That a majority of people do not trust MS is not surprising. I don't trust my government, my bankers, my customers, hell... I doubt the guy at the supermarket.
People are cynical enough that they just bumble through life looking over their shoulder bitching about stuff.
I just bought a new laptop - it came with XP pro - already I'm having problems with it. But I bitch about it over coffee and just get on with things. I had to register the software - something I bitched about. IIS won't work properly - bitch bitch bitch. Norton seems to be checking every file every 2 minutes making the thing unusable for the first hour in a day - bitch bitch bitch.
Would I buy another the same - probably.
The trust issue won't hurt MS as much as we'd like to think. And it won't help the alternatives much either.
The movie industry sucks - but a good percentage of you reading this will run out and give them 30 dollars for Tron someday soon.
Poll Suggestion: Is $29.99 good value for the Tron DVDs?
My answer - not on your life! $10 maybe - but 30! Sheesh! I seriously want to know is anyone considers the price of these things - or are we all just looking in our wallets, seeing the money, and spending it... despite lack of value, because its 'disposable'?
A technique I think would work well for medium sized projects is build and burn.
You build the project once through, cobbling things together to get as close to what you want in a given time frame. You then start again from scratch.
Version two of any software is always better, so get straigh on with it. Involve the user towards the end of the initial build.
You then spend time assessing how you would do it properly, hopefully having had a majority of 'niggles' highlighted during the initial sloppy build.
I often do this for smaller projects, but think it could scale pretty well. If you spend 20% of the total build time on the initial build - but that lets you estimate the total time more accurately, there are great business benefits to be had.
The Hydrogen Problem is like making love to a beautiful woman! You could always just have a wank - but its a whole lot more rewarding to put some effort into seducing the beautiful woman.
The wanking is oil okay - the beautiful woman is hydrogen, or solar, or wind or whatever.
Our world changed on 9/11/01 and it will never ever be the same. We are doing exactly what our enemies wished us to do, we are giving in?
No it didn't. The world is the same - still being run by opportunistic politicians driven by dogma and self interest.
None of this is happenning because of terrorism - non of this is AIMED at stopping terrorism. This is ALL about increasing the power of the government.
America already has a society where there are possibly 20 men alive (and Britney Spears) who will ever get a chance of being President.
Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.
This is fine for the 'say sorry to the lady who you knocked over with your skateboard little jimmy - you wont do it again now will you!'
Much better than calling the police and sending to a juvenile offender centre.
But when you get into the realms of 'should the UK enter the Euro zone - 99.9% of us don't have enough of an understanding of economics to even START thinking about it.
You can't vote on everything - most of us don't know enough to decide on most of the really important stuff.
Yogic Flying my friend! A month is plenty time for us to get out our mats and simply wish the asteroid away with our bubbling happiness and baggy trousers.
The banks, well, two of the four I have spoken to in the past 2 months, ARE onto this one.
And this is at local business banking manager level. They are querying the entire charging and revenue structure of online businesses, wishing to take on as many of the stages as possible in an effort to get maximum revenues by taking smaller individual commissions on each step.
4 or 5 1.5 or 2.0% fees mounts up pretty quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them started getting in on the delivery aspects soon to offer a single stop trusted, secure, long standing vendor for handling online transactions.
How often do you hear 'our security is as good as that used by the online banks' People trust banks. They could make a serious inroad into some of these markets from the opposite angle to MS.
MS has the consumer computing market sown up - banks have the consumer confidence / trust sewn up.
Which are YOU more likely to get to look after your ecommerce site? I'd go for a bank over a MS passport system every time - IF the service was up to scratch.
Some of the UK banks are taking this massively seriously. Dont underestimate the level of change thats going to hit banking over the coming few years. And with the markets offering negative returns, the banks are finding their coffers expanding as people go for the safe option of long term high interest savings accounts. They have money to play with.
Re:But I don't want to score down my foes
on
Slashdot Code Update
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Indeed.
I suggest replacing the simple Friend and Foe with:
Buddy: People who may or may not speak bollocks but you want to read it all anyway because your buddies with them within and/or outwith/.
Twat: People who only talk bollocks that you just wish would go away (currently foe)
LOTP: Leader of the Opposition. Someone that tends towards an opposite view from your own, but whom doesn't talk bollocks. You can see their points - you just disagree with them.
