Three years ago, I became an unwilling MSFT employee via acquisition (don't worry, I didn't stay and remain ideologically pure ), and that's *exactly* how many Microsoft employees think. It's not surprising and it's not their fault, considering how much effort and money Microsoft spends on propaganda to tell them so. The only place I've ever lived that had a propaganda drive like MSFT HQ was a communist country with huge party banners on many street corners.
You apparently read neither my post, nor even your own.
Your point was "If Nvidia hires 50 new engineers to start working on chipsets, instead of GPUs, how would that affect their GPU development at all?" (verbatim quote, in case you forgot what you said). I showed you exactly how that could, would, and almost certainly did affect their GPU development, with a real world example. To make that point more clear to you: if you launch a new product line, it is impossible for that new product line to not have a negative effect on your existing product line.
That doesn't mean launching a new product line is bad, or that nVidia was wrong to get into the chipset business. Heck, I'm glad they did. All of my desktop machines have AMD CPUs, and most of them also have nVidia chipsets, and I'm very happy with them. The only non-AMD machine I use is a MacBook Pro. However, none of that is relevant to your argument, which is that developing a chipset business would not affect the GPU business. If it did nothing else, it would slow the pace of development of GPUs, especially when the chipset business was in its infancy.
Been there, done that, know what I'm talking about. You haven't, and don't.
Simple: resources put to developing the chipsets are resources that are not being put to developing GPUs. I work for a company that up until a year and a half or so ago had a single product, which had then and has now the largest market share among vendors in that market. Then we launched a new product in a complementary market sector in which there is a dominant player. Sure, we hired new staff to work on this product and it has gained considerable traction in the last nine months and the dominant player in that market is probably starting to sweat:) However, some staff from our existing product line also moved onto that new product line and while development has continued on our core product and new features continue to be released and we continue to be number one in that market, we could have done more, faster if we were focusing on a single product line.
That doesn't mean nv was wrong to get into the chipset business. Certainly, my employer was not wrong to enter the complementary market sector we entered. Sales are going very well and there are great cross-sell opportunities between our two product lines. I can see us becoming the dominant player in this new market. However, that doesn't mean that entering a new market will not have an effect on your existing products, especially in the short term. I assure you it does.
The problem nv has in the chipset market, as I see it, is that they entered a very crowded market with a dominant player (Intel), which didn't really need another player, and they put themselves in direct competition with Intel, something they weren't when they only made GPUs. It got more complicated when AMD bought ATI, since that also put them in direct competition with AMD. If nv were to exit the chipset business they could make nice with Intel as a hedge against AMD. Thus, exiting the chipset business, even if they are profitable in it, could make business sense.
Sure, they deny it. Of course, a lot of these sorts of denied stories later turn out to mostly or wholly true. Time will tell, but I shan't be surprised if we see an announcement from nv in 3 months that they are leaving the chipset business. Who knows? They might even be able to sell some of their IP to Intel and recover some of their initial investment.
I should add that the only time in the last four years I've actually seen either of those checkpoints open was during business hours on a weekday. On weekends and at night, they seem to always be closed. I think I can guess when the smugglers drive through there:p
Maybe I'm just a statistical anomaly, but I've probably driven between San Diego and LA 100 times in the last four years and I've only seen the San Onofre checkpoint actually manned once. The rest of the time it was just a slight slowdown in traffic. Considering that it seems to be hardly ever open, I don't see why they don't just close the thing.
Absolutely WRT that "getting users involved" thing. Some of the tools used by my part of engineering at my company are designed and built by other parts of engineering at my company, and it's typical that the first time I see a new release is when it goes into beta. Guess what the chances are of getting something that I think sucks fixed at that point? Uh-huh. And that's a major contributing factor in why one of those tools is the only web app I know of anywhere that does not render correctly in Firefox 3, despite the fact that the current release version of the app was only released a week or two before Firefox 3. Swell. And of course, I think the whole design of that tool sucks anyway, and so does pretty much everyone else who uses it.
Only if they license the Thinkpad one from Lenovo. The Toshiba version is utter crap. Does anyone else still even use those? The super great erase is one of the many things I love about the Thinkpad line, along with the fact that it runs Linux better than my MBP does. This MBP is a year and a half old, you'd think wireless networking would work out of the box with current versions of *buntu, but nooooooooooo! I still have to compile madwifi from source to get wireless on it.
