The GLONASS system - operated out of Russia, isn't even run by the United States. NavStar, or the United States GPS system, is run by the department of defense.
These two systems tend to not be compatible with each other too well, so if you buy a nice GPS unit in the states, you can't just plug into the Glonass system and expect it to work.
I think it is rash that they want to close the lighthouses down, since a defunct satellite or a malfunctioning landbased correction system (Those are ground based stations that intercept GPS transmittions and make certain they are right before they hit the GPS device like the StreetPilot, Mystic, or Roadmate.) I don't know how widespread this system is in Europe, but it has to be used in the US (Also known as WAAS)
I think it is a very bad idea they are getting rid of the lighthouses, and agree with the concerns brought up in the article...... but lets not go bashing the US for something they aren't responsible for. GLONASS != NavStar.
I actually write SEO content -- but in a specialized manner. All of my content has to be keyword specific -AND- useful. Its the only way to get onto the search engines, and realistically stay there.
My works never involved link farming, or similar sort, and in the end results in better company pages (and ranks).
However, my competition doesn't see things in that way: They put bullcrap up for the search engines, which results in more bullcrap jobs for SEO.
(And by SEO, I mean standard content for websites. SEO is becoming the requirement for all pages to get into google at all... not just spider food (Bad SEO))
I can't say I don't like SEO: Its my job. However, if Spider food is banned or removed and replaced with half-decent content that actually means something, the internet would be better off.
Unfortunately, companies want to pay 1 or 2 dollars per 500+ word article for spider food, and expect their rankings to sky rocket. (I only write for higher paying markets. If the company is serious about good content, they should pay for it.)
Content writing has been outsourced just as much as tech jobs, straight to India. So you pay for crap, and get crap.
With so much crap out there, one good content writer CAN drastically improve a company. Now, this won't have such drastic change in the future, but right now its making a real difference.
It'd be nice if people were more concerned about having GOOD sites, rather than spamming search engines. While it costs more to get into it, the results will be better for everyone.
But, until some companies get over actually having to pay consultants and writers, I think it will be more junk in, more junk out. This is a prime example of how outsourcing is doing a lot more damage than good. (even the SEO companies are starting to outsource instead of using inhouse writers -- which means non-native, half of the time non-fluent English writers.)
It is quite frustrating, really.
Companies like the one in the article, while expensive, do tend to be more effective than the 1 or 2 dollar jobs -- in the long run. I just wish the companies would see it that way as well.
My point is, when a passanger and driver discuss things, the passanger knows when to shut up, as they are more likely to pay attention to whats going on around them.
Even in passangers, cell phones inhibit that ability.
I'm sorry you can't understand that and have to take it to extremes, but I think the points kinda clear -- when driving conditions get dangerous, drivers need to be able to pay attention without distraction. That means passangers should be paying enough attention to shut their mouths at appropriate times.
Thats one thing that makes kids in cars so dangerous as well -- they don't KNOW when to shut up yet.
Something else that should be considered is that cell phone use by -passangers- interrupts the driver as well.
My husband and I were heading to a friends house, and I called my friend on my cell phone to ask if he needed anything from the store while we were en route.
When traffic got bad, I was too busy dealing with the cell phone to realize traffic was bad, and this distracted the driver. The driver (poor hubby) had to get snappy to get me to shut up while he was paying attention to the road.
Frankly, that same senario has popped up several times. Cellphones have no place in cars -- either by driver OR by the passanger, in my opinion. Now, if I need to call, I try to make the call from the gas station or when the car isn't moving rather than when it is.
Well, I reboot my system fairy often. It is a laptop, and it goes on numerous car trips -- and shutting the lid, taking it out into -10 C and below while running is rather stupid.
My laptop and my friends decrepid XP system have similar boot times, but as I utterly dislike windows, I'll cope with the boot times
It WOULD be nice if some programs (cough exim cough) would time out faster or at least allow you to bypass it when there is not an internet connection at the time. Waiting 5 minutes for that to time out is a -real- time waster.
