What are your reasons for running the old standby suite over the Firefox/Thunderbird combo?
Simple. Because it works. There isn't enough reason for me to switch.
Also, because Firefox seems to have a problem running on my computer, and has every time I've tried it (0.7, 1.0, etc.) - If I try to save anything (^S), it hangs and has to be "kill -9'd"
I'm beyond the age where I care enough to build it from source and debug it myself, and since they're no entry in Bugzilla that I could find for it, it's probably something about my local linux installation, and again, I'm beyond the age where "reinstall the OS" is considered appropriate.
a survey released in October found that 93.8 percent of American households had telephones of some sort.
More households had televisions--98.2 percent, according to Nielsen Media Research-NTI.
Consider that Nielson would probably have done telephone surveys to determine these statistics, how exactly do they calculate how many people don't have phones?
"Hey, call Floyd and ask if he's got a phone!"
Who's Floyd? What's his number?
I don't know, but there must be a Floyd. Hmm, not in the white pages, so he must not have a phone
So don't call him, but when you call him, ask him if he has a T.V.
Can you say Reductio ad absurdum kids? I knew you could!
The Missile Defense Agency has attempted to conduct the test several times this month, but scrubbed each one for a variety of reasons, including weather problems [...]
Important Notice to Rogue States and Terrorists: If you plan to attack the US, check the weather first and make sure it's a calm, clear day so our missile defence system has a chance of working. Love, the US government.
As anyone who knows about photography would know this is total tosh. The depth of field depends upon the aperture of the iris.
Actually, the depth of field depends primarly on the size of the aperature, the focal length of the lens, and the size of the circle of confusion at the film/sensor plane. Any spheric and chromatic abberation in the lens elements can also have an effect, but this is not as important as the first three.
And this is part of a larger user interface principle, "Don't try to control your user's behaviour if you don't need to."
Example: Sites that pop up their "main" window from their "entry tunnel." Exactly what justification do you have for thinking I still need to view your entry tunnel?
Example: (as mentioned,) sites that use Javascript to open windows. Granted, this practice came around before Opera/Mozilla introduced us to the wonders of tabbed browsing, but what's the point of pulling up a "diversionary" window and forcing the user to close it? Afraid they might not understand the concept of the "back" button?
Example: using flash/java/shockwave/etc to perform functions that could be handled in HTML, especially now that we have DHTML. I have trouble with understanding the argument "we will be more successful if we deny access to some percentage of the population."
etc etc etc.IMHO, this is a symptom of the problem where people assume "everyone else thinks / acts / behaves in the same way I do."
... to go wading through a 478 page report, here's the ranking of "students at each level of math scale," which basically means "The higher your ranking, the more students you have testing with high skills, and the less you have with low skills."
1. Finland
2. Korea
3. Canada
4. Hong Kong-China
5. Netherlands
6. Macao-China
7. Licchtenstein
8. Japan
9. Austrailia
10. Switzerland
11. Iceland
12. New Zealand
13. Denmark
14. Belgium
15. Czeck Republic
16. France
17. Ireland
18. Sweden
19. Austria
20. Slovak Republic
21. Norway
22. Germany
23. Luxemborg
24. Poland
25. Spain
26. Hungary
27. Latvia
28. Unites States
29. Portugal
30. Russian Federation
31. Italy
32. Greece
33. Serbia
34. Uraguay
35. Turkey
36. Mexico
37. Brazil
38. Tunesia
39. Indonesia
There are several different tables in the report if you don't like this one, measuring different things. RTF-PDF if you want more data.
I can't IMAGINE wanting to keep up with the minute-by-minute details...
There's a bunch of people out there who like to watch sports; personally, I can't understand why. It's not like it means anything, and you can find out the results the next day. How exactly is a bunch of millionaires who weren't born in your city beating another bunch of millionaires who weren't born in their city a personal victory for you?
Some of us feel about politics the way others feel about sports.
The main difference (and I'm stereotyping here; I'm sorry) is that Mexican labour usually comes in to do jobs that American's don't want to do, like pick lettuce and clean office buildings.