And that's exactly what's wrong with the post I replied to. There is nothing special about middle Americans WRT computers and clue, or the lack of it. Thus, the use of "middle American" was a troll. And yes, I was insightful. Not only do I think so, a lot of others did, too.
I might go along with the Insightful were it not for the gratuitous (and most likely inaccurate) use of "middle America." There are a number of things wrong with this:
1) I can think of a lot of places in world (having lived there) where people are at least as technologically clueless as the average American. There is nothing special about Americans - either positive or negative - in that regard;
2) If you meant "middle" as in "middle class" you missed. The most technologically clueful income strata in America is most likely the middle class. One of the things that keeps the poor in poverty is lack of clue combined with means to acquire it; rich people, on the other hand, have middle class people who are paid to do all that stuff for them, and thus don't acquire clue about computers unless they are very interested in them or were once middle class;
3) If you meant "middle" as in "geographic center" it is still likely that you missed. Even in the Silicon Valley area, where I live, computer cluefulness remains largely the province or those who are in the industry or who are computer enthusiasts on their own. Everyone else is as clueless as they are everywhere else. Those who aren't clueless are, again, mostly in the middle class.
If you'd written that the majority of people (everywhere) are unaware, I might have spent one of my remaining mod points to mod you up. As it is, I was tempted to use to mod you troll, but decided to take the time to explain why I consider your post a troll instead.
Get real. He was a criminal, that's why he was in the spamming business in the first place.
If you don't think so, try working as a postmaster, especially at an ISP. Better still, go from there to working for an email security vendor, as I have for the past four years. You'll get quite an education in just what kind of people we're dealing with. I'm shocked by the barbarity of what he did, but not all that surprised. Those innocent people were not the first to be murdered by a spammer (although maybe the first in this country) and will almost certainly not be the last.
Doesn't anyone vet these questions at all?! The market offers a choice of version control systems, and even just plain old diff might be good enough for the task (or not). It's very clear that zero research was done prior to tasking Slashdot. I've been mulling over whether it was a dumb question or a lazy one, and things have become clear: both dumb and lazy.
Even a little googling would have yielded good answers to the problem, but more to the point, if they asked someone who could not, off the top of her/his head give an answer that a version control system, or possibly just diff, are good approaches to solve the problem, then the "overlords" were obviously asking the question of someone who is unqualified to answer it, or to be in charge of implementing whatever solution they choose.
Exactly. I don't use a Mac at work because of eye candy (I use minimal effects and prefer just a tasteful UI), but because of its tremendous usability. KDE 4 has loads of eye candy, but on my Linux machines I'll be sticking with KDE 3.5.x for a long time to come. The problems with the eye candy in KDE 4 are that it doesn't have much else. They revolutionized the desktop in a way that I (nor, it seems, very many others) have much of a use for, wanted, or asked for.
As for other eye candy stuff, I don't really need a rotating cube, etc. I just want highly usable, consistent apps. Not that Linux doesn't have a lot of those, but there is much to be done before we meet or beat the standard set by Apple.
Thank you, I was going to write that myself. When I was in my early teens and getting interested in computers, no one had to *encourage* me or any of the other guys (and yes, I mean guys - there were no girls in my middle school computer club) to learn programming or anything else about computers. The hard part was getting us away from the computer to do anything else. This was in the mid-seventies, and we would ride our bikes a few miles to the nearest computer store - a few miles - to ogle things like IMSAI machines. We were using an HP 2000 Access system on dial-up through terminals, and more than a few of us saved up our allowance money to buy the BASIC manual for those systems. Accomplished by riding our bikes a couple of miles to the San Diego HP office (which is no longer an HP office) that was on Aero Drive.
It may depend on where you are. Here in California, there has been a nurse shortage for over 20 years. There are loads of nurses from English-speaking countries working in California to fill the gap. I don't know if that shortage will continue for another 30 years, but considering the aging of the US population, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I don't buy these stories of the imminent death of IT as a career, either. I've been in IT for nearly 30 years and it's never left me wanting. Sure, there are some jobs than could be sent overseas - probably even mine - but there will always be plenty of local IT jobs, too. You can't outsource or offshore *all* of your IT work no matter how hard you try.
