I find it more interesting that Jobs, simultaneously head of Pixar, went and discussed any thing with Iger of Disney. As we recall Pixar and Disney had an acrimonious split and this, reportedly, bothered the market and Disney shareholders. And, Eisner is still putatively running Disney, so talking things over with Iger seems to be a slap at Michael.
Time Warner would also have a huge catalog of animated shorts, so did Jobs talk to them? Have those talks stayed confidential? Could this WSJ report be placed in order to send Time Warner a message to not miss the boat? Is this a thaw in relations and reconciliation between Pixar and Disney? Is Toy Story 3 still in production? Could this be any more soap opera?
Microsoft is a software publisher, and I would expect them to have a large interest in DRM implementation and deployment in order for them to achieve their goal of 0 unauthorized copies of any titles they publish.
Television programs and films are not like music tracks. You should not watch them while driving. They really do not work as background. When writing that paper at 3am, you aren't going to brew a cup of joe and put on Friends to keep you awake and more or less productive. There aren't clubs where scene-js or troupes spin or cover favorite snippets from multiple films, sequed by a common word of dialog or pose. Because people view films and listen to music differently, I truly don't think there is any lesson for iPod/iTunes that can be applied to digital film distribution. other than minimize the DRM, sell the stuff to the customer and let go (all of which are missed if Microsoft is truly committed to a forced upgrade scheme). And, probably Microsoft knows this, so, selling the no-theft-paradise to the studios may be about signing studios up now and... tomorrow is another day. Perhaps once in the pocket for insignificant digital film distribution, maybe there's a leverage point with which to ask the studios to get the music divisions on the Microsoft page, and here's some bucks to encourage it. Everyone walking around with msViewPods: don't see it. Microsoft thinking that control of music goes through film distribution relationships: that I get.
Ditto for me with the proviso that the probable cause be more rigorous than a kinda match with the no-fly-list.
(I wonder if a public posting that I don't like no-fly-lists gets me on one?)
It seems to me the trick with developing to sell software on Windows is to perform a delicate balancing act: to be popular and not so popular that Microsoft won't put your marketshare in their cross-hairs and slam your business model. Clearly, applications targeted at niche markets may be an answer (like productivity software for medical offices), but haven't you then scoped down your potential user base to Apple-magnitude numbers by choosing your niche?
Seems to me there's got to be some upside to developing for people who like their computers; think about how after-market items for cars succeed: people who love their cars, or who make their cars into an element of their identity buy that stuff.
I've been a fan of Bruce Springsteen since 1976: owned every thing on vinyl and even bought the 45s (to get the B-side songs) and 12-inch remixes in the 80s. I bought my first cd player forty minutes after I bought the Springsteen 3 CD Live set (the person at the register was the drummer for Toad the Wet Sprocket, trivia fans).
I didn't buy the recent release because it wasn't a standard CD. (And no, I haven't gone and downloaded it from the net.) While I listen to my music from ripped mp3s on hard drive, I like having the CDs, because hard drives are a little too volatile. Should I ever make an administrative (obviously dumb something you would never do) mistake, I can live with re-ripping the cds. All these schemes to try and prevent some presumed nefarious activity on my part which increases the hassle factor for my enjoyment of music will not be tolerated and my dollars will go somewhere else.
I'm also not too crazy about buying a movie ticket and being yelled at in the theatre before the feature about the movie downloading I am clearly not doing, but that's another story.
Well, okay, good point. But Fox has cable outlets as well. I think the grandparent post is right. By also producing for some kind of cast, the costs can be divided among the two divisions, and there's an opportunity to add to the revenue with the airing receipts.
Didn't Groening say that one reason Futurama's broadcast future was dicey was that, unlike King of the Hill, Fox didn't own any of the production? So, hmmmm.
On the other hand, straight to DVD has got to mean a lower budget (in current dollars) per episode than the original network run received.
Oh, hell. Fox should bring Futurama back as an animated short and show a new one before each of its features. I just came back from Ep III. Just imagine how much perspective we'd have into General Grievous' character if it was preceded by the best loved and most apt Benderism.
