Will he? Oh, I know that that's what the rules say, but rules can be changed or ignored...
He would never get away with that. Doesn't matter anyway, I, for one doubt that Bush is the one pulling all the strings. The president has a term limit but the folks in the other powerful positions don't. People like Rove are the smart ones. They don't need any kind of public mandate.
The thing that keeps companies on Windows despite the vast downsides, in terms of security, stability and expense (that last one being the biggest and the most germane to this discussion) is because of the vast amount of legacy code that most businesses have.
Don't underestimate the draw of office. The requirement to run MS office is probably one of the few legitimate arguments for the absolute requirement for windows.
Yes, there are alternatives. Open office is getting better, but OO writer still seems to lack something over word, ditto Calc vs Excel. For all the crap that MS bundles into office (including the handy virus runtime), they did managed to create a pretty decent office suite.
Even with retraining and a legion of staff that can use OO effectively. There is still a niggle that perhaps the doc file you created with OO will not view right in Word. It is not practical to expect everyone to convert to OO on the same day. You can use PDF but oddly, you can be more certain that the recipient of the document will be able to view a.doc than a.pdf.
You see, even this text plain files are based on some conventions, this is, we all "know" that when your machine reads one of those files a 65 means the character A, 67 character B and so on. Thus, the generation that wants the information must be aware of those things.
Assuming for a minute that all knowledge of ASCII is lost; given that during WW2 we were able to crack the enigma, I seriously doubt a simple substitution cipher will be a huge deal for our ancestors. People do more difficult puzzles with a pen and paper on a flight.
Also, please hand in your geek credentials at the desk for "65 means the character A, 67 character B and so on".
Nah. If Microsoft were behind it there would be 8 or 9 different editions of the patriot act and nobody would be sure which edition applied to them.
This a bill that has a significant cost, but 95% of it it isnt relevant for most people and it was created by a man who believes in his own divine power. My money is on Oracle.
I see what you are saying but it seems to me that international corporations mostly make their profits by producing goods in a cheap labour market and selling them in expensive ones. They make their products in places where they can pay cents an hour and sell them to people who make tens, even hundreds of dollars and hour. They need both markets to be successful. They have the power to reverse the market but this doesnt get them anywhere. I still maintain that they are choking themselves.
As each cycle of better software clangs itself onto clueless managers' brains, the managers start to realize that employing real people is a profit negative....and as they steam faster and faster into 'streamlining' and 'outsourcing' they will find that the consumers who are on the bottom end of their supply chain have no money to spend on their products or the products of their customers. Not to worry though, the current CEO's will probably have retired by that point!
Want to solve all of the world's problems in one go? Supress the instant gratification gene!
"Nerds are people that are fascinated by technology. Geeks are people that are fascinated by technology, but know what to do with it."
Case in point, Bill Gates is a nerd. Linus Torvalds is a geek. IMHO.
Do me a favour! You are suggesting that Bill Gates, the guy who built a technology company that changed the entire planet and based on the success attained a personal fortune that is larger than the GDP of many countries is someone who is "fascinated by technology but doesnt know what to do with it!". I think not!
It is time to stop trying to define the terms nerd, geek, dork etc they mean nothing. I happen to be a software professional whose hobbies are mostly related to tech too. I have been called all of these things (and more:oP), as a wise-mane once said... "I am what I am and that's all that I am!".
Taco, why not implement the ability for users to configure whether they see stories submitted by 'foes' on the front page (and perhaps move stories submitted by 'friends' TO the front page)?
Clearly, some people will say, "Yeah get rid of user X stories" and other will say "No, I want to read them". The answer is configuration, and you already have the infrastructure in the foes/friends system.
The shareholders only really ended up getting fucked because they got caught. If everything had remained covered then the shareholders would have been quite happy with the situation. Infact, the only reason to do what was done, was to keep the share price high and the holders happy.
If the business goes bankrupt then yes, shareholders are only liable for the money they have already invested (it is probably a little more complex than this, but on the whole...).
