Yes, but the fact that they can't see the driver also means that they can't prove there was no passenger. They might hit you with attempted fraud, though.
They're still going to deploy it as the default document format for the new Offices. Lots of small and large companies are still going to upgrade their software at some point. OOXML is still very likely to become the new de facto standard due to common usage.
Patents aren't about wether or not something is obvious. They're about being the first to think of something. A lot of things seem obvious when you see them, even though you'd never have thought of it yourself.
However, it's clear that Amazon wasn't the first to think of one-click ordering, just the first to think of pouring it into a patent. Maybe they should be granted a patent on asking patents for obvious things:-)
I've had several of those wonderful personalities. No, I'll take an asocial guru over an average people person anytime.
Get a decent guru interested in a project, and he'll deliver more, better and faster than a half dozen regulars. I've worked with enough regular programmers to know that you need at least one week of heavy testing by another team for any noteworthy development. I've also worked with barely a handful of really good guys, whose code I had no qualms about dumping straight into customer acceptance without thinking. Those very few held themselves to a similar standard as me: sufficient pride in your work that when you deliver something as finished, you take it personal if someone finds a bug.
If your projects are so big that you really NEED a big team, then it's up to the team leader to also be very good at his job, which is to interact with each of them. He should be the one making sure they keep motivated (which requires a high degree of empathy), divide the project into manageable chunks (which requires both decent tech knowledge and an ability to interact with project managers), and keep marketroids and similar as far away as possible from the guys doing the actual work (which, aside from buzzword-compliant communication skills, also requires a firm hand, a thick skin and occasionally a stick with nails). Yes, decent team managers are as hard to find as decent tech people. A demonstrated ability to herd cats is a good starting point:-)
I'm sick and tired of non-tech people trying to tell tech people how they should behave to be fit for their jobs. HR should be kicked back to doing payroll & benefits. Shirts and ties are NOT required skills for a programmer or a sysadmin. If anything, they get in the way because they restrict bloodflow to the brain:-)
A very interesting hiring procedure would be a roundtable with the majority of the prospective co-workers. You only get hired if you manage to impress more than half of them.
It looks like you are trying to start your car. Would you like me to:
- Adjust the mirrors and seat to your wife's preferred positions ?
- Navigate you to the nearest Microsoft outlet ?
- Drive straight into the wall ahead?
- Blow up the engine ?
You have one. So does the enemy. How about this internal dialogue in the applicance:
- I predict X will do a, so I propose that Y should do b. - However, I know that X also has one of me, which will have told X that I predicted X will do a and I will have told Y to do b, so it will tell him to do c - Thus, I will anticipate and tell Y to do d - But I can now anticipate that X's machine will have predicted this and will tell him to do e, so I will again anticipate and tell Y to do e [repeat ad nauseam]
Isn't infinite recursion fun ?
Alternatively, if this kind of recursion issue is solved (or non-existant), if I know you have one of these predicting what I'm gonna do, I'll just fire up my own and ask it what *I* am going to do. Knowing what you have been told I'm about to do allows me to do something entirely different.
It seems that this technology, like psychohistory and any number of statistical sciences, only works if the subject isn't aware that it's being profiled. Once it, or knowledge of it, becomes widespread it starts losing much of it's effectiveness.
A monopoly, per definition, is when you have no choice. When a majority of people choose a specific product because it's the best, the simple fact that there is a choice being made makes it so that there is no monopoly. Yes, they're the market leader by a long streak, and almost everyone is using their software; but that is because they are simply the best at what they're doing, not because they have somehow locked in their customers.
Granted, there's the issue of file formats, but that's hardly more lock-in than, say, Oracle does by using a proprietary format for their database storage.
And yes, I'll probably get booing for this, but it's been a long time since Microsoft had a monopoly. It ended as soon as some other company came up with another OS for the PC, although I couldn't say who it was. Microsoft is not a monopolist, or at least, is not in a monopoly position.
What they're being charged with all over the place, is anti-competitive behaviour, which kind of comes down to trying to establish a monopoly when you don't have one.
We don't loathe Microsoft because they're a monopolist - even the vendor lock-in issue is debateable - but for the exact opposite that you're hitting on Macromedia: far from being the best in their field, we feel that they, in many areas, do not have the technical merit to deserve the leading position they have acquired through their unhealthy business practices.
