Well, drinking a whole can is a whole different experience from taking a sip.
You seriously think that's the whole story? These companies have been engaged in an all-out war for global market share for decades. Trying to reduce it to "but Coke tastes better" only makes you sound like a sucker.
If I'm a salesman and you're a doctor, and my job is to sell stuff and your job is to save people's lives, and I offer you some money and you take it... whose ethics are worse, mine or yours? Nobody is propping those doctors' mouths open and shoving steak in them.
And then again, coming at it from another angle, a doctor who is unaware of what new medications are coming to market isn't doing his job. What he needs to do is A.) hear the sales pitch, and B.) hit the journals to see if the pharma company's claims are backed up by evidence. This is where Merck lying about its products in a fake journal comes into play.
Just to clarify: Do you mean the publisher has offered to produce a special issue that features a favorable article on your product that has already been written, or do you mean the publisher offers to have one written for you?
Most trade publishers offer some form of reprint service or custom publishing division as a side business. It's only really a problem if they're passing off paid articles as legitimate news or peer-reviewed content, or if the editors have any direct involvement. If they're just repackaging a favorable article that has already been produced/published so that you can use it for your own promotional purposes, I don't see the harm.
True, but there may be a technical element to this. As in: I don't subscribe to any TV service, but I still get all the channels of "Basic Plus" cable. Try plugging your cable into the back of a TV sometime and see what you get. My understanding is that they have to put filters on your line to block the TV once they turn the line live with Internet service, and a lot of installers can't be bothered.
Kudos to the editors for attempting something different -- trying to match the product they sell to the market demand.
I don't think you understand what's going on at all. The marketing department were the ones trying to adjust the news to meet "market demand" (apparently -- it wasn't clear just what they were trying to do). The editors were the ones raising the red flag.
News that is "sold" as an entertainment product designed to match "market demand" is inherently corrupt. Any organization that is attempting to foist off that kind of insidious manipulation as information should be destroyed.
This is far above and beyond simple oral storytelling.
Actually, I'd rank it far below simple oral storytelling. Am I the only one who can't tell what this "story" is even supposed to be about?
So your professor went to a screenwriting workshop and somebody told him about a kooky screenplay and then the author told him that the screenplay was "a masterplan for gods disguised as a screenplay." What is that supposed to mean?
Then the professor tells you that there is a guy named Cameron who is actually making this screenplay into a movie and that the Cameron guy is nuts.
Next thing we know, the professor is hanging out in LA, picking up chicks, and the chicks have glowing eyes and telephones that talk to god.
True story.
Do I have that about right?
I think all we have learned from this is: A.) Your professor takes drugs. B.) Hollywood screenwriters are talentless hacks. C.) Chicks in Los Angeles are bubbleheaded bimbos who like to hear themselves talk.
SARS is a different type of virus than influenza (it is a form of coronavirus), and it "fizzled out" mainly because the physicians who responded to the initial incidents were mistaken about how it was transmitted. Most of the people who came down with SARS did so because they were all staying at the same hotel, and the hotel had bad plumbing. The patients contracted the virus, essentially, by inhaling waste from other infected people. Viral cells were being aerosolized into the hallways by tiny cracks in the pipes. Nasty-sounding, but true. SARS is not really all that virulent -- my understanding is that you need pretty close contact with an infected person to catch it -- and this is the main reason why you haven't heard about more major outbreaks. As it turns out, all those face masks you saw on the news were really more of a result of bad information spread by the media than they were any kind of meaningful preventative measure.
Heparin is also rat poison. True story -- the original use for that class of anticoagulant drugs, beginning with warfarin, was to overdose vermin so that they would hemorrhage and die. Read the boxes on a lot of rat and mouse poison and you'll find that they're still the preferred agent in use today.
But heparin is also vital therapy for a variety of life-threatening conditions. If it disappeared from the market, a whole lot of people would be screwed, and many would die.
True, Merck's behavior was absolutely reprehensible. They actually got their very just desserts already: All the money that they spent to develop the drug has been wasted, all the money they could have made from selling the drug has vanished in a puff of smoke. Good. We hit 'em where it hurt, for once.
