I'm really much more bothered here about the fact a millionaire can throw around money like this to shut down a news site, however lousy, that he doesn't like. Yes, it's Gawker today, but who knows who the next victim will be?
Honestly, what's shady about this? If you got accused of drunk driving, some helpful millionaire could step in and pay your legal fees. Who'd care?
I'm not sure I'm following. Microsoft made some changes to FBSD, so it will work better on Azure and Hyper-V. They submitted those changes back to the main FBSD project. What does any of that have to do with Linux?
The GP probably made a slip of the (virtual) tongue. But Microsoft already made all these changes to the Linux kernel. It submitted them, too. There was one year when Microsoft was one of the top Linux kernel contributors, owing to all the Hyper-V related changes it submitted.
Yes: with barely any business and IT acumen and understanding comes Microsoft to be the biggest software company in the world after few decades. With deep business and IT acumen and understanding, on the other hand, things would have been completely different.
These statements seem silly. Why do offices run on Microsoft networking and Active Directory when Novell's product line predated both? How did Microsoft become the #1 word processor vendor when everybody already had WordPerfect? When both those companies went out of business, were their execs grumbling that they could never seem to find any customers with "deep business and IT acumen"? What do you suppose their boards of directors would think of an excuse like that?
Apps for my bank and credit cards. Apps for airlines (I don't even print out boarding passes anymore). Basic document readers (that can access things that I've synced to cloud storage). Ebook reader. Bus/train schedules. HP calculator emulator. An app that tells me movie times and lets me buy tickets easily. It I was into sports, I'd probably have an app or two about that.
So like you, there's lots of apps I use. It's dumb to look at these statistics and say "nobody wants apps anymore." It's just that, pretty plainly, the ones I want I already have.
Hmm. This just does not match my social media usage pattern at all. I realize it's mostly a sinkhole for time, but sometimes you just wanna blow off steam and goof around with friends who can't be in the same room as you. I really do know pretty much everybody in my friends list (though I see them IRL to more or less degree). I don't follow any celebrities, I don't "like" pages, I pretty much ignore all the event notices. I use an ad blocker on my PC and it still seems to work pretty well.
I guess it's no wonder why I don't feel like I'm using social media a lot less than before? Maybe participating in social media is kind of like having a credit card. Some people can handle it, others can't.
Blackberry made awful phones with stupid keyboards that were hard to use.
I don't agree with this. Blackberry's messaging UI (the most important part to me) always made more sense to me than the smartphones that made you dig all over the place for email, SMS, other email, notifications, etc. Nothing could be easier. And the keyboards were good. Lots of people swore by them. Not as many people bought the smaller form-factor phones with the abbreviated keyboards, so they probably didn't realize BlackBerry had some of the best predictive text on the market. There were three letters to a key and the device almost always knew which one I meant.
Where BlackBerry's hardware started to look shoddy was in some of the later decisions they made. When they moved from the rocker-style switches to the trackballs, the trackballs were notoriously prone to failure. When they replaced them with the tiny trackpads, nobody really liked those (and they, too, would fail). Meanwhile they were trying to compete on volume by lowering prices, so the overall build quality decreased. Then they went on a tangent with some misguided ad campaign that seemed aimed at college students, rather than the professional and government users that had always been BlackBerry's core audience. By the time I finally bought an Android phone, it was because I just plain didn't see anything on the market from BlackBerry that I wanted to buy. It's almost like I didn't dump them, they dumped me.
Except that there is no significant cost reduction. You've got a certain amount of mail to deliver. That doesn't change. Reducing the number of delivery days simply means you have to deliver 6 days worth of mail in 5 days, so your overtime costs go up.
Is sorting mail really the most costly function of the USPS in 2016? I would have thought it was physically having a carrier walk to each address on his or her route and stuff the pile of mail into each mailbox. If you have the carrier walk the route half as many times per week and simply stuff a slightly thicker pile into each box, it seems to me you would slash your delivery costs by almost half.
And lets talk turkey. Bills? I went paperless ages ago. I get an alert on my phone and then I pay the bill, also on my phone.