If they didn't want you to view their ads - they would not have put it there.
Frankly, they should pull their content if their monetary returns aren't good enough. That'll teach me for ignoring their ads.
But don't tell me that I have to read their ads because of some bogus social contract. You put something out to the public and the public can look. You don't like that, do what you want to do some other way.
Oh yes, I don't have cable, I channel surf during commercials, even checking out programming in languages I cannot speak, and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. If television programming continues to degrade and/or broadcasting becomes a seemingly inexorable digital hell, I'll read a book. It'd be better for me, any way.
And Winter '73-'74: Savings Time was accelerated and started in January. I was in Santa Barbara (and high school) then, and the first, 8:00, class started before sunrise. When I rode my bike to school, I was starting out when it was still pretty dark. I recall that by the first week of February, the entire ride was by dawn's light. But for those of you to the north, sunrise would be even later. (As it would be for those of you who are towards the western edge of a time zone. Santa Barbara is very close to 120 degrees West, so it's in the center of the time zone.)
Well, Microsoft's Counsel Brad Smith's prescription for repair is summed up as follows:
Less infringement suits [against Microsoft],
Other countries should harmonize their laws with the US, and
The US government should charge less to small companies and individuals for their patent filings while the patent office collects fewer fees for increased work.
And these fix the problems, how?
But, reasoning from your point of view that this is the game and taking into consideration those who say that Microsoft's patents are all defensive, does Microsoft really need the ISNOT patent and the NZ xml patent in order to protect the good works that they do? When criticizing the nuclear arms race, opponents broached the question of just how many times does one need to be able to destroy civilization before someone starts thinking twice about lobbing an ICBM your way? Was Microsoft really being pushed around because they didn't have enough patents, i.e., they had no effective deterrent? Another point: here in the US, success-leeching litigation is brought by people who don't have products and thus aren't vulnerable to patent counter claims; in light of that, how good a defense strategy is "patent anything", any way? Meanwhile, as I observe the widespread acceptance and worship of the great American philosopher (Vince Lombardi) who writes in the The Art of Football: the best defense is a good offense, someone like me is suspicious of someone else who stockpiles item after item after item, defensively.
Two things jump out at me. The first is the vaguely defined "abusive lawsuit." The whole point about patenting is that someone registers an idea and than has government-sanctioned leverage to benefit from or stop others who use the idea without a license. So under doctrines of equal justice for all, how does one indicate that one plaintiff is abusive and another is not? I suspect that the dividing line may have to do with bringing implementations to market (which does nothing for the startup that fails or the writer which gives away the code to sell the service.) The other thing that jumps out at me is the suggestion to reduce or eliminate patent fees for small companies or individuals. This does nothing about ancillary legal costs required to research, file, and receive a patent, which are and will remain a large barrier for the small guys to play in the game. Next, large firms still may gain effective control over the the small entities' patents by investment, proxy, acquisition, or alliance. Large firms, which can afford the legal and filing fees, will still hold the threat of infringement litigation over the heads of underfunded startups and volunteer writers of free software. For that matter, large firms will be able to afford the actual costs of bringing litigation to courts in order to legitimately protect patents, while small firms have to sit on their hands or look for targets rich enough to justify contingency legal representation. (And, I wouldn't be surprised if perhaps contingency percentage limits will be part of any final "reforms" to stop "abusive" lawsuits!) Finally, the patent office will have to spend some of its resources to support the bureaucracy needed to vet which patent filers qualify for no filing fees, all done with reduced fee revenue while patent filings from the small fry increase in number; the latter sounds like a recipe for more patents on the obvious, not fewer.
I think Mr. Smith's suggestions are cynical. The proposed reforms will relieve Microsoft of some of its costs while preserving the gaming tactics and strategies Microsoft has mapped out within the current U.S. system. An honest suggestion for reform should include structural changes that preclude future patents along the lines of inequality being checked by looking at address in memory, or patents for parsing xml, or patents on the specifics in a protocol.
