Once upon a time, there was this amazing company called Netscape. It was so fantastic that this other company called AOL bought it for over $4 billion.
Later on, there was this amazing company called AOL. It was so fantastic that this other company called Time Warner believed it was valued it at something like a quarter trillion dollars, so merged with it.
Later on, there was this amazing company called Facebook...
Gigantic shades in the sky, with patterns of light coming through them. Just think of the sponsorship opportunities! Every time you look at the Sun, you could see an Apple or Coca Cola logo.
Clearly, they aren't thinking this through. The monetization could be extraordinary!
There is a very big difference between a computer OS and a music player line. Macs having 10% of the marketshare gives them 50% of the mindshare in every software ad that says "available for Mac and PC." It means that software developers have to build Mac apps and try to make them successful, or they risk losing 1 out of every 10 customers.
Zune having 10% of the market means, comparatively, nothing. (And to answer someone above, same goes for IIS.)
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Windows: Macs just climbed to 10% of US sales. That's a huge event, considering that no software vendor can consider losing one in ten of every sale. It means that even despite Windows still near-dominence, Macs are in some ways on equal footing with them. And then of course there's Linux, which continues to grow in mindshare and has the price that can't be beat. Not to mention the security compared to Windows. Plus the libre vs. dracon mindset.
IE: Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome. And it's no wonder. Anyone who ever used IE and then *anything else* would find that *anything else* is better in every way except for compatibility with retarded websites that never bothered to program for anything except IE. And have you noticed that those retarded websites have gone from very prevalent to almost nonexistent?
Office: See above story. Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these?? Usually when Microsoft releases something because everyone else is doing it, they have a really hard time doing it at all well. May I draw your attention to the Zune?
Bing: How many of you use Bing? How many of you use Google? 'Nuff said.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Exchange server: Still a contender, but the open source tools are very robust now, and the licensing for Exchange is punishingly expensive. If enterprise still wants to buy commercial products, then solutions like OS X Server cost a tiny fraction of Exchange for most of the functionality.
Then you may notice that we see story after story of Microsoft closing down projects which were going to take over the world and which seem to have died a slow and long-overdue death. Again... you gotta wonder how much longer they're going to wait before they give up on the Zune. I'll bet they are losing tons of money on it, but keep it alive just so they don't have to face the humiliation of shutting it down.
So what does Microsoft have going for them? Yeah, Xbox. And while PS3 has at least jumped on the Wii-controller bandwagon, XB seems to still be missing the boat. But maybe they'll catch up here. If I were MS, I would want to spin off Xbox as the one branch of the company that might survive.
Don't get me wrong. They're still a huge and very powerful company. But it seems like they can do no right anymore. How much longer can they keep investors interested in holding their stock?
I have seen websites which: - require more than 8 characters - require 8 or fewer characters (great security there!) - require special characters - disallow special characters (!) - require mixed case - are not case-sensitive - require numbers and letters - require that password not start with a number - other stupid rules I can't remember
So many of those are so stupid, and the result of horrid programming. I want all my passwords to be a minimum of 9 characters, have plenty of symbols, and (and no sites ever require this) have no dictionary words in them.
Now it is possible for me to come up with a personal algorithm I can use and remember which would allow me to create a unique password for every site and still not be decipherable by someone who collected three of my passwords. (Sure, if you somehow got a dozen, maybe, just maybe you could figure it out; but that's unlikely since it uses weird associations from my personal past experiences for some of the characters and sometimes even for the number and kind of characters.) But there is no way I can implement a good algorithm given all the variances noted above.
I can't tell you how many times I've been locked out of accounts for getting my password wrong; only to find out when I'm resetting it that this particular system has some weird (and fundamentally stupid) combination of the above rules.
And you gotta love the spinoff of that. Typing in numerous variations of what I think is the right password. Seems insecure all by itself.
And as an aside... Who ever came up with the stupid idea that substituting numbers for letters is somehow secure? Do they honestly think that a hacker could never think of that, even though every idiot with fingers already has tried it? Really? If your company makes "trinkets" you think "tr1nk3ts" is a good password? WTF?
Yeah, but if you want to run anything on it, you have to get approved by the Free Store. The draconian linux overlords will reject anything that isn't 100% free, open, copyleft, and blindingly geeky.
AT&T: You want coverage? Consumerist: I think I have the towers. AT&T: You want coverage? Consumerist: I want the iPhone! AT&T: You can't handle the iPhone!!
No, I have not seen it. But your statement just validates my point: the creatures have eyes. That seems like a pretty odd thing to develop on a different planet. (And separately, what would be believable is that if eyes develop, most large creatures would have the same number. That happened on our planet because our common ancestors had two eyes... it would be odd to expect different large animals on the same planet to have different numbers of eyes.)
