My underlying point being, I don't see anything remotely sinister here. Rather I see an efficient PR organization doing its job.
Wow, I didn't think I'd be saying this but... I tend to agree.
By way of explanation: Until recently I have been a senior editor at InfoWorld. My primary responsibility was features. I've written hundreds of articles and attended hundreds of vendor briefings, private meetings, etc. In pretty much every single one of those meetings there is some woman sitting there with a pad of paper, jotting down notes. She seldom says a word. You just can't let it bother you.
You want "When PR Attacks"? This Microsoft dossier ain't it. I've had PR people, thinking they were being cute, drop little comments about me into their emails. "Hey are you going to the such-and-such concert this weekend?" What they've done is Google searched me, pulled up my personal Web page, and added all that info into my file, also. So if they see that I like heavy metal music, for example, they'll make some comment about that.
Or, if you meet them in person, they might make a casual comment about Indian food. If you say that you like Indian food, they will mention the name of a particular nearby restaurant that they like. You'll think, "Oh, that's interesting, I'll make a note of that." But guess what? They will too. That information will also go into your dossier, and from then on every time you meet that PR rep she will try to get you to grab lunch at that particular Indian restaurant (and her client might come along too, just for kicks).
If you get laid off from a media job, somebody will Google search you and e-mail or call you at home, trying to find out where you will be working next, to preserve the relationship. (Never mind that you didn't even realize that you had a relationship with this person.) It doesn't occur to them that you might have left work to care for your wife, who is dying of cancer. To them, if they can reach you, you're fair game.
This Microsoft dossier, on the other hand... this is pretty much what I'd expect. If anything, I'd say it looks like WaggEd is doing a competent and professional job.
You mock the blogger's fear as overreaction. Try thinking like a more vulnerable person, and then perhaps you'll respond more charitably.
You don't have to be a vulnerable person to be a victim of crime. Anybody who receives death threats or threats of bodily harm has a right to take them seriously. I myself have received threats over the Internet that included very specific information about what I looked like and mentioned real-world places I was likely to frequent. I was within inches of notifying the authorities before a friend finally owned up that it was a practical joke. It wasn't a funny joke.
Awful things do happen in this world. A lot of them seem inexplicable to normal, rational people. Why would an audience member at a concert by the heavy metal band Damageplan choose to get up on stage and murder the guitar player of the band? It makes no sense. But when people are dealing with "celebrities," they sometimes get funny ideas in their heads about what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Some people think it's acceptable to post threatening, misogynist messages to forums. Others feel justified in crossing the line even further. Who are you or I to say someone is "vulnerable" just because they don't take their personal safety for granted?
Does anyone study what the common cold looks like after many attempts to inoculate us against it?
IANAS, but I would hazard the answer to this is "yes," but that the results are inconclusive. The whole problem with the common cold, what makes it so difficult to inoculate against, is that it routinely "looks like" so many different things that we can't come up with a vaccine that will "recognize" them all.
That said, Cap will be back. Steve Rogers was not the only Captain America and he won't be the last. William Naslund, Jeff Mace, a "fake" Steve Rogers, and most recently, John Walker briefly took the mantle of "Captain America" from Rogers. I am sure another Marvel hero will assume the role of Captain America in his stead.
Maybe that Winter Soldier guy, hmmmmm? (Name starts with a B and ends with a Y.)
I think your glasses are pretty rose colored if your think the corps have "failed" to subvert ANY counter culture that has achieved any sufficiently large number of adherants.
In that light, I recommend the book Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Its premise is that the whole idea of the so-called counterculture has actually been detrimental to the goal of meaningful progressive change. It points out just how many of the popular conceptions of "rebellion" or "contrarian thinking" are actually expressed in terms of buying stuff. Far from being the anti-capitalist utopia described by Adbusters or "Buy Nothing Day," counterculture thinking is actually the epitome of crass consumer capitalism. The book is flawed in some ways but it's also an enlightening counter-example against the idea that buying a certain rock band's CD results in a meaningful expression of your desire for progressive change upon the world. To over-simplify the authors' argument, if everybody took all the money that they normally spend on tattoos and drugs and donated it to progressive social programs, we might have a real counterculture. But most people just want to go to parties and talk to cute girls about change, rather than really doing something about it.