FYI, Canada is already the second biggest outsourcer for U.S. jobs.
I was driving home yesterday in Calgary, Alberta, and saw this tiny little vehicle stopped at a red light next to me. My first thought was "What the hell was that?" My next thought was to look at the massive SUV (sexless-upscaling-vehicle) behind it and think "mmmm, lunch..."
Historically (Before 1998,) business methods were not patentable for the following reasons:
Business methods are not "technical"
A market monopoly might result
However, this was questioned in State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group Inc., 49 F. 3d 1369 (Fed Cir. 1998).
Signature was assigned a patent, "Data processing system for Hub and Spoke Financial Services Configuration," which described a computer system for asset management, where mutual funds ("Spokes") pooled their assets in an investment portfolio ("The Hub,") which was organized as a partnership to offer tax advantages and economies of scale.
State Street had been negotiating for use of the patent. When talks broke down, they brought legal action saying that the patent was invalid.
The lower court found for State Street, saying business methods are not patentable. The US Federal Court of Appeals overturned this decision, saying that considering business methods unpatentable was ill conceived and unsupported by the Patent Act. In other words, business methods should be treated as any other patent claim.
Because of this ruling, business methods are now patentable as long as they can be implemented in software. This has been one of the drivers on the rush for software patents.
Sources:
Duplessis et. al, Canadian Business and the Law, 2001 (background; most text adapted form there)
Internet search on "state street v. signature" (verification of no supreme court appeal; current impact assessment)
- Hayden Christensen appears at the end of the film in place of Sebastian Shaw as 'Ghost Anakin'.
I wonder how this affects actor's residuals... I see several possibilities:
(1) Shaw stops getting residuals because he's effectively no longer in the picture
(2) Shaw still gets residuals because he was in the picture, just you can't see him anymore
(3) Christensen sues Shaw for all the back residuals, since Lucas is effectively ret-conning the movie, and Christensen now always played ghost Anikin.
As I see it, one of the main problems is that Outlook comes bundled with a scheduling application. Scheduling is v. important in any company of non-trivial size.
Mozilla/Firefox don't come with a scheduling application because they (or at least FF) have the Unix "less is beautiful" mentality.
Granted, there are scheduling apps out there. Some even sort-of work with Mozilla. But when comparing to outlook:
It's two apps instead of one. Two to support. Two to make work together. Two chances for things to screw up instead of one.
More or less, Outlook + Exchange Server just works. People know how to install it. People can get certified in it. People can buy books on it. People can call Microsoft for help. Most of those resources aren't available for Mozilla.org products. This leads to a perception of higher Total Cost of Ownership and Risk.
There's a training cost. Remember,./ readers are not representitive of the general office worker. There are tons of people whose skills with Microsoft apps have been slowly built over years because they're just not computer-happy people. Switching apps means (a) learning something new, (b) devaluation of previous experience, and (c) change, which normal people hate.
If it's already a MS office, most of the IT staff will be MS experienced or certified. Chances are, they will have little experience with PD/GPL/so-called-Marginal-apps. Many of these people will be as MS-biased as/. readers are anti-MS-biased. And remember, from their own point of view, both are right. The reason there's so many "one true religions" is because all of them are the one true religion to their followers.
Gee, Toto, I can't believe I posted something I learnt from my MBA on slashdot!
Abuse of salaried workers has always gone on, but it is becoming more and more endemic within the economy...
Medical interns regularly work 100 hour weeks. So do articling lawyers. So do investment bankers. So do finance research analysts. So do lots of bankers, senior managers, etc.
Personally I blame mutual funds. As more and more people started to buy mutual funds and become educated about the stock market, there was increasing pressure on companies to return higher profits. The easiest way to do so is to squeeze employees, either through overwork or layoffs.
So, theoretically, overworked employees should be getting the same return as they would have from overtime from investments in mutual funds. Unfortunatly, it didn't work out that way. Institutional investers got most of the gains, or at least those left after senior management was done siphoning them off for themselves.