Unfortunately, I'm also with the people who say it's a real shame that patients who could benefit from Vioxx no longer have access to it.
This is just my speculation, but Sun probably had 20 lawyers in a room full of IBM lawyers for every day of negotiation... and Scott McNealy probably crashed at Larry Ellison's house every night.
I don't think there was anything untoward on Sun's part, though. IBM walked away from the deal. Nothing about being a giant company precludes you from being a sucker.
3. Oracle needs to expand their product line beyond just the database to continue to grow. There is more growth potential in the rest of the datacenter than there is in database software.
You make a valid point, but you seem to have forgotten that Oracle already owns PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and BEA.
Months ago? Lots of analysts? Hmmm. I think maybe it's easier to "foresee" this type of stuff in hindsight.
Not to toot my own horn, but I predicted Oracle would buy Sun before the deal was announced -- but I didn't do it months ago. I didn't hear anyone else talking about it months ago, either. And when I made the prediction, the consensus here on Slashdot seemed to be that it was a terrible idea. So if you can point to some references from months ago I'd love to see them. I don't think anybody was really even thinking much about Oracle/Sun before the talks with IBM made the news -- I know I wasn't -- especially considering that Sun had consistently maintained that it was doing fine and didn't need any help from anybody.
So it doesn't completely surprise me that Ballmer didn't see this coming -- though maybe he's not as shocked as he's pretending to be. By acting surprised, he makes it sound like he wouldn't have made this deal himself, which makes it sound like he might not think the deal is a good idea, which is a totally self-serving position for Microsoft to take.
It does seem a little strange that IBM is acting surprised, though. By all accounts they had exclusive rights to negotiate with Sun for a set period of time, and they let that period elapse. What did they expect? Maybe they didn't believe Sun would be able to leave the table and arrive at a firm deal with a different suitor so quickly, but that seems a little foolish on their part, if it's true.
Well, it's hard to find a replacement that Microsoft ships for free with its OS. But one of the more infuriating things about Comic Sans is that the name implies it's a font that looks like comic book lettering. The truth is, pretty much every single comic book printed today is lettered using a computer font of some kind. There are dozens of fonts designed specifically for this purpose. And pretty much all of them look better than Comic Sans. Comic Sans is just grotesquely ugly, full stop.
Americans are crazy. One guy with a blog has discovered a security flaw. There has been no exploit for this flaw. Nobody is complaining that they've lost anything. What's more, this "issue" can be fixed with a firmware update. But no! Our sense of entitlement tells us that this is another opportunity to take a bunch of money out of the pockets of an eeeeeeeeeevvil corporation... and put it into the pockets of a bunch of lawyers. Awesome.
I love the part where Nokia hasn't even issued a response yet, and we interpret that as more reason to sue. Awesome.
Every other post on Slashdot seems to be decrying how messed-up the system is in this country, and then the next post comes along demanding that we shovel more coal into the fires. Get your heads straight, please.
In my experience, it's less common for them to pass a virus in an actual software installer; instead, they slip it into the corresponding keygen. By the time someone has spent an hour installing Photoshop, they usually don't think twice about double-clicking a little keygen.
I first started washing my hands regularly when I worked retail. All of a sudden, whenever I would wash my hands in the bathroom the water that ran off my hands wouldn't be clear -- it would be more grayish. I realized that this was coming from handling the money. And then I started thinking.
These days I just wash my hands. And I wish the GP would, too. I'm not a germophobe, that's just gross.
(unless visa, or your bank pays all when your card info has been compromised).
Which they do. Your total liability for credit card fraud in the U.S. is $50, and I've never heard of anyone actually being charged that. I once had a fraudulent $600+ charge on my account and all I did was call the credit card company and calmly ask them to remove it, which they did immediately. They sent me a form to fill out and sign to attest that I had been the victim of fraud, which I sent back at my leisure. And that was the end of that -- no $50 charge, no nothing.
And, in fact, the same is true for debit cards. The only difference is that you have to report the fraud within two days to limit your liability to $50, otherwise you might owe as much as $500. But, again, it's at the company's discretion whether they want to charge you or not. If you have good credit, maybe they'd rather keep your business.
