Everyone is apparently far too stupid to realize what its greatest use would be. They're too busy drooling over trying to "get a slice of the $ XX billion a year mobile phone revenue".
We've already got cell phones, and in all the places I travel for work, only once in the backwoods of Kentucky did I ever consistently lose the signal. There isn't enough "flaw" left that quality improvement in this direction is going to make much money. Not enough to justify this effort.
And as for internet access, I sure as hell don't need to share the road with some pervert whacking off to www.farmsex.com. And I don't buy the passenger angle either, the last thing parents need is for 2 brats in the back to be squabbling over which web page to visit. This just isn't very compelling.
What I want, and what I think would ultimately be useful for everyone, is a wireless net link that maxes out at about 300 yards. My car would broadcast its location (via GPS) along with everyone elses, and right up next on the dash board, I'd have a little mini-LCD with a map of the current occupants of the road. What's more, we could also send turn signals and such via this link (in addition to visually). Those places you always come to, where visual signals are ambiguous? Well, you'd now have more than just a left/right turn signal. Signaling for straight ahead, the 2nd from the left of a 4-fork road (yes, I've really seen one of thse, 5 roads meeting at a single point), etc.
Then, there is the traffic jam possibility. What if those people up ahead in a jam could warn you in time to get off at the next exit? Hell, we could even have a "thank you" and "I'm sorry" signals... might cut down on some road rage.
And when critical mass is achieved, we could start to do things that would make this even more useful. Traffic lights, for instance, would detect all the cars relevant to it. So if you're sitting at the stop light at 3am, and no one is going the other way, the traffic light would be smart enough to see this, and change the light to green for you, no waiting. Cyclic lights could die very easily... this would be very close to the smart roads they've been wanting forever.
And you know how those navigator appliances that the new rentals have, that always have the road information as it was 2 years ago? This could augment that. If a road worker plops down a orange warning cone, it starts broadcasting its location and that the road is reduced by one lane.
We could even consider getting rid of some of the traffic sign clutter... it could just be beamed directly to the dash. Instead of signs, a small transmitter mounted on the same pole, with a battery and solar cell panel. How much prettier would our roads look? Hell, you'd always know what the speed limit is (you decide if that's good or bad) because it would show on your dash. For me, I just got a ticket 2 months ago, because a road I thought was 55 for years turns out to be 45mph on one stretch. Could be useful.
And depending on how intrusive we want to let the advertizers become, we could even force them to transmit signage that way too. (Before someone gets bent, remind yourself you can turn off the mickeyD's sign on the dashboard, but we can't currently do the same with a billboard). We could concievably get rid of all signage along roads, and do so without (supposedly) crippling advertizers. Might be a bit prettier along the highways.
And why will this never happen? #1 Idiots in Detroit like nice shiny technology, but that's as far as their understanding of it or its uses, goes. #2 Politicians and goverment are the most worthless institution to ever exist in the 14 billion years or so of history of the universe. #3 Some asshole would insist on making my idea more privacy intrusive than I would, and privacy advocates would go into an uproar (possibly justified).
But, as much as I dislike their product, I just get the strange feeling inside, that their company isn't run by the complete and utter assholes we see everywhere else.
To suspect them of pulling any dirty is just damn wrong. Maybe it's just me wanting at least one company out there to be ethical, some really corny wishful thinking on my part, but what have they ever done to you? They deserve an an apology.
Besides, they might be able to stick it to M$ somehow...
Yes, but if you really read the books you'd know that that is how bugger colonies greet each other. Ender just shakes hands really enthusiastically, is all.
Twisted to the extreme that you seem to want to go to, posting at all is advertising. You're exposing yourself to a public medium in the hopes that you'll recieve prestige, fame, whatever. So I guess (*best sarcastic voice*) We're all advertising!
I suppose I should have been a bit more polite, maybe you're still shell shocked from sifting through 5000 spam or something. Still, I find it interesting that many can't tell what is and what isn't... if we started a friendly conversation about snowboarding, would you accuse me of covertly advertising for the snowboarding industry? In a way, this is another crime that advertisers are guilty of, blurring the line so completely that no one is above suspicion.
Some things aren't ads, such as sigs. Turn them off if you can't tell the difference.