OMS: On my side. Someone who tends to agree with your views - doesn't talk bollocks... is worth reading.
Rich guys have better sticks to poke with - look at OBL
I was talking about the departure and destination - the route to social change is normally messy, scary, and deadly. Just accept it and get on with it.
Re:has the targeted demographic really changed?
on
Attack of the Clones
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly. This is a fairy tale. Always has been always will be. It hapenned to be a pretty cool fairy tale with guns and stuff. But its still a fairy tale.
The young female dollar is the hardest to tap into, and thus the one most ripe for new market share.
The young female dollar worships celebrity. Get some celebrity in there and you might attract a 20% increase in the audience for Episode 2.
This is exactly how Star Wars should be! You either grow with your audience, or you stick with the fairy tale. In these celebrity soaked times its the only way to win! You need something the chicks will want to watch 250 times over aswell.
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else. "
Nah. Just because this isn't the 'ONE GREAT ANSWER' to the GM question doesn't mean its worthless.
That Monsanto is willing to overlook undeniable environmental damage in pursuit of profits does not prove GM to be a bad thing. What it indicates is that we have to take everything Monsanto says about GM with a grain of salt - because they have been proven to lie and deceive in one line of business they cannot be trusted in others.
If Bill can lie about Monica, he'll lie about anything!
Personally, I'm unsure about GM. Its promising, but its also a bit scary. Should we stop research? Never. Should we allow widespread use of untested GMOs? No. Should we listen to Monsanto when considering these issues? certainly not.
China is growing in wealth - and is set to accellerate - remember Japan? Look at China! It's going to happen - why do you think Clinton was so keen to make friends and open trade routes.
China will be the biggest exporting economy on the planet within 10-15 years. You think they wont need PCs??
Also - China is changing. The very heart of Capitalism - the right to found and operate a business - has been granted to every adult citizen in the Chinese constitution! You can't get a better indicator of China 'going western' than that.
Rich countries have better human rights records because the people poke sticks at the government less, so get poked back less. China gets rich, China gets Internet, China gets better human rights.
China will not change fundamentally because of the internet, but because of the free market. You cannot benefit from a global free market if you are not a national free market. China is moving towards a free market - so it can make money out of the rest of us.
The 'west' has been doing it for centuries - it works - we all have laptops and comfortable pants - good luck to them.
Partick Moore beats some very modestly shaggable birds any day of the week in my book! I'm sure they should have had a bit more leg in that program! Dominic Diamond was a bit of a twat on GamesMaster - but at least the game knew that SFII was better than... anything else.
This certainly could work. GamesMaster was an Okay program, which brought a little of the humour and attitude of a bunch of guys playing sad sports games to the small screen. A program like that would be good.
A gushy Movies, Games and Videos style show at least lets you see decent moving screenshots of upcoming games quickly.
An 'adam and joe' (do they get that in the US?) style show would also be cool - how easy would it be to do a decent games program with a couple of little £2000 sony cameras, and a modest games budget - oh - and a stack of talent.
And a special 5 minute filler program before midnight each night could review crappy old Atari VCS 2600 games and spout about their cultural significance.
99% of people using Excel don't kow that if you type jan in one cell, and feb in the next, you can drag out the rest of the year.
In fact, most of them don't know you call those little boxes CELLS!
It is those users, not us, that Linux WP and SS need to cater more for - because it is those users that make up the majority of users. Offer a business with a hundred terminals a free alternative to Word and Excel (especially over the coming year when the pressure to go XP mounts) and your offering a HUGE saving.
Most users simply use excel as a way to format text. Its amazing. But its true!
Nope. Everything has a flip side, you could say that while I'm advantaged by being tall because I can reach the hoop with a modest jump, I am also 'disabled' because I have to bend further which might hurt my back in the long term.
In the geek community I regard this as 'I'm Ender' syndrome. I'M good at school, I'M better than my peers, I'M bullied - therefore I have the power to rule the known universe!!!
Just because your a bit smarter than the rest of your class doesn't mean your in the ranks of picasso and hawking (hawking isn't in the ranks of hawking if we're honest). Being good at something is NOT the same as being great. I can paint - I sell the odd painting - they're better than 90% of the crap sold in low rent galleries. But they are pure turd compared to .