Your friend who quit driving trucks to go into IT in 1998 was going in just in time to get caught up in the dot-com bust a couple years later. I didn't really get to cash in much on the dot-com boom, but I was working for a company that was already stable and profitable before the boom, and I didn't lose my job in the bust. Is IT still a good field to be in 8 years after the bust? Sure is. I'd probably have to be a doctor to make more than I do in IT, and the stress would be a lot higher, probably.
Depends on when she left. If they did their business and she left directly thereafter, they had until morning to work on the Blackberry. That's more than enough time to rifle through his email and to take a shot at breaking into the Exchange server.
Or, she might have just sold it. Either way, he's a dork.
Certainly not because I'm as bad as they are - I can't figure out what dumb-assed logic leads you to conclude that a person willing to serve as an executioner is = a child pornographer - but because they deserve it and because I support capital punishment. I not only support capital punishment, but believe that if you *really* support capital punishment, you should be willing to serve on the firing squad. In the case of child molesters, I'd not only be willing to serve on the firing squad, I'd be willing to *be* the firing squad.
Your post reveals a lot about you. First and foremost, that you don't have children, or you would not for a second question my willingness to personally execute convicted child molesters. I don't need to list any of the other things it reveals about you (none of them good), since they're even more obvious to all than the fact that you don't have kids.
Do I recognize their humanity at all? No, I don't. They laid that down a long time ago. Executing a child molester is no different than putting down a rabid dog, and yields a greater benefit to society.
Mods: if you disagree with me and can't bother to respond, preferring to vote with mod points rather than reasoned argument, please go for flamebait rather than troll. Trolls are just trying to elicit a kneejerk response and don't (necessarily) mean what they say. I really mean all of the foregoing, so it's not a troll. It's not meant to be flamebait either, but the lazy may mod it that way instead of taking up their keyboards and responding. Thanks for your time.
My ISP already doesn't offer Usenet, so I have the cheapest account Supernews offers. If ISPs turn off Usenet, they'll just drive more business to Supernews and other NNTP services. As a former ISP sysadmin, I suspect that's actually their real plan. Running a decent news server takes quite a bit of bandwidth and disk space (at least if you carry binary newsgroups).
So, what's an ISP to do? Hmmm. Drop NNTP service. Saves you money and disk space. Claim it's to fight CP. Makes you look good to some people who don't know the real story. Customers who want Usenet then sign up with an NNTP service. They go over their bandwidth caps and you either then throttle them down or charge them extra bandwidth charges. They may pay, they may go elswhere. Either way, you've solved a few business problems for yourself, all the while being able to claim it's because you're thinking of the children.
Don't get me wrong about CP - I'm a dad, and I not only think child pornographers should be taken out and shot, I'd be happy to shoot them myself - but this just isn't going to do anything to control, contain, or prevent CP>
You're kinda sorta half right. Apple is busting out of the niche market, especially in some areas. For example, if you looked around the engineering department where I work (the entire third floor of our building, about 200 people) you'd have to look for quite a while before you found a machine that wasn't a Mac. And when you did, it would probably be a Linux or BSD box. At our corporate parent (an organization of about 60K people), roughly 10% of the staff have Macs despite the fact that it's not even an IT-supported platform. Word is it's going to be supported, though.
I also seem to recall reading somewhere not too long ago that Apple has the largest market share in sales of new laptops now. Can't remember the source, though.
"Mindshare" may be an overused term, but Apple certainly has it, and a great deal of market momentum besides. I fully expect that they'll make the 10% market share level, and sooner rather than later.
As for the $500 number, I think it's a non-sequitur. Yeah, you can buy a laptop for $500. Not a good laptop, but a laptop. Apple sells into the mid and high ends of the market, as do the other major vendors, and they are pretty much at the same price points. The myth that you have to pay $1000 more for a Mac has been debunked for a long time. I recently bought my wife a MacBook Pro, and to get the same features and quality in another brand, I would have had to pay just as much. So from my perspective, to pay the same price and get a Mac instead of some machine running a PoS (and I don't mean point of sale) OS like Vista, the Mac is the clear winner on cost:features grounds.