However, officers are not protected against negligence or fraud. Surely you have seen the news of proceedings against Worldcom and/or Enron executives.
Quite often, I am asked by non-programmers which language they should use to get started. My answer is always the same... 'get yourself some BASIC training' (man, I love that pun!). Most people reject my suggestion because they want to write games in their first four minutes or because other people respond with 'YEEECH BASIC?? You should learn to code with an exposed processor core and a soldering iron!'.
The fact of the matter is, there is a language out there specifically designed for people new to programming to dip their toe in the water and learn some of the basic concepts like loops, conditions and variables without having to worry about memory models, pointers and header files.
After spending a few months writing the standard "Hello World", "Im thinking of a number.." style programs, then you can branch out almost anywhere.
wait till you have disposable camera wrappers and discarded "Welcome to Space!" flyers zooming around up there.
Then the spacecraft operators will need to inform their customers to keep their hands and feet inside the spaceship at all times and keep all doors and windows securely fastened.
Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
if you think it's some other way around, tell me what was the 5th banner back that you saw on slashdot.
I am not sure what you point is. What is the 5th advertisement back you saw on television? Which of your relatives was the 7th birthday back? What was the 12th meal back you ate? (Yes, all of these questions sound grammatically wrong to me too, I cant quite put my finger on the correct format).
All you have done is prove that people have a poor memory for detailed facts, but if I asked you what dabs.com sell or which industry you associate nestle with, I am sure you could give me an answer. It is this kind of 'vague association' that advertising folks want to build, so that next time you need a new PC or you need to search the web you know where to go intuitively.
I happen to believe that online adverts DO serve this purpose, but I would also say that there are companies that I associate negative feelings with because their advert popped onto my screen while I was reading something important (or amusing).
If I click on an ad, order a product, get a great service, need the same kind of product again, I will probably return to that same site. Advertising may only be the first step, but it is probably the most important as without that ad I would have never have made the order or even found the site.
So details like "What was the 5th banner you saw" are completely irrlevant if the 5th banner you saw now means you associate a specific product or service with a specific company. Who cares how many adverts back it was???
Re:Wow.. this is so like.. 1997
on
Skype 2.0 Adds Video
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Isnt this always the way. Some pioneering company releases a technology that is far ahead of it's time but the hardware just isnt their to support it. A few years latter the technology reappears on a platform that is ready to support the concept. I can think of at least 10 or 20 examples of this. Makes you feel a bit sorry for the pioneers.
Expect a massive VR resurrgance in a few years time.
When buying products online, use a credit card, not a debit card. If the merchant acts in the way you described, dont argue with them. Wait a few days to see if you have been charged by them and if you have call you card issuing bank and explain the situation clearly to them and ask for them to peform a charge back on the transaction. You may need to sign and return some legal documents stating that you consider the charge to be illigitimate (this is designed to implicate folks who do this after receiving the goods without problem).
The credit card company will return the money to your card and the merchant will receive a letter from their bank informing them that the money has been removed from their account. If this happens many times on the same merchant account the merchant bank will close the account and the merchant will be unable to open another account. This will effectively put them out of business.
Issuing a charge back is a simple process (I have done it many times) and will hurt the retailer far more than shouting at them down the phone.
Thats a damn good point. I didnt spend the last 15 years perfecting my air guitar technique to have this damn contraption play a DMaj7 when I was fretting a Asus4!!!
So what you are saying is that there is a senior scientific position vacant where one of the perks could be described as "Research assistants keen to donate their eggs to the successful applicant".
Both you and the grandparent seem to be missing the point. Google are not charging people who want your time, they are charging people who want your business. Do you expect companies to pay you for your business? That sounds a little illogical to me!
I do think advertising will get more and more subtle, and you know what? Great! I find convential advertising irritating because the focus is trying to convince me to purchase a product or service that I dont need. Advertisers could not target specific potential customers so they 'carpet bomb'.
Google have enabled advertisers to deliver advertisments to true potential customers and they have done it in a way that is subtle, inoffensive and doesnt preclude smaller businesses or even non-commercial folks to get some of my attention.