OBPersonal Experience: I used to work for Nortel Networks back when it was still Northern Telecom and BNR. We used to get paid overtime as software developers. Then they took away the overtime, and the hours stayed the same. Then they took away the $15,000 annual compensation for carrying a pager and being on call 24/7, saying it was "part of the job." All of this real compensation was replaced (in theory at least) by stock options.
When I left, I had a ton of options at about $180 a share while the stock was at around $30. Same year I left the CEO got many millions in bonuses and stock options (that somehow weren't underwater.)
Nowadays, my attitude is that I'll work the unpaid overtime if it (a) needs to be done and (b) it's my fault. But when managers come calling saying "we need you to work overtime because {our schedule was unreasonable | we mistimed the market | Our forecasts were wrong | We need to boost the stock price}," I just go home.
I bought a Compaq x1000 laptop last august, which is one of the ones on this list. By October, it had died.
Compaq made me ship it back to them, then they called me and said "It's completely destroyed, and we think you dropped it, so it'll cost about $4000 to fix." Keep in mind this was an under-$2000 laptop.
Since they wouldn't do anything, I asked them to ship it back to me. They did, and I took it apart, piece by piece, looking for this "damage" they mentioned. Never found any.
What was more interesting was that when I put it back together, it booted. Granted, it would now only run for about 15 minutes before going black-screen, but it did boot. Which I thought was pretty amazing for a "completely destroyed" laptop.
To make a long story short, after calls to about ten different people at Compaq, and two letters to the president, they basically said "Look, our service techs say you probably dropped it, so we're not going to do anything. Stop wasting our time."
What wonderful customer service... I know I'll never buy a Compaq/HP product again.
Now I have a Dell Inspiron 9100. Yeah, but at least they offer the chance to buy a $200 "we won't fsck you around" warrenty - If it stops working, they'll give me a new one, no questions asked.
Your seargent yells at you for not physically and visibly checking to make sure there is not a cartridge in the chamber, then pulls out a Colt.45, uses his right thumb to flip the safety from 1 to 0, uses his left hand to pull back the slide, aims his pistol three-quarters of an inch above your left eyeball, and then applies exactly 642 grams of pressure on the trigger.
The bullet's trajectory is deflected 0.003 millimetres to the left due to the shifting winds, which average between 9 kilometres/hour SSW and 11 kilometres/hour SSW. However, this is not significant enough to keep it from killing you.
The only reason people keep [email] around is that they're too lazy to delete them themselves.
Bullocks.
There's lots of reasons people keep their email around basically forever... Some quick examples:
License keys
Particularly nice or significant email messages
Evidence that someone actually said something & can't deny it later
For future reference
Or are you one of those Dilbert-esque PHB's who have your secretary print all your emails, file them in binders, then keep them under lock & key until you forget the key?
It strikes me as very odd that in a state as liberal and environmentally minded as California, a lower emission engine isn't available in these cars.
What got me was how, after the California "power crisis" in 2000, they started building all those peaking stations[1] in light-industrial areas (which are usually right beside suburban areas) that burn diesel oil, the most pollutin'est fuel there is.
If California was ever "environmentally minded," it sure doesn't seem so now.
[1] Peaking Station: A small power plant designed to only operate during electricity shortages.
Microsoft has effectively abandoned significant browser development efforts.
make me wonder, what has Microsoft got up its collective sleeve? They cornered the browser market and now they'll give it up without a fight?
They already won. As much as we argue the point, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera only have marginal market share and most people either (a) can't be bothered to switch, or (b) aren't technical/leading edge/interested in looking (or even being aware) of alternatives.
Despite their effectively infinite cash, Microsoft still has limited resources (people,) and butressing a battle they've already won isn't the most effective use of their resources at this time.
I have to put on my MBA hat to answer this one... [1]
Branding and perceptions. Starbucks took a product that you used to pay under $1 for (coffee) and charged you upwards of $3 for it.