Apple communicated its request, I suspect, via a letter from the legal department. If I got such a letter, I'd have to go find an attorney and work out the fight or flight strategies. And it would cost me money and time. Okay, so I'm guessing what the request looked like. My "leave the kids alone" advice is based on my inability to see any upside for Apple on asking the bloggers for their contacts, even as I agree that Apple has the right to ask and the bloggers, even though journalists, have no right to shield their sources in this matter.
I basically agree with your points. But, as to "freedom of the press," and who is a journalist, my point of view is that press freedom is necessary in order to not provide the government with a back door way to deny freedom of speech. Because, it is the printing press (and now the internet) which allow the ideas to be persisted and transported.
Now these leaks did not reveal any governmental malfeasance or corporate illegal behavior. Instead, they undermined the marketing of a product, and the folks who passed the info on were violating the promises they made to their employer. So, I think these web-sites (and bloggers) are journalists, but there is no public interest (in the big sense) in the specifics of Apple's product releases, and so I don't think shield laws should apply in this case.
That said, I think Apple should leave the kids alone. That these rumors are being printed are a testament to public interest in what Apple will come out with next. And, it may increase interest in the official pronouncements as people look in to confirm the truth. As someone has said, you worry when people stop talking about you.
Well, I'm sure they focus grouped the issue and found out that 95% of the real world thinks their pc is already a hassle machine, they're afraid to kill a runaway program because they don't want to break the computer, and generally have been trained to accept their computers as necessary evils.
I introduced my Dad, a Ph.D., to perl (and he loved it) but wouldn't listen as I tried to explain that, even though we got perl going on his Windows XP machine, it would have been there, out of the box, with a Linux or OS X machine. (Shoot, with Linux, he wouldn't have to get new hardware.) "What if it breaks and you're not around?" he asked. Since I live out of town, I had no answer: I realized a few weeks later that Windows brainwash, er, experiences had conditioned him to failure.
If this was truly about Firefox competition, they'd improve IE across all the platforms and not just for users of XP SP2 and the long-rumored Longhorn.
IMHO, this is going to be used to try and convince Win98/2000/NT users that an intolerable (and never to be fixed) security situation will be tolerable with firewalls, upgrades, AND the new operating system WITH the new and improved browser.
Now let's think about backward compatibility. The reason it was so important was that otherwise their customer base would only upgrade at purchase of new equipment, and may balk at that, if the legacy application was too critical. Microsoft's biggest competition is itself and the fact that its established base is happy, well satisfied, well devoting as much mindfulness to Windows as it prefers.
I say if you want to roll-out IE7, do it, do it right, support the old platforms (and reward those customers' inexplicable loyalty), then tell us all when it's here, and God bless you for the effort.
If I'm right and this is only about moving the herd to the north pasture, then the fact that Firefox is available and can run on these legacy Windows platforms will put Microsoft in an awkward position as they trumpet the message with text (or subtext) that IE6 and legacy platforms are inadequate, maybe dangerous, even as they dance around when someone points out that the alternative is here, now, and won't cost a dime.
Most folks have the take that Microsoft McGrath is throwing bricks from the glass house. But let me take a different view. Does Red Hat take responsibility? And the answer is, yes, or else. Because since you can get a Linux kernel from many sources any distributor that behaves irresponsibly (or insensitively) will lose the business end of their business, and, poof, they're gone. And this concept extends beyond the kernel to other aspects of doing business.
A few of us (call me a semi-pro minus or hobbyist plus) left the RedHat tent with the way they handled the transition from 9.0 -> Fedora, and, in retrospect, I'm happier and it seems from the financial results that RedHat is happier.
Now McGrath's comments are not meant to be part of a serious debate about how us users may get the most safe, seamless, fuss-free, and satisfactory experience with the kit we own, but are the equivalent to the flip side of preaching to the choir, which I suggest is reminding the congregation of damnation should they even think of leaving the church. Remember the Flintstones, how much of the "technology" was powered by a purposed, humiliated animal who would look up and say to the audience, "It's a living." I suppose it is.