About the only thing that I expect to get in the mail are election ballots and replacement credit cards, and maybe a monthly update on my health insurance or my retirement plan. The USPS is delivering all of that to me essentially as a free service (because I no longer even buy stamps). For Christmas packages etc., I generally use UPS.
So most of the time, the only thing I can expect to find in my mailbox is a huge pile of coupons, most of which goes straight into the recycling bin without so much as being unfolded. As a result, I check my mail maybe three times a week. Sometimes I'll go a few days without thinking about it.
I wish I was just being bitter and cynical, but this just seems to be the pattern. Some of the jobs I plain quit, I didn't even hate the job. I would have been happy to stay there -- provided it didn't mean staying there, year after year, doing the exact same job with the same title for about the same money (or a "raise" that barely matches inflation). Not one effort made, not one single finger lifted to retain me as an employee, no matter how many compliments I got on my performance. Quite literally, talk is cheap. So I'd quit, everybody would act surprised, and I'd take my salary increase and my new title at another company down the road.
And it kind of boggles the mind. Imagine if the first company hadn't wasted all the years they invested in training me and me gathering institutional knowledge and know-how. All of that was investment. All of it cost money. And instead of using what they paid for, they let me walk away and apply my skills elsewhere, occasionally with the competition. No wonder they can't afford to give raises.
But that's not just one company, it seems to be every company now. It's the American way of doing business. Human capi^H^Httle management.
I dunno man, it just seems like yelling "OK Mr Google could you please tell me the nearest theater where the Iron Man movie is playing" is a lot more of a pain in the ass than just keying "Iron Man" into a form and pressing return. And a lot more things can go wrong, requiring a do-over.
And it seems to me that one of the reasons we invented machines is because you can just use the machine, no questions asked. I might have to ask you to go harvest my wheat for me but I don't have to ask the combine harvester if it wants to do it. But now, what, they want to put voice interfaces on everything because it's going to make me feel closer to my combine harvester? That's nuts. It's a machine. Push the button. Why complicate it further?
It really feels like these "genius" tech companies are starting to come up with solutions that nobody asked for, and now they're desperately trying to create problems that their solutions can solve.
Still not excited about talking to inanimate objects, when I know they don't need me to talk to them to do what they're supposed to do.
Chatbots, Cortana, "OK Google"... it all just makes me feel like they think I'm an idiot.
Maybe it's a personality thing? Maybe the people who carry on whole conversations with their dogs and cats would also like to talk to their computer instead of pushing a button, and I'm just not one of those people? But it seems crazy to me that anybody would want to complicate their life in that way. Just point to the menu option and click it. No whispering sweet nothings into your computer is needed.
Hilarious to me was "Silicon Alley," ie startups in New York trying to do tech. These companies were crazy about building out their data centers on premises, where there was a tinted glass window behind the receptionist so that when you visited the company's offices you would see the lights blinking on all the pretty servers. "SERIOUS INTERNET WORK BEING DONE HERE!" I visited one company in NYC that intentionally left all the cardboard boxes from Dell leaning against the wall in the hallway so you'd know they were, like, buying hella servers.
Don't get me wrong; back in the Bay Area they were buying pool tables and pinball machines. But it just always seemed like a certain, bizarre brand of hubris to want to show off all the pretty server LEDs as proof that you were doing something important.
If your house is empty most of the day, or unpredictably empty, it will more than make up for the cost of purchase in at the most, a year
My apartment is almost always empty. By being a genius with the IQ of an Einstein, I came up with an algorithm to achieve the optimal setting on my thermostat.
(Seriously, am I the only one who sees the irony in a company making an expensive thermostat from a place where weather probably matters the least of anywhere in the US?)
In practice, you find that your smart TV won't play from Amazon Prime Instant Video and your smart Blu-Ray player won't play from Netflix.
Or how about this one: Your smart TV used to play Amazon Prime Instant Video, but now it doesn't because they discontinued support for that service. On my LG smart TV I think I've already lost support for Facebook, Skype, some 3D streaming service, and a couple of other things.
