with bursts of polarised coherent light - although I guess that'd be kind of hard to justify even by the best PR spin doctor.
Ya know - maybe I should just read the article and stuff.
If the secondary channel isn't secure, an eavesdropper who listened both to the quantum-encrypted data and the integrity check would be able to reconstruct the data.
Yeah, but the point is that in a good implementation of such a system, no third party would be able to listen to the quantum-encrypted data without changing it - at which point Bob and Alice would know that the there was an eavesdropper (or that the system had gone bellyup).
Not only a PR stunt. The basic idea is that it breaks the principle that any encryption system for transmitting data must be sufficiently powerful to ensure that the expected cost of breaking the encryption is greater than the value of the data being transmitted. Using quantum encryption for data transmission means that in principle, you can send data of an arbitrary value over the link, as there is no known theoretical way for any third party to listen in on the transmission - i.e., you don't have to worry about it.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and I do wonder if the subject of the article is actually a foolproof implementation of the theory. Honsetly, I doubt that they can send a _single_ photon through 120 km of fibre and reliably measure it at the end. And as soon as you're sending redundant photons (i.e., regular short bursts of laser light that happen to be polarised) - bang goes your theory. That would make it far harder to tap, but there would be theoretical methods of doing so at a finite cost.
Maybe you're right. (Or maybe you're just taking the piss). From my perspective the Hotmail takeover was a showcase of MS's then-budding Passport(TM) system, that failed. What they did is take over Hotmail, then fail miserably A) to update the backend (was it 2 years + to get rid af the last trace of BSD?), and B) to update the service in in any significant manner. Two bad things about Hotmail as it is today: First, the limit is still at the original 2 MB, which, especially considering the bad spam filtering, is not enough for anybody's primary email address. Second, the tie-in with any non-web interface is locked to Outlook Express, and this for no good reason at all. They could have done POP. One result is that Hotmail turned from being a household word - as Google is today - to one of many web-based email systems, or rather, the worst of many, for those with any experience. Point: if Hotmail/MSN/Instant Messenger is indeed as valuable as you proport, then this has nothing to do with Hotmail the web-based email system alone. MS could have started with "Microsoft Webmail (TM)" and gotten the same result they have today, with the difference that then, they would have had to start at zero, rather than drag down the premier service of its time, to attain the solid mediocrity they have today.
[...] we would all find a new search engine once Microsoft ruined google and the employees leave to start fresh.
Well, to get into the Halloween spirit - it might not be so easy. Remember the issue when Netscape was big? IIRC, MS dug their own (temporary) grave on that one by ommitting the internet from their list of top 5 strategic priorities. Ever since it turned out that the 'net was getting bigger than they had expected, they've been trying to find a way in.
In hindsight, it might not have been such a blunder after all. If they had not concentrated on the server OS and office apps, they'd look much worse compared to Linux than they do today - they still have 90%+ dominance on the desktop. And, as it is, the 'net has settled down to a certain degree, and it is now "known" where the key points are located. For instance: Hotmail is irrelevant - that was more or less a mistake - since most netizens get email services elesewhere (on the other hand, if Hotmail had not been acquired my MS, who knows... but I digress). But for many things, Google is the 'net (or web & usenet, at least). The point is: Google might be irreplaceable. Maybe the 'net has settled down to such a degree that the Next Big Thing will necessarily be an incremental change in the way things work, and not a quantum leap / revolution. And if Google is acquired, the technology - irreplaceable due to IP - is acquired along with it. The Google techs may go, but they would have to leave their ball behind, and would be unable to recreate it elsewhere. If the web is Google, and Google is MS, then the web is MS.
'Course, the above is all an overstatement, and it doesn't actually look likely the Google will die this particular horrible death - but that's no reason not to pray if so inclined.
Happy Halloween. Or make that "terrible". Whatever.
Now it'll take 24 h to get the song out of my head again. And I already cringe at explaining the reason for humming that particular song to the first non-techie to ask. The blank stares I shall get. The indifferent shrugs. The utter absence of anything resembling a smile.
Starting from the assumption that the iPod is indeed superior: it just works. I don't own one, but several friends do, and using it is a synch. Comapring it to for instance my SonyEricsson cellphone: whenever I pick up my cellphone, I get this twinge, in the style of "This is not going to be easy." - whatever it may be - calling someone (mysterious crashes, dropped calls, bad sound), sending an SMS (going through 5 levels of menus before you can start writing it), resetting the time (how come it doesn't recognise the end of daylight saving time itself?) and so on. The iPod, on the other hand, annoys me only for my friends' limited taste in music.