So. Cal resident here. Auto recall? Free repair of potentially life threatening issue? I'm there. I've done it. Microsoft class action suit? I received maybe a dozen letters between home and work. Tossed 'em all. I'm not going to try and find old receipts in order to get a rebate/discount on future purchases. I'd rather punish Microsoft with bad word of mouth and my advocacy and support for ways to get things done without troubling Microsoft for so much as the time of day. By the way, if Microsoft thinks their customers love them, then their exit polling is underperforming the Ohio Election Day surveys.
I'm working to transition my office from Word Perfect and Word to OOo. My recommendation is export to pdf for any thing that has to make its way in the outside world. (And yes, I want it to print out over there the way it prints here in the office, working in a design related field, that aesthetic seems to go with the territory.)
But, someone should tell Kinko's (and others who receive digital copy) that documents in OOo and Scribus (and other programs) are coming. So you out there who can do something about this, check them out, download, install and make available for the stores to service their customers. It's not like there's this big licensing, capitalization hassle, right?
Ocaml has been at the periphery of things I wanted to learn for a while now. Thanks to the reviewer and team for the heads up about and translation of le livre O'Reilly. And thank you Rich for the tutorial which I plan to work through.
My reaction -- you're on to something, but you are missing the real dynamic. I think that privatization is being looked at as a synergy thing by those holding power in the Executive and Legislative branches of our Federal government. There's a suitable theoretic underpinning: that the private sector is more efficient, so this very much appeals to the l'aissez faire policy wonks. And the politicos find new contracts that can be easily let to supporters. The trick is to have the political appointees pressure the bureaucracy professionals to cook the specs and limit the qualifying vendors. After the "right company" gets the contract, they can now afford to contribute heart, soul, and bucks to the cause of promoting the election of more people who won't derail the gravy train.
Frankly, I think a primary subext of television (news, adult dramas and comedy) is that the outside is very dangerous, especially for children. Self-serving answer: stay in the house and get "reality" through visceral experience. What a sign of the times.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it more interesting that Jobs, simultaneously head of Pixar, went and discussed any thing with Iger of Disney. As we recall Pixar and Disney had an acrimonious split and this, reportedly, bothered the market and Disney shareholders. And, Eisner is still putatively running Disney, so talking things over with Iger seems to be a slap at Michael.
Time Warner would also have a huge catalog of animated shorts, so did Jobs talk to them? Have those talks stayed confidential? Could this WSJ report be placed in order to send Time Warner a message to not miss the boat? Is this a thaw in relations and reconciliation between Pixar and Disney? Is Toy Story 3 still in production? Could this be any more soap opera?
Microsoft is a software publisher, and I would expect them to have a large interest in DRM implementation and deployment in order for them to achieve their goal of 0 unauthorized copies of any titles they publish.
Television programs and films are not like music tracks. You should not watch them while driving. They really do not work as background. When writing that paper at 3am, you aren't going to brew a cup of joe and put on Friends to keep you awake and more or less productive. There aren't clubs where scene-js or troupes spin or cover favorite snippets from multiple films, sequed by a common word of dialog or pose. Because people view films and listen to music differently, I truly don't think there is any lesson for iPod/iTunes that can be applied to digital film distribution. other than minimize the DRM, sell the stuff to the customer and let go (all of which are missed if Microsoft is truly committed to a forced upgrade scheme). And, probably Microsoft knows this, so, selling the no-theft-paradise to the studios may be about signing studios up now and... tomorrow is another day. Perhaps once in the pocket for insignificant digital film distribution, maybe there's a leverage point with which to ask the studios to get the music divisions on the Microsoft page, and here's some bucks to encourage it. Everyone walking around with msViewPods: don't see it. Microsoft thinking that control of music goes through film distribution relationships: that I get.
Ditto for me with the proviso that the probable cause be more rigorous than a kinda match with the no-fly-list. (I wonder if a public posting that I don't like no-fly-lists gets me on one?)
It seems to me the trick with developing to sell software on Windows is to perform a delicate balancing act: to be popular and not so popular that Microsoft won't put your marketshare in their cross-hairs and slam your business model. Clearly, applications targeted at niche markets may be an answer (like productivity software for medical offices), but haven't you then scoped down your potential user base to Apple-magnitude numbers by choosing your niche?
Seems to me there's got to be some upside to developing for people who like their computers; think about how after-market items for cars succeed: people who love their cars, or who make their cars into an element of their identity buy that stuff.
DOS ?!?!? That CP/M wannabe?
I think that was Order 67.
I've been a fan of Bruce Springsteen since 1976: owned every thing on vinyl and even bought the 45s (to get the B-side songs) and 12-inch remixes in the 80s. I bought my first cd player forty minutes after I bought the Springsteen 3 CD Live set (the person at the register was the drummer for Toad the Wet Sprocket, trivia fans).
I didn't buy the recent release because it wasn't a standard CD. (And no, I haven't gone and downloaded it from the net.) While I listen to my music from ripped mp3s on hard drive, I like having the CDs, because hard drives are a little too volatile. Should I ever make an administrative (obviously dumb something you would never do) mistake, I can live with re-ripping the cds. All these schemes to try and prevent some presumed nefarious activity on my part which increases the hassle factor for my enjoyment of music will not be tolerated and my dollars will go somewhere else.
I'm also not too crazy about buying a movie ticket and being yelled at in the theatre before the feature about the movie downloading I am clearly not doing, but that's another story.
Well, okay, good point. But Fox has cable outlets as well. I think the grandparent post is right. By also producing for some kind of cast, the costs can be divided among the two divisions, and there's an opportunity to add to the revenue with the airing receipts.
Didn't Groening say that one reason Futurama's broadcast future was dicey was that, unlike King of the Hill, Fox didn't own any of the production? So, hmmmm.
On the other hand, straight to DVD has got to mean a lower budget (in current dollars) per episode than the original network run received.
Oh, hell. Fox should bring Futurama back as an animated short and show a new one before each of its features. I just came back from Ep III. Just imagine how much perspective we'd have into General Grievous' character if it was preceded by the best loved and most apt Benderism.
I quote:
Frankly, they should pull their content if their monetary returns aren't good enough. That'll teach me for ignoring their ads.
But don't tell me that I have to read their ads because of some bogus social contract. You put something out to the public and the public can look. You don't like that, do what you want to do some other way.
Oh yes, I don't have cable, I channel surf during commercials, even checking out programming in languages I cannot speak, and I'm not going to feel guilty about it. If television programming continues to degrade and/or broadcasting becomes a seemingly inexorable digital hell, I'll read a book. It'd be better for me, any way.
And Winter '73-'74: Savings Time was accelerated and started in January. I was in Santa Barbara (and high school) then, and the first, 8:00, class started before sunrise. When I rode my bike to school, I was starting out when it was still pretty dark. I recall that by the first week of February, the entire ride was by dawn's light. But for those of you to the north, sunrise would be even later. (As it would be for those of you who are towards the western edge of a time zone. Santa Barbara is very close to 120 degrees West, so it's in the center of the time zone.)
Then, you are making frequent backups, of course.
Well, Microsoft's Counsel Brad Smith's prescription for repair is summed up as follows:
- Less infringement suits [against Microsoft],
- Other countries should harmonize their laws with the US, and
- The US government should charge less to small companies and individuals for their patent filings while the patent office collects fewer fees for increased work.
And these fix the problems, how?But, reasoning from your point of view that this is the game and taking into consideration those who say that Microsoft's patents are all defensive, does Microsoft really need the ISNOT patent and the NZ xml patent in order to protect the good works that they do? When criticizing the nuclear arms race, opponents broached the question of just how many times does one need to be able to destroy civilization before someone starts thinking twice about lobbing an ICBM your way? Was Microsoft really being pushed around because they didn't have enough patents, i.e., they had no effective deterrent? Another point: here in the US, success-leeching litigation is brought by people who don't have products and thus aren't vulnerable to patent counter claims; in light of that, how good a defense strategy is "patent anything", any way? Meanwhile, as I observe the widespread acceptance and worship of the great American philosopher (Vince Lombardi) who writes in the The Art of Football: the best defense is a good offense, someone like me is suspicious of someone else who stockpiles item after item after item, defensively.
Two things jump out at me. The first is the vaguely defined "abusive lawsuit." The whole point about patenting is that someone registers an idea and than has government-sanctioned leverage to benefit from or stop others who use the idea without a license. So under doctrines of equal justice for all, how does one indicate that one plaintiff is abusive and another is not? I suspect that the dividing line may have to do with bringing implementations to market (which does nothing for the startup that fails or the writer which gives away the code to sell the service.) The other thing that jumps out at me is the suggestion to reduce or eliminate patent fees for small companies or individuals. This does nothing about ancillary legal costs required to research, file, and receive a patent, which are and will remain a large barrier for the small guys to play in the game. Next, large firms still may gain effective control over the the small entities' patents by investment, proxy, acquisition, or alliance. Large firms, which can afford the legal and filing fees, will still hold the threat of infringement litigation over the heads of underfunded startups and volunteer writers of free software. For that matter, large firms will be able to afford the actual costs of bringing litigation to courts in order to legitimately protect patents, while small firms have to sit on their hands or look for targets rich enough to justify contingency legal representation. (And, I wouldn't be surprised if perhaps contingency percentage limits will be part of any final "reforms" to stop "abusive" lawsuits!) Finally, the patent office will have to spend some of its resources to support the bureaucracy needed to vet which patent filers qualify for no filing fees, all done with reduced fee revenue while patent filings from the small fry increase in number; the latter sounds like a recipe for more patents on the obvious, not fewer.
I think Mr. Smith's suggestions are cynical. The proposed reforms will relieve Microsoft of some of its costs while preserving the gaming tactics and strategies Microsoft has mapped out within the current U.S. system. An honest suggestion for reform should include structural changes that preclude future patents along the lines of inequality being checked by looking at address in memory, or patents for parsing xml, or patents on the specifics in a protocol.
Apple communicated its request, I suspect, via a letter from the legal department. If I got such a letter, I'd have to go find an attorney and work out the fight or flight strategies. And it would cost me money and time. Okay, so I'm guessing what the request looked like. My "leave the kids alone" advice is based on my inability to see any upside for Apple on asking the bloggers for their contacts, even as I agree that Apple has the right to ask and the bloggers, even though journalists, have no right to shield their sources in this matter.
I basically agree with your points. But, as to "freedom of the press," and who is a journalist, my point of view is that press freedom is necessary in order to not provide the government with a back door way to deny freedom of speech. Because, it is the printing press (and now the internet) which allow the ideas to be persisted and transported.
Now these leaks did not reveal any governmental malfeasance or corporate illegal behavior. Instead, they undermined the marketing of a product, and the folks who passed the info on were violating the promises they made to their employer. So, I think these web-sites (and bloggers) are journalists, but there is no public interest (in the big sense) in the specifics of Apple's product releases, and so I don't think shield laws should apply in this case.
That said, I think Apple should leave the kids alone. That these rumors are being printed are a testament to public interest in what Apple will come out with next. And, it may increase interest in the official pronouncements as people look in to confirm the truth. As someone has said, you worry when people stop talking about you.
Well, I'm sure they focus grouped the issue and found out that 95% of the real world thinks their pc is already a hassle machine, they're afraid to kill a runaway program because they don't want to break the computer, and generally have been trained to accept their computers as necessary evils.
I introduced my Dad, a Ph.D., to perl (and he loved it) but wouldn't listen as I tried to explain that, even though we got perl going on his Windows XP machine, it would have been there, out of the box, with a Linux or OS X machine. (Shoot, with Linux, he wouldn't have to get new hardware.) "What if it breaks and you're not around?" he asked. Since I live out of town, I had no answer: I realized a few weeks later that Windows brainwash, er, experiences had conditioned him to failure.
If this was truly about Firefox competition, they'd improve IE across all the platforms and not just for users of XP SP2 and the long-rumored Longhorn.
IMHO, this is going to be used to try and convince Win98/2000/NT users that an intolerable (and never to be fixed) security situation will be tolerable with firewalls, upgrades, AND the new operating system WITH the new and improved browser.