I'm waiting for the class action lawsuit when my TV stops supporting Netflix or YouTube, even though it shipped with their logos right on the box and in all the advertising materials. But of course they'll argue that these were all optional services, rather than actual features.
Bicycle shops, for many of the same reasons as auto shops. How annoyed am I going to be if I order a new inner tube online and then the day it shows up I can't find my tire levers? It's the weekend, I just wanted to go for a bike ride...
Toy stores, for all sorts of reasons.
Bookstores. Believe it or not, some people are still persuaded to buy books based on things like the paper stock, the way the cover was printed, the size, the font, and so on.
Furniture stores. Ever try to sit in an armchair online?
Drug stores. When your face is exploding because of allergies, is "Standard Shipping" good enough or do you go for Two-Day?
How should a singer-songwriter confirm that his song is original before posting it to YouTube, SoundCloud, or another site intended for publishing original video or music in order to avoid losing his account on said site?
Register it with the Copyright Office. That's what it's there for.
You don't need to register to own the copyright. Copyright is automatic. But if you register, the government has recognized that you are the owner of said copyright, and registration has additional benefits, such as the ability to sue for monetary damages (including statutory damages, if you can prove willful infringement).
Attorneys go where the money is. If you don't have it, they're not suing you.
Depends. Independent law firms, sure. But if the attorneys in question are on the payroll of a media company, you can bet they will sue individuals where they believe it will send a clear enough message to the broader public.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really much more bothered here about the fact a millionaire can throw around money like this to shut down a news site, however lousy, that he doesn't like. Yes, it's Gawker today, but who knows who the next victim will be?
Honestly, what's shady about this? If you got accused of drunk driving, some helpful millionaire could step in and pay your legal fees. Who'd care?
The militarization of the Police is a fascinating phenomenon.
Indeed. Who knew Andy Summers was such a dead shot with an AR-15?
Can't rally expect anything better from MICROS~1.
Why not? It sounds like Microsoft agrees with your assessment and has decided to rewrite the Hyper-V drivers.
Unlike Linux folks, FreeBSD users are encouraged to build their own kernel and user-space.
That's a pretty broad statement. What's Gentoo, then?
And I would certainly hope that anyone who considers themselves serious about Linux has at least compiled a kernel and ran 'make' a few times.
I'm not sure I'm following. Microsoft made some changes to FBSD, so it will work better on Azure and Hyper-V. They submitted those changes back to the main FBSD project. What does any of that have to do with Linux?
The GP probably made a slip of the (virtual) tongue. But Microsoft already made all these changes to the Linux kernel. It submitted them, too. There was one year when Microsoft was one of the top Linux kernel contributors, owing to all the Hyper-V related changes it submitted.
Yes: with barely any business and IT acumen and understanding comes Microsoft to be the biggest software company in the world after few decades. With deep business and IT acumen and understanding, on the other hand, things would have been completely different.
These statements seem silly. Why do offices run on Microsoft networking and Active Directory when Novell's product line predated both? How did Microsoft become the #1 word processor vendor when everybody already had WordPerfect? When both those companies went out of business, were their execs grumbling that they could never seem to find any customers with "deep business and IT acumen"? What do you suppose their boards of directors would think of an excuse like that?
Apps for my bank and credit cards. Apps for airlines (I don't even print out boarding passes anymore). Basic document readers (that can access things that I've synced to cloud storage). Ebook reader. Bus/train schedules. HP calculator emulator. An app that tells me movie times and lets me buy tickets easily. It I was into sports, I'd probably have an app or two about that.
So like you, there's lots of apps I use. It's dumb to look at these statistics and say "nobody wants apps anymore." It's just that, pretty plainly, the ones I want I already have.
Hmm. This just does not match my social media usage pattern at all. I realize it's mostly a sinkhole for time, but sometimes you just wanna blow off steam and goof around with friends who can't be in the same room as you. I really do know pretty much everybody in my friends list (though I see them IRL to more or less degree). I don't follow any celebrities, I don't "like" pages, I pretty much ignore all the event notices. I use an ad blocker on my PC and it still seems to work pretty well.