Assuming the iPod is not the be-all and end-all, on the other hand: even if there are some annoyances, and there are superiour products out there: it is and will remain simply a good MP3 player. Like old Macintoshes: if all you wanted to do with the box when you bought it is, say, write letters, then the oldie 256k original mac is still a good tool to do that, after all these years. Same for the iPod: I predict that 20, 30, 50 years down the line, once someone has worked out how to replace the worn-out rechargeables, iPods will still be good, elegant devices for doing nothing else that listen to adequate-quality stereophonic music.
I actually received my MP2100 on the morning the news went out "The Newton is dead". Sent it back, unopened. Couldn't face the heartbreak.
Got an eBookMan (Franklin) the other day. It does at least some of what a Newton was able to do: the screen is big enough to read a book on. The batteries last all of 12 hours or so, though, and that's on a device with no IR and not even a file browser that will show you the contents of the MMC card. The handwriting recognition is OK, but not to the degree of actually being useable. It was cheap.
Killing the Newton, and especially the eMate, and the unreleased LC, will go down as one of the most stupid management decisions in the history of industrialised civilisation, I wager.
"how can I modify this IM program so that the person you are talking to knows that you are currently typing without actually sending each character as you type it?"
I agree, in principle. But I would formulate the question more broadly in this case: "When I'm using IM it find it annoying that I always get interrupted when I'm typing a long post and the other guy puts stuff in between. It makes the conversation disjointed. Same if the other guys writing a long post: I can't tell if he's typing or just gone to the toilet. Any ideas?"
Now *that* makes the solution obvious. Any/.er could probably come up with half a dozen on the spot, and this "innovation" would feature among them in 90% of the cases.
This thing sounds great. Except they'd first have to work on the 0.3-4kHz bandpass filter regular phones have, to get that "natural conversation feel" going. Oh, and stereo wouldn't be bad, either. OK, so it's a silly idea after all.
Comments: Anyone else dig the way they so obviously used a silver-sprayed motorcycle helmet? "It looks cool, kind of futury". No dear, it doesn't. It looks like crap.
2: Quote: "We will have to see if the Isophone is worth the trouble. In the meantime it will just drift in a sea of ideas." That was very, very funny. Oh, if we only had that wit in every single thing we ever read, heard, or saw. Can you imagine?
The only "maningful" change results from the error correction logic in the CD drive.
[...] the way fungus and bacteria [grow] can shape the sound in weird ways.
Tosh. It's flipping some of the bits in a bitstream which represents audio encoded with an arbitrary codec. Dude - there are more interesting ways of flipping bits, and ones that might just tell you a bit more about bacteria, fungi, music, life, the universe, and everything. What's this guy on? I want some.
... for some message to pop up somewhere, with some guy going "OH GOD! YES! I DID IT! I COPIED V5 SOURCE CODE INTO THE LINUX KERNEL. I'M SO SORRY! THE PRESSURE! I COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! AAAARGH! *sob*"
Whereupon we can all go "you know - you're a dick" and buy him a beer. Then everyone cleans up after him.
As to Dee McBride... I dunno. Is this guy more or less priceless than al-Sahaf? Dude - *you're* disappointed? Well let me tell you how *we* feel...
Slashdot Mirror
- [...]
Basically, because the employees of the company, specially the management, has a mandate from the shareholders to maximise the profit. It justifies their (professional) existence, as it were. And they do it by saturating their own niche, then trying themselves in new niches. This most often results in their falling flat on their faces at some point or other, picking themselves up, and trying again, probably with a set of new people.Why not just be a medium sized company, making a few million dollars of profit every year with your core business?
[...]
This is the business version of the "cycle of life", but there's no cute baby lion.
Point is though, they can't afford to tread water. They have to expand at least so much to keep up with inflation, or they're shrinking; if in addition they're not expanding enough to keep up with population expansion then they're losing market share; and so on. And if they expand only enough to account for these two factors year by year then the shareholders will be at them saying that they can do better than that, and bingo you get a new, more expansion-oriented top management. Capitalism's freaky that way.
This is my sig. Deal with it.
I did. What do you want done with the body?
/wassthis karma stuff good for again?
... try him, try him again.
Until he's in shreds, in SHREDS, I say.
... er, I mean - "until justice is served".
- [...] What unique set of problems do the segways solve?
I think the main problem is that even the affluent fat manage to spend their money of food. Walking can be *such* a chore... next up: extend.
I agree - I will miss them too.