Why did people buy it? For the fringe benefit - You and your friends could go to a local Starbucks and hang out for several hours for that $3. There weren't a lot of other places where you could really do that... Bars are too noisy to have conversations, and restraunts want to flip your table and get the next person in.
Eventually, a perceptual association forms: Starbucks == good times with friends. And since you buy coffee anyways, you get in the habit of buying their coffee just for yourself.
You take the cup to work. Everyone sees it (free advertising.) The more people are seen toting Starbucks cups, the more other people want to figure out what the "buzz is."
Then, of course, they expanded like a watermellon dropped from a 747. Now, everywhere you go, you pass a Starbucks. It becomes just too convinient to drop in and pick one up. It becomes too convinient to call a friend and say "I'm at the Starbucks on 7th S.W. - come on over."
Now, people continue to patronize because they've become comfortable with the brand.
[1] I actually do have a hat that says "MBA" - I got it on the first day of my program. I guess they figured it softened the blow of the tuition bill... "Hey, you get a hat."
Slashdot Mirror
Simple. Because it works. There isn't enough reason for me to switch.
Also, because Firefox seems to have a problem running on my computer, and has every time I've tried it (0.7, 1.0, etc.) - If I try to save anything (^S), it hangs and has to be "kill -9'd"
I'm beyond the age where I care enough to build it from source and debug it myself, and since they're no entry in Bugzilla that I could find for it, it's probably something about my local linux installation, and again, I'm beyond the age where "reinstall the OS" is considered appropriate.
Consider that Nielson would probably have done telephone surveys to determine these statistics, how exactly do they calculate how many people don't have phones?
"Hey, call Floyd and ask if he's got a phone!"
Who's Floyd? What's his number?
I don't know, but there must be a Floyd. Hmm, not in the white pages, so he must not have a phone
So don't call him, but when you call him, ask him if he has a T.V.
Can you say Reductio ad absurdum kids? I knew you could!
Important Notice to Rogue States and Terrorists: If you plan to attack the US, check the weather first and make sure it's a calm, clear day so our missile defence system has a chance of working. Love, the US government.
Did you really have to ask?
Actually, the depth of field depends primarly on the size of the aperature, the focal length of the lens, and the size of the circle of confusion at the film/sensor plane. Any spheric and chromatic abberation in the lens elements can also have an effect, but this is not as important as the first three.
I sentence you to a beating with a copy of Photographic Materials and Processes.
When I go to that page, I get "connection refused." Yep, his analysis is right on the money.
You can even do this at home, if your site isn't cool enough, with the slashdot simulator.
Example: Sites that pop up their "main" window from their "entry tunnel." Exactly what justification do you have for thinking I still need to view your entry tunnel?
Example: (as mentioned,) sites that use Javascript to open windows. Granted, this practice came around before Opera/Mozilla introduced us to the wonders of tabbed browsing, but what's the point of pulling up a "diversionary" window and forcing the user to close it? Afraid they might not understand the concept of the "back" button?
Example: using flash/java/shockwave/etc to perform functions that could be handled in HTML, especially now that we have DHTML. I have trouble with understanding the argument "we will be more successful if we deny access to some percentage of the population."
etc etc etc.IMHO, this is a symptom of the problem where people assume "everyone else thinks / acts / behaves in the same way I do."
1. Finland
2. Korea
3. Canada
4. Hong Kong-China
5. Netherlands
6. Macao-China
7. Licchtenstein
8. Japan
9. Austrailia
10. Switzerland
11. Iceland
12. New Zealand
13. Denmark
14. Belgium
15. Czeck Republic
16. France
17. Ireland
18. Sweden
19. Austria
20. Slovak Republic
21. Norway
22. Germany
23. Luxemborg
24. Poland
25. Spain
26. Hungary
27. Latvia
28. Unites States
29. Portugal
30. Russian Federation
31. Italy
32. Greece
33. Serbia
34. Uraguay
35. Turkey
36. Mexico
37. Brazil
38. Tunesia
39. Indonesia
There are several different tables in the report if you don't like this one, measuring different things. RTF-PDF if you want more data.