I live in the real world! I understand that advertising of some kind is a required evil in modern society. Corporations, their customers and their employees pay the taxs that will give your kids an education or make sure their is a police force in your area. Beaming adverts for gym equipment to the home of a 90 year old is an inefficient adversting system. Advertising the same equipment to people who search for "Where is my nearest gym?" is more efficient. The same advert to people who search for "Where is my nearest gym?" and discover that there isnt one for many miles is more efficient still and google will probably get there eventually.
Am I worried? A little, but probably not while Page, Brin and Schmit are at the helm. I tend to trust these guys. What worries me is the potential for a change of management to a team that might not be so worried about 'doing evil'.
Not only is it being used today, but you might even say that 'cognitive suggestion' forms a definition of modern marketing.
Discussing this with my company's experienced sales and marketing director was enlightening and shocking. Billions of US dollars are spent to harness our subconsious traits. Emotional reaction to certain colours or shapes are used convince us to part with our money.
Next time you see an ad with an animated character, note the proportion of the characters eyes and head. Most of the time you will see that the eyes and head are proportionally larger than those of an adult human but closer to those of a baby/young child. Why? Because we are genetically tuned to respond in a positive way to children.
Surf around a few corp websites that offer services to other companies. What percentage use blue as their main colour? Supposedly blue is a 'trustworthy' colour.
The common misconception is that hypnosis is about swinging a pocket watch and chanting "You are feeling sleepy". The fact is, you are essentially hypnotised by marketing specialised many times (perhaps hundreds of times) daily. It is the reason why millions of people will go to the supermarket and pay double the price of the exact same shit in a different colour box.
I would love to see how they can change the internals of a Celeron 1.7GHz to make the CPUID instruction return the ID of a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz...
I would love to see them change it to "This is a fake CPU and you paid over the odds for it you complete and utter mug!!"... and see how many of their customers noticed!
Slashdot Mirror
Try putting an X in the center square.
These are all steps on the path to enlightenment.
Will he? Oh, I know that that's what the rules say, but rules can be changed or ignored...
He would never get away with that. Doesn't matter anyway, I, for one doubt that Bush is the one pulling all the strings. The president has a term limit but the folks in the other powerful positions don't. People like Rove are the smart ones. They don't need any kind of public mandate.
Don't underestimate the draw of office. The requirement to run MS office is probably one of the few legitimate arguments for the absolute requirement for windows.
Yes, there are alternatives. Open office is getting better, but OO writer still seems to lack something over word, ditto Calc vs Excel. For all the crap that MS bundles into office (including the handy virus runtime), they did managed to create a pretty decent office suite.
Even with retraining and a legion of staff that can use OO effectively. There is still a niggle that perhaps the doc file you created with OO will not view right in Word. It is not practical to expect everyone to convert to OO on the same day. You can use PDF but oddly, you can be more certain that the recipient of the document will be able to view a
Assuming for a minute that all knowledge of ASCII is lost; given that during WW2 we were able to crack the enigma, I seriously doubt a simple substitution cipher will be a huge deal for our ancestors. People do more difficult puzzles with a pen and paper on a flight.
Also, please hand in your geek credentials at the desk for "65 means the character A, 67 character B and so on".
Nah. If Microsoft were behind it there would be 8 or 9 different editions of the patriot act and nobody would be sure which edition applied to them.
This a bill that has a significant cost, but 95% of it it isnt relevant for most people and it was created by a man who believes in his own divine power. My money is on Oracle.
I see what you are saying but it seems to me that international corporations mostly make their profits by producing goods in a cheap labour market and selling them in expensive ones. They make their products in places where they can pay cents an hour and sell them to people who make tens, even hundreds of dollars and hour. They need both markets to be successful. They have the power to reverse the market but this doesnt get them anywhere. I still maintain that they are choking themselves.