The real victim in credit fraud cases is the retailer. If someone "buys" a $1,000 television using my credit card number and then I report the charge as fraudulent, I don't pay the bill, the credit card company doesn't pay the bill, and the retailer doesn't get the TV back. The retailer is out $1,000.
...and if you think the parent is going overboard, remember: I am only in my 30s, yet I come from an era when word processors were not WYSIWYG. Think about it. In essence, every secretary was required to understand and apply the basic concepts of HTML. Have we really grown that much dumber in 20 years?
Seems to me that part of the problem with Web UIs these days is that so much of the interface functionality is still being made "interactive" using JavaScript. The JavaScript serves no other purpose than to load and/or render various UI elements. Therefore, a front-end Web designer is often expected to use both tools to achieve the desired result. And yet programming JavaScript -- which I believe to be a fully valid use of the verb -- and really knowing what you're doing is a totally different skill than writing HTML. In an ideal world you'd have JavaScript experts working side-by-side with HTML/CSS experts, and presumably both of them would have some rudimentary understanding of graphic design -- but who can afford that? So what most people are looking for is the "ideal" Web designer, who knows both skills. It's an unlikely scenario at best, so it's no surprise that so many Web designers seem to have questionable skills and/or practices.
And besides, doctors are called doctors because they attained an academic degree, not because a licensing board allows them to practice
That's sorta true... but only in the sense that they took an academic course that led to a degree whose sole purpose was to allow them to take and pass their boards. For example, my father earned a DPhil in medicine from Oxford University, but that only qualified him as a medical researcher. He had to go back and get an additional M.D. before he was allowed to practice as a physician in the U.S. and Canada (dunno if he could have practiced in the UK).
and someone building bridges could very well be an engineer, and is certainly so in the original sense of the word.
That's kind of a circular argument, isn't it? Just because I built my own house doesn't mean I'm an architect.
My own feeling is that precious little of the programming I see in practice really qualifies as "engineering," especially at small shops (Web projects and the like). Consider two people doing Pair Programming -- would you call what they're doing "engineering"? To me, engineering implies that you need to know a little bit of applied mathematics, at minimum. It also implies that you're planning ahead, and "planning" doesn't mean "OK, sounds like a plan." It means "this will work."
And if this tablet won't do it, many current tablets on the market license pen technology from Wacom. They don't have the full range of sensitivity of the standalone Intuos tablets, but that's true of the Cintiq, also.
One criticism of tablets I've heard from artist types, though, is that the screens that ship with tablets are inadequate for graphics work for various reasons. For example, the extra layer of plastic required for the touchscreen makes the image look "off," or the color response is poor. It may be difficult to overcome this problem, for technical reasons.
So you were lucky enough to do this during business hours? When I did a BIOS upgrade on my brothers machine (okay, it was because I upgraded his Single Core CPU to Dual Core), I got the activation too. Except I did this in the evening and couldn't call them. So I had to come back to his place during business hours. How fun....
Didn't you read the part about my mom putting dinner on the table? It was probably around 7pm Arizona time. I guess it's always business hours in Bangalore.
The first time I had to call Microsoft to re-activate a legitimate copy of Windows that had stopped working after extensive repairs, I was connected to a call center in India. The nice man asked me a couple of questions ("How many PCs is this copy of Windows installed on?"), gave me a code, said "please to be having a nice day" and we were done in about five minutes. I actually did it while my mom was putting dinner on the table.
The second time I had to call Microsoft, it wasn't even a call center. This time it was a computer that used voice recognition to get the same information from me. This time the call length was down to about two minutes.
The third time I had to call Microsoft, it wasn't even really a legit copy of Windows, but activation worked anyway and the process went just as quickly.
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
I don't understand your comment about not wanting to upgrade past XP because of activation, either. At least one of those calls to Microsoft was to re-activate a copy of XP Home.
Slashdot Mirror
Antibiotics also have reduced the danger of infection from surgery by, oh, 95% or so, making surgery a much more realistic proposition.
Well ... if you don't count nosocomial MRSA infections, I guess. But I'm just being snarky. Your post is well stated.