I could definitely use a proggie to show me exactly whats taking so long. Then I might be bothered to go and try to fix the problem (Read: Find someone with a little more computer know-how than me to fix it for me)
Would it be possible, when the meteor hit, that the bees moved to a different part of the world? I mean, I have my personal doubts that one meteor could cause an entire global change in temperature of 22 degrees! 7 C drop in average is pretty signifcant, and the bees could survive...... but lets assume that the center of the crash zone had a drop of 22 degrees. This cloud would spread, of course: But! Wouldn't the change be less drastic as the cloud settled and thinned as it was blown about?
If I were a bee, and it was getting too cold for me, I'd move.
For that matter -- when this meteor hit, would it really cause a nuclear winter, period? I confess to not being an expert on this of any kind, but lets consider a moment: Does the crash of a meteor have the same ash and cloud power of a volcano?
Unless it was a super volcano, a volcano would only drop the temperature a few degrees... and a volcano can spew out ash for days upon days. The meteor would be a one strike instance. Without knowing how much a meteor spews up, isn't hard to just claim it would drop the global temperature by so much?
Does anyone know any "factual" sites about how much junk these meteors can spew out?
Also, depending on the type of materials in the blast site, isn't it quite possible that most of the debris would fall back to earth in an incredibly fast period of time? The burn out zones (considering a chunk of this thing is under water.. hhmm) couldn't be -that- large. It isn't as if it landed in the middle of russia, or the mainland of Canada or the USA.
It just makes me wonder if they over-estimate how much damage this thing could of done.
I still don't see what is so surprising: Animals have a pretty good method of spreading plant growth pretty quickly, too. Alright, so it might have taken Nature a month or two, perhaps up to a year longer, but adaptations have to be made qwuickly, or they won't survive long enough to adapt and populate after adaption.
I mean, some plants adapted to reproduction from cuttings for that very reason!
I don't understand what is so shocking about this. Animals are known to adapt to their environments, why can't plants? After all, there aren't the same types of plants there were in the age of the dinosaurs. They had to evolve somehow.
So a few sturdy plants survived, then mutated. Then the mutated plants thrived, and grew an adaption to the chemical.
I think scientists are really starting to get the "God" mentality -- Surely Nature would not fend for itself, after all! Nature couldn't have possibly done the smart thing without the help from Godlings.
I just recently got a gmail account, and I love how flexible it is.. I love being able to use the lables in conjunction with (myemail)+filterIwant@gmail.com to make automated filters, etc.
I found that much more convient than most freebe mail types. Also, its much much much faster to load than yahoo, and yahoo doesn't follow the conversations easily. The conversations I find make things a LOT easier. Instead of looking through 1,000 email threads, I can look through one conversation and locate the tab/entry I'm looking for with little fuss.
Yahoo would have to do that plus a lot more to make me even remotely impressed with 100 megs.:)
And oh, labels are king. Labels will rule the world. Labels can be placed on several different emails without having copy the email, fwd another copy to yourself or otherwise go through hassle to make the email show up in two different folders. Saves space, too.
(No, I don't like my gmail account, not at all... and no, you can't have any of my invites. Miiine.)
Cool. Maybe other gaming companies will follow suit and do similar things. Anything released by large companies under the company deserves a loud applause and two thumbs up.
I don't see why they would pay big bucks for such a feature. If it costs too much, its cheaper to just get monthly parking.
Though, I do know what some lots charge down in MTL... however, if the unit costs more than 2-3k, its cheaper just to get a monthly parking spot.
Then you can gloat to your unlucky friend that hahahaha I have a parking spot and you don't...
But seriously, the amount for a GPS find-a-parking spot deal versus monthly parking... monthly is better. Especially once you consider cost of searching for a spot, plus having to pay for the spot in the first place.
I don't know if I agree. The 250 doesn't have the ability to pop out different discs at will. They are completely different beasts.
Now, if the 250 gig hdd could pop out a new disc whenever you wanted, then it would be something a little more special, in my opinion.