Just because you can write a bit of decent code and you shit your pants when a woman asks you the time doesn't mean your autistic - it means you can write a bit of decent code and you have a social anxiety problem. Most are mild, and can be easily rememdied through counselling - mine was.
Theres comfort in identifying with a disabled group. Everyone claims to be 'a bit dyslexic' - very few genuinely are. They just use it as a cover for the occassional mistake - its not my fault - I was born this way - and theres nothing I can do about it.
While I agree that Energy companies are into all kinds of alternative fuels - I must disagree on the 'best interest to move people onto hydrogen'.
For as long as Oil is the major fuel source globally the Oil industry can fix prices, hold nations to ransom, and generally act like dicks.
As soon as alternative fuels start to account for more than 10 - 15% of transportation they are mainstream - in that everyone that wants one can have one. At that point any government, city, company can simply say 'okay - we're going oil free' an average city council / police force / medium sixed company in the UK will replace 90% of existing vehicles within 3 years. Not long if you decide to buy fuel cell only in 2004.
As soon as Oil has to COMPETE for markets against alternatives (not just oil from another supplier) prices will come down - they will have to - hopefully they will drop below viability and the oil cos will have to stop extraction.
With an average field life cycle lasting upwards of 30 years there are a LOT of young fields which will only start paying for themselves 5, 6, 7 years from now. Shell doesn't want fuel cells to be common until at least 2015 for that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
That a majority of people do not trust MS is not surprising. I don't trust my government, my bankers, my customers, hell... I doubt the guy at the supermarket.
I maybe trust my mum and dad, and aunt jemima for her tasty pancakes - but a software company???
People are cynical enough that they just bumble through life looking over their shoulder bitching about stuff.
I just bought a new laptop - it came with XP pro - already I'm having problems with it. But I bitch about it over coffee and just get on with things. I had to register the software - something I bitched about. IIS won't work properly - bitch bitch bitch. Norton seems to be checking every file every 2 minutes making the thing unusable for the first hour in a day - bitch bitch bitch.
Would I buy another the same - probably.
The trust issue won't hurt MS as much as we'd like to think. And it won't help the alternatives much either.
The movie industry sucks - but a good percentage of you reading this will run out and give them 30 dollars for Tron someday soon.
Poll Suggestion: Is $29.99 good value for the Tron DVDs?
My answer - not on your life! $10 maybe - but 30! Sheesh! I seriously want to know is anyone considers the price of these things - or are we all just looking in our wallets, seeing the money, and spending it... despite lack of value, because its 'disposable'?
A technique I think would work well for medium sized projects is build and burn.
You build the project once through, cobbling things together to get as close to what you want in a given time frame. You then start again from scratch.
Version two of any software is always better, so get straigh on with it. Involve the user towards the end of the initial build.
You then spend time assessing how you would do it properly, hopefully having had a majority of 'niggles' highlighted during the initial sloppy build.
I often do this for smaller projects, but think it could scale pretty well. If you spend 20% of the total build time on the initial build - but that lets you estimate the total time more accurately, there are great business benefits to be had.
The real reason we all want an iPod is that we want to be able to dance like this dude!
He must be beating the chicks off with a stick!
Many newspapers, especially business oriented ones, in the UK are ENTIRELY paid for ads pretending to be articles.
You get a few genuine news snippets and the rest is just 'this company is great' type news. Everyone knows it and reads them on that basis.
I assume its the same the world over with these papers?
Swiss Tony Says:
The Hydrogen Problem is like making love to a beautiful woman! You could always just have a wank - but its a whole lot more rewarding to put some effort into seducing the beautiful woman.
The wanking is oil okay - the beautiful woman is hydrogen, or solar, or wind or whatever.
Our world changed on 9/11/01 and it will never ever be the same. We are doing exactly what our enemies wished us to do, we are giving in?
No it didn't. The world is the same - still being run by opportunistic politicians driven by dogma and self interest.
None of this is happenning because of terrorism - non of this is AIMED at stopping terrorism. This is ALL about increasing the power of the government.
America already has a society where there are possibly 20 men alive (and Britney Spears) who will ever get a chance of being President.
The world sucked well before sept.
Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.