Just because an indie label has a distribution deal with someone like sony/BMG doesn't mean that they are no longer indie...it works the same way in the indie film world.
Tell that to the folks that run 924 Gilman Street. You got major label distribution, you don't play Gilman. It's a widely disputed policy, but it does make a certain sort of sense, to wit: By sticking to this policy, corporate interests do not get to infiltrate independent/alternative venues with "submarine" artists who will later be reared up to full major label status. Major labels and distributors aren't owed access to any venue or channel. They have the money to put their bands up at the standard pay-for-play venues, so let them do that, and not crowd out the true local scene from a $5-per-show venue like Gilman.
And BTW, I think you seriously overestimate the both the independence and the worth of a station like Live 105, which is owned by CBS Media. That station is pretty much the definition of corporate radio rock in the Bay Area right now.
Still, after about the 100th person walked up to you and said, "Hey, how's it going, Hack-On?? Or should I say Hake-On?" you'd probably think of something, too.
Wow. OK, I stand corrected. I must admit, I get most of my radio in the form of about 1 hour of NPR a day, so I guess I've been insulated from a lot of the examples you cite.:-S Kinda... scary.
I guess that depends on whether you're stating opinion or fact. Everyone is entitled to their opinion no matter how stupid it is.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion but they are not necessarily entitled to write it down and publish it for the whole world to read. If I say "I think George W. Bush looks like a child molester. In fact think he is a child molester" and then I go on for the next few paragraphs to talk about George W. Bush as if he molests children, speculating on the times and places where he might have had access to children to molest them, then I am begging for a lawsuit. I'd be a fool to believe that "but I told you up front that it was just my opinion" was going to save me. In the United States, the Supreme Court has pretty much rejected the "fair comment" defense for libel cases.
Um, yes, if you don't protect your rights, and have become injured, and you know you're injured, then several theories of law say you're tacitly approving of the injury, and your losses become assuaged by this approval.
That must explain why there is no such thing as submarine patents.
And if the campaign garners enough attention and if Steve Ballmer maintains silence, then the community and companies behind Linux can take the silence for for the admission that it is.
Um... except that the law doesn't work that way. Silence != admission of anything. Good luck in court, fellas.
Obviously not someone comprehends the utility of opening access to a switched network built upon a ubiquitous public resource.
What resource is that? Sure, the airwaves are "owned" by all of society... but last I heard it was the carriers who built out the equipment necessary to broadcast phone calls over them.
This article seems to be a mishmash of specious and self-serving claims on Skype's part.
The reason for Skype's interest in the issue is obvious: they want to force network operators to allow Skype-enabled calling across their networks, something currently prohibited on wireless data plans. In its filing, Skype argues that this capability would offer "tremendous new sources of price competition provided by entities such as Skype," and that's exactly why wireless operators will fight the plan tooth and nail.
And the problem here is exactly what? It sounds to me like Skype is saying, "Hey guys, if you let us use your networks we'll undercut all your prices and undermine your business models. Then all that money you spent to build out your cellular networks will benefit us instead of you! Deal?"
Unfortunately, the "invisible hand" has been a little too invisble here, and no operator actually offers a wide-open network. Skype thinks a smidgen of government regulation could actually help out quite a bit
No doubt it would. They're trying it in Venezuela. What's the basis for doing it here? Why should Skype benefit and the cellular carriers gain nothing?
Skype (and Wu's paper) point out the various ways that the wireless phone companies block consumer choice: crippling features on phones, locking handsets to operators, limiting consumers' ability to install third-party applications, and limiting the terms of service with bandwidth caps and restrictions on what content can be accessed through the network (Skype calls are forbidden, for instance).
"Block consumer choice" is an interesting choice of wording here. I've heard most of these complaints before. Then again, T-Mobile allows me to install third-party apps on my BlackBerry, and I can even use it as a wireless modem if I hook it up to my laptop. Presumably I could then run Skype on the laptop (though how well it would work is another story). Kinda makes me wonder what Skype is actually hoping to achieve.