I specifically said "unlike tv". Telemarketing, spam, junk mail all fall into this category. Junk mailers are wasting a precious national resource, sending it to me in a form that is hard to recycle and expecting me to dispose of it. This isn't something to laugh about.
I'm already working on software for my tivo that will kill most ads, no matter what tricks they use. It md5s the first frame of all ads, and adds this to a database that contains how long the ad is, so that it can blank it out whenever it sees it.
Still needs me to hit the "adkiller" button, but I'll only see it once, and then only part of it. If I get it working, may have to let others use the db...
Advertiising firms employ a bunch of people who could be making more X. Since less X gets made, volume is lower, prices rise to fill in the profit margin. Not to mention the huge outlay of $$$ for marketing that could also be rolled into profit, R&D, etc.
Maybe 50 years ago, getting info about your needed products to consumers was a problem, but not now. If the customer even has an inkling they need it, finding it themselves is easy. If they don't need it, then you're just diverting money away from other businesses that might use it for better things.
Advertising is a dinosaur, huddling in the jungle wondering when all the little meteorites will stop.. never thinking that a big one is on the way.
Did they ever stop to realize that maybe they're not even an industry worth having? Flawed business model perhaps?
Examine the evidence:
#1 Inability to prove that people actually are paying attention, or that they can influence spending in a significant way. Even if they can, are they being manipulative in an unethical way?
#2 Advertising pollution becoming increasingly intrusive, even for products that are directly paid for by the consumer. Can't drive down the road without seeing billboards, watch a movie, even in a theatre. On and on and on...
#3 They use money that might actually be used in more worthwhile ways by companies. Such as increased production, better employee benefits, R&D, planning for consequences... hell, you guys probably have a better idea than I do where the $$$ could go, including places that benefit consumers, employees AND shareholders.
#4 The difficulty of drawing the line between advertising and fraudulent claims. Before you boo and hiss, are Miss Cleo's commercials on tv at 2am valid advertising? How low does she have to go before it isn't? How many in the past have sunk that low?
#5 Existence of products that were market hits even without much of an ad campaign. Word of mouth and quality were good enough, and the product filled a real need (instead of trying to invent a dubious one).
#6 The ability of advertisers to steal people's valuable time from them, even when they haven't expressly or implicitly agreed to give such time (unlike watching TV). Well maybe the ability isn't the bad thing, but their willingness to exploit such an ability is unbounded. Only fear of law and PR backlash keeps them in check, and then not always.
Again, do we need this industry? If it disappears off the face of the earth, will we be so much poorer? The workers will adapt, find new employment, and our country would be stronger. And even if they don't deserve it, maybe a few idiots would get scammed less often.
You tried to convince them. They were retards. Any more, and you risk negative side effects from the management ("Look! He's a troublemaker, he probably hacks into it himself!"). Make sure yourr own workstations are secure (they seem to be reasonably so), and just laugh if anything happens to the administrative boxen. Really, it's not your problem *or* fault.
Does make me sad that another bootcamp MCSE is filling a job that I could do more comptently. It sucks being unemployed. Oh well, my life will get back on track when millions of these managers realize that millions of these bootcamp MCSE's are worthless, and I get a million job offers. Haha.
No, they most certainly have never got anything right. If by "right" you mean being able to know how to cheat the most effectively, then your definition of "right" is simply too twisted for us to communicate.
Pyrric victories only apply to war, where winning means losing so many of your workers, loved ones, etc.
In business, it means you are the only one left standing to charge money for something. So what if you've nearly busted the bank, in 2 years you'll have recovered and own everything.
Sure, on technical merits, gameplay, any "quality" issue, I'll grant you that it's probably a flop. But no one seems to understand, maybe they're blinded by love for the gamecube or ps2.
Microsoft is doing more than just trying to leverage into another hot market... this plan is so much bolder than that. They're out to chop the knees out from under Dell, HPaq, and Gateway.
Xbox2, most likely, but possibly xbox3 will be the "home computer". It will be marketed as such, a computer that is "so much simpler to use" and never has compatibility problems caused by all sorts of 3rd party drivers. It will be cheaper too, loaded with software and still well under then $700 price mark that consumer pc's are shooting for. This too, will look like a failure
But it will just be beginning. Next version will be the Xbox Corporrate edition, loaded with the new version of Office XP, cheaper, with no annoying expansion possibilities. Relatively nicer licensing... cheaper, easier for your bonhead MCSE's to administrate, and having the latest office software 6 months before it's released on the PC.
And linux won't run on it, ever. They'll find some way, even if it means adding chips with no purpose other than to thwart it. And no matter how good at reverse engineering you are, what happens when you recieve the DMCA cease and desist?
At this point, the Xbox family will be making serious inroads into the desktop PC market, without annoying competitor operating systems. Maybe 40% - 50%, which in an industry with razor thin profit margins, will kill Gateway. Hpaq will hold on, and Dell will license it... the Dellbox will debut. No, I'm not kidding.
Also, at this point, the price starts to rise on bare mobo's even more, as the taiwanese manufacturers see the advantages of high volume manufacturing evaporate. These are the same people that make mobo's for Dell, and if they aren't making those, the cost slightly rises on *ALL* their products. And as someone that builds your own box, you are further marginalized... people laugh at you for spending that much more on a system that can't run Halo 5.
Now, M$ starts to really drag ass with the PC versions of Office. Salesmen that arrange licensing with the Fortune 500 starrt pushing the Xbox 5: Professional Edition as the only real choice with a future, Microsoft may not be able to continue the cost of developing M$ Office PC edition, and you don't want to be stuck with 10,000 machines that won't be able to run the latest software.
Market, better than 70% at this point. All the industry rags coo and blush, telling how M$ cleaned things up when customer service was in the toilet. The PR campaign is heavy duty now. Prices continue to rise, and HPaq gets out of the consumer PC market, content to sell servers and laserjets. Dell is licensing Xbox, but still retaining the PC line... but prices rise due to no serious competition.
The DOJ initiates an investigation into further illegal monopoly practices, but this will take years, and M$ buys the right politicians. Whenever anyone important and unsilencable bitches, they hold up Dell like ventriloquists hold up the dummy and insist he really is real, and talking.
The market share of Xbox hits 80%, with %5 for mac zealots (no offense, I have 12 macs myself guys) that only leaves 15% for the do-it-your-selfers and linux zealots (no offense guys, I have 5 linux machines, including Amiga Linux, on a 2k). At this point, Dell does a press release how there really isn't enough market to support selling general purpose PC's. There are lots of little 2nd and 3rd tier vendors... but none that make any inroads into the corporate or even medium sized privately owned businesses. Plus, the cost for general purpose components is now through the roof, and taiwan is bleeding hardware manufacturers left and right.
I'm thinking Intel will be compelled to go along with it, knowing that they'll have exclusive for the Xbox cpu, and still retaining their server market. Places that need mid-range to high end rackmount servers, if they use x86, have always shrugged off paying $600 for a motherboard, $200 for a nic. They won't notice.
At about this point, M$ will quit supporting mac, which may be the only viable alternative.
And you thought it was just an ugly games machine.
Access is an illegally bundled product of dubious security and quality produced by a convicted monopolist.
And generally, user stupidity aside, anything you would do with Access could just as easily be done with either mysql or postgres. And I'm sure there are other low-end open source db's I haven't even heard of, just as capable.
The few people I talked to locally that would have the authority to arrange something like this were lukewarm to the offer. "We'll get back to you" and "I'm not sure what our policy is on such things". Single school district. Maybe it would be different elsewhere.
Well excuse me. Linux has most of those tools bundled with the default install. Bash, perl... I suppose you could even do the dumb gui thing, if necessary.
As for reports, I assume you mean the worthless paperwork managers invent to look important and maintain the status quo. Since linux is the exact opposite of all that, and Micro$oft the essence of it, it's no wonder that M$ would be the tool of choice. Duh.
As for forms, I could teach even the braindead to write simple interactive scripts in their scripting lang. of choice in a day. And it'd be zippier than M$ Office ever could be.
Oh, I do kinda like Filemaker, have an older version of it running on one of my 14 macs. Paradox I have somewhere, but never installed it... I don't power up the dos boxen much anymore.
Yeh, it's only good for trivial things... but then what non-trivial thing is Access capable of?
As a toy or small office database, mysql kicks access's ass any day of the week. For enterprise level work, you need something more than either. And for teaching students something real, rather than clickety-click eye candy buttons, mysql wins hands down.
Oh, and by the way, if one of them has crippled sql, I suggest you take a look at Access, not mysql. That is what is truly hideously non-standard.
This is the statistical anomaly that will never happen again. M$ used their one "get to be right for free" card on knocking down realnames, so it's safe to assume they'll *never* *ever* be right again.
I am unfamiliar with that phrase actually. I didn't have alot of friends in high school either (except for "Han").
We also went to a few rennaisance festivals in our star trek costumes. Was fun to go up to the "elves" (WTF do elves have to do with a ren festival?) and do the "Live long and prosper" gesture. Then my friend would whip out the "tricorder" and start talking star trek mumbo jumbo. Was funny as hell. We were politely asked to leave, though we did manage to get them to refund our entrance fee.
Um, don't remember seeing any whips, to be honest.
Cap. Janeway was supposedly a woman, though some are still demanding a chromosome test. The black woman was a commisioned officer, as opposed to the asian and russian who were both ensigns iirc. And despite how you like to troll it up, a communications specialist on a military ship is anything but a "receptionist". Not that you'd know much about that. As for a starship pilot being a "chauffeur"... oh well. You say the show was misogynistic, and yet it appears to be you that is the man-hater. Me, I've always sort of thought that everyone has only ever been as far away from the other sex as a few gene expressions taking place the first couple days after conception. I totally accept the fact that both men and women (like yourself) are totally fucked up. Funny, but you're just another part of the problem you hate so much. Haha.
The new show: Geordi Laforge was black, last time I noticed. Cap. Sisko was black. I seem to remember more than a few female admirals too, one show or another.
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Everyone is apparently far too stupid to realize what its greatest use would be. They're too busy drooling over trying to "get a slice of the $ XX billion a year mobile phone revenue".
We've already got cell phones, and in all the places I travel for work, only once in the backwoods of Kentucky did I ever consistently lose the signal. There isn't enough "flaw" left that quality improvement in this direction is going to make much money. Not enough to justify this effort.
And as for internet access, I sure as hell don't need to share the road with some pervert whacking off to www.farmsex.com. And I don't buy the passenger angle either, the last thing parents need is for 2 brats in the back to be squabbling over which web page to visit. This just isn't very compelling.
What I want, and what I think would ultimately be useful for everyone, is a wireless net link that maxes out at about 300 yards. My car would broadcast its location (via GPS) along with everyone elses, and right up next on the dash board, I'd have a little mini-LCD with a map of the current occupants of the road. What's more, we could also send turn signals and such via this link (in addition to visually). Those places you always come to, where visual signals are ambiguous? Well, you'd now have more than just a left/right turn signal. Signaling for straight ahead, the 2nd from the left of a 4-fork road (yes, I've really seen one of thse, 5 roads meeting at a single point), etc.
Then, there is the traffic jam possibility. What if those people up ahead in a jam could warn you in time to get off at the next exit? Hell, we could even have a "thank you" and "I'm sorry" signals... might cut down on some road rage.
And when critical mass is achieved, we could start to do things that would make this even more useful. Traffic lights, for instance, would detect all the cars relevant to it. So if you're sitting at the stop light at 3am, and no one is going the other way, the traffic light would be smart enough to see this, and change the light to green for you, no waiting. Cyclic lights could die very easily... this would be very close to the smart roads they've been wanting forever.
And you know how those navigator appliances that the new rentals have, that always have the road information as it was 2 years ago? This could augment that. If a road worker plops down a orange warning cone, it starts broadcasting its location and that the road is reduced by one lane.
We could even consider getting rid of some of the traffic sign clutter... it could just be beamed directly to the dash. Instead of signs, a small transmitter mounted on the same pole, with a battery and solar cell panel. How much prettier would our roads look? Hell, you'd always know what the speed limit is (you decide if that's good or bad) because it would show on your dash. For me, I just got a ticket 2 months ago, because a road I thought was 55 for years turns out to be 45mph on one stretch. Could be useful.
And depending on how intrusive we want to let the advertizers become, we could even force them to transmit signage that way too. (Before someone gets bent, remind yourself you can turn off the mickeyD's sign on the dashboard, but we can't currently do the same with a billboard). We could concievably get rid of all signage along roads, and do so without (supposedly) crippling advertizers. Might be a bit prettier along the highways.