This is fine for the 'say sorry to the lady who you knocked over with your skateboard little jimmy - you wont do it again now will you!'
Much better than calling the police and sending to a juvenile offender centre.
But when you get into the realms of 'should the UK enter the Euro zone - 99.9% of us don't have enough of an understanding of economics to even START thinking about it.
You can't vote on everything - most of us don't know enough to decide on most of the really important stuff.
It has 'cute', it has 'familiarity', it has 'innuendo', it relates to bacon sandwiches... perfect!
'Hefty Nukes'????
Yogic Flying my friend! A month is plenty time for us to get out our mats and simply wish the asteroid away with our bubbling happiness and baggy trousers.
The banks, well, two of the four I have spoken to in the past 2 months, ARE onto this one.
And this is at local business banking manager level. They are querying the entire charging and revenue structure of online businesses, wishing to take on as many of the stages as possible in an effort to get maximum revenues by taking smaller individual commissions on each step.
4 or 5 1.5 or 2.0% fees mounts up pretty quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them started getting in on the delivery aspects soon to offer a single stop trusted, secure, long standing vendor for handling online transactions.
How often do you hear 'our security is as good as that used by the online banks' People trust banks. They could make a serious inroad into some of these markets from the opposite angle to MS.
MS has the consumer computing market sown up - banks have the consumer confidence / trust sewn up.
Which are YOU more likely to get to look after your ecommerce site? I'd go for a bank over a MS passport system every time - IF the service was up to scratch.
Some of the UK banks are taking this massively seriously. Dont underestimate the level of change thats going to hit banking over the coming few years. And with the markets offering negative returns, the banks are finding their coffers expanding as people go for the safe option of long term high interest savings accounts. They have money to play with.
Indeed.
/.
I suggest replacing the simple Friend and Foe with:
Buddy: People who may or may not speak bollocks but you want to read it all anyway because your buddies with them within and/or outwith
Twat: People who only talk bollocks that you just wish would go away (currently foe)
LOTP: Leader of the Opposition. Someone that tends towards an opposite view from your own, but whom doesn't talk bollocks. You can see their points - you just disagree with them.
OMS: On my side. Someone who tends to agree with your views - doesn't talk bollocks... is worth reading.
Rich guys have better sticks to poke with - look at OBL
I was talking about the departure and destination - the route to social change is normally messy, scary, and deadly. Just accept it and get on with it.
Exactly. This is a fairy tale. Always has been always will be. It hapenned to be a pretty cool fairy tale with guns and stuff. But its still a fairy tale.
The young female dollar is the hardest to tap into, and thus the one most ripe for new market share.
The young female dollar worships celebrity. Get some celebrity in there and you might attract a 20% increase in the audience for Episode 2.
This is exactly how Star Wars should be! You either grow with your audience, or you stick with the fairy tale. In these celebrity soaked times its the only way to win! You need something the chicks will want to watch 250 times over aswell.
"To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else. "
Nah. Just because this isn't the 'ONE GREAT ANSWER' to the GM question doesn't mean its worthless.
That Monsanto is willing to overlook undeniable environmental damage in pursuit of profits does not prove GM to be a bad thing. What it indicates is that we have to take everything Monsanto says about GM with a grain of salt - because they have been proven to lie and deceive in one line of business they cannot be trusted in others.
If Bill can lie about Monica, he'll lie about anything!
Personally, I'm unsure about GM. Its promising, but its also a bit scary. Should we stop research? Never. Should we allow widespread use of untested GMOs? No. Should we listen to Monsanto when considering these issues? certainly not.
Agreed. I have tried to play and enjoy games of this type since the days of the NES - but ALWAYS find disappointment, impatience and frustration.
If I want to watch CGI I'll see Monsters Inc or Toy Story!
China is growing in wealth - and is set to accellerate - remember Japan? Look at China! It's going to happen - why do you think Clinton was so keen to make friends and open trade routes.
China will be the biggest exporting economy on the planet within 10-15 years. You think they wont need PCs??
Also - China is changing. The very heart of Capitalism - the right to found and operate a business - has been granted to every adult citizen in the Chinese constitution! You can't get a better indicator of China 'going western' than that.
Rich countries have better human rights records because the people poke sticks at the government less, so get poked back less. China gets rich, China gets Internet, China gets better human rights.