Three weeks? Sheesh. Most email security firms, including the one I work for, stopped whitelisting Google over a month ago. Heck, we're even penalizing some of their IP space. This is old news. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
No, what he (and the court decision, also) is saying is that if you violate the license agreement, you are then also in violation of copyright when you run the program. I'm not a lawyer, but this seems rather a big step to me. It's taking things from "When you break the license agreement, you are in violation of the license agreement" which may give certain remedies to the licensor - generally, that you must stop using the softwware - and going all the way to "When you violate the license agreement, you're not only in violation of the license agreement, you're in violation of copyright." This moves it from the area of contract law into the area of copyright law, an area that (IMO) it certainly does not belong.
Sadly, Blizzard will probably bet away with this highhandedness because few WoW players are likely to stop playing over this in protest. But for those few, I think today is the day to give up WoW forever.
For the rest of us, well, lawsuits and court decisions like this are a better argument for using Free software (and only Free software) to the greatest extent possible than pretty much anything $FOSS_ADVOCATE_OF_YOUR_CHOICE could say. Use Free software except when absolutely essential. IMO no game counts as even remotely essential, so if you're a gamer, switch over to gaming with Free software only. It'll save you money, too. In those cases where using non-Free software is truly essential, watch for and advocate for a Free alternative. When one arrives, switch.
You don't need to relax. You're completely right, and political change is usually effected by angry people. The Boston Tea Party wasn't held by people who thought they needed to relax. We need to start punishing politicians who do not support America - and the American people - first. You can bet the politicians in (some) other countries are certainly doing so for their constituencies. I have great respect for the Indian government. They're obviously working hard to promote the best interests of their country and their people. Our worthless, gutless, spineless politicians could learn a lot from them.
If I'm going to be nothing but a gravedigger, may I please start with yours? Note that this is not a death threat. I want to dig the hole, then you off yourself and fall in. It'll be good for society, trust me. Think of it as a form of outsourcing yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, did you used to work there, too?
Three years ago, I became an unwilling MSFT employee via acquisition (don't worry, I didn't stay and remain ideologically pure ), and that's *exactly* how many Microsoft employees think. It's not surprising and it's not their fault, considering how much effort and money Microsoft spends on propaganda to tell them so. The only place I've ever lived that had a propaganda drive like MSFT HQ was a communist country with huge party banners on many street corners.
You apparently read neither my post, nor even your own.
Your point was "If Nvidia hires 50 new engineers to start working on chipsets, instead of GPUs, how would that affect their GPU development at all?" (verbatim quote, in case you forgot what you said). I showed you exactly how that could, would, and almost certainly did affect their GPU development, with a real world example. To make that point more clear to you: if you launch a new product line, it is impossible for that new product line to not have a negative effect on your existing product line.
That doesn't mean launching a new product line is bad, or that nVidia was wrong to get into the chipset business. Heck, I'm glad they did. All of my desktop machines have AMD CPUs, and most of them also have nVidia chipsets, and I'm very happy with them. The only non-AMD machine I use is a MacBook Pro. However, none of that is relevant to your argument, which is that developing a chipset business would not affect the GPU business. If it did nothing else, it would slow the pace of development of GPUs, especially when the chipset business was in its infancy.
Been there, done that, know what I'm talking about. You haven't, and don't.
Simple: resources put to developing the chipsets are resources that are not being put to developing GPUs. I work for a company that up until a year and a half or so ago had a single product, which had then and has now the largest market share among vendors in that market. Then we launched a new product in a complementary market sector in which there is a dominant player. Sure, we hired new staff to work on this product and it has gained considerable traction in the last nine months and the dominant player in that market is probably starting to sweat :) However, some staff from our existing product line also moved onto that new product line and while development has continued on our core product and new features continue to be released and we continue to be number one in that market, we could have done more, faster if we were focusing on a single product line.
That doesn't mean nv was wrong to get into the chipset business. Certainly, my employer was not wrong to enter the complementary market sector we entered. Sales are going very well and there are great cross-sell opportunities between our two product lines. I can see us becoming the dominant player in this new market. However, that doesn't mean that entering a new market will not have an effect on your existing products, especially in the short term. I assure you it does.