I guess it's no wonder why I don't feel like I'm using social media a lot less than before? Maybe participating in social media is kind of like having a credit card. Some people can handle it, others can't.
Of course, science fiction has taken a hit: Planet IX sounds a whole lot less ominous than Planet X.
Many machines on IX. New machines.
Blackberry made awful phones with stupid keyboards that were hard to use.
I don't agree with this. Blackberry's messaging UI (the most important part to me) always made more sense to me than the smartphones that made you dig all over the place for email, SMS, other email, notifications, etc. Nothing could be easier. And the keyboards were good. Lots of people swore by them. Not as many people bought the smaller form-factor phones with the abbreviated keyboards, so they probably didn't realize BlackBerry had some of the best predictive text on the market. There were three letters to a key and the device almost always knew which one I meant.
Where BlackBerry's hardware started to look shoddy was in some of the later decisions they made. When they moved from the rocker-style switches to the trackballs, the trackballs were notoriously prone to failure. When they replaced them with the tiny trackpads, nobody really liked those (and they, too, would fail). Meanwhile they were trying to compete on volume by lowering prices, so the overall build quality decreased. Then they went on a tangent with some misguided ad campaign that seemed aimed at college students, rather than the professional and government users that had always been BlackBerry's core audience. By the time I finally bought an Android phone, it was because I just plain didn't see anything on the market from BlackBerry that I wanted to buy. It's almost like I didn't dump them, they dumped me.
Except that there is no significant cost reduction. You've got a certain amount of mail to deliver. That doesn't change. Reducing the number of delivery days simply means you have to deliver 6 days worth of mail in 5 days, so your overtime costs go up.
Is sorting mail really the most costly function of the USPS in 2016? I would have thought it was physically having a carrier walk to each address on his or her route and stuff the pile of mail into each mailbox. If you have the carrier walk the route half as many times per week and simply stuff a slightly thicker pile into each box, it seems to me you would slash your delivery costs by almost half.
And lets talk turkey. Bills? I went paperless ages ago. I get an alert on my phone and then I pay the bill, also on my phone.
About the only thing that I expect to get in the mail are election ballots and replacement credit cards, and maybe a monthly update on my health insurance or my retirement plan. The USPS is delivering all of that to me essentially as a free service (because I no longer even buy stamps). For Christmas packages etc., I generally use UPS.
So most of the time, the only thing I can expect to find in my mailbox is a huge pile of coupons, most of which goes straight into the recycling bin without so much as being unfolded. As a result, I check my mail maybe three times a week. Sometimes I'll go a few days without thinking about it.
Pretty much every pedal I've had my foot upon needs several pounds of pressure to get it to maximum depression.
Which I take to mean the point at which you decide to drive your car into a wall at top speed?
I wish I was just being bitter and cynical, but this just seems to be the pattern. Some of the jobs I plain quit, I didn't even hate the job. I would have been happy to stay there -- provided it didn't mean staying there, year after year, doing the exact same job with the same title for about the same money (or a "raise" that barely matches inflation). Not one effort made, not one single finger lifted to retain me as an employee, no matter how many compliments I got on my performance. Quite literally, talk is cheap. So I'd quit, everybody would act surprised, and I'd take my salary increase and my new title at another company down the road.
And it kind of boggles the mind. Imagine if the first company hadn't wasted all the years they invested in training me and me gathering institutional knowledge and know-how. All of that was investment. All of it cost money. And instead of using what they paid for, they let me walk away and apply my skills elsewhere, occasionally with the competition. No wonder they can't afford to give raises.
But that's not just one company, it seems to be every company now. It's the American way of doing business. Human capi^H^Httle management.
Yeah, admittedly my opinion is skewed because I don't own a car, never see this use case.
I dunno man, it just seems like yelling "OK Mr Google could you please tell me the nearest theater where the Iron Man movie is playing" is a lot more of a pain in the ass than just keying "Iron Man" into a form and pressing return. And a lot more things can go wrong, requiring a do-over.
