We already have ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Fox to choose from... what do we need Nickelodeon or Discovery or ESPN for?
We already have Judaism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Islam... what do we need Buddhism or Humanism or Hinduism for?
We already have hamburgers, burritos, fried chicken, and pizza... what do we need curry or fish-n-chips or hotdogs for?
We already have Symbian, WinMobile, PalmOS, and Blackberry... what do we need Android or iPhoneOS for?
We already have WordStar, MSWord, WordPerfect, and WordPro... what do we need OpenOffice or Pages or AbiWord for?
Having choices is a Good Thing.
Also, you might notice that sometimes it's one of those other/extra/superfluous/ options that eventually turns out to be the most viable choice going forward. Who would've thought 10 years ago that StarOffice's Write and Calc (rather than, say, WordPerfect or Lotus123) would become the leading contenders to challenge MS Office? Or that Psion's EPOC (the parent of Symbian) would become one of the dominant handset OSes, rather than something from Palm or maybe Sharp? There was a time when it was self-evident that GNU or one of the BSDs would rise up to challenge UNIX®, but it turned out to be that new kernel from the Finnish fella which caught fire. A diverse ecosystem with lots of strange little things growing in various niches is the healthiest kind of environment.
The Comics Code Authority effectively crippled the medium of comics for decades, restricting it to kiddie humor and simplistic superhero stories. The only comics that were able to tell intelligent, challenging, or sophisticated stories for grown-ups after the CCA was established were those that developed through the "underground" drug culture, which weren't distributed to a mainstream audience and market. Fortunately, the CCA gradually became less relevant when comics stopped being distributed widely through newsstands (instead being sold only in comics specialty shops), and material like Watchmen, From Hell, 300, Road to Perdition, and a non-campy version of Batman (plus a whole range of comics that haven't been made into films) were possible. But it's taken decades for the comics medium to recover from (self)censorship, and the comics industry still hasn't. Since the imposition of the CCA, comics have withered into a niche medium, still dominated by the two genres that the CCA tolerated. Our culture is the poorer for it.
All so your parents wouldn't need to worry about what kinds of books you had access to.
I'm an iPod Touch user who finds it very frustrating how often I try to use features like e-mail and the news apps... but can't because I'm so often offline. Trying to use it as a phone would be even more annoying. Looking for a place with free wifi would be a lot like the bad old days of trying to find a pay phone whenever you wanted to call someone. And forget about incoming calls.
I'm not offended by the sex in GoDaddy's ads... just the sexism. It's been clear since their first SuperBowl ad got "banned" that they're just trying to push people's buttons and create a sensational scandal, under the reasoning that it's free publicity. I wrote to Parsons at the time of the original ad and complained that he was making me - a long-time customer - embarassed to be associated with a business whose ad campaign was based on adolescent T&A fantasies, and he shrugged it off with a joke. All he cares about is that it's making him money.
In a previous job I submitted several naming schemes for approval; the first one that was approved was to name servers after the planets. It went fine until we got to Uranus, and the snickering began.
In another instance, we had three mainframes to name. For some reason they didn't go with my proposal to name them Yahweh (the Father), Jesus (the Son), and Casper (the Friendly Ghost).
I had more success at a later job, where I had dozens of servers, printers, etc. to name and proposed using names from Greek mythology. I carefully reserved the more difficult to pronounce names for machines that didn't face the users (e.g. Aeolus). Officially, the assignment of specific names to certain printers, servers, etc. had no significance (to protect me in case someone inferred a meaning I didn't intend), but I often had a private association in mind that helped me keep track of which name applied to which device (e.g. Iris was the main color printer, a system in the metalworking lab was Hephaestus)
On my home network, each machine is named after a member of the Justice League: Clark, Bruce, Diana, Barry, Hal, Ollie, Dinah...
It's easily explained if you posit the simple hypothesis that other civilizations are stuck up, and just don't want to talk to us. This should be obvious to any geek who lived through middle school.
Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like "address book" into all of these languages.
It's an important point to make, because too many idiots don't understand the difference. The fact that there's a correlation between downloading music and buying music is interesting, but by itself it doesn't prove any of the things that people are hoping to prove. Without additional information, it is unsound reasoning to argue that downloading music leads to buying more music, or that buying more music leads to downloading music, or that buying and downloading music are caused by the same outside factor. There may be a causal relationship between the two, but any competent scientist should demand that such a relationship (and its direction) be demonstrated, not just assumed.
So what they've discovered here is that people who are really interested in music (i.e. they download a lot of it) tend to buy more music than people who are not that into it (i.e. they download very little). This is not surprising ("obvious" would be a better word), nor does it say anything definitive about the effect of downloading on sales, because (all together now) correlation does not equal causation.