Verizon, Cingular, et al. hate this and would love to keep crippling WiFi and Bluetooth access on their phones in order to keep traffic flowing through their network, using their (high-priced) services.
What do WiFi and Bluetooth have to do with running Skype over a cellular network? This sounds like a red herring to allow them to start talking about "crippling" again. How have the carriers "crippled" their WiFi-enabled phones anyway? This one I have not heard of.
And they manage to avoid the most important question: If Skype is encouraging the government to pass regulation to allow Skype into the telcos' markets, can we therefore assume that Skype is willing to itself be regulated, exactly as the telcos are regulated today?
More like extras are for filling up the DVD... or, these days, to give them an excuse to add a second DVD to the package and jack up the price. Seriously, how many times can you watch a 10-minute documentary on how they used a computer to create a certain effect? Or interviews at press junkets where the actors explain how great it was to work with the director? The so-called extras they cram onto most discs are obvious filler. Even the deleted scenes are usually just slapped on there, not even formatted anamorphic, sometimes with time codes still onscreen.
There are very few DVDs in my collection that have made an effort to provide good extras. The Lord of the Rings movies are one example -- in fact, their extras include more information than I'd ever want about any movie. "Taxi Driver" is another -- it has a button that you can press at any point in the film that takes you to the corresponding page of the script. But otherwise I'm usually ecstatic to see DVDs packed full of extras...because I know the main feature will look that much better once I run it through DVDShrink.
Note that I don't care if I get to use Aero or not.
Then you'll be fine. Honestly, people, it's not that much different than XP. I have to assume that most of the people who are repeating these claims about RAM usage simply haven't booted Vista yet. I have 2GB on my Vista machine but that's mainly for VMWare and Photoshop work. It ran fine with 1GB (though there was a slight "Windows Experience Index" improvement when I added the second gig, probably because of the aforementioned caching).
I'd even buy that sony libre thingy if it ever came to my country.
I'd really recommend playing around with it first. The page-turn rate on the model I saw at a Sony Store was slow. You can absolutely forget about the idea of "flipping through" an ebook on one of those.
When MP3 players first started to come out MP3s were something only geeks had on their computers. Right now most people in any kind of tech job have a few ebooks or help files on their PCs that would be perfect on an ereader.
That may be true, but the geeks who were first to latch onto MP3 typically had hundreds of MP3 files, if not thousands. The difference is that those same geeks were also making the MP3 files. So long as the ebook readers are tied to proprietary, cumbersome formats (and I include PDF in that list), ebooks will not thrive. Readers should be able to display the formats that everybody has and everybody knows how to work with -- HTML being the prime example. I've read thousands of pages on a Nokia 770 with FBReader, and every single one of those ebooks was a plain HTML file.
IO is the bottleneck anyway. The scheme I mentioned reduces the bottlenecks to that single one. And it allows arbitrary scaling with minimal (if any) recoding, just by adding HW.
That's dumb.
In the shared-nothing design, each query server only has access to part of the database. Therefore, each server is able to use 100 percent of its I/O to access its portion of the data, because no other servers are trying to access that data. Bottlenecks only occur when the cluster is poorly designed and a disproportionate number of queries hit a single server.
By comparison, in a shared-everything design, each server has a complete copy of the data, therefore each server can use 100 percent of its I/O to access that data. The problem is that you have to keep all those copies of the data replicated, which introduces overhead that the shared-nothing design doesn't have.
In a scheme like you describe, you have a data store and you want to add an arbitrary number of query servers to access it. Unlike either of the actual, real-world designs I just mentioned, in your scheme the data store is the bottleneck. If you want to have ten query servers accessing the data store, then the data store must have ten times the I/O bandwidth of any one of the query servers if the system is to operate with no degradation of performance. If you want to add more, you need to find some way to increase the bandwidth of the data store. This should be obvious. If you can't do the math, just consider the fact that no real-world database clusters use this design.