The problem nv has in the chipset market, as I see it, is that they entered a very crowded market with a dominant player (Intel), which didn't really need another player, and they put themselves in direct competition with Intel, something they weren't when they only made GPUs. It got more complicated when AMD bought ATI, since that also put them in direct competition with AMD. If nv were to exit the chipset business they could make nice with Intel as a hedge against AMD. Thus, exiting the chipset business, even if they are profitable in it, could make business sense.
Sure, they deny it. Of course, a lot of these sorts of denied stories later turn out to mostly or wholly true. Time will tell, but I shan't be surprised if we see an announcement from nv in 3 months that they are leaving the chipset business. Who knows? They might even be able to sell some of their IP to Intel and recover some of their initial investment.
I should add that the only time in the last four years I've actually seen either of those checkpoints open was during business hours on a weekday. On weekends and at night, they seem to always be closed. I think I can guess when the smugglers drive through there :p
Maybe I'm just a statistical anomaly, but I've probably driven between San Diego and LA 100 times in the last four years and I've only seen the San Onofre checkpoint actually manned once. The rest of the time it was just a slight slowdown in traffic. Considering that it seems to be hardly ever open, I don't see why they don't just close the thing.
The translation of the Bible into the vernacular was a result of the Renaissance, not a trigger of it.
Absolutely WRT that "getting users involved" thing. Some of the tools used by my part of engineering at my company are designed and built by other parts of engineering at my company, and it's typical that the first time I see a new release is when it goes into beta. Guess what the chances are of getting something that I think sucks fixed at that point? Uh-huh. And that's a major contributing factor in why one of those tools is the only web app I know of anywhere that does not render correctly in Firefox 3, despite the fact that the current release version of the app was only released a week or two before Firefox 3. Swell. And of course, I think the whole design of that tool sucks anyway, and so does pretty much everyone else who uses it.
Only if they license the Thinkpad one from Lenovo. The Toshiba version is utter crap. Does anyone else still even use those? The super great erase is one of the many things I love about the Thinkpad line, along with the fact that it runs Linux better than my MBP does. This MBP is a year and a half old, you'd think wireless networking would work out of the box with current versions of *buntu, but nooooooooooo! I still have to compile madwifi from source to get wireless on it.
And that's exactly what's wrong with the post I replied to. There is nothing special about middle Americans WRT computers and clue, or the lack of it. Thus, the use of "middle American" was a troll. And yes, I was insightful. Not only do I think so, a lot of others did, too.
You're a troll, too. HAND.
I might go along with the Insightful were it not for the gratuitous (and most likely inaccurate) use of "middle America." There are a number of things wrong with this:
1) I can think of a lot of places in world (having lived there) where people are at least as technologically clueless as the average American. There is nothing special about Americans - either positive or negative - in that regard;
2) If you meant "middle" as in "middle class" you missed. The most technologically clueful income strata in America is most likely the middle class. One of the things that keeps the poor in poverty is lack of clue combined with means to acquire it; rich people, on the other hand, have middle class people who are paid to do all that stuff for them, and thus don't acquire clue about computers unless they are very interested in them or were once middle class;
3) If you meant "middle" as in "geographic center" it is still likely that you missed. Even in the Silicon Valley area, where I live, computer cluefulness remains largely the province or those who are in the industry or who are computer enthusiasts on their own. Everyone else is as clueless as they are everywhere else. Those who aren't clueless are, again, mostly in the middle class.
If you'd written that the majority of people (everywhere) are unaware, I might have spent one of my remaining mod points to mod you up. As it is, I was tempted to use to mod you troll, but decided to take the time to explain why I consider your post a troll instead.
You're right, the punishment doesn't fit the crime. It should have been a life sentence.
No, this is not a troll. I really believe that.
Get real. He was a criminal, that's why he was in the spamming business in the first place.
If you don't think so, try working as a postmaster, especially at an ISP. Better still, go from there to working for an email security vendor, as I have for the past four years. You'll get quite an education in just what kind of people we're dealing with. I'm shocked by the barbarity of what he did, but not all that surprised. Those innocent people were not the first to be murdered by a spammer (although maybe the first in this country) and will almost certainly not be the last.
Doesn't anyone vet these questions at all?! The market offers a choice of version control systems, and even just plain old diff might be good enough for the task (or not). It's very clear that zero research was done prior to tasking Slashdot. I've been mulling over whether it was a dumb question or a lazy one, and things have become clear: both dumb and lazy.