Now let's think about backward compatibility. The reason it was so important was that otherwise their customer base would only upgrade at purchase of new equipment, and may balk at that, if the legacy application was too critical. Microsoft's biggest competition is itself and the fact that its established base is happy, well satisfied, well devoting as much mindfulness to Windows as it prefers.
I say if you want to roll-out IE7, do it, do it right, support the old platforms (and reward those customers' inexplicable loyalty), then tell us all when it's here, and God bless you for the effort.
If I'm right and this is only about moving the herd to the north pasture, then the fact that Firefox is available and can run on these legacy Windows platforms will put Microsoft in an awkward position as they trumpet the message with text (or subtext) that IE6 and legacy platforms are inadequate, maybe dangerous, even as they dance around when someone points out that the alternative is here, now, and won't cost a dime.
Most folks have the take that Microsoft McGrath is throwing bricks from the glass house. But let me take a different view. Does Red Hat take responsibility? And the answer is, yes, or else. Because since you can get a Linux kernel from many sources any distributor that behaves irresponsibly (or insensitively) will lose the business end of their business, and, poof, they're gone. And this concept extends beyond the kernel to other aspects of doing business.
A few of us (call me a semi-pro minus or hobbyist plus) left the RedHat tent with the way they handled the transition from 9.0 -> Fedora, and, in retrospect, I'm happier and it seems from the financial results that RedHat is happier.
Now McGrath's comments are not meant to be part of a serious debate about how us users may get the most safe, seamless, fuss-free, and satisfactory experience with the kit we own, but are the equivalent to the flip side of preaching to the choir, which I suggest is reminding the congregation of damnation should they even think of leaving the church. Remember the Flintstones, how much of the "technology" was powered by a purposed, humiliated animal who would look up and say to the audience, "It's a living." I suppose it is.
The country that builds the robotic scorekeepers!
So. Cal resident here. Auto recall? Free repair of potentially life threatening issue? I'm there. I've done it. Microsoft class action suit? I received maybe a dozen letters between home and work. Tossed 'em all. I'm not going to try and find old receipts in order to get a rebate/discount on future purchases. I'd rather punish Microsoft with bad word of mouth and my advocacy and support for ways to get things done without troubling Microsoft for so much as the time of day. By the way, if Microsoft thinks their customers love them, then their exit polling is underperforming the Ohio Election Day surveys.
Or... keep the pinkies, use base 8 and count to 31 with one thumb = 8, two thumb = 16 and two thumb and left pinky = 24.
I'm working to transition my office from Word Perfect and Word to OOo. My recommendation is export to pdf for any thing that has to make its way in the outside world. (And yes, I want it to print out over there the way it prints here in the office, working in a design related field, that aesthetic seems to go with the territory.)
But, someone should tell Kinko's (and others who receive digital copy) that documents in OOo and Scribus (and other programs) are coming. So you out there who can do something about this, check them out, download, install and make available for the stores to service their customers. It's not like there's this big licensing, capitalization hassle, right?
Ocaml has been at the periphery of things I wanted to learn for a while now. Thanks to the reviewer and team for the heads up about and translation of le livre O'Reilly. And thank you Rich for the tutorial which I plan to work through.
My reaction -- you're on to something, but you are missing the real dynamic. I think that privatization is being looked at as a synergy thing by those holding power in the Executive and Legislative branches of our Federal government. There's a suitable theoretic underpinning: that the private sector is more efficient, so this very much appeals to the l'aissez faire policy wonks. And the politicos find new contracts that can be easily let to supporters. The trick is to have the political appointees pressure the bureaucracy professionals to cook the specs and limit the qualifying vendors. After the "right company" gets the contract, they can now afford to contribute heart, soul, and bucks to the cause of promoting the election of more people who won't derail the gravy train.
Frankly, I think a primary subext of television (news, adult dramas and comedy) is that the outside is very dangerous, especially for children. Self-serving answer: stay in the house and get "reality" through visceral experience. What a sign of the times.