And why will this never happen?
#1 Idiots in Detroit like nice shiny technology, but that's as far as their understanding of it or its uses, goes.
#2 Politicians and goverment are the most worthless institution to ever exist in the 14 billion years or so of history of the universe.
#3 Some asshole would insist on making my idea more privacy intrusive than I would, and privacy advocates would go into an uproar (possibly justified).
Not to me, I still download tarballs.
I don't even like redhat linux. At all.
But, as much as I dislike their product, I just get the strange feeling inside, that their company isn't run by the complete and utter assholes we see everywhere else.
To suspect them of pulling any dirty is just damn wrong. Maybe it's just me wanting at least one company out there to be ethical, some really corny wishful thinking on my part, but what have they ever done to you? They deserve an an apology.
Besides, they might be able to stick it to M$ somehow...
Yes, but if you really read the books you'd know that that is how bugger colonies greet each other. Ender just shakes hands really enthusiastically, is all.
Who says it's analog? I have directv.
Twisted to the extreme that you seem to want to go to, posting at all is advertising. You're exposing yourself to a public medium in the hopes that you'll recieve prestige, fame, whatever. So I guess (*best sarcastic voice*) We're all advertising!
I suppose I should have been a bit more polite, maybe you're still shell shocked from sifting through 5000 spam or something. Still, I find it interesting that many can't tell what is and what isn't... if we started a friendly conversation about snowboarding, would you accuse me of covertly advertising for the snowboarding industry? In a way, this is another crime that advertisers are guilty of, blurring the line so completely that no one is above suspicion.
Some things aren't ads, such as sigs. Turn them off if you can't tell the difference.
I find your post idiotic, because my sig is a sig. It tells something about me, it doesn't sell a service.
It is also something you could turn off, if you had the intelligence that 7 out of 10 chimpanzees display in their first 4 years of development.
So, that said, fuck off.
I specifically said "unlike tv". Telemarketing, spam, junk mail all fall into this category. Junk mailers are wasting a precious national resource, sending it to me in a form that is hard to recycle and expecting me to dispose of it. This isn't something to laugh about.
I'm already working on software for my tivo that will kill most ads, no matter what tricks they use. It md5s the first frame of all ads, and adds this to a database that contains how long the ad is, so that it can blank it out whenever it sees it.
Still needs me to hit the "adkiller" button, but I'll only see it once, and then only part of it. If I get it working, may have to let others use the db...
Advertiising firms employ a bunch of people who could be making more X. Since less X gets made, volume is lower, prices rise to fill in the profit margin. Not to mention the huge outlay of $$$ for marketing that could also be rolled into profit, R&D, etc.
Maybe 50 years ago, getting info about your needed products to consumers was a problem, but not now. If the customer even has an inkling they need it, finding it themselves is easy. If they don't need it, then you're just diverting money away from other businesses that might use it for better things.
Advertising is a dinosaur, huddling in the jungle wondering when all the little meteorites will stop.. never thinking that a big one is on the way.
Did they ever stop to realize that maybe they're not even an industry worth having? Flawed business model perhaps?
Examine the evidence:
#1 Inability to prove that people actually are paying attention, or that they can influence spending in a significant way. Even if they can, are they being manipulative in an unethical way?
#2 Advertising pollution becoming increasingly intrusive, even for products that are directly paid for by the consumer. Can't drive down the road without seeing billboards, watch a movie, even in a theatre. On and on and on...
#3 They use money that might actually be used in more worthwhile ways by companies. Such as increased production, better employee benefits, R&D, planning for consequences... hell, you guys probably have a better idea than I do where the $$$ could go, including places that benefit consumers, employees AND shareholders.
#4 The difficulty of drawing the line between advertising and fraudulent claims. Before you boo and hiss, are Miss Cleo's commercials on tv at 2am valid advertising? How low does she have to go before it isn't? How many in the past have sunk that low?
#5 Existence of products that were market hits even without much of an ad campaign. Word of mouth and quality were good enough, and the product filled a real need (instead of trying to invent a dubious one).