No, the point the article makes is that in addition to everything else he did, Galileo also gets points for mapping the moon, while Harriot - who did it early and better - gets none. They figure it's an accomplishment worth noting. (The comment about Harriot being "known better" isn't in reference to Galileo, but in reference to his actual current status.)
"should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic...?"
Any system should be designed in such a way that a mere clueless user should not be able to bring it down accidentally. If an e-mail system can't handle "reply-to-all" when used carelessly, then it shouldn't have that function.
I've done tech work in organizations of a few sizes, and found the bigger tech departents increasingly frustrating to work in. The company is going to get a _____, and that sounds like a fun project to work on, but that falls under the _____ group, so you don't get to. And they're going to replace the _____ with some new gear, but you aren't on the committee deciding what to get, so you have to live with whatever they pick.... And so on. Metaphors involving small cogs and big machines come to mind.
On the other hand, I've been part of some tech departments of just a few people, and there's been so much more opportunity to learn and grow. Sure, it means you get stuck doing grunt work like crawling under desks and changing toner cartridges, but a job where I get to design and build the web site, select and install the mail system, configure the standard user desktop settings, plan and spec out the server room, write the training materials and teach the users, map out the IP addressing scheme and assign names under DNS, diagnose and repair workstation problems, implement the backup strategy... what a great job description! Granted, it's not all sunshine and roses, and I could go on at length about the down side of working in a small shop. It depends a lot on finding the right (small) group of people to work with. But for someone who considers "jack of all trades" just a pejorative term for "renaissance man", it can be a great environment to work in.
(And if there's anybody in West Michigan who thinks they could use (not abuse) someone like that, drop me a line.)
It should surprise no one that the UI systems in Michigan, the official Unemployment Capital of North America, are also buckling under the traffic. My longtime buddy MARVIN (aka Michigan Automated Voice Interactive Network) has been offline the past couple days. Fortunately I have a couple part-time jobs, so I'm not collecting benefits, but I know people who are... trying to.
So the beige Power Mac G3 All-In-One that immediately predated the iMac doesn't count? It had none of the aesthetic appeal of the iMac, but the G3 AIO - which looked very much like a Mac Classic which had been exposed to gamma radiation and then made very angry - was the iMac's direct and immediate ancestor.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." -William Butler Yeats
No. Not even close.
Before trying to figure out what copyright and trademark law allow you to do, go learn what the two things are. Your attempt to summarize them demonstrates that you don't understand that yet, and without that you'll never get how they each work.
Kdawson apparently doesn't understand basic legal terms (or perhaps just suffers from a kind of dyslexia). The notion of copyrighting a name is utterly absurd. To set it straight:
The copyright - the appearance and basic character traits off the Thimble Theater cast - has expired in the EU.
The trademark - the name and the distinctive likeness of the characters, as used in marketing - presumably has not.
The effect of this is that in the EU, you can create your own Popeye and Olive Oyl stories, and use the characters as they were originally presented by Segar, and you can even sell this comics strip/book/movie/opera/whatever for profit. However, you cannot use the name or images of the characters in the packaging or marketing of your product, because that would violate the trademark rights of (I assume) King Features.
Please read more carefully: I said "they way they're used to" not "the way it's supposed to". I'm talking about the UI. For example, IE6 has the same set of pulldown menus in the same place they've been since the first time the user encountered Windows. That's familiar. The toolbar is right underneath it left-aligned, where it's been found in most Win apps for years. Again: familiar. But IE7 (like Office2007) defies those long-standing conventions... maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but it's inarguably different and unfamiliar, and most casual computer users don't like that. Ironically, switching to Firefox or Safari provides these users with a more familiar UI than IE7 does. (Chrome, on the other hand, is the most IE7-like alternative among the top half-dozen browsers... not really the best "upgrade" path for IE6 users.)
To many people IE6 is the WinXP/Office2003 of browsers. It may be technically inferior to its successor, but it works the way they're used to, and it runs on their current platform. Microsoft has shoved a bunch of unwanted UI overhauls down the throats of its users with IE7, Vista, and Office2007, and I know a fair number of people who are sticking with the ones before those because of that. And if they can't (as Google seems to be telling IE6 users), then that's a good time to explore other browsers, other OSes, and other office suites.
Well, to be fair, the Aussie had grown up in Manchester, so... yeah, understanding my flatmates was a challenge.:)
But nothing compared to following the Welsh fella in my Sociology seminar. I have a pretty good ear for accents, and I can fake a Scots or Irish or R.P. English accent well enough to impress an American. But I can't figure out what makes a Welsh accent tick.... though I think that watching two series of Torchwood on DVD is starting to help.
Slashdot Mirror
When it's closer to release readiness, I'm sure they will.
We already have ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and Fox to choose from... what do we need Nickelodeon or Discovery or ESPN for?