Even a little googling would have yielded good answers to the problem, but more to the point, if they asked someone who could not, off the top of her/his head give an answer that a version control system, or possibly just diff, are good approaches to solve the problem, then the "overlords" were obviously asking the question of someone who is unqualified to answer it, or to be in charge of implementing whatever solution they choose.
Exactly. I don't use a Mac at work because of eye candy (I use minimal effects and prefer just a tasteful UI), but because of its tremendous usability. KDE 4 has loads of eye candy, but on my Linux machines I'll be sticking with KDE 3.5.x for a long time to come. The problems with the eye candy in KDE 4 are that it doesn't have much else. They revolutionized the desktop in a way that I (nor, it seems, very many others) have much of a use for, wanted, or asked for.
As for other eye candy stuff, I don't really need a rotating cube, etc. I just want highly usable, consistent apps. Not that Linux doesn't have a lot of those, but there is much to be done before we meet or beat the standard set by Apple.
Thank you, I was going to write that myself. When I was in my early teens and getting interested in computers, no one had to *encourage* me or any of the other guys (and yes, I mean guys - there were no girls in my middle school computer club) to learn programming or anything else about computers. The hard part was getting us away from the computer to do anything else. This was in the mid-seventies, and we would ride our bikes a few miles to the nearest computer store - a few miles - to ogle things like IMSAI machines. We were using an HP 2000 Access system on dial-up through terminals, and more than a few of us saved up our allowance money to buy the BASIC manual for those systems. Accomplished by riding our bikes a couple of miles to the San Diego HP office (which is no longer an HP office) that was on Aero Drive.
It may depend on where you are. Here in California, there has been a nurse shortage for over 20 years. There are loads of nurses from English-speaking countries working in California to fill the gap. I don't know if that shortage will continue for another 30 years, but considering the aging of the US population, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I don't buy these stories of the imminent death of IT as a career, either. I've been in IT for nearly 30 years and it's never left me wanting. Sure, there are some jobs than could be sent overseas - probably even mine - but there will always be plenty of local IT jobs, too. You can't outsource or offshore *all* of your IT work no matter how hard you try.
Your friend who quit driving trucks to go into IT in 1998 was going in just in time to get caught up in the dot-com bust a couple years later. I didn't really get to cash in much on the dot-com boom, but I was working for a company that was already stable and profitable before the boom, and I didn't lose my job in the bust. Is IT still a good field to be in 8 years after the bust? Sure is. I'd probably have to be a doctor to make more than I do in IT, and the stress would be a lot higher, probably.
Depends on when she left. If they did their business and she left directly thereafter, they had until morning to work on the Blackberry. That's more than enough time to rifle through his email and to take a shot at breaking into the Exchange server.
Or, she might have just sold it. Either way, he's a dork.
Yes, I'd really shoot them myself.
Why would I do that?
Certainly not because I'm as bad as they are - I can't figure out what dumb-assed logic leads you to conclude that a person willing to serve as an executioner is = a child pornographer - but because they deserve it and because I support capital punishment. I not only support capital punishment, but believe that if you *really* support capital punishment, you should be willing to serve on the firing squad. In the case of child molesters, I'd not only be willing to serve on the firing squad, I'd be willing to *be* the firing squad.
Your post reveals a lot about you. First and foremost, that you don't have children, or you would not for a second question my willingness to personally execute convicted child molesters. I don't need to list any of the other things it reveals about you (none of them good), since they're even more obvious to all than the fact that you don't have kids.
Do I recognize their humanity at all? No, I don't. They laid that down a long time ago. Executing a child molester is no different than putting down a rabid dog, and yields a greater benefit to society.
Mods: if you disagree with me and can't bother to respond, preferring to vote with mod points rather than reasoned argument, please go for flamebait rather than troll. Trolls are just trying to elicit a kneejerk response and don't (necessarily) mean what they say. I really mean all of the foregoing, so it's not a troll. It's not meant to be flamebait either, but the lazy may mod it that way instead of taking up their keyboards and responding. Thanks for your time.