But more to the point, I was speaking about the humanoids. Even if something so utterly like us could develop somewhere else (which itself seems incredibly unlikely, given the infinitude of possibilities), why would it be the dominant life form?
On this planet, hominids have never been dominant until quite recently. The only thing which has set us apart is our adaptability, but that certainly is not intrinsically tied to our body design. If I were going to model after life on this planet (which I doubt I would if I were imagining life on a different planet), my bet for the dominant ones would be on creatures more like insects or waterfowl, which have much more adaptability overall.
Re:What ever happened to Suspension of disbelief
on
The Science of Avatar
·
· Score: 1
Then why not just have a movie which is nothing but 90 minutes of things blowing up? (Kinda like Ass in Idiocracy.)
The story line is relevant, and so are the elements which give the story meaning. In a movie which appears to be almost entirely about alien life, the elements which make them alien are extremely relevant to the experience of the movie.
How much fun would it be to watch a romance movie where one of the protagonists dies in the middle... and then they happily get together at the end (and without any sort of fantasy-ghost story element... just presto he's inexplicably alive again)? Wouldn't that somewhat diminish your experience of the movie?
All planets with life have trees, reptiles, insects, and of course bipedal creatures who have two eyes, four limbs, a head with two eyes one nose one mouth, and generally caucasian-human features. Those humanoids have technology in line with something in our history, they use speech, they have two sexes and reproduce like we do, and they breathe and eat things we can breathe and eat.
The only real question -- the really important one -- is do they natively speak modern English, or do they speak something which sounds a little bit different from some other Earth language? That is how you can tell just how utterly alien they are.
And how much would these MS prototypes cost the end-user? One that may be really awesome isn't going to be very practical if it is $700...
And have they done ergonomics testing to see if these concepts hurt your wrist after a day of use?
And how easy/hard is the configuration software? The user learning experience?
Comparing a real shipping product to vaporware is just silly.
I have an image in my head of a mind-controlled input device that simply takes the cursor wherever I want it, moves pages on a whim, and oh yeah it also does direct mind-to-text input. It also works in 3D environments, and allows multiple users to input into the same session. Mine is clearly better than any of these offerings. I win.
It's the principle of the thing. I am not suggesting anyone actually do this.
What I am commenting on is that Microsoft Licensing is absolutely brutal in their enforcement of their licensing policies. They demand (and enforce) complete compliance to the letter of the license. And then they go and do the shenanigans in TFA to get out of paying taxes.
I've worked in IT for over a decade, and it's not my experience or lack thereof that made me say that some may scoff.
Some may. And will. A lot of IT people are very opinionated, particularly about what is and isn't "good enough" to qualify for their definitions.
Heck, a lot of IT people still don't take any Macs seriously at all (even now when they're Intel boxes running UNIX). I used to administer a room full of Macs providing a full suite of services to a corporation... and had people telling me I didn't have any *servers* because Macs are graphics machines.
On this form, titles are truncated to a set length. However, the title field itself does not impose a length limit, so the truncation can slip-by the unsuspecting submitter and result in unwittingly truncated titles.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time, there was this amazing company called Netscape. It was so fantastic that this other company called AOL bought it for over $4 billion.
Later on, there was this amazing company called AOL. It was so fantastic that this other company called Time Warner believed it was valued it at something like a quarter trillion dollars, so merged with it.
Later on, there was this amazing company called Facebook...
Gigantic shades in the sky, with patterns of light coming through them. Just think of the sponsorship opportunities! Every time you look at the Sun, you could see an Apple or Coca Cola logo.
Clearly, they aren't thinking this through. The monetization could be extraordinary!
Did someone come back in time and start IISi in order to delay the deployment of Skynet by a few years?
Brilliant!
Just saw a semi-related post in the firehose: Scary USB marketing device.
So would a marketing gimmick/keyboard emulator which pretends to be a USB flash drive count as free hardware? :/
There is a very big difference between a computer OS and a music player line. Macs having 10% of the marketshare gives them 50% of the mindshare in every software ad that says "available for Mac and PC." It means that software developers have to build Mac apps and try to make them successful, or they risk losing 1 out of every 10 customers.
Zune having 10% of the market means, comparatively, nothing. (And to answer someone above, same goes for IIS.)
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Windows: Macs just climbed to 10% of US sales. That's a huge event, considering that no software vendor can consider losing one in ten of every sale. It means that even despite Windows still near-dominence, Macs are in some ways on equal footing with them. And then of course there's Linux, which continues to grow in mindshare and has the price that can't be beat. Not to mention the security compared to Windows. Plus the libre vs. dracon mindset.
IE: Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome. And it's no wonder. Anyone who ever used IE and then *anything else* would find that *anything else* is better in every way except for compatibility with retarded websites that never bothered to program for anything except IE. And have you noticed that those retarded websites have gone from very prevalent to almost nonexistent?