#6 The ability of advertisers to steal people's valuable time from them, even when they haven't expressly or implicitly agreed to give such time (unlike watching TV). Well maybe the ability isn't the bad thing, but their willingness to exploit such an ability is unbounded. Only fear of law and PR backlash keeps them in check, and then not always.
Again, do we need this industry? If it disappears off the face of the earth, will we be so much poorer? The workers will adapt, find new employment, and our country would be stronger. And even if they don't deserve it, maybe a few idiots would get scammed less often.
You tried to convince them. They were retards. Any more, and you risk negative side effects from the management ("Look! He's a troublemaker, he probably hacks into it himself!"). Make sure yourr own workstations are secure (they seem to be reasonably so), and just laugh if anything happens to the administrative boxen. Really, it's not your problem *or* fault.
Does make me sad that another bootcamp MCSE is filling a job that I could do more comptently. It sucks being unemployed. Oh well, my life will get back on track when millions of these managers realize that millions of these bootcamp MCSE's are worthless, and I get a million job offers. Haha.
*SMACK*
*SMACK*
And for good measure,
*SMACK*
No, they most certainly have never got anything right. If by "right" you mean being able to know how to cheat the most effectively, then your definition of "right" is simply too twisted for us to communicate.
Pyrric victories only apply to war, where winning means losing so many of your workers, loved ones, etc.
In business, it means you are the only one left standing to charge money for something. So what if you've nearly busted the bank, in 2 years you'll have recovered and own everything.
they don't want to believe?
Sure, on technical merits, gameplay, any "quality" issue, I'll grant you that it's probably a flop. But no one seems to understand, maybe they're blinded by love for the gamecube or ps2.
Microsoft is doing more than just trying to leverage into another hot market... this plan is so much bolder than that. They're out to chop the knees out from under Dell, HPaq, and Gateway.
Xbox2, most likely, but possibly xbox3 will be the "home computer". It will be marketed as such, a computer that is "so much simpler to use" and never has compatibility problems caused by all sorts of 3rd party drivers. It will be cheaper too, loaded with software and still well under then $700 price mark that consumer pc's are shooting for. This too, will look like a failure
But it will just be beginning. Next version will be the Xbox Corporrate edition, loaded with the new version of Office XP, cheaper, with no annoying expansion possibilities. Relatively nicer licensing... cheaper, easier for your bonhead MCSE's to administrate, and having the latest office software 6 months before it's released on the PC.
And linux won't run on it, ever. They'll find some way, even if it means adding chips with no purpose other than to thwart it. And no matter how good at reverse engineering you are, what happens when you recieve the DMCA cease and desist?
At this point, the Xbox family will be making serious inroads into the desktop PC market, without annoying competitor operating systems. Maybe 40% - 50%, which in an industry with razor thin profit margins, will kill Gateway. Hpaq will hold on, and Dell will license it... the Dellbox will debut. No, I'm not kidding.
Also, at this point, the price starts to rise on bare mobo's even more, as the taiwanese manufacturers see the advantages of high volume manufacturing evaporate. These are the same people that make mobo's for Dell, and if they aren't making those, the cost slightly rises on *ALL* their products. And as someone that builds your own box, you are further marginalized... people laugh at you for spending that much more on a system that can't run Halo 5.
Now, M$ starts to really drag ass with the PC versions of Office. Salesmen that arrange licensing with the Fortune 500 starrt pushing the Xbox 5: Professional Edition as the only real choice with a future, Microsoft may not be able to continue the cost of developing M$ Office PC edition, and you don't want to be stuck with 10,000 machines that won't be able to run the latest software.
Market, better than 70% at this point. All the industry rags coo and blush, telling how M$ cleaned things up when customer service was in the toilet. The PR campaign is heavy duty now. Prices continue to rise, and HPaq gets out of the consumer PC market, content to sell servers and laserjets. Dell is licensing Xbox, but still retaining the PC line... but prices rise due to no serious competition.
The DOJ initiates an investigation into further illegal monopoly practices, but this will take years, and M$ buys the right politicians. Whenever anyone important and unsilencable bitches, they hold up Dell like ventriloquists hold up the dummy and insist he really is real, and talking.