And it seems to me that one of the reasons we invented machines is because you can just use the machine, no questions asked. I might have to ask you to go harvest my wheat for me but I don't have to ask the combine harvester if it wants to do it. But now, what, they want to put voice interfaces on everything because it's going to make me feel closer to my combine harvester? That's nuts. It's a machine. Push the button. Why complicate it further?
It really feels like these "genius" tech companies are starting to come up with solutions that nobody asked for, and now they're desperately trying to create problems that their solutions can solve.
Still not excited about talking to inanimate objects, when I know they don't need me to talk to them to do what they're supposed to do.
Chatbots, Cortana, "OK Google" ... it all just makes me feel like they think I'm an idiot.
Maybe it's a personality thing? Maybe the people who carry on whole conversations with their dogs and cats would also like to talk to their computer instead of pushing a button, and I'm just not one of those people? But it seems crazy to me that anybody would want to complicate their life in that way. Just point to the menu option and click it. No whispering sweet nothings into your computer is needed.
So ... Oracle? Doomed?
Hilarious to me was "Silicon Alley," ie startups in New York trying to do tech. These companies were crazy about building out their data centers on premises, where there was a tinted glass window behind the receptionist so that when you visited the company's offices you would see the lights blinking on all the pretty servers. "SERIOUS INTERNET WORK BEING DONE HERE!" I visited one company in NYC that intentionally left all the cardboard boxes from Dell leaning against the wall in the hallway so you'd know they were, like, buying hella servers.
Don't get me wrong; back in the Bay Area they were buying pool tables and pinball machines. But it just always seemed like a certain, bizarre brand of hubris to want to show off all the pretty server LEDs as proof that you were doing something important.
If your house is empty most of the day, or unpredictably empty, it will more than make up for the cost of purchase in at the most, a year
My apartment is almost always empty. By being a genius with the IQ of an Einstein, I came up with an algorithm to achieve the optimal setting on my thermostat.
(Seriously, am I the only one who sees the irony in a company making an expensive thermostat from a place where weather probably matters the least of anywhere in the US?)
Is it its first attempt, or only the first attempt that can reasonably be classified as a tune?
In practice, you find that your smart TV won't play from Amazon Prime Instant Video and your smart Blu-Ray player won't play from Netflix.
Or how about this one: Your smart TV used to play Amazon Prime Instant Video, but now it doesn't because they discontinued support for that service. On my LG smart TV I think I've already lost support for Facebook, Skype, some 3D streaming service, and a couple of other things.
I'm waiting for the class action lawsuit when my TV stops supporting Netflix or YouTube, even though it shipped with their logos right on the box and in all the advertising materials. But of course they'll argue that these were all optional services, rather than actual features.
I can think of plenty of other examples, too.
Bicycle shops, for many of the same reasons as auto shops. How annoyed am I going to be if I order a new inner tube online and then the day it shows up I can't find my tire levers? It's the weekend, I just wanted to go for a bike ride...
Toy stores, for all sorts of reasons.
Bookstores. Believe it or not, some people are still persuaded to buy books based on things like the paper stock, the way the cover was printed, the size, the font, and so on.
Furniture stores. Ever try to sit in an armchair online?
Drug stores. When your face is exploding because of allergies, is "Standard Shipping" good enough or do you go for Two-Day?
And so on...
How should a singer-songwriter confirm that his song is original before posting it to YouTube, SoundCloud, or another site intended for publishing original video or music in order to avoid losing his account on said site?
Register it with the Copyright Office. That's what it's there for.
You don't need to register to own the copyright. Copyright is automatic. But if you register, the government has recognized that you are the owner of said copyright, and registration has additional benefits, such as the ability to sue for monetary damages (including statutory damages, if you can prove willful infringement).
Attorneys go where the money is. If you don't have it, they're not suing you.
Depends. Independent law firms, sure. But if the attorneys in question are on the payroll of a media company, you can bet they will sue individuals where they believe it will send a clear enough message to the broader public.