If you're going to get snotty and dismissive, why not recognize that the needs of the market, easily/cheaply scalable databases without complex planning in application design, are more important than what this team happens to think it can do better, and don't need a vendor white paper to make clear in a few sentences?
More important to whom? Vertica is not a general purpose database. Period. It doesn't matter how many people might want something else. Existing general-purpose RDBMSs serve the general database market well (and they don't do what you're asking for because it won't work). This is a niche product.
Is anyone (here) surprised by this? It seems painfully obvious to me, that most such services obviously wouldn't work.
My home phone service is through AT&T CallVantage VoIP. AT&T has a FAQ on its CallVantage information pages specifically about this issue. And I quote:
No, this service does not support home alarm or security systems.
What's more, I seem to remember I was shown this information during the sign-up process and had to acknowledge on a terms-of-service agreement form that I understood that this service was not to be used for home security systems.
Elsewhere on the site AT&T discusses the fact that a power outage will knock out your phone service -- in fact, it's in bold type.
I agree with the others who say it's probably the ILECs behind this kind of FUD(*). It's not that the problems don't exist... it's that you shouldn't be complaining about them after you've gone ahead and signed up for the service, because nobody is concealing this information.
(* Ironically, however, my VoIP provider is now technically the same company as my ILEC... though the two services are offered by very different divisions.)
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Wow, I didn't think I'd be saying this but ... I tend to agree.
By way of explanation: Until recently I have been a senior editor at InfoWorld. My primary responsibility was features. I've written hundreds of articles and attended hundreds of vendor briefings, private meetings, etc. In pretty much every single one of those meetings there is some woman sitting there with a pad of paper, jotting down notes. She seldom says a word. You just can't let it bother you.
You want "When PR Attacks"? This Microsoft dossier ain't it. I've had PR people, thinking they were being cute, drop little comments about me into their emails. "Hey are you going to the such-and-such concert this weekend?" What they've done is Google searched me, pulled up my personal Web page, and added all that info into my file, also. So if they see that I like heavy metal music, for example, they'll make some comment about that.
Or, if you meet them in person, they might make a casual comment about Indian food. If you say that you like Indian food, they will mention the name of a particular nearby restaurant that they like. You'll think, "Oh, that's interesting, I'll make a note of that." But guess what? They will too. That information will also go into your dossier, and from then on every time you meet that PR rep she will try to get you to grab lunch at that particular Indian restaurant (and her client might come along too, just for kicks).
If you get laid off from a media job, somebody will Google search you and e-mail or call you at home, trying to find out where you will be working next, to preserve the relationship. (Never mind that you didn't even realize that you had a relationship with this person.) It doesn't occur to them that you might have left work to care for your wife, who is dying of cancer. To them, if they can reach you, you're fair game.
This Microsoft dossier, on the other hand ... this is pretty much what I'd expect. If anything, I'd say it looks like WaggEd is doing a competent and professional job.
You don't have to be a vulnerable person to be a victim of crime. Anybody who receives death threats or threats of bodily harm has a right to take them seriously. I myself have received threats over the Internet that included very specific information about what I looked like and mentioned real-world places I was likely to frequent. I was within inches of notifying the authorities before a friend finally owned up that it was a practical joke. It wasn't a funny joke.
Awful things do happen in this world. A lot of them seem inexplicable to normal, rational people. Why would an audience member at a concert by the heavy metal band Damageplan choose to get up on stage and murder the guitar player of the band? It makes no sense. But when people are dealing with "celebrities," they sometimes get funny ideas in their heads about what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Some people think it's acceptable to post threatening, misogynist messages to forums. Others feel justified in crossing the line even further. Who are you or I to say someone is "vulnerable" just because they don't take their personal safety for granted?
Use DAT tapes for near-line storage.
IANAS, but I would hazard the answer to this is "yes," but that the results are inconclusive. The whole problem with the common cold, what makes it so difficult to inoculate against, is that it routinely "looks like" so many different things that we can't come up with a vaccine that will "recognize" them all.
Maybe that Winter Soldier guy, hmmmmm? (Name starts with a B and ends with a Y.)