Office: See above story. Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these?? Usually when Microsoft releases something because everyone else is doing it, they have a really hard time doing it at all well. May I draw your attention to the Zune?
Bing: How many of you use Bing? How many of you use Google? 'Nuff said.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Exchange server: Still a contender, but the open source tools are very robust now, and the licensing for Exchange is punishingly expensive. If enterprise still wants to buy commercial products, then solutions like OS X Server cost a tiny fraction of Exchange for most of the functionality.
Then you may notice that we see story after story of Microsoft closing down projects which were going to take over the world and which seem to have died a slow and long-overdue death. Again... you gotta wonder how much longer they're going to wait before they give up on the Zune. I'll bet they are losing tons of money on it, but keep it alive just so they don't have to face the humiliation of shutting it down.
So what does Microsoft have going for them? Yeah, Xbox. And while PS3 has at least jumped on the Wii-controller bandwagon, XB seems to still be missing the boat. But maybe they'll catch up here. If I were MS, I would want to spin off Xbox as the one branch of the company that might survive.
Don't get me wrong. They're still a huge and very powerful company. But it seems like they can do no right anymore. How much longer can they keep investors interested in holding their stock?
"tr1nk3ts"
Whoops. That was totally insecure. I meant: tr1nk3t5,
Nobody would EVER crack with that.
maybe a misspelled one
bingo.
I have seen websites which:
- require more than 8 characters
- require 8 or fewer characters (great security there!)
- require special characters
- disallow special characters (!)
- require mixed case
- are not case-sensitive
- require numbers and letters
- require that password not start with a number
- other stupid rules I can't remember
So many of those are so stupid, and the result of horrid programming. I want all my passwords to be a minimum of 9 characters, have plenty of symbols, and (and no sites ever require this) have no dictionary words in them.
Now it is possible for me to come up with a personal algorithm I can use and remember which would allow me to create a unique password for every site and still not be decipherable by someone who collected three of my passwords. (Sure, if you somehow got a dozen, maybe, just maybe you could figure it out; but that's unlikely since it uses weird associations from my personal past experiences for some of the characters and sometimes even for the number and kind of characters.) But there is no way I can implement a good algorithm given all the variances noted above.
I can't tell you how many times I've been locked out of accounts for getting my password wrong; only to find out when I'm resetting it that this particular system has some weird (and fundamentally stupid) combination of the above rules.
And you gotta love the spinoff of that. Typing in numerous variations of what I think is the right password. Seems insecure all by itself.
And as an aside... Who ever came up with the stupid idea that substituting numbers for letters is somehow secure? Do they honestly think that a hacker could never think of that, even though every idiot with fingers already has tried it? Really? If your company makes "trinkets" you think "tr1nk3ts" is a good password? WTF?
Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.
Sorry... just thought I'd post something more interesting than the OP.
Yeah, but if you want to run anything on it, you have to get approved by the Free Store. The draconian linux overlords will reject anything that isn't 100% free, open, copyleft, and blindingly geeky.
Maybe that CSR just watched A Few Good Men.
AT&T: You want coverage?
Consumerist: I think I have the towers.
AT&T: You want coverage?
Consumerist: I want the iPhone!
AT&T: You can't handle the iPhone!!
No, I have not seen it. But your statement just validates my point: the creatures have eyes. That seems like a pretty odd thing to develop on a different planet. (And separately, what would be believable is that if eyes develop, most large creatures would have the same number. That happened on our planet because our common ancestors had two eyes... it would be odd to expect different large animals on the same planet to have different numbers of eyes.)
But more to the point, I was speaking about the humanoids. Even if something so utterly like us could develop somewhere else (which itself seems incredibly unlikely, given the infinitude of possibilities), why would it be the dominant life form?
On this planet, hominids have never been dominant until quite recently. The only thing which has set us apart is our adaptability, but that certainly is not intrinsically tied to our body design. If I were going to model after life on this planet (which I doubt I would if I were imagining life on a different planet), my bet for the dominant ones would be on creatures more like insects or waterfowl, which have much more adaptability overall.
Then why not just have a movie which is nothing but 90 minutes of things blowing up? (Kinda like Ass in Idiocracy.)
The story line is relevant, and so are the elements which give the story meaning. In a movie which appears to be almost entirely about alien life, the elements which make them alien are extremely relevant to the experience of the movie.
How much fun would it be to watch a romance movie where one of the protagonists dies in the middle... and then they happily get together at the end (and without any sort of fantasy-ghost story element... just presto he's inexplicably alive again)? Wouldn't that somewhat diminish your experience of the movie?
All planets with life have trees, reptiles, insects, and of course bipedal creatures who have two eyes, four limbs, a head with two eyes one nose one mouth, and generally caucasian-human features. Those humanoids have technology in line with something in our history, they use speech, they have two sexes and reproduce like we do, and they breathe and eat things we can breathe and eