I bet I'm not the only one with a significant other that drives them nuts by tidying up all the time. A typical conversation might go something like this:
Me [settling down to watch a movie]: Where is the HMDI lead?
Her Wherever you last left it.
Me I left it on the floor behind the TV.
Her Well I haven't touched it.
Me You must have, it can't have moved itself.
Her I definately haven't moved it. You're always loosing things.
Me Do you even know what it is?
Her What is it?
Me It's a black cable. It was on the floor behind the TV.
Her Oh, I might have put it in one of the boxes in the shed.
Me [angry] So now I've got to put my shoes on and go out into the cold to look through all the boxes in the shed!
Her Don't blame me! You're the untidy one that is always loosing things...
I remember Bill Gates once saying that his worst fear for Microsoft was to become the next IBM - in other words, a big slow moving business with many levels of bureaucracy (this was some years ago and he was talking about the "old" IBM).
Well, it looks like Bills worst nightmare has come true, as evidenced by Ballmers comments. Google is now what Microsoft used to be - a lot of small teams working on their own projects without levels of bureaucracy interfering.
His hope is that offerings like Spore might force kids to rethink their understandings of nature.
Confusing kids more like. Animals don't evolve faster as they eat more... I can imaging playing this with my son and having to explain to him afterwards "evolution isn't really like that at all".
If you want to improve kids understanding of nature, get them outside and actually looking at the real thing. And/or buy some of the David Attenborough series, which many kids enjoy watching and are actually educationally very sound.
I think I shall blow some karma by cheering Microsoft on. Cybersquatting has long tickled my free-rider detector, so it would be nice to see a few of them get pwned.
I once had the unpleasant experience of being targeted by the attack lawers of a big company. I had a domain name registered which contained part of their company name, and it was a generic word was relevant to my website. As an individual when you start getting letters and threatening (in the legal way...) phone calls from a big legal company, what do you do? Even if legally you know you are probably in the right, the time and expense to fight it is just not worth it.
So, althought I agree that cybersquatters are scum, so are many lawyers and either should be encouraged!
What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.
No, I don't. In my perfect word there would be one or two core OS, and they would be OPEN SOURCE. So, there is nothing ironic about my viewpoint.
The answer is simple and obvious but unfortunately unlikely to happen: The mobile companies should collaboratively work on a single OSS operating system, which they can all use as a base, and then build their own stuff on top of that. It would be better for everyone (apart from the companies that make operating systems of course).
On the one hand, if you paid to build the network, it *is* yours, and you should get exclusive access to it.
Although that sounds common sense, in actual fact the fibre network will travel almost entirely over public property (under pavements, roads etc), and so we the people (through our government) can put whatever conditions we want on it.
As I see that it would be hard for Enterprises, of any moderate size, to store any remotly sensitive data on googles disks.
I don't see why this should be the case - large enterprises often trust their data to third parties. I think this is just a perception issue, people think of Google as being a consumer company, and so not have the level of service required by an Enterprise, but I don't see why that should be the case. I don't think you'd hear someone say "As I see that it would be hard for Enterprises, of any moderate size, to store any remotly sensitive data on IBMs disks."
I expect everyone here on Slashdot can recount something that happened during their childhood that was not a "minor incident"... We all did stupid things when we were kids. But overreaching to that stuff, or reacting in the wrong way, can do more damage than the incident itself.
I'm not saying this isn't serious stuff. But parents, teachers, and the kids themselves are usually able to deal with serious stuff in the correct way.
Surely bullying should be dealt with at the level of teachers/parents? Putting these things into law just seems like asking for trouble - potentially making the minor incidents of growing up into major issues that will scar children for life.
The thing that annoys me about this stuff is that the justificaiton for it seems to be mainly catching terrorists, but it will only catch the stupid or incompetant ones. So the government can catch some dissaffected and naieve youth with a half-baked plan that he may never commit and give it as an example of how they are winning the "war on terror".
I would of thought rule number one for any competent terrorist these days is "don't use electronic communications of any sort". We know that real terrorist cells can lie dormant for years - I'm sure they don't worry about the couple of days it might take to send a letter or spoken message.
Well, in the UK children who study computer science study a module that basically tells them how to comply with software licences, and that it is illegal to "copy software".
And your old mum is going to spend $400 for an IPhone?
Actually she might. She loves her Mac Mini.
Both Apple and MS are trying to get to the same point, but I believe MS will make it there first.
And then Apple will come along and do it right...
Compare the iPod and the Zune and tell me which company understands the consumer better.
Microsoft are stuck in a quagmire of their own making at the moment. Still the large majority of their revenue come from two products - their operating system and their office suite, a monopoly they have had for over a decade, and even with their core products they've been having major difficulties (see Vista). The future belongs to others.
You say that, then proceed to list everything from Apple that is designed to have a Mac at the center of it all controlling it.
I don't think they are designed that way, I bet future iPods will have a direct link to the iTunes store and you'll be able to purchase music directly. And I'm not sure why you think the iPhone needs a Mac, it looks like a pretty standalone device from what I've seen. Finally, the box that they currently call the AppleTV I believe is not the final product - that will come in the next few years, and I'll bet you won't need a Mac or PC to use it.
Hate to kill your Apple dream but Microsoft will do mainstream IPTV with the xbox360 way sooner,
Yes, and they did phones sooner, and I believe they had PDAs that play music before the iPod.
The difference is that Jobs has a very clear idea of what consumers want. My old mum isn't going to buy an XBox360 to watch TV on it. Nor am I for that matter.
I think Steve Jobs has seen the future, and realised that the PC won't be so important, the action is all going to move to various types of devices aimed at consumers. So, he started with music players, is moving into portable video/gaming and now of course telephones, and has made the first steps towards TV. Television is the biggie of course, and I believe Jobs is being deliberately low key about his intentions there - with the low key announcement of the Apple TV box, for instance.
Here's a prediction, in the next few years Steve Jobs is going to make a presentation where he says something like "First we revolutionised the personal computer, then the music player and the telephone. Now we're going to revolutionise television..."
They should treat it like Big Brother (is that shown in the USA? It's a "reality" show) and deliberately choose people who they know are going to have problems, then put a camera in there and broadcast it live. They would make a fortune. And voting for who is going to get "thrown out" would be even more fun as the consequences of that would be rather dramatic. Sounds like great TV to me!
Today apostasy is punishable by death in the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Mauritania, the Comoros and, most likely, Iraq. Similarly, blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan. In Qatar apostasy is a capital offense, but no executions have been reported for it.
There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime.
I think about commiting crimes quite a bit. How would I rob a bank, for instance? Or "disappear" someone, without getting caught? If my country was occupied by a foreign army, what could I as an individual do to cause maximum damage to it?
These are interesting and fun mental exercises, and of course novel writers think about this kind of stuff all the time. I just do this stuff in my head, and that's where it will stay. It does worry me however that these days it seems the law is beginning to view talking about doing something as if it was proof you will actually do it. If I had a friend that also liked doing this kind of mental exercise, and we discussed this kind of stuff via IRC, for instance, in the not too distant future I could envisage getting a visit from the police, or even ending up in jail, just for talking about stuff.
One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
Which countries are those? I know it certainly has been the case in the past, but I can't think of any country in which people are forced to follow a particular religion these days.
Actually your chromosomes do fragment as you get older. It's possible that in some distant future we will contain nanobots to "defrag" our chromosomes.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times have we seen articles about how Apple's consumer market share is going to rise? And it never does.
Actually I think the stats show that Apple's market share is rising at the moment. Anyone got any stats?
I bet I'm not the only one with a significant other that drives them nuts by tidying up all the time. A typical conversation might go something like this:
Me [settling down to watch a movie]: Where is the HMDI lead?
Her Wherever you last left it.
Me I left it on the floor behind the TV.
Her Well I haven't touched it.
Me You must have, it can't have moved itself.
Her I definately haven't moved it. You're always loosing things.
Me Do you even know what it is?
Her What is it?
Me It's a black cable. It was on the floor behind the TV.
Her Oh, I might have put it in one of the boxes in the shed.
Me [angry] So now I've got to put my shoes on and go out into the cold to look through all the boxes in the shed!
Her Don't blame me! You're the untidy one that is always loosing things...
I remember Bill Gates once saying that his worst fear for Microsoft was to become the next IBM - in other words, a big slow moving business with many levels of bureaucracy (this was some years ago and he was talking about the "old" IBM).
Well, it looks like Bills worst nightmare has come true, as evidenced by Ballmers comments. Google is now what Microsoft used to be - a lot of small teams working on their own projects without levels of bureaucracy interfering.
His hope is that offerings like Spore might force kids to rethink their understandings of nature.
Confusing kids more like. Animals don't evolve faster as they eat more... I can imaging playing this with my son and having to explain to him afterwards "evolution isn't really like that at all".
If you want to improve kids understanding of nature, get them outside and actually looking at the real thing. And/or buy some of the David Attenborough series, which many kids enjoy watching and are actually educationally very sound.
I think I shall blow some karma by cheering Microsoft on. Cybersquatting has long tickled my free-rider detector, so it would be nice to see a few of them get pwned.
I once had the unpleasant experience of being targeted by the attack lawers of a big company. I had a domain name registered which contained part of their company name, and it was a generic word was relevant to my website. As an individual when you start getting letters and threatening (in the legal way...) phone calls from a big legal company, what do you do? Even if legally you know you are probably in the right, the time and expense to fight it is just not worth it.
So, althought I agree that cybersquatters are scum, so are many lawyers and either should be encouraged!
No Space Invaders? No PacMan?
What REALLY makes me LMAO with this thread is that this is EXACTLY what you all rail against on the desktop, where y'all get a glowy feeling imagining a world with hundreds (or thousands) of different desktop operating systems.
No, I don't. In my perfect word there would be one or two core OS, and they would be OPEN SOURCE. So, there is nothing ironic about my viewpoint.
The answer is simple and obvious but unfortunately unlikely to happen: The mobile companies should collaboratively work on a single OSS operating system, which they can all use as a base, and then build their own stuff on top of that. It would be better for everyone (apart from the companies that make operating systems of course).
On the one hand, if you paid to build the network, it *is* yours, and you should get exclusive access to it.
Although that sounds common sense, in actual fact the fibre network will travel almost entirely over public property (under pavements, roads etc), and so we the people (through our government) can put whatever conditions we want on it.
As I see that it would be hard for Enterprises, of any moderate size, to store any remotly sensitive data on googles disks.
I don't see why this should be the case - large enterprises often trust their data to third parties. I think this is just a perception issue, people think of Google as being a consumer company, and so not have the level of service required by an Enterprise, but I don't see why that should be the case. I don't think you'd hear someone say "As I see that it would be hard for Enterprises, of any moderate size, to store any remotly sensitive data on IBMs disks."
News flash : This is NOT "minor incidents".
News flash: These are children. At school.
I expect everyone here on Slashdot can recount something that happened during their childhood that was not a "minor incident"... We all did stupid things when we were kids. But overreaching to that stuff, or reacting in the wrong way, can do more damage than the incident itself.
I'm not saying this isn't serious stuff. But parents, teachers, and the kids themselves are usually able to deal with serious stuff in the correct way.
Surely bullying should be dealt with at the level of teachers/parents? Putting these things into law just seems like asking for trouble - potentially making the minor incidents of growing up into major issues that will scar children for life.
The thing that annoys me about this stuff is that the justificaiton for it seems to be mainly catching terrorists, but it will only catch the stupid or incompetant ones. So the government can catch some dissaffected and naieve youth with a half-baked plan that he may never commit and give it as an example of how they are winning the "war on terror".
I would of thought rule number one for any competent terrorist these days is "don't use electronic communications of any sort". We know that real terrorist cells can lie dormant for years - I'm sure they don't worry about the couple of days it might take to send a letter or spoken message.
Er, children don't study computer science in the UK.
a l/
Well, they call it ICT.
I did exactly that, and have never heard of this so-called software license module.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/ict/leg
Well, in the UK children who study computer science study a module that basically tells them how to comply with software licences, and that it is illegal to "copy software".
And your old mum is going to spend $400 for an IPhone?
Actually she might. She loves her Mac Mini.
Both Apple and MS are trying to get to the same point, but I believe MS will make it there first.
And then Apple will come along and do it right...
Compare the iPod and the Zune and tell me which company understands the consumer better.
Microsoft are stuck in a quagmire of their own making at the moment. Still the large majority of their revenue come from two products - their operating system and their office suite, a monopoly they have had for over a decade, and even with their core products they've been having major difficulties (see Vista). The future belongs to others.
I am exciting to see what will be out there in 5+ years.
That's kind of what I'm referring to in the parent post - the question was "were are operating systems headed?"
You say that, then proceed to list everything from Apple that is designed to have a Mac at the center of it all controlling it.
I don't think they are designed that way, I bet future iPods will have a direct link to the iTunes store and you'll be able to purchase music directly. And I'm not sure why you think the iPhone needs a Mac, it looks like a pretty standalone device from what I've seen. Finally, the box that they currently call the AppleTV I believe is not the final product - that will come in the next few years, and I'll bet you won't need a Mac or PC to use it.
Hate to kill your Apple dream but Microsoft will do mainstream IPTV with the xbox360 way sooner,
Yes, and they did phones sooner, and I believe they had PDAs that play music before the iPod.
The difference is that Jobs has a very clear idea of what consumers want. My old mum isn't going to buy an XBox360 to watch TV on it. Nor am I for that matter.
Two words: Consumer devices.
I think Steve Jobs has seen the future, and realised that the PC won't be so important, the action is all going to move to various types of devices aimed at consumers. So, he started with music players, is moving into portable video/gaming and now of course telephones, and has made the first steps towards TV. Television is the biggie of course, and I believe Jobs is being deliberately low key about his intentions there - with the low key announcement of the Apple TV box, for instance.
Here's a prediction, in the next few years Steve Jobs is going to make a presentation where he says something like "First we revolutionised the personal computer, then the music player and the telephone. Now we're going to revolutionise television..."
They should treat it like Big Brother (is that shown in the USA? It's a "reality" show) and deliberately choose people who they know are going to have problems, then put a camera in there and broadcast it live. They would make a fortune. And voting for who is going to get "thrown out" would be even more fun as the consequences of that would be rather dramatic. Sounds like great TV to me!
From Wikipedia:
Today apostasy is punishable by death in the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Mauritania, the Comoros and, most likely, Iraq. Similarly, blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan. In Qatar apostasy is a capital offense, but no executions have been reported for it.
There is, as of yet, no laws prohibiting thinking about commiting a crime.
I think about commiting crimes quite a bit. How would I rob a bank, for instance? Or "disappear" someone, without getting caught? If my country was occupied by a foreign army, what could I as an individual do to cause maximum damage to it?
These are interesting and fun mental exercises, and of course novel writers think about this kind of stuff all the time. I just do this stuff in my head, and that's where it will stay. It does worry me however that these days it seems the law is beginning to view talking about doing something as if it was proof you will actually do it. If I had a friend that also liked doing this kind of mental exercise, and we discussed this kind of stuff via IRC, for instance, in the not too distant future I could envisage getting a visit from the police, or even ending up in jail, just for talking about stuff.
One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
Which countries are those? I know it certainly has been the case in the past, but I can't think of any country in which people are forced to follow a particular religion these days.
Actually your chromosomes do fragment as you get older. It's possible that in some distant future we will contain nanobots to "defrag" our chromosomes.