In that light, I recommend the book Nation of Rebels by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Its premise is that the whole idea of the so-called counterculture has actually been detrimental to the goal of meaningful progressive change. It points out just how many of the popular conceptions of "rebellion" or "contrarian thinking" are actually expressed in terms of buying stuff. Far from being the anti-capitalist utopia described by Adbusters or "Buy Nothing Day," counterculture thinking is actually the epitome of crass consumer capitalism. The book is flawed in some ways but it's also an enlightening counter-example against the idea that buying a certain rock band's CD results in a meaningful expression of your desire for progressive change upon the world. To over-simplify the authors' argument, if everybody took all the money that they normally spend on tattoos and drugs and donated it to progressive social programs, we might have a real counterculture. But most people just want to go to parties and talk to cute girls about change, rather than really doing something about it.
Tell that to the folks that run 924 Gilman Street. You got major label distribution, you don't play Gilman. It's a widely disputed policy, but it does make a certain sort of sense, to wit: By sticking to this policy, corporate interests do not get to infiltrate independent/alternative venues with "submarine" artists who will later be reared up to full major label status. Major labels and distributors aren't owed access to any venue or channel. They have the money to put their bands up at the standard pay-for-play venues, so let them do that, and not crowd out the true local scene from a $5-per-show venue like Gilman.
And BTW, I think you seriously overestimate the both the independence and the worth of a station like Live 105, which is owned by CBS Media. That station is pretty much the definition of corporate radio rock in the Bay Area right now.
Let me guess... you studied Unix at the University of Alberta?
Well, technically it wasn't even a war. It was a "conflict," or perhaps a "police action." It was never declared by Congress.
Still, after about the 100th person walked up to you and said, "Hey, how's it going, Hack-On?? Or should I say Hake-On?" you'd probably think of something, too.
Wow. OK, I stand corrected. I must admit, I get most of my radio in the form of about 1 hour of NPR a day, so I guess I've been insulated from a lot of the examples you cite. :-S Kinda ... scary.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion but they are not necessarily entitled to write it down and publish it for the whole world to read. If I say "I think George W. Bush looks like a child molester. In fact think he is a child molester" and then I go on for the next few paragraphs to talk about George W. Bush as if he molests children, speculating on the times and places where he might have had access to children to molest them, then I am begging for a lawsuit. I'd be a fool to believe that "but I told you up front that it was just my opinion" was going to save me. In the United States, the Supreme Court has pretty much rejected the "fair comment" defense for libel cases.
No, it's pretty close. The A with a ring over it in Scandinavian languages isn't really pronounced like an A. It sounds more like a kind of O.
That must explain why there is no such thing as submarine patents.
Um... except that the law doesn't work that way. Silence != admission of anything. Good luck in court, fellas.
Since nobody gets it, I'll spoil it: That's how Håkon advises people to pronounce his name. It's even on his business card.
Umm... I think by definition that actually would make his arguments less valid.
What resource is that? Sure, the airwaves are "owned" by all of society ... but last I heard it was the carriers who built out the equipment necessary to broadcast phone calls over them.
This article seems to be a mishmash of specious and self-serving claims on Skype's part.
And the problem here is exactly what? It sounds to me like Skype is saying, "Hey guys, if you let us use your networks we'll undercut all your prices and undermine your business models. Then all that money you spent to build out your cellular networks will benefit us instead of you! Deal?"
No doubt it would. They're trying it in Venezuela. What's the basis for doing it here? Why should Skype benefit and the cellular carriers gain nothing?
"Block consumer choice" is an interesting choice of wording here. I've heard most of these complaints before. Then again, T-Mobile allows me to install third-party apps on my BlackBerry, and I can even use it as a wireless modem if I hook it up to my laptop. Presumably I could then run Skype on the laptop (though how well it would work is another story). Kinda makes me wonder what Skype is actually hoping to achieve.
What do WiFi and Bluetooth have to do with running Skype over a cellular network? This sounds like a red herring to allow them to start talking about "crippling" again. How have the carriers "crippled" their WiFi-enabled phones anyway? This one I have not heard of.