China will not change fundamentally because of the internet, but because of the free market. You cannot benefit from a global free market if you are not a national free market. China is moving towards a free market - so it can make money out of the rest of us.
The 'west' has been doing it for centuries - it works - we all have laptops and comfortable pants - good luck to them.
Partick Moore beats some very modestly shaggable birds any day of the week in my book! I'm sure they should have had a bit more leg in that program! Dominic Diamond was a bit of a twat on GamesMaster - but at least the game knew that SFII was better than... anything else.
This certainly could work. GamesMaster was an Okay program, which brought a little of the humour and attitude of a bunch of guys playing sad sports games to the small screen. A program like that would be good.
A gushy Movies, Games and Videos style show at least lets you see decent moving screenshots of upcoming games quickly.
An 'adam and joe' (do they get that in the US?) style show would also be cool - how easy would it be to do a decent games program with a couple of little £2000 sony cameras, and a modest games budget - oh - and a stack of talent.
And a special 5 minute filler program before midnight each night could review crappy old Atari VCS 2600 games and spout about their cultural significance.
Does anyone know of a 'not for physicists' guide to what can usefully be done with different numbers of qbits?
7 qbits factors 15 to 3 and 5
How many do we need to factor a 50 digit number?
How many to do some maths we just don't have time to do with Binary?
99% of people using Excel don't kow that if you type jan in one cell, and feb in the next, you can drag out the rest of the year.
In fact, most of them don't know you call those little boxes CELLS!
It is those users, not us, that Linux WP and SS need to cater more for - because it is those users that make up the majority of users. Offer a business with a hundred terminals a free alternative to Word and Excel (especially over the coming year when the pressure to go XP mounts) and your offering a HUGE saving.
Most users simply use excel as a way to format text. Its amazing. But its true!
Can't talk now. Must see Lord of the Rings, and then play more FFX. Is this a great time to be alive, or what?
Personally, I think a GREAT time to have been alive would have been when debbie harry was at her finest!
Free Love!
"Every inteligent person is disabled in some way"
Nope. Everything has a flip side, you could say that while I'm advantaged by being tall because I can reach the hoop with a modest jump, I am also 'disabled' because I have to bend further which might hurt my back in the long term.
In the geek community I regard this as 'I'm Ender' syndrome. I'M good at school, I'M better than my peers, I'M bullied - therefore I have the power to rule the known universe!!!
Just because your a bit smarter than the rest of your class doesn't mean your in the ranks of picasso and hawking (hawking isn't in the ranks of hawking if we're honest). Being good at something is NOT the same as being great. I can paint - I sell the odd painting - they're better than 90% of the crap sold in low rent galleries. But they are pure turd compared to .
Just because you can write a bit of decent code and you shit your pants when a woman asks you the time doesn't mean your autistic - it means you can write a bit of decent code and you have a social anxiety problem. Most are mild, and can be easily rememdied through counselling - mine was.
Theres comfort in identifying with a disabled group. Everyone claims to be 'a bit dyslexic' - very few genuinely are. They just use it as a cover for the occassional mistake - its not my fault - I was born this way - and theres nothing I can do about it.
This guy deserves some sort of award for entertaining us!
/. Awards! Categories will be obvious - I nominate this guy for
'cool but wierd' 2001
While I agree that Energy companies are into all kinds of alternative fuels - I must disagree on the 'best interest to move people onto hydrogen'.
For as long as Oil is the major fuel source globally the Oil industry can fix prices, hold nations to ransom, and generally act like dicks.
As soon as alternative fuels start to account for more than 10 - 15% of transportation they are mainstream - in that everyone that wants one can have one. At that point any government, city, company can simply say 'okay - we're going oil free' an average city council / police force / medium sixed company in the UK will replace 90% of existing vehicles within 3 years. Not long if you decide to buy fuel cell only in 2004.
As soon as Oil has to COMPETE for markets against alternatives (not just oil from another supplier) prices will come down - they will have to - hopefully they will drop below viability and the oil cos will have to stop extraction.
With an average field life cycle lasting upwards of 30 years there are a LOT of young fields which will only start paying for themselves 5, 6, 7 years from now. Shell doesn't want fuel cells to be common until at least 2015 for that reason.