However: the modern artists who apply themselves to CGI are just as much artists as their predecessors who drew everything by hand. Often, they can actually spend _more_ time on the nitty-gritty details of the characters, their mannerisms, the background, sideline frivolity, insider jokes, et cetera, and apart from being more "cost effective" (whatever that means when you're creating art), the result is at least equally rich as the old-style 'toons.
I just mention this because I come from the prejudice that CG-film would necessarily be sterile, less "feature rich", less imaginitive, and - the horror of horrors in 'toonworld - physically acurate. None of this is true. Of course, it's a different medium, with only the end results being similar, and also, it's unlikely that anyone will sink the required money into conventional toons anymore, but the people behind the stories are the same high-class, imaginitive artists, just with a different toolset. The 'toon carriage has just become horseless, that's all.
Yes. My point was whether they actually are sending separate photons, or just faking it with bursts of polarised coherent light - although I guess that'd be kind of hard to justify even by the best PR spin doctor.
Ya know - maybe I should just read the article and stuff.
- If the secondary channel isn't secure, an eavesdropper who listened both to the quantum-encrypted data and the integrity check would be able to reconstruct the data.
Yeah, but the point is that in a good implementation of such a system, no third party would be able to listen to the quantum-encrypted data without changing it - at which point Bob and Alice would know that the there was an eavesdropper (or that the system had gone bellyup).Not only a PR stunt. The basic idea is that it breaks the principle that any encryption system for transmitting data must be sufficiently powerful to ensure that the expected cost of breaking the encryption is greater than the value of the data being transmitted. Using quantum encryption for data transmission means that in principle, you can send data of an arbitrary value over the link, as there is no known theoretical way for any third party to listen in on the transmission - i.e., you don't have to worry about it.
Of course, the devil is in the details, and I do wonder if the subject of the article is actually a foolproof implementation of the theory. Honsetly, I doubt that they can send a _single_ photon through 120 km of fibre and reliably measure it at the end. And as soon as you're sending redundant photons (i.e., regular short bursts of laser light that happen to be polarised) - bang goes your theory. That would make it far harder to tap, but there would be theoretical methods of doing so at a finite cost.
Maybe you're right. (Or maybe you're just taking the piss). From my perspective the Hotmail takeover was a showcase of MS's then-budding Passport(TM) system, that failed. What they did is take over Hotmail, then fail miserably A) to update the backend (was it 2 years + to get rid af the last trace of BSD?), and B) to update the service in in any significant manner. Two bad things about Hotmail as it is today: First, the limit is still at the original 2 MB, which, especially considering the bad spam filtering, is not enough for anybody's primary email address. Second, the tie-in with any non-web interface is locked to Outlook Express, and this for no good reason at all. They could have done POP.
One result is that Hotmail turned from being a household word - as Google is today - to one of many web-based email systems, or rather, the worst of many, for those with any experience.
Point: if Hotmail/MSN/Instant Messenger is indeed as valuable as you proport, then this has nothing to do with Hotmail the web-based email system alone. MS could have started with "Microsoft Webmail (TM)" and gotten the same result they have today, with the difference that then, they would have had to start at zero, rather than drag down the premier service of its time, to attain the solid mediocrity they have today.
Use GMX
:)
Link to http://www.sco.com/products/linux/ from their homepage, returns a 403:
/products/linux/ on this server.
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access
Well feh.
- [...] we would all find a new search engine once Microsoft ruined google and the employees leave to start fresh.
Well, to get into the Halloween spirit - it might not be so easy. Remember the issue when Netscape was big? IIRC, MS dug their own (temporary) grave on that one by ommitting the internet from their list of top 5 strategic priorities. Ever since it turned out that the 'net was getting bigger than they had expected, they've been trying to find a way in.In hindsight, it might not have been such a blunder after all. If they had not concentrated on the server OS and office apps, they'd look much worse compared to Linux than they do today - they still have 90%+ dominance on the desktop. And, as it is, the 'net has settled down to a certain degree, and it is now "known" where the key points are located. For instance: Hotmail is irrelevant - that was more or less a mistake - since most netizens get email services elesewhere (on the other hand, if Hotmail had not been acquired my MS, who knows
'Course, the above is all an overstatement, and it doesn't actually look likely the Google will die this particular horrible death - but that's no reason not to pray if so inclined.
Happy Halloween. Or make that "terrible". Whatever.
- It's the end of the 'Net as we know it [...]
tambo - you so beat me to it.Now it'll take 24 h to get the song out of my head again. And I already cringe at explaining the reason for humming that particular song to the first non-techie to ask. The blank stares I shall get. The indifferent shrugs. The utter absence of anything resembling a smile.