As each cycle of better software clangs itself onto clueless managers' brains, the managers start to realize that employing real people is a profit negative. ...and as they steam faster and faster into 'streamlining' and 'outsourcing' they will find that the consumers who are on the bottom end of their supply chain have no money to spend on their products or the products of their customers. Not to worry though, the current CEO's will probably have retired by that point!
Want to solve all of the world's problems in one go? Supress the instant gratification gene!
"Nerds are people that are fascinated by technology. Geeks are people that are fascinated by technology, but know what to do with it."
:oP), as a wise-mane once said... "I am what I am and that's all that I am!".
Case in point, Bill Gates is a nerd. Linus Torvalds is a geek. IMHO.
Do me a favour! You are suggesting that Bill Gates, the guy who built a technology company that changed the entire planet and based on the success attained a personal fortune that is larger than the GDP of many countries is someone who is "fascinated by technology but doesnt know what to do with it!". I think not!
It is time to stop trying to define the terms nerd, geek, dork etc they mean nothing. I happen to be a software professional whose hobbies are mostly related to tech too. I have been called all of these things (and more
Taco, why not implement the ability for users to configure whether they see stories submitted by 'foes' on the front page (and perhaps move stories submitted by 'friends' TO the front page)?
Clearly, some people will say, "Yeah get rid of user X stories" and other will say "No, I want to read them". The answer is configuration, and you already have the infrastructure in the foes/friends system.
The shareholders only really ended up getting fucked because they got caught. If everything had remained covered then the shareholders would have been quite happy with the situation. Infact, the only reason to do what was done, was to keep the share price high and the holders happy.
If the business goes bankrupt then yes, shareholders are only liable for the money they have already invested (it is probably a little more complex than this, but on the whole...).
However, officers are not protected against negligence or fraud. Surely you have seen the news of proceedings against Worldcom and/or Enron executives.
the billionaire talked [about] sending a spaceship into orbit that launches and lands vertically ...With just a single click.
Quite often, I am asked by non-programmers which language they should use to get started. My answer is always the same... 'get yourself some BASIC training' (man, I love that pun!). Most people reject my suggestion because they want to write games in their first four minutes or because other people respond with 'YEEECH BASIC?? You should learn to code with an exposed processor core and a soldering iron!'.
The fact of the matter is, there is a language out there specifically designed for people new to programming to dip their toe in the water and learn some of the basic concepts like loops, conditions and variables without having to worry about memory models, pointers and header files.
After spending a few months writing the standard "Hello World", "Im thinking of a number.." style programs, then you can branch out almost anywhere.
wait till you have disposable camera wrappers and discarded "Welcome to Space!" flyers zooming around up there.
Then the spacecraft operators will need to inform their customers to keep their hands and feet inside the spaceship at all times and keep all doors and windows securely fastened.
Surely there was some kind of trigger in the software that would detect these kind of errors! Windows asks if im sure when I try to delete a file and even then it only sends to to the recyle bin!
if you think it's some other way around, tell me what was the 5th banner back that you saw on slashdot.
I am not sure what you point is. What is the 5th advertisement back you saw on television? Which of your relatives was the 7th birthday back? What was the 12th meal back you ate? (Yes, all of these questions sound grammatically wrong to me too, I cant quite put my finger on the correct format).
All you have done is prove that people have a poor memory for detailed facts, but if I asked you what dabs.com sell or which industry you associate nestle with, I am sure you could give me an answer. It is this kind of 'vague association' that advertising folks want to build, so that next time you need a new PC or you need to search the web you know where to go intuitively.
I happen to believe that online adverts DO serve this purpose, but I would also say that there are companies that I associate negative feelings with because their advert popped onto my screen while I was reading something important (or amusing).
If I click on an ad, order a product, get a great service, need the same kind of product again, I will probably return to that same site. Advertising may only be the first step, but it is probably the most important as without that ad I would have never have made the order or even found the site.
So details like "What was the 5th banner you saw" are completely irrlevant if the 5th banner you saw now means you associate a specific product or service with a specific company. Who cares how many adverts back it was???