IANAA (I am not an American), but if the way the American lawsuit-culture is perceived here is anywhere near accurate, then I can imagine MDs are quite reluctant to use this kind of tech.
Imagine someone going for an examination, and the MD deciding to dismiss the software's suggestion that the patient may have some rare disease. If the patient later does turns out to be suffering from that disease, or even dies from it, the malpractice lawsuits will soon be flying, even though the doc's decision may have been perfectly reasonable.
In the end, instead of adding to the likelyhood of uncommon conditions being caught early, it will serve to add a ton of stress to the job, and probably even more 'preventative' subscription of various drugs.
I didn't actually RTFA, but if the ruling literally states 'downloading SABAM's musical repertoire', then I guess Scarlet should ask them for a complete and up-to-date copy of their catalog, and of course publish that so their clients know what they can and cannot do.
I don't know how the MAFIAA et al do things, but SABAM isn't very willing to disclose the exact contents of their catalog, as we've experienced several times. They want to you cough up for all songs you play at parties, not just the ones that they actually are the representatives for.
True enough, but it also tends to be the people who dream about new stuff that push the technological envelope in order to get there.
Without the Napsters back then dreaming of free online music, you would not be downloading over BitTorrent right now.
I'm not saying they don't (read: aren't able to) support it, as that would be sheer stupidity in the system's design; I'm saying nobody ever took useability enhancements far enough to research and design a 'thumbs-only' optimized keyboard layout - at least, not that I'm aware of.
Slashdot Mirror
Will this thing also have up and down turn signals ?
Yes, but the fact that they can't see the driver also means that they can't prove there was no passenger. They might hit you with attempted fraud, though.
> This forces the Office2007 users to learn how to "Save As".
:-)
You're being very optimistic here
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people just copy/paste entire documents into an email.
The problem is that this doesn't change much.
They're still going to deploy it as the default document format for the new Offices. Lots of small and large companies are still going to upgrade their software at some point. OOXML is still very likely to become the new de facto standard due to common usage.
How did you think black holes got stretched so big ?
Quite so. As a matter of stroking your ego some more, I just nicked it for use as a mail sig :-)
probably wouldn't have happened if he was running Linux.
> And a 100% chance that a change in your timezone will cause your servers to suddenly have the wrong time (assuming default configuration).
Yeah, because timezones get changed more often than my underpants.
Patents aren't about wether or not something is obvious. They're about being the first to think of something. A lot of things seem obvious when you see them, even though you'd never have thought of it yourself.
:-)
However, it's clear that Amazon wasn't the first to think of one-click ordering, just the first to think of pouring it into a patent. Maybe they should be granted a patent on asking patents for obvious things
I've had several of those wonderful personalities. No, I'll take an asocial guru over an average people person anytime.
:-)
:-)
Get a decent guru interested in a project, and he'll deliver more, better and faster than a half dozen regulars. I've worked with enough regular programmers to know that you need at least one week of heavy testing by another team for any noteworthy development. I've also worked with barely a handful of really good guys, whose code I had no qualms about dumping straight into customer acceptance without thinking. Those very few held themselves to a similar standard as me: sufficient pride in your work that when you deliver something as finished, you take it personal if someone finds a bug.
If your projects are so big that you really NEED a big team, then it's up to the team leader to also be very good at his job, which is to interact with each of them. He should be the one making sure they keep motivated (which requires a high degree of empathy), divide the project into manageable chunks (which requires both decent tech knowledge and an ability to interact with project managers), and keep marketroids and similar as far away as possible from the guys doing the actual work (which, aside from buzzword-compliant communication skills, also requires a firm hand, a thick skin and occasionally a stick with nails). Yes, decent team managers are as hard to find as decent tech people. A demonstrated ability to herd cats is a good starting point
I'm sick and tired of non-tech people trying to tell tech people how they should behave to be fit for their jobs. HR should be kicked back to doing payroll & benefits. Shirts and ties are NOT required skills for a programmer or a sysadmin. If anything, they get in the way because they restrict bloodflow to the brain
A very interesting hiring procedure would be a roundtable with the majority of the prospective co-workers. You only get hired if you manage to impress more than half of them.
> What's the policy for de-bugging astronauts, anyway?