The usefulness of the Iomega is the fact that one unit can read in a lot of discs. I mean, if people were willing to buy DVD RW for 400 once upon a time, I don't see the difference... except these can be written and rewritten a lot more reliably.
Really, I don't see the problem with Iomega. I used some of their products back in the old days of reallllly old computers, and I never had one flat out fail on me. And it was a bit convient.
And if the thing really has the stats that they are claiming (Doubtful, perhaps, but if it even comes close) then it might be worth playing with, if you've got the cash to toss at the thing.
And, realistically, it is cheaper than buying flat out harddrives to store things like MP3s or movies. I could see their uses.
And as a backup device, if it REALLY lasts 30 years, I could see blowing 60 bucks on a disk to see what kinda junk I had on my system that long ago;)
And 400 bucks for the primary unit, that realistically isn't that bad, especially if you have a monster of a computer system that has over 120 gigs of hdd space that needs backed up.
Perhaps in *that* writing field, yes. But other genres, that is the sign of a con artist. As I am not a scientist, nor am I overly educated about being one besides knowing a little bit about the basic invention process... eh.
I'm a writer. Not a researcher. If I were to do that and only that, I'd go broke, regardless of how well known I got to be.
I still don't think it'd work well for small time people who don't have the extra 2k to throw at getting into a journal.
That makes sense. I suppose since I'm a small name in my writing field, I don't have the petty cash to throw at getting articles published in a journal. So I definitely agree that it would hurt those smaller labs, definitely. I'll have a look at the other comments in the thread to find out more.:)
Not getting paid is a lot different than paying to be put into the publication list. I definitely see the uses of freebe articles in publications, especially to get your name out there and to grow your reputation. But, I would not *pay* for this. Then I've lost both time and money into attempting this publication.
Perhaps I am being a little over suspecious, but something just doesn't feel right about the concept to me. Donating writing to a cause is one thing, but paying for that donation of time, research and effort already invested in the writing is the step over the brink I don't think I'd take, personally.
Perhaps I misunderstood something about this, but why would any writer pay to have their work published? I know it happens -- usually by con artists -- but is this a realistic measure? How does the writer then support him or herself? I saw a mention to this in one of the articles in the set, but it did not give enough specifications to really make any firm judgements on.
From what I've read of several of the articles, readers would pay for the value of the content. In one case, and only for not-for-profit, writers would pay for their own articles... but it didn't give any information about that. But if Open Access is a writer pays model like the slashdot comment suggests, then the professional writers will not be able to afford to write *and* pay for the right to have their work published, especially if the readers are receiving the content for free.
Isn't the point of business, afterall, to make money? I know I personally only donate writing to causes I really agree with, but I would not pay to have my work published, ever.
Especially not after the PublishAmerica scandles and the likes. Perhaps I missed the point, but it seems like there isn't enough information on the specific proposed business model to really be an effective tool to inform people how these writers would make any profit at all, instead of just losing time and money.
I still wonder a bit at how much money goes into these things, as well as man hours. I can see their uses as survelliance, but would those resources be better used elsewhere?... a lot of resources would be better used if people didn't suck and have to fight amongst themselves all of the time, though. So, in that case, whats a little plane?
I'd like to own one, personally, but I just love playing with rockets and planes.
As someone mentioned before, using these devices for rescue personel would be very cool. I think a little robotic snake of somesort would be more efficient in rubble, but for overhead rescues to locate crashes, it would work.
Its a shame people don't come up for this stuff for rescue and other more beneficial things, then converted it to "war" types. But I suppose if you took away the wars, there wouldn't be quite so many people that needed rescued in the first place.
Honestly, I could see why a company like this one would be afraid of a law-suit from SCO. I mean, I don't agree with SCO's point of view, but if I were a company whose business was so founded on linux servers as this one appears to be, losing those servers or having the choice between licensing and going with microsoft are realistically the only options they had. While some companies (IBM) have the resources to throw into a law-suit, does this one?
Having a license no one agrees with, or losing the servers and potentially a law-suit may seem like a better option.
I would suggest that the responses he got in relation to his choice is what fuels this statement, but it is good hes making it. It A: Proves he is honest B: It means he has balls.
His PR may need work, but I think hes at least somewhat on the right track. Better to be open and honest and rebuild their reputation through that means than to be underhanded about the whole thing. Openly stating it may just protect some other company from SCO.
Thats a very good point.. But I think the search engine market is slightly different. They have to have a good enough product for people to bother. Yes, its quite possible they would do something like force IE to not accept google addresses, but with linux making such a come around, I think that a lot of people would switch to escape that. If they censor a competitor like google, what else are they censoring, mentality.
This isn't like their usual business model, which makes it that much more "dangerous", and google and co will respond to that "threat".
Thats quite true, and I agree with you on most of the aspects, but it WILL force the other companies to get their acts together or end up outof business. That, whether or not Microsoft actually does any innovating, is what the benefit is.
Honestly, I almost think it is a good thing that Microsoft is joining the search engine fray. I have several reasons for this, but primarily, the first one is that search engine technology has seemed a big stagnant. Take Google, for example. With a great many websites participating in feeding search engines Spider Food, it is more difficult to find results that actually match what you are looking for. If microsoft manages to boost this, and cause a stream of activity in fixing these issues by providing a high powered level of competition, then I think its great.
Now, this does not mean I am advidly supporting Microsoft. This just means I'm supporting the addition of another wild card to the search engine battles that might have some good come out of it.
I certainly hope so at anyrate, as using Google gets to be more difficult with each passing day.
Slashdot Mirror
The GLONASS system - operated out of Russia, isn't even run by the United States. NavStar, or the United States GPS system, is run by the department of defense.
... but lets not go bashing the US for something they aren't responsible for. GLONASS != NavStar.
These two systems tend to not be compatible with each other too well, so if you buy a nice GPS unit in the states, you can't just plug into the Glonass system and expect it to work.
I think it is rash that they want to close the lighthouses down, since a defunct satellite or a malfunctioning landbased correction system (Those are ground based stations that intercept GPS transmittions and make certain they are right before they hit the GPS device like the StreetPilot, Mystic, or Roadmate.) I don't know how widespread this system is in Europe, but it has to be used in the US (Also known as WAAS)
I think it is a very bad idea they are getting rid of the lighthouses, and agree with the concerns brought up in the article...
I actually write SEO content -- but in a specialized manner. All of my content has to be keyword specific -AND- useful. Its the only way to get onto the search engines, and realistically stay there.
My works never involved link farming, or similar sort, and in the end results in better company pages (and ranks).
However, my competition doesn't see things in that way: They put bullcrap up for the search engines, which results in more bullcrap jobs for SEO.
(And by SEO, I mean standard content for websites. SEO is becoming the requirement for all pages to get into google at all... not just spider food (Bad SEO))
I can't say I don't like SEO: Its my job. However, if Spider food is banned or removed and replaced with half-decent content that actually means something, the internet would be better off.
Unfortunately, companies want to pay 1 or 2 dollars per 500+ word article for spider food, and expect their rankings to sky rocket. (I only write for higher paying markets. If the company is serious about good content, they should pay for it.)
Content writing has been outsourced just as much as tech jobs, straight to India. So you pay for crap, and get crap.
With so much crap out there, one good content writer CAN drastically improve a company. Now, this won't have such drastic change in the future, but right now its making a real difference.
It'd be nice if people were more concerned about having GOOD sites, rather than spamming search engines. While it costs more to get into it, the results will be better for everyone.
But, until some companies get over actually having to pay consultants and writers, I think it will be more junk in, more junk out. This is a prime example of how outsourcing is doing a lot more damage than good. (even the SEO companies are starting to outsource instead of using inhouse writers -- which means non-native, half of the time non-fluent English writers.)
It is quite frustrating, really.
Companies like the one in the article, while expensive, do tend to be more effective than the 1 or 2 dollar jobs -- in the long run. I just wish the companies would see it that way as well.
No, not at all.
My point is, when a passanger and driver discuss things, the passanger knows when to shut up, as they are more likely to pay attention to whats going on around them.
Even in passangers, cell phones inhibit that ability.
I'm sorry you can't understand that and have to take it to extremes, but I think the points kinda clear -- when driving conditions get dangerous, drivers need to be able to pay attention without distraction. That means passangers should be paying enough attention to shut their mouths at appropriate times.
Thats one thing that makes kids in cars so dangerous as well -- they don't KNOW when to shut up yet.
Something else that should be considered is that cell phone use by -passangers- interrupts the driver as well.
My husband and I were heading to a friends house, and I called my friend on my cell phone to ask if he needed anything from the store while we were en route.
When traffic got bad, I was too busy dealing with the cell phone to realize traffic was bad, and this distracted the driver. The driver (poor hubby) had to get snappy to get me to shut up while he was paying attention to the road.
Frankly, that same senario has popped up several times. Cellphones have no place in cars -- either by driver OR by the passanger, in my opinion. Now, if I need to call, I try to make the call from the gas station or when the car isn't moving rather than when it is.
Well, I reboot my system fairy often. It is a laptop, and it goes on numerous car trips -- and shutting the lid, taking it out into -10 C and below while running is rather stupid.
My laptop and my friends decrepid XP system have similar boot times, but as I utterly dislike windows, I'll cope with the boot times
It WOULD be nice if some programs (cough exim cough) would time out faster or at least allow you to bypass it when there is not an internet connection at the time. Waiting 5 minutes for that to time out is a -real- time waster.
I could definitely use a proggie to show me exactly whats taking so long. Then I might be bothered to go and try to fix the problem (Read: Find someone with a little more computer know-how than me to fix it for me)
Would it be possible, when the meteor hit, that the bees moved to a different part of the world? I mean, I have my personal doubts that one meteor could cause an entire global change in temperature of 22 degrees! 7 C drop in average is pretty signifcant, and the bees could survive... ... but lets assume that the center of the crash zone had a drop of 22 degrees. This cloud would spread, of course: But! Wouldn't the change be less drastic as the cloud settled and thinned as it was blown about?
If I were a bee, and it was getting too cold for me, I'd move.
For that matter -- when this meteor hit, would it really cause a nuclear winter, period? I confess to not being an expert on this of any kind, but lets consider a moment: Does the crash of a meteor have the same ash and cloud power of a volcano?
Unless it was a super volcano, a volcano would only drop the temperature a few degrees... and a volcano can spew out ash for days upon days. The meteor would be a one strike instance. Without knowing how much a meteor spews up, isn't hard to just claim it would drop the global temperature by so much?
Does anyone know any "factual" sites about how much junk these meteors can spew out?
Also, depending on the type of materials in the blast site, isn't it quite possible that most of the debris would fall back to earth in an incredibly fast period of time? The burn out zones (considering a chunk of this thing is under water.. hhmm) couldn't be -that- large. It isn't as if it landed in the middle of russia, or the mainland of Canada or the USA.
It just makes me wonder if they over-estimate how much damage this thing could of done.
I still don't see what is so surprising: Animals have a pretty good method of spreading plant growth pretty quickly, too. Alright, so it might have taken Nature a month or two, perhaps up to a year longer, but adaptations have to be made qwuickly, or they won't survive long enough to adapt and populate after adaption.
I mean, some plants adapted to reproduction from cuttings for that very reason!
I don't understand what is so shocking about this. Animals are known to adapt to their environments, why can't plants? After all, there aren't the same types of plants there were in the age of the dinosaurs. They had to evolve somehow.
So a few sturdy plants survived, then mutated. Then the mutated plants thrived, and grew an adaption to the chemical.
I think scientists are really starting to get the "God" mentality -- Surely Nature would not fend for itself, after all! Nature couldn't have possibly done the smart thing without the help from Godlings.
... Open office runs just fine on a 266 laptop. On 64 whole megs of ram.
Its slow on boot up, but it runs pretty after its going.
There ain't no reason the older machines can't run it, you just can't expect it to have big balls and run like superman on steroids.
I just recently got a gmail account, and I love how flexible it is.. I love being able to use the lables in conjunction with (myemail)+filterIwant@gmail.com to make automated filters, etc.
:)
I found that much more convient than most freebe mail types. Also, its much much much faster to load than yahoo, and yahoo doesn't follow the conversations easily. The conversations I find make things a LOT easier. Instead of looking through 1,000 email threads, I can look through one conversation and locate the tab/entry I'm looking for with little fuss.
Yahoo would have to do that plus a lot more to make me even remotely impressed with 100 megs.
And oh, labels are king. Labels will rule the world. Labels can be placed on several different emails without having copy the email, fwd another copy to yourself or otherwise go through hassle to make the email show up in two different folders. Saves space, too.
(No, I don't like my gmail account, not at all... and no, you can't have any of my invites. Miiine.)
Under the GPL even. Durn, my brains fried. Musta been the pleasant thought of games that blew it.
Cool. Maybe other gaming companies will follow suit and do similar things. Anything released by large companies under the company deserves a loud applause and two thumbs up.
I don't see why they would pay big bucks for such a feature. If it costs too much, its cheaper to just get monthly parking.
Though, I do know what some lots charge down in MTL... however, if the unit costs more than 2-3k, its cheaper just to get a monthly parking spot.
Then you can gloat to your unlucky friend that hahahaha I have a parking spot and you don't...
But seriously, the amount for a GPS find-a-parking spot deal versus monthly parking... monthly is better. Especially once you consider cost of searching for a spot, plus having to pay for the spot in the first place.
I don't know if I agree. The 250 doesn't have the ability to pop out different discs at will. They are completely different beasts.
Now, if the 250 gig hdd could pop out a new disc whenever you wanted, then it would be something a little more special, in my opinion.
The usefulness of the Iomega is the fact that one unit can read in a lot of discs. I mean, if people were willing to buy DVD RW for 400 once upon a time, I don't see the difference... except these can be written and rewritten a lot more reliably.
Really, I don't see the problem with Iomega. I used some of their products back in the old days of reallllly old computers, and I never had one flat out fail on me. And it was a bit convient.
;)
And if the thing really has the stats that they are claiming (Doubtful, perhaps, but if it even comes close) then it might be worth playing with, if you've got the cash to toss at the thing.
And, realistically, it is cheaper than buying flat out harddrives to store things like MP3s or movies. I could see their uses.
And as a backup device, if it REALLY lasts 30 years, I could see blowing 60 bucks on a disk to see what kinda junk I had on my system that long ago
And 400 bucks for the primary unit, that realistically isn't that bad, especially if you have a monster of a computer system that has over 120 gigs of hdd space that needs backed up.
Thats just my $0.02 though.
Perhaps in *that* writing field, yes. But other genres, that is the sign of a con artist. As I am not a scientist, nor am I overly educated about being one besides knowing a little bit about the basic invention process... eh.
I'm a writer. Not a researcher. If I were to do that and only that, I'd go broke, regardless of how well known I got to be.
I still don't think it'd work well for small time people who don't have the extra 2k to throw at getting into a journal.
For scientists, yes. They have other sources of income. But for a professional writer, it would be "Publish, pay fee, starve".
Or not publish and starve, either way.
That just gives me twice more reason to avoid that specific market, but eh. thats just me.
That makes sense. I suppose since I'm a small name in my writing field, I don't have the petty cash to throw at getting articles published in a journal. So I definitely agree that it would hurt those smaller labs, definitely. I'll have a look at the other comments in the thread to find out more. :)
Not getting paid is a lot different than paying to be put into the publication list. I definitely see the uses of freebe articles in publications, especially to get your name out there and to grow your reputation. But, I would not *pay* for this. Then I've lost both time and money into attempting this publication.