We already have Judaism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Islam... what do we need Buddhism or Humanism or Hinduism for?
We already have hamburgers, burritos, fried chicken, and pizza... what do we need curry or fish-n-chips or hotdogs for?
We already have Symbian, WinMobile, PalmOS, and Blackberry... what do we need Android or iPhoneOS for?
We already have WordStar, MSWord, WordPerfect, and WordPro... what do we need OpenOffice or Pages or AbiWord for?
Having choices is a Good Thing.
Also, you might notice that sometimes it's one of those other/extra/superfluous/ options that eventually turns out to be the most viable choice going forward. Who would've thought 10 years ago that StarOffice's Write and Calc (rather than, say, WordPerfect or Lotus123) would become the leading contenders to challenge MS Office? Or that Psion's EPOC (the parent of Symbian) would become one of the dominant handset OSes, rather than something from Palm or maybe Sharp? There was a time when it was self-evident that GNU or one of the BSDs would rise up to challenge UNIX®, but it turned out to be that new kernel from the Finnish fella which caught fire. A diverse ecosystem with lots of strange little things growing in various niches is the healthiest kind of environment.
So why would your parents have needed to worry about you picking up Sandman or Preacher (if they had been available)? Your "reasoning" makes no sense.
The Comics Code Authority effectively crippled the medium of comics for decades, restricting it to kiddie humor and simplistic superhero stories. The only comics that were able to tell intelligent, challenging, or sophisticated stories for grown-ups after the CCA was established were those that developed through the "underground" drug culture, which weren't distributed to a mainstream audience and market. Fortunately, the CCA gradually became less relevant when comics stopped being distributed widely through newsstands (instead being sold only in comics specialty shops), and material like Watchmen, From Hell, 300, Road to Perdition, and a non-campy version of Batman (plus a whole range of comics that haven't been made into films) were possible. But it's taken decades for the comics medium to recover from (self)censorship, and the comics industry still hasn't. Since the imposition of the CCA, comics have withered into a niche medium, still dominated by the two genres that the CCA tolerated. Our culture is the poorer for it.
All so your parents wouldn't need to worry about what kinds of books you had access to.
I'm an iPod Touch user who finds it very frustrating how often I try to use features like e-mail and the news apps... but can't because I'm so often offline. Trying to use it as a phone would be even more annoying. Looking for a place with free wifi would be a lot like the bad old days of trying to find a pay phone whenever you wanted to call someone. And forget about incoming calls.
Mod parent Funny. (Hint: Ginger = Segway)
I'm not offended by the sex in GoDaddy's ads... just the sexism. It's been clear since their first SuperBowl ad got "banned" that they're just trying to push people's buttons and create a sensational scandal, under the reasoning that it's free publicity. I wrote to Parsons at the time of the original ad and complained that he was making me - a long-time customer - embarassed to be associated with a business whose ad campaign was based on adolescent T&A fantasies, and he shrugged it off with a joke. All he cares about is that it's making him money.
In a previous job I submitted several naming schemes for approval; the first one that was approved was to name servers after the planets. It went fine until we got to Uranus, and the snickering began.
In another instance, we had three mainframes to name. For some reason they didn't go with my proposal to name them Yahweh (the Father), Jesus (the Son), and Casper (the Friendly Ghost).
I had more success at a later job, where I had dozens of servers, printers, etc. to name and proposed using names from Greek mythology. I carefully reserved the more difficult to pronounce names for machines that didn't face the users (e.g. Aeolus). Officially, the assignment of specific names to certain printers, servers, etc. had no significance (to protect me in case someone inferred a meaning I didn't intend), but I often had a private association in mind that helped me keep track of which name applied to which device (e.g. Iris was the main color printer, a system in the metalworking lab was Hephaestus)
On my home network, each machine is named after a member of the Justice League: Clark, Bruce, Diana, Barry, Hal, Ollie, Dinah...
It's easily explained if you posit the simple hypothesis that other civilizations are stuck up, and just don't want to talk to us. This should be obvious to any geek who lived through middle school.
Duh... use Babelfish.
But can you hack OS X to run on them?
It's an important point to make, because too many idiots don't understand the difference. The fact that there's a correlation between downloading music and buying music is interesting, but by itself it doesn't prove any of the things that people are hoping to prove. Without additional information, it is unsound reasoning to argue that downloading music leads to buying more music, or that buying more music leads to downloading music, or that buying and downloading music are caused by the same outside factor. There may be a causal relationship between the two, but any competent scientist should demand that such a relationship (and its direction) be demonstrated, not just assumed.
So what they've discovered here is that people who are really interested in music (i.e. they download a lot of it) tend to buy more music than people who are not that into it (i.e. they download very little). This is not surprising ("obvious" would be a better word), nor does it say anything definitive about the effect of downloading on sales, because (all together now) correlation does not equal causation.