Starting from the assumption that the iPod is indeed superior: it just works. I don't own one, but several friends do, and using it is a synch. Comapring it to for instance my SonyEricsson cellphone: whenever I pick up my cellphone, I get this twinge, in the style of "This is not going to be easy." - whatever it may be - calling someone (mysterious crashes, dropped calls, bad sound), sending an SMS (going through 5 levels of menus before you can start writing it), resetting the time (how come it doesn't recognise the end of daylight saving time itself?) and so on. The iPod, on the other hand, annoys me only for my friends' limited taste in music.
Assuming the iPod is not the be-all and end-all, on the other hand: even if there are some annoyances, and there are superiour products out there: it is and will remain simply a good MP3 player. Like old Macintoshes: if all you wanted to do with the box when you bought it is, say, write letters, then the oldie 256k original mac is still a good tool to do that, after all these years. Same for the iPod: I predict that 20, 30, 50 years down the line, once someone has worked out how to replace the worn-out rechargeables, iPods will still be good, elegant devices for doing nothing else that listen to adequate-quality stereophonic music.
/end rant. I'm platform-agnostic, for chrissakes.
Aye!
... :)
I actually received my MP2100 on the morning the news went out "The Newton is dead". Sent it back, unopened. Couldn't face the heartbreak.
Got an eBookMan (Franklin) the other day. It does at least some of what a Newton was able to do: the screen is big enough to read a book on. The batteries last all of 12 hours or so, though, and that's on a device with no IR and not even a file browser that will show you the contents of the MMC card. The handwriting recognition is OK, but not to the degree of actually being useable. It was cheap.
Killing the Newton, and especially the eMate, and the unreleased LC, will go down as one of the most stupid management decisions in the history of industrialised civilisation, I wager.
Oh, what could have been
- "how can I modify this IM program so that the person you are talking to knows that you are currently typing without actually sending each character as you type it?"
I agree, in principle. But I would formulate the question more broadly in this case:"When I'm using IM it find it annoying that I always get interrupted when I'm typing a long post and the other guy puts stuff in between. It makes the conversation disjointed. Same if the other guys writing a long post: I can't tell if he's typing or just gone to the toilet.
Any ideas? "
Now *that* makes the solution obvious. Any
Feh! I say, feh!
Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species.
So much for sex being the most natural thing in the world. That sounds like a definition of "unnatural practices".
- 13. The method of claim 12, wherein the new entry comprises the location of the location of the failure.
errmmmm/ damn. I think MS is trying a buffer overflow on my brain
... only 1998.9 versions to go (plus a couple of arbitrary letters), and we'll have caught up with Microsoft!
(hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way)
This thing sounds great.
Except they'd first have to work on the 0.3-4kHz bandpass filter regular phones have, to get that "natural conversation feel" going. Oh, and stereo wouldn't be bad, either.
OK, so it's a silly idea after all.
Comments:
Anyone else dig the way they so obviously used a silver-sprayed motorcycle helmet? "It looks cool, kind of futury".
No dear, it doesn't. It looks like crap.
2: Quote: "We will have to see if the Isophone is worth the trouble. In the meantime it will just drift in a sea of ideas."
That was very, very funny.
Oh, if we only had that wit in every single thing we ever read, heard, or saw. Can you imagine?
- [...] the way fungus and bacteria [grow] can shape the sound in weird ways.
Tosh. It's flipping some of the bits in a bitstream which represents audio encoded with an arbitrary codec. Dude - there are more interesting ways of flipping bits, and ones that might just tell you a bit more about bacteria, fungi, music, life, the universe, and everything.What's this guy on? I want some.
/beer, you say? Good. I can do that.
We'll just end up double-guessing a computer that's doing its demented best at double-guessing us.
- no duct tape?
Heh. Believe it or not, that was my exact same first thought./So off-topic it came out the other side.
The clicky clicky thing is bwoken!
A Geocities site slashdotted. Well I never.
... for some message to pop up somewhere, with some guy going
... I dunno. Is this guy more or less priceless than al-Sahaf? ...
"OH GOD! YES! I DID IT! I COPIED V5 SOURCE CODE INTO THE LINUX KERNEL.
I'M SO SORRY! THE PRESSURE! I COULDN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! AAAARGH! *sob*"
Whereupon we can all go "you know - you're a dick" and buy him a beer. Then everyone cleans up after him.
As to Dee McBride
Dude - *you're* disappointed? Well let me tell you how *we* feel