Perhaps I am being a little over suspecious, but something just doesn't feel right about the concept to me. Donating writing to a cause is one thing, but paying for that donation of time, research and effort already invested in the writing is the step over the brink I don't think I'd take, personally.
Perhaps I misunderstood something about this, but why would any writer pay to have their work published? I know it happens -- usually by con artists -- but is this a realistic measure? How does the writer then support him or herself? I saw a mention to this in one of the articles in the set, but it did not give enough specifications to really make any firm judgements on.
From what I've read of several of the articles, readers would pay for the value of the content. In one case, and only for not-for-profit, writers would pay for their own articles... but it didn't give any information about that. But if Open Access is a writer pays model like the slashdot comment suggests, then the professional writers will not be able to afford to write *and* pay for the right to have their work published, especially if the readers are receiving the content for free.
Isn't the point of business, afterall, to make money? I know I personally only donate writing to causes I really agree with, but I would not pay to have my work published, ever.
Especially not after the PublishAmerica scandles and the likes. Perhaps I missed the point, but it seems like there isn't enough information on the specific proposed business model to really be an effective tool to inform people how these writers would make any profit at all, instead of just losing time and money.
I still wonder a bit at how much money goes into these things, as well as man hours. I can see their uses as survelliance, but would those resources be better used elsewhere? ... a lot of resources would be better used if people didn't suck and have to fight amongst themselves all of the time, though. So, in that case, whats a little plane?
I'd like to own one, personally, but I just love playing with rockets and planes.
As someone mentioned before, using these devices for rescue personel would be very cool. I think a little robotic snake of somesort would be more efficient in rubble, but for overhead rescues to locate crashes, it would work.
Its a shame people don't come up for this stuff for rescue and other more beneficial things, then converted it to "war" types. But I suppose if you took away the wars, there wouldn't be quite so many people that needed rescued in the first place.
But there'd still be too many.
Honestly, I could see why a company like this one would be afraid of a law-suit from SCO. I mean, I don't agree with SCO's point of view, but if I were a company whose business was so founded on linux servers as this one appears to be, losing those servers or having the choice between licensing and going with microsoft are realistically the only options they had. While some companies (IBM) have the resources to throw into a law-suit, does this one?
Having a license no one agrees with, or losing the servers and potentially a law-suit may seem like a better option.
I would suggest that the responses he got in relation to his choice is what fuels this statement, but it is good hes making it. It A: Proves he is honest B: It means he has balls.
His PR may need work, but I think hes at least somewhat on the right track. Better to be open and honest and rebuild their reputation through that means than to be underhanded about the whole thing. Openly stating it may just protect some other company from SCO.
Thats a very good point.. But I think the search engine market is slightly different. They have to have a good enough product for people to bother. Yes, its quite possible they would do something like force IE to not accept google addresses, but with linux making such a come around, I think that a lot of people would switch to escape that. If they censor a competitor like google, what else are they censoring, mentality.
This isn't like their usual business model, which makes it that much more "dangerous", and google and co will respond to that "threat".
Thats quite true, and I agree with you on most of the aspects, but it WILL force the other companies to get their acts together or end up outof business. That, whether or not Microsoft actually does any innovating, is what the benefit is.
Honestly, I almost think it is a good thing that Microsoft is joining the search engine fray. I have several reasons for this, but primarily, the first one is that search engine technology has seemed a big stagnant. Take Google, for example. With a great many websites participating in feeding search engines Spider Food, it is more difficult to find results that actually match what you are looking for. If microsoft manages to boost this, and cause a stream of activity in fixing these issues by providing a high powered level of competition, then I think its great.
Now, this does not mean I am advidly supporting Microsoft. This just means I'm supporting the addition of another wild card to the search engine battles that might have some good come out of it.
I certainly hope so at anyrate, as using Google gets to be more difficult with each passing day.