My ISP already doesn't offer Usenet, so I have the cheapest account Supernews offers. If ISPs turn off Usenet, they'll just drive more business to Supernews and other NNTP services. As a former ISP sysadmin, I suspect that's actually their real plan. Running a decent news server takes quite a bit of bandwidth and disk space (at least if you carry binary newsgroups).
So, what's an ISP to do? Hmmm. Drop NNTP service. Saves you money and disk space. Claim it's to fight CP. Makes you look good to some people who don't know the real story. Customers who want Usenet then sign up with an NNTP service. They go over their bandwidth caps and you either then throttle them down or charge them extra bandwidth charges. They may pay, they may go elswhere. Either way, you've solved a few business problems for yourself, all the while being able to claim it's because you're thinking of the children.
Don't get me wrong about CP - I'm a dad, and I not only think child pornographers should be taken out and shot, I'd be happy to shoot them myself - but this just isn't going to do anything to control, contain, or prevent CP>
You're kinda sorta half right. Apple is busting out of the niche market, especially in some areas. For example, if you looked around the engineering department where I work (the entire third floor of our building, about 200 people) you'd have to look for quite a while before you found a machine that wasn't a Mac. And when you did, it would probably be a Linux or BSD box. At our corporate parent (an organization of about 60K people), roughly 10% of the staff have Macs despite the fact that it's not even an IT-supported platform. Word is it's going to be supported, though.
I also seem to recall reading somewhere not too long ago that Apple has the largest market share in sales of new laptops now. Can't remember the source, though.
"Mindshare" may be an overused term, but Apple certainly has it, and a great deal of market momentum besides. I fully expect that they'll make the 10% market share level, and sooner rather than later.
As for the $500 number, I think it's a non-sequitur. Yeah, you can buy a laptop for $500. Not a good laptop, but a laptop. Apple sells into the mid and high ends of the market, as do the other major vendors, and they are pretty much at the same price points. The myth that you have to pay $1000 more for a Mac has been debunked for a long time. I recently bought my wife a MacBook Pro, and to get the same features and quality in another brand, I would have had to pay just as much. So from my perspective, to pay the same price and get a Mac instead of some machine running a PoS (and I don't mean point of sale) OS like Vista, the Mac is the clear winner on cost:features grounds.
Three weeks? Sheesh. Most email security firms, including the one I work for, stopped whitelisting Google over a month ago. Heck, we're even penalizing some of their IP space. This is old news. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
No, but it constitutes a serious bug. Evil usually requires intent. Stupidity, on the other hand, can be completely unintentional.
No, what he (and the court decision, also) is saying is that if you violate the license agreement, you are then also in violation of copyright when you run the program. I'm not a lawyer, but this seems rather a big step to me. It's taking things from "When you break the license agreement, you are in violation of the license agreement" which may give certain remedies to the licensor - generally, that you must stop using the softwware - and going all the way to "When you violate the license agreement, you're not only in violation of the license agreement, you're in violation of copyright." This moves it from the area of contract law into the area of copyright law, an area that (IMO) it certainly does not belong.
Sadly, Blizzard will probably bet away with this highhandedness because few WoW players are likely to stop playing over this in protest. But for those few, I think today is the day to give up WoW forever.
For the rest of us, well, lawsuits and court decisions like this are a better argument for using Free software (and only Free software) to the greatest extent possible than pretty much anything $FOSS_ADVOCATE_OF_YOUR_CHOICE could say. Use Free software except when absolutely essential. IMO no game counts as even remotely essential, so if you're a gamer, switch over to gaming with Free software only. It'll save you money, too. In those cases where using non-Free software is truly essential, watch for and advocate for a Free alternative. When one arrives, switch.
You don't need to relax. You're completely right, and political change is usually effected by angry people. The Boston Tea Party wasn't held by people who thought they needed to relax. We need to start punishing politicians who do not support America - and the American people - first. You can bet the politicians in (some) other countries are certainly doing so for their constituencies. I have great respect for the Indian government. They're obviously working hard to promote the best interests of their country and their people. Our worthless, gutless, spineless politicians could learn a lot from them.
If I'm going to be nothing but a gravedigger, may I please start with yours? Note that this is not a death threat. I want to dig the hole, then you off yourself and fall in. It'll be good for society, trust me. Think of it as a form of outsourcing yourself.