Well, drinking a whole can is a whole different experience from taking a sip.
You seriously think that's the whole story? These companies have been engaged in an all-out war for global market share for decades. Trying to reduce it to "but Coke tastes better" only makes you sound like a sucker.
I love the ones that say something like, "Namubitol ... so you can live with confidence again. Ask your doctor."
If I'm a salesman and you're a doctor, and my job is to sell stuff and your job is to save people's lives, and I offer you some money and you take it ... whose ethics are worse, mine or yours? Nobody is propping those doctors' mouths open and shoving steak in them.
And then again, coming at it from another angle, a doctor who is unaware of what new medications are coming to market isn't doing his job. What he needs to do is A.) hear the sales pitch, and B.) hit the journals to see if the pharma company's claims are backed up by evidence. This is where Merck lying about its products in a fake journal comes into play.
Just to clarify: Do you mean the publisher has offered to produce a special issue that features a favorable article on your product that has already been written, or do you mean the publisher offers to have one written for you?
Most trade publishers offer some form of reprint service or custom publishing division as a side business. It's only really a problem if they're passing off paid articles as legitimate news or peer-reviewed content, or if the editors have any direct involvement. If they're just repackaging a favorable article that has already been produced/published so that you can use it for your own promotional purposes, I don't see the harm.
True, but there may be a technical element to this. As in: I don't subscribe to any TV service, but I still get all the channels of "Basic Plus" cable. Try plugging your cable into the back of a TV sometime and see what you get. My understanding is that they have to put filters on your line to block the TV once they turn the line live with Internet service, and a lot of installers can't be bothered.
Kudos to the editors for attempting something different -- trying to match the product they sell to the market demand.
I don't think you understand what's going on at all. The marketing department were the ones trying to adjust the news to meet "market demand" (apparently -- it wasn't clear just what they were trying to do). The editors were the ones raising the red flag.
News that is "sold" as an entertainment product designed to match "market demand" is inherently corrupt. Any organization that is attempting to foist off that kind of insidious manipulation as information should be destroyed.
This is far above and beyond simple oral storytelling.
Actually, I'd rank it far below simple oral storytelling. Am I the only one who can't tell what this "story" is even supposed to be about?
So your professor went to a screenwriting workshop and somebody told him about a kooky screenplay and then the author told him that the screenplay was "a masterplan for gods disguised as a screenplay." What is that supposed to mean?
Then the professor tells you that there is a guy named Cameron who is actually making this screenplay into a movie and that the Cameron guy is nuts.
Next thing we know, the professor is hanging out in LA, picking up chicks, and the chicks have glowing eyes and telephones that talk to god.
True story.
Do I have that about right?
I think all we have learned from this is: A.) Your professor takes drugs. B.) Hollywood screenwriters are talentless hacks. C.) Chicks in Los Angeles are bubbleheaded bimbos who like to hear themselves talk.
(hopefully this just fizzles out like SARS)
SARS is a different type of virus than influenza (it is a form of coronavirus), and it "fizzled out" mainly because the physicians who responded to the initial incidents were mistaken about how it was transmitted. Most of the people who came down with SARS did so because they were all staying at the same hotel, and the hotel had bad plumbing. The patients contracted the virus, essentially, by inhaling waste from other infected people. Viral cells were being aerosolized into the hallways by tiny cracks in the pipes. Nasty-sounding, but true. SARS is not really all that virulent -- my understanding is that you need pretty close contact with an infected person to catch it -- and this is the main reason why you haven't heard about more major outbreaks. As it turns out, all those face masks you saw on the news were really more of a result of bad information spread by the media than they were any kind of meaningful preventative measure.
Heparin is also rat poison. True story -- the original use for that class of anticoagulant drugs, beginning with warfarin, was to overdose vermin so that they would hemorrhage and die. Read the boxes on a lot of rat and mouse poison and you'll find that they're still the preferred agent in use today.
But heparin is also vital therapy for a variety of life-threatening conditions. If it disappeared from the market, a whole lot of people would be screwed, and many would die.