Go Canada #3!
There's a bunch of people out there who like to watch sports; personally, I can't understand why. It's not like it means anything, and you can find out the results the next day. How exactly is a bunch of millionaires who weren't born in your city beating another bunch of millionaires who weren't born in their city a personal victory for you?
Some of us feel about politics the way others feel about sports.
FYI, Canada is already the second biggest outsourcer for U.S. jobs.
And still, the number of people tuning into "Joey" every thursday still far dwarfs the number of people who read slashdot.
Rare is the person who has gone broke from underestimating the intelligence of the common person.
Well, this was pretty topical...
I was driving home yesterday in Calgary, Alberta, and saw this tiny little vehicle stopped at a red light next to me. My first thought was "What the hell was that?" My next thought was to look at the massive SUV (sexless-upscaling-vehicle) behind it and think "mmmm, lunch..."
How about every BASIC interpriter wriiten during the 1970's?
Actually, business methods are patentable.
Historically (Before 1998,) business methods were not patentable for the following reasons:
However, this was questioned in State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group Inc., 49 F. 3d 1369 (Fed Cir. 1998).
Signature was assigned a patent, "Data processing system for Hub and Spoke Financial Services Configuration," which described a computer system for asset management, where mutual funds ("Spokes") pooled their assets in an investment portfolio ("The Hub,") which was organized as a partnership to offer tax advantages and economies of scale.
State Street had been negotiating for use of the patent. When talks broke down, they brought legal action saying that the patent was invalid.
The lower court found for State Street, saying business methods are not patentable. The US Federal Court of Appeals overturned this decision, saying that considering business methods unpatentable was ill conceived and unsupported by the Patent Act. In other words, business methods should be treated as any other patent claim.
Because of this ruling, business methods are now patentable as long as they can be implemented in software. This has been one of the drivers on the rush for software patents.
Sources:
Disclaimer:
IANAL.
I wonder how this affects actor's residuals... I see several possibilities:
(1) Shaw stops getting residuals because he's effectively no longer in the picture
(2) Shaw still gets residuals because he was in the picture, just you can't see him anymore
(3) Christensen sues Shaw for all the back residuals, since Lucas is effectively ret-conning the movie, and Christensen now always played ghost Anikin.
(4) Everyone dies. No, wait, that was Hamlet.
h|_|H? 1 hA\/3 |\|0 pR0b13Mz r33D1|\|G t3Xt 1|\| aLt3r|\|At1Ng k4S3! Th1z j|_|sT m33|\|z th3 r3S34rch3rz suX0r & r n0T 31337!
I get enough "free family tech support" calls from my grandmother when she's trying to do something with her computer.
I'd never get anything done if she started using LaTeX!
Mozilla/Firefox don't come with a scheduling application because they (or at least FF) have the Unix "less is beautiful" mentality.
Granted, there are scheduling apps out there. Some even sort-of work with Mozilla. But when comparing to outlook:
Gee, Toto, I can't believe I posted something I learnt from my MBA on slashdot!
Medical interns regularly work 100 hour weeks. So do articling lawyers. So do investment bankers. So do finance research analysts. So do lots of bankers, senior managers, etc.
Personally I blame mutual funds. As more and more people started to buy mutual funds and become educated about the stock market, there was increasing pressure on companies to return higher profits. The easiest way to do so is to squeeze employees, either through overwork or layoffs.
So, theoretically, overworked employees should be getting the same return as they would have from overtime from investments in mutual funds. Unfortunatly, it didn't work out that way. Institutional investers got most of the gains, or at least those left after senior management was done siphoning them off for themselves.
OBPersonal Experience: I used to work for Nortel Networks back when it was still Northern Telecom and BNR. We used to get paid overtime as software developers. Then they took away the overtime, and the hours stayed the same. Then they took away the $15,000 annual compensation for carrying a pager and being on call 24/7, saying it was "part of the job." All of this real compensation was replaced (in theory at least) by stock options.
When I left, I had a ton of options at about $180 a share while the stock was at around $30. Same year I left the CEO got many millions in bonuses and stock options (that somehow weren't underwater.)
Nowadays, my attitude is that I'll work the unpaid overtime if it (a) needs to be done and (b) it's my fault. But when managers come calling saying "we need you to work overtime because {our schedule was unreasonable | we mistimed the market | Our forecasts were wrong | We need to boost the stock price}," I just go home.
Compaq made me ship it back to them, then they called me and said "It's completely destroyed, and we think you dropped it, so it'll cost about $4000 to fix." Keep in mind this was an under-$2000 laptop.
Since they wouldn't do anything, I asked them to ship it back to me. They did, and I took it apart, piece by piece, looking for this "damage" they mentioned. Never found any.
What was more interesting was that when I put it back together, it booted. Granted, it would now only run for about 15 minutes before going black-screen, but it did boot. Which I thought was pretty amazing for a "completely destroyed" laptop.
To make a long story short, after calls to about ten different people at Compaq, and two letters to the president, they basically said "Look, our service techs say you probably dropped it, so we're not going to do anything. Stop wasting our time."
What wonderful customer service... I know I'll never buy a Compaq/HP product again.
Now I have a Dell Inspiron 9100. Yeah, but at least they offer the chance to buy a $200 "we won't fsck you around" warrenty - If it stops working, they'll give me a new one, no questions asked.
What, you think this is a macro-management game?
] remove magazine
You have removed the magazine
] pull charging handle
You have pulled the charging handle
pull hand guard retaining ring towards receiver
Your seargent yells at you for not physically and visibly checking to make sure there is not a cartridge in the chamber, then pulls out a Colt .45, uses his right thumb to flip the safety from 1 to 0, uses his left hand to pull back the slide, aims his pistol three-quarters of an inch above your left eyeball, and then applies exactly 642 grams of pressure on the trigger.
The bullet's trajectory is deflected 0.003 millimetres to the left due to the shifting winds, which average between 9 kilometres/hour SSW and 11 kilometres/hour SSW. However, this is not significant enough to keep it from killing you.
You are dead. Play again (Y/N)
What got me was how, after the California "power crisis" in 2000, they started building all those peaking stations[1] in light-industrial areas (which are usually right beside suburban areas) that burn diesel oil, the most pollutin'est fuel there is.
If California was ever "environmentally minded," it sure doesn't seem so now.
[1] Peaking Station: A small power plant designed to only operate during electricity shortages.
They already won. As much as we argue the point, Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera only have marginal market share and most people either (a) can't be bothered to switch, or (b) aren't technical/leading edge/interested in looking (or even being aware) of alternatives.
Despite their effectively infinite cash, Microsoft still has limited resources (people,) and butressing a battle they've already won isn't the most effective use of their resources at this time.
Branding and perceptions. Starbucks took a product that you used to pay under $1 for (coffee) and charged you upwards of $3 for it.
Why did people buy it? For the fringe benefit - You and your friends could go to a local Starbucks and hang out for several hours for that $3. There weren't a lot of other places where you could really do that... Bars are too noisy to have conversations, and restraunts want to flip your table and get the next person in.
Eventually, a perceptual association forms: Starbucks == good times with friends. And since you buy coffee anyways, you get in the habit of buying their coffee just for yourself.
You take the cup to work. Everyone sees it (free advertising.) The more people are seen toting Starbucks cups, the more other people want to figure out what the "buzz is."
Then, of course, they expanded like a watermellon dropped from a 747. Now, everywhere you go, you pass a Starbucks. It becomes just too convinient to drop in and pick one up. It becomes too convinient to call a friend and say "I'm at the Starbucks on 7th S.W. - come on over."
Now, people continue to patronize because they've become comfortable with the brand.
[1] I actually do have a hat that says "MBA" - I got it on the first day of my program. I guess they figured it softened the blow of the tuition bill... "Hey, you get a hat."