Isnt this always the way. Some pioneering company releases a technology that is far ahead of it's time but the hardware just isnt their to support it. A few years latter the technology reappears on a platform that is ready to support the concept. I can think of at least 10 or 20 examples of this. Makes you feel a bit sorry for the pioneers.
Expect a massive VR resurrgance in a few years time.
I cannot stress this enough...
When buying products online, use a credit card, not a debit card. If the merchant acts in the way you described, dont argue with them. Wait a few days to see if you have been charged by them and if you have call you card issuing bank and explain the situation clearly to them and ask for them to peform a charge back on the transaction. You may need to sign and return some legal documents stating that you consider the charge to be illigitimate (this is designed to implicate folks who do this after receiving the goods without problem).
The credit card company will return the money to your card and the merchant will receive a letter from their bank informing them that the money has been removed from their account. If this happens many times on the same merchant account the merchant bank will close the account and the merchant will be unable to open another account. This will effectively put them out of business.
Issuing a charge back is a simple process (I have done it many times) and will hurt the retailer far more than shouting at them down the phone.
Thats a damn good point. I didnt spend the last 15 years perfecting my air guitar technique to have this damn contraption play a DMaj7 when I was fretting a Asus4!!!
So what you are saying is that there is a senior scientific position vacant where one of the perks could be described as "Research assistants keen to donate their eggs to the successful applicant".
Please form an orderly line... behind me.
Both you and the grandparent seem to be missing the point. Google are not charging people who want your time, they are charging people who want your business. Do you expect companies to pay you for your business? That sounds a little illogical to me!
I do think advertising will get more and more subtle, and you know what? Great! I find convential advertising irritating because the focus is trying to convince me to purchase a product or service that I dont need. Advertisers could not target specific potential customers so they 'carpet bomb'.
Google have enabled advertisers to deliver advertisments to true potential customers and they have done it in a way that is subtle, inoffensive and doesnt preclude smaller businesses or even non-commercial folks to get some of my attention.
I live in the real world! I understand that advertising of some kind is a required evil in modern society. Corporations, their customers and their employees pay the taxs that will give your kids an education or make sure their is a police force in your area. Beaming adverts for gym equipment to the home of a 90 year old is an inefficient adversting system. Advertising the same equipment to people who search for "Where is my nearest gym?" is more efficient. The same advert to people who search for "Where is my nearest gym?" and discover that there isnt one for many miles is more efficient still and google will probably get there eventually.
Am I worried? A little, but probably not while Page, Brin and Schmit are at the helm. I tend to trust these guys. What worries me is the potential for a change of management to a team that might not be so worried about 'doing evil'.
Not only is it being used today, but you might even say that 'cognitive suggestion' forms a definition of modern marketing.
Discussing this with my company's experienced sales and marketing director was enlightening and shocking. Billions of US dollars are spent to harness our subconsious traits. Emotional reaction to certain colours or shapes are used convince us to part with our money.
Next time you see an ad with an animated character, note the proportion of the characters eyes and head. Most of the time you will see that the eyes and head are proportionally larger than those of an adult human but closer to those of a baby/young child. Why? Because we are genetically tuned to respond in a positive way to children.
Surf around a few corp websites that offer services to other companies. What percentage use blue as their main colour? Supposedly blue is a 'trustworthy' colour.
The common misconception is that hypnosis is about swinging a pocket watch and chanting "You are feeling sleepy". The fact is, you are essentially hypnotised by marketing specialised many times (perhaps hundreds of times) daily. It is the reason why millions of people will go to the supermarket and pay double the price of the exact same shit in a different colour box.
I would love to see how they can change the internals of a Celeron 1.7GHz to make the CPUID instruction return the ID of a Pentium 4 at 3.6GHz...
I would love to see them change it to "This is a fake CPU and you paid over the odds for it you complete and utter mug!!"... and see how many of their customers noticed!
A certain british PC vendor whom I won't name, but they're not huge (wink, wink)
Just so everybody is clear. He is talking about Tiny.