True, Merck's behavior was absolutely reprehensible. They actually got their very just desserts already: All the money that they spent to develop the drug has been wasted, all the money they could have made from selling the drug has vanished in a puff of smoke. Good. We hit 'em where it hurt, for once.
Unfortunately, I'm also with the people who say it's a real shame that patients who could benefit from Vioxx no longer have access to it.
This is just my speculation, but Sun probably had 20 lawyers in a room full of IBM lawyers for every day of negotiation ... and Scott McNealy probably crashed at Larry Ellison's house every night.
I don't think there was anything untoward on Sun's part, though. IBM walked away from the deal. Nothing about being a giant company precludes you from being a sucker.
3. Oracle needs to expand their product line beyond just the database to continue to grow. There is more growth potential in the rest of the datacenter than there is in database software.
You make a valid point, but you seem to have forgotten that Oracle already owns PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and BEA.
Months ago? Lots of analysts? Hmmm. I think maybe it's easier to "foresee" this type of stuff in hindsight.
Not to toot my own horn, but I predicted Oracle would buy Sun before the deal was announced -- but I didn't do it months ago. I didn't hear anyone else talking about it months ago, either. And when I made the prediction, the consensus here on Slashdot seemed to be that it was a terrible idea. So if you can point to some references from months ago I'd love to see them. I don't think anybody was really even thinking much about Oracle/Sun before the talks with IBM made the news -- I know I wasn't -- especially considering that Sun had consistently maintained that it was doing fine and didn't need any help from anybody.
So it doesn't completely surprise me that Ballmer didn't see this coming -- though maybe he's not as shocked as he's pretending to be. By acting surprised, he makes it sound like he wouldn't have made this deal himself, which makes it sound like he might not think the deal is a good idea, which is a totally self-serving position for Microsoft to take.
It does seem a little strange that IBM is acting surprised, though. By all accounts they had exclusive rights to negotiate with Sun for a set period of time, and they let that period elapse. What did they expect? Maybe they didn't believe Sun would be able to leave the table and arrive at a firm deal with a different suitor so quickly, but that seems a little foolish on their part, if it's true.
Well, it's hard to find a replacement that Microsoft ships for free with its OS. But one of the more infuriating things about Comic Sans is that the name implies it's a font that looks like comic book lettering. The truth is, pretty much every single comic book printed today is lettered using a computer font of some kind. There are dozens of fonts designed specifically for this purpose. And pretty much all of them look better than Comic Sans. Comic Sans is just grotesquely ugly, full stop.
A class-action lawsuit? Seriously?
Americans are crazy. One guy with a blog has discovered a security flaw. There has been no exploit for this flaw. Nobody is complaining that they've lost anything. What's more, this "issue" can be fixed with a firmware update. But no! Our sense of entitlement tells us that this is another opportunity to take a bunch of money out of the pockets of an eeeeeeeeeevvil corporation ... and put it into the pockets of a bunch of lawyers. Awesome.
I love the part where Nokia hasn't even issued a response yet, and we interpret that as more reason to sue. Awesome.
Every other post on Slashdot seems to be decrying how messed-up the system is in this country, and then the next post comes along demanding that we shovel more coal into the fires. Get your heads straight, please.
In my experience, it's less common for them to pass a virus in an actual software installer; instead, they slip it into the corresponding keygen. By the time someone has spent an hour installing Photoshop, they usually don't think twice about double-clicking a little keygen.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
I first started washing my hands regularly when I worked retail. All of a sudden, whenever I would wash my hands in the bathroom the water that ran off my hands wouldn't be clear -- it would be more grayish. I realized that this was coming from handling the money. And then I started thinking.
These days I just wash my hands. And I wish the GP would, too. I'm not a germophobe, that's just gross.
(unless visa, or your bank pays all when your card info has been compromised).
Which they do. Your total liability for credit card fraud in the U.S. is $50, and I've never heard of anyone actually being charged that. I once had a fraudulent $600+ charge on my account and all I did was call the credit card company and calmly ask them to remove it, which they did immediately. They sent me a form to fill out and sign to attest that I had been the victim of fraud, which I sent back at my leisure. And that was the end of that -- no $50 charge, no nothing.