No, the point the article makes is that in addition to everything else he did, Galileo also gets points for mapping the moon, while Harriot - who did it early and better - gets none. They figure it's an accomplishment worth noting. (The comment about Harriot being "known better" isn't in reference to Galileo, but in reference to his actual current status.)
"should an e-mail system be able to handle this type of traffic...?"
Any system should be designed in such a way that a mere clueless user should not be able to bring it down accidentally. If an e-mail system can't handle "reply-to-all" when used carelessly, then it shouldn't have that function.
I've done tech work in organizations of a few sizes, and found the bigger tech departents increasingly frustrating to work in. The company is going to get a _____, and that sounds like a fun project to work on, but that falls under the _____ group, so you don't get to. And they're going to replace the _____ with some new gear, but you aren't on the committee deciding what to get, so you have to live with whatever they pick.... And so on. Metaphors involving small cogs and big machines come to mind.
... what a great job description! Granted, it's not all sunshine and roses, and I could go on at length about the down side of working in a small shop. It depends a lot on finding the right (small) group of people to work with. But for someone who considers "jack of all trades" just a pejorative term for "renaissance man", it can be a great environment to work in.
On the other hand, I've been part of some tech departments of just a few people, and there's been so much more opportunity to learn and grow. Sure, it means you get stuck doing grunt work like crawling under desks and changing toner cartridges, but a job where I get to design and build the web site, select and install the mail system, configure the standard user desktop settings, plan and spec out the server room, write the training materials and teach the users, map out the IP addressing scheme and assign names under DNS, diagnose and repair workstation problems, implement the backup strategy
(And if there's anybody in West Michigan who thinks they could use (not abuse) someone like that, drop me a line.)
It should surprise no one that the UI systems in Michigan, the official Unemployment Capital of North America, are also buckling under the traffic. My longtime buddy MARVIN (aka Michigan Automated Voice Interactive Network) has been offline the past couple days. Fortunately I have a couple part-time jobs, so I'm not collecting benefits, but I know people who are... trying to.
So the beige Power Mac G3 All-In-One that immediately predated the iMac doesn't count? It had none of the aesthetic appeal of the iMac, but the G3 AIO - which looked very much like a Mac Classic which had been exposed to gamma radiation and then made very angry - was the iMac's direct and immediate ancestor.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." -William Butler Yeats
No. Not even close.
Before trying to figure out what copyright and trademark law allow you to do, go learn what the two things are. Your attempt to summarize them demonstrates that you don't understand that yet, and without that you'll never get how they each work.
Personally I was hoping they'd switch to wanker or twit, or maybe even arsehole.
Kdawson apparently doesn't understand basic legal terms (or perhaps just suffers from a kind of dyslexia). The notion of copyrighting a name is utterly absurd. To set it straight:
The copyright - the appearance and basic character traits off the Thimble Theater cast - has expired in the EU.
The trademark - the name and the distinctive likeness of the characters, as used in marketing - presumably has not.
The effect of this is that in the EU, you can create your own Popeye and Olive Oyl stories, and use the characters as they were originally presented by Segar, and you can even sell this comics strip/book/movie/opera/whatever for profit. However, you cannot use the name or images of the characters in the packaging or marketing of your product, because that would violate the trademark rights of (I assume) King Features.
Please read more carefully: I said "they way they're used to" not "the way it's supposed to". I'm talking about the UI. For example, IE6 has the same set of pulldown menus in the same place they've been since the first time the user encountered Windows. That's familiar. The toolbar is right underneath it left-aligned, where it's been found in most Win apps for years. Again: familiar. But IE7 (like Office2007) defies those long-standing conventions... maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but it's inarguably different and unfamiliar, and most casual computer users don't like that. Ironically, switching to Firefox or Safari provides these users with a more familiar UI than IE7 does. (Chrome, on the other hand, is the most IE7-like alternative among the top half-dozen browsers... not really the best "upgrade" path for IE6 users.)
To many people IE6 is the WinXP/Office2003 of browsers. It may be technically inferior to its successor, but it works the way they're used to, and it runs on their current platform. Microsoft has shoved a bunch of unwanted UI overhauls down the throats of its users with IE7, Vista, and Office2007, and I know a fair number of people who are sticking with the ones before those because of that. And if they can't (as Google seems to be telling IE6 users), then that's a good time to explore other browsers, other OSes, and other office suites.
Well, to be fair, the Aussie had grown up in Manchester, so... yeah, understanding my flatmates was a challenge. :)
But nothing compared to following the Welsh fella in my Sociology seminar. I have a pretty good ear for accents, and I can fake a Scots or Irish or R.P. English accent well enough to impress an American. But I can't figure out what makes a Welsh accent tick.... though I think that watching two series of Torchwood on DVD is starting to help.