Incineration tends to work reasonably well.
Stolen, of course :-)
Throw out the people, and employ the viruses.
We don't want the Krikkit guys knowing we're out here.
It looks like you are trying to start your car. Would you like me to:
- Adjust the mirrors and seat to your wife's preferred positions ?
- Navigate you to the nearest Microsoft outlet ?
- Drive straight into the wall ahead?
- Blow up the engine ?
You have one. So does the enemy. How about this internal dialogue in the applicance:
- I predict X will do a, so I propose that Y should do b.
- However, I know that X also has one of me, which will have told X that I predicted X will do a and I will have told Y to do b, so it will tell him to do c
- Thus, I will anticipate and tell Y to do d
- But I can now anticipate that X's machine will have predicted this and will tell him to do e, so I will again anticipate and tell Y to do e
[repeat ad nauseam]
Isn't infinite recursion fun ?
Alternatively, if this kind of recursion issue is solved (or non-existant), if I know you have one of these predicting what I'm gonna do, I'll just fire up my own and ask it what *I* am going to do. Knowing what you have been told I'm about to do allows me to do something entirely different.
It seems that this technology, like psychohistory and any number of statistical sciences, only works if the subject isn't aware that it's being profiled. Once it, or knowledge of it, becomes widespread it starts losing much of it's effectiveness.
> pros use Photoshop because it is the best
A monopoly, per definition, is when you have no choice. When a majority of people choose a specific product because it's the best, the simple fact that there is a choice being made makes it so that there is no monopoly. Yes, they're the market leader by a long streak, and almost everyone is using their software; but that is because they are simply the best at what they're doing, not because they have somehow locked in their customers.
Granted, there's the issue of file formats, but that's hardly more lock-in than, say, Oracle does by using a proprietary format for their database storage.
And yes, I'll probably get booing for this, but it's been a long time since Microsoft had a monopoly. It ended as soon as some other company came up with another OS for the PC, although I couldn't say who it was. Microsoft is not a monopolist, or at least, is not in a monopoly position.
What they're being charged with all over the place, is anti-competitive behaviour, which kind of comes down to trying to establish a monopoly when you don't have one.
We don't loathe Microsoft because they're a monopolist - even the vendor lock-in issue is debateable - but for the exact opposite that you're hitting on Macromedia: far from being the best in their field, we feel that they, in many areas, do not have the technical merit to deserve the leading position they have acquired through their unhealthy business practices.
> Your local hospital may only have need for one of these things in the long run.
"I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" - Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman, 1943
> Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
Why do people still insist on going hunting even though there's food aplenty in the nearest supermarket ?
IANAA (I am not an American), but if the way the American lawsuit-culture is perceived here is anywhere near accurate, then I can imagine MDs are quite reluctant to use this kind of tech.
Imagine someone going for an examination, and the MD deciding to dismiss the software's suggestion that the patient may have some rare disease. If the patient later does turns out to be suffering from that disease, or even dies from it, the malpractice lawsuits will soon be flying, even though the doc's decision may have been perfectly reasonable.
In the end, instead of adding to the likelyhood of uncommon conditions being caught early, it will serve to add a ton of stress to the job, and probably even more 'preventative' subscription of various drugs.
I didn't actually RTFA, but if the ruling literally states 'downloading SABAM's musical repertoire', then I guess Scarlet should ask them for a complete and up-to-date copy of their catalog, and of course publish that so their clients know what they can and cannot do. I don't know how the MAFIAA et al do things, but SABAM isn't very willing to disclose the exact contents of their catalog, as we've experienced several times. They want to you cough up for all songs you play at parties, not just the ones that they actually are the representatives for.
True enough, but it also tends to be the people who dream about new stuff that push the technological envelope in order to get there. Without the Napsters back then dreaming of free online music, you would not be downloading over BitTorrent right now.
Well, your wife would see that you hold the phone three foot from your ear whenever she starts screaming at you.
I'm not saying they don't (read: aren't able to) support it, as that would be sheer stupidity in the system's design; I'm saying nobody ever took useability enhancements far enough to research and design a 'thumbs-only' optimized keyboard layout - at least, not that I'm aware of.
Good try, but you *do* know exactly when the clock stopped - you see, the hands don't actually move after that time.