And they manage to avoid the most important question: If Skype is encouraging the government to pass regulation to allow Skype into the telcos' markets, can we therefore assume that Skype is willing to itself be regulated, exactly as the telcos are regulated today?
More like extras are for filling up the DVD ... or, these days, to give them an excuse to add a second DVD to the package and jack up the price. Seriously, how many times can you watch a 10-minute documentary on how they used a computer to create a certain effect? Or interviews at press junkets where the actors explain how great it was to work with the director? The so-called extras they cram onto most discs are obvious filler. Even the deleted scenes are usually just slapped on there, not even formatted anamorphic, sometimes with time codes still onscreen.
There are very few DVDs in my collection that have made an effort to provide good extras. The Lord of the Rings movies are one example -- in fact, their extras include more information than I'd ever want about any movie. "Taxi Driver" is another -- it has a button that you can press at any point in the film that takes you to the corresponding page of the script. But otherwise I'm usually ecstatic to see DVDs packed full of extras...because I know the main feature will look that much better once I run it through DVDShrink.
Then you'll be fine. Honestly, people, it's not that much different than XP. I have to assume that most of the people who are repeating these claims about RAM usage simply haven't booted Vista yet. I have 2GB on my Vista machine but that's mainly for VMWare and Photoshop work. It ran fine with 1GB (though there was a slight "Windows Experience Index" improvement when I added the second gig, probably because of the aforementioned caching).
I'd really recommend playing around with it first. The page-turn rate on the model I saw at a Sony Store was slow. You can absolutely forget about the idea of "flipping through" an ebook on one of those.
That may be true, but the geeks who were first to latch onto MP3 typically had hundreds of MP3 files, if not thousands. The difference is that those same geeks were also making the MP3 files. So long as the ebook readers are tied to proprietary, cumbersome formats (and I include PDF in that list), ebooks will not thrive. Readers should be able to display the formats that everybody has and everybody knows how to work with -- HTML being the prime example. I've read thousands of pages on a Nokia 770 with FBReader, and every single one of those ebooks was a plain HTML file.
Seems like you could pick up a used Tablet PC for that price and look at any kind of format you want.
That's dumb.
In the shared-nothing design, each query server only has access to part of the database. Therefore, each server is able to use 100 percent of its I/O to access its portion of the data, because no other servers are trying to access that data. Bottlenecks only occur when the cluster is poorly designed and a disproportionate number of queries hit a single server.
By comparison, in a shared-everything design, each server has a complete copy of the data, therefore each server can use 100 percent of its I/O to access that data. The problem is that you have to keep all those copies of the data replicated, which introduces overhead that the shared-nothing design doesn't have.
In a scheme like you describe, you have a data store and you want to add an arbitrary number of query servers to access it. Unlike either of the actual, real-world designs I just mentioned, in your scheme the data store is the bottleneck. If you want to have ten query servers accessing the data store, then the data store must have ten times the I/O bandwidth of any one of the query servers if the system is to operate with no degradation of performance. If you want to add more, you need to find some way to increase the bandwidth of the data store. This should be obvious. If you can't do the math, just consider the fact that no real-world database clusters use this design.
More important to whom? Vertica is not a general purpose database. Period. It doesn't matter how many people might want something else. Existing general-purpose RDBMSs serve the general database market well (and they don't do what you're asking for because it won't work). This is a niche product.
My home phone service is through AT&T CallVantage VoIP. AT&T has a FAQ on its CallVantage information pages specifically about this issue. And I quote:
What's more, I seem to remember I was shown this information during the sign-up process and had to acknowledge on a terms-of-service agreement form that I understood that this service was not to be used for home security systems.
Elsewhere on the site AT&T discusses the fact that a power outage will knock out your phone service -- in fact, it's in bold type.
I agree with the others who say it's probably the ILECs behind this kind of FUD(*). It's not that the problems don't exist ... it's that you shouldn't be complaining about them after you've gone ahead and signed up for the service, because nobody is concealing this information.
(* Ironically, however, my VoIP provider is now technically the same company as my ILEC ... though the two services are offered by very different divisions.)