The market share of Xbox hits 80%, with %5 for mac zealots (no offense, I have 12 macs myself guys) that only leaves 15% for the do-it-your-selfers and linux zealots (no offense guys, I have 5 linux machines, including Amiga Linux, on a 2k). At this point, Dell does a press release how there really isn't enough market to support selling general purpose PC's. There are lots of little 2nd and 3rd tier vendors... but none that make any inroads into the corporate or even medium sized privately owned businesses. Plus, the cost for general purpose components is now through the roof, and taiwan is bleeding hardware manufacturers left and right.
I'm thinking Intel will be compelled to go along with it, knowing that they'll have exclusive for the Xbox cpu, and still retaining their server market. Places that need mid-range to high end rackmount servers, if they use x86, have always shrugged off paying $600 for a motherboard, $200 for a nic. They won't notice.
At about this point, M$ will quit supporting mac, which may be the only viable alternative.
And you thought it was just an ugly games machine.
Yeh, but I'm not the monopoly/Monopoly expert here. It is M$ we're talking about. ;-)
Access is an illegally bundled product of dubious security and quality produced by a convicted monopolist.
And generally, user stupidity aside, anything you would do with Access could just as easily be done with either mysql or postgres. And I'm sure there are other low-end open source db's I haven't even heard of, just as capable.
Too many M$ apologists around here.
The few people I talked to locally that would have the authority to arrange something like this were lukewarm to the offer. "We'll get back to you" and "I'm not sure what our policy is on such things". Single school district. Maybe it would be different elsewhere.
Well excuse me. Linux has most of those tools bundled with the default install. Bash, perl... I suppose you could even do the dumb gui thing, if necessary.
As for reports, I assume you mean the worthless paperwork managers invent to look important and maintain the status quo. Since linux is the exact opposite of all that, and Micro$oft the essence of it, it's no wonder that M$ would be the tool of choice. Duh.
As for forms, I could teach even the braindead to write simple interactive scripts in their scripting lang. of choice in a day. And it'd be zippier than M$ Office ever could be.
Oh, I do kinda like Filemaker, have an older version of it running on one of my 14 macs. Paradox I have somewhere, but never installed it... I don't power up the dos boxen much anymore.
Command line interface, for one thing.
Yeh, it's only good for trivial things... but then what non-trivial thing is Access capable of?
As a toy or small office database, mysql kicks access's ass any day of the week. For enterprise level work, you need something more than either. And for teaching students something real, rather than clickety-click eye candy buttons, mysql wins hands down.
Oh, and by the way, if one of them has crippled sql, I suggest you take a look at Access, not mysql. That is what is truly hideously non-standard.
This is the statistical anomaly that will never happen again. M$ used their one "get to be right for free" card on knocking down realnames, so it's safe to assume they'll *never* *ever* be right again.
Satisfying, in a way.
I am unfamiliar with that phrase actually. I didn't have alot of friends in high school either (except for "Han").
We also went to a few rennaisance festivals in our star trek costumes. Was fun to go up to the "elves" (WTF do elves have to do with a ren festival?) and do the "Live long and prosper" gesture. Then my friend would whip out the "tricorder" and start talking star trek mumbo jumbo. Was funny as hell. We were politely asked to leave, though we did manage to get them to refund our entrance fee.
Um, don't remember seeing any whips, to be honest.
Cap. Janeway was supposedly a woman, though some are still demanding a chromosome test. The black woman was a commisioned officer, as opposed to the asian and russian who were both ensigns iirc. And despite how you like to troll it up, a communications specialist on a military ship is anything but a "receptionist". Not that you'd know much about that. As for a starship pilot being a "chauffeur"... oh well. You say the show was misogynistic, and yet it appears to be you that is the man-hater. Me, I've always sort of thought that everyone has only ever been as far away from the other sex as a few gene expressions taking place the first couple days after conception. I totally accept the fact that both men and women (like yourself) are totally fucked up. Funny, but you're just another part of the problem you hate so much. Haha.
The new show:
Geordi Laforge was black, last time I noticed. Cap. Sisko was black. I seem to remember more than a few female admirals too, one show or another.
Sorry if I implied you should be teaching sql databases...
I don't think I'd mind taking your latin classes, but I can't imagine that the computer classes are anything but absolute drivel. No offense.
And the system is now too big for it to ever fix itself successfully. Shame.