And, in fact, the same is true for debit cards. The only difference is that you have to report the fraud within two days to limit your liability to $50, otherwise you might owe as much as $500. But, again, it's at the company's discretion whether they want to charge you or not. If you have good credit, maybe they'd rather keep your business.
The real victim in credit fraud cases is the retailer. If someone "buys" a $1,000 television using my credit card number and then I report the charge as fraudulent, I don't pay the bill, the credit card company doesn't pay the bill, and the retailer doesn't get the TV back. The retailer is out $1,000.
...and if you think the parent is going overboard, remember: I am only in my 30s, yet I come from an era when word processors were not WYSIWYG. Think about it. In essence, every secretary was required to understand and apply the basic concepts of HTML. Have we really grown that much dumber in 20 years?
Seems to me that part of the problem with Web UIs these days is that so much of the interface functionality is still being made "interactive" using JavaScript. The JavaScript serves no other purpose than to load and/or render various UI elements. Therefore, a front-end Web designer is often expected to use both tools to achieve the desired result. And yet programming JavaScript -- which I believe to be a fully valid use of the verb -- and really knowing what you're doing is a totally different skill than writing HTML. In an ideal world you'd have JavaScript experts working side-by-side with HTML/CSS experts, and presumably both of them would have some rudimentary understanding of graphic design -- but who can afford that? So what most people are looking for is the "ideal" Web designer, who knows both skills. It's an unlikely scenario at best, so it's no surprise that so many Web designers seem to have questionable skills and/or practices.
And besides, doctors are called doctors because they attained an academic degree, not because a licensing board allows them to practice
That's sorta true... but only in the sense that they took an academic course that led to a degree whose sole purpose was to allow them to take and pass their boards. For example, my father earned a DPhil in medicine from Oxford University, but that only qualified him as a medical researcher. He had to go back and get an additional M.D. before he was allowed to practice as a physician in the U.S. and Canada (dunno if he could have practiced in the UK).
and someone building bridges could very well be an engineer, and is certainly so in the original sense of the word.
That's kind of a circular argument, isn't it? Just because I built my own house doesn't mean I'm an architect.
My own feeling is that precious little of the programming I see in practice really qualifies as "engineering," especially at small shops (Web projects and the like). Consider two people doing Pair Programming -- would you call what they're doing "engineering"? To me, engineering implies that you need to know a little bit of applied mathematics, at minimum. It also implies that you're planning ahead, and "planning" doesn't mean "OK, sounds like a plan." It means "this will work."
He's just feels rejected because after all that effort, still nobody notices he's a dog.
And if this tablet won't do it, many current tablets on the market license pen technology from Wacom. They don't have the full range of sensitivity of the standalone Intuos tablets, but that's true of the Cintiq, also.
One criticism of tablets I've heard from artist types, though, is that the screens that ship with tablets are inadequate for graphics work for various reasons. For example, the extra layer of plastic required for the touchscreen makes the image look "off," or the color response is poor. It may be difficult to overcome this problem, for technical reasons.
So you were lucky enough to do this during business hours? When I did a BIOS upgrade on my brothers machine (okay, it was because I upgraded his Single Core CPU to Dual Core), I got the activation too. Except I did this in the evening and couldn't call them. So I had to come back to his place during business hours. How fun....
Didn't you read the part about my mom putting dinner on the table? It was probably around 7pm Arizona time. I guess it's always business hours in Bangalore.
The first time I had to call Microsoft to re-activate a legitimate copy of Windows that had stopped working after extensive repairs, I was connected to a call center in India. The nice man asked me a couple of questions ("How many PCs is this copy of Windows installed on?"), gave me a code, said "please to be having a nice day" and we were done in about five minutes. I actually did it while my mom was putting dinner on the table.
The second time I had to call Microsoft, it wasn't even a call center. This time it was a computer that used voice recognition to get the same information from me. This time the call length was down to about two minutes.
The third time I had to call Microsoft, it wasn't even really a legit copy of Windows, but activation worked anyway and the process went just as quickly.
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
I don't understand your comment about not wanting to upgrade past XP because of activation, either. At least one of those calls to Microsoft was to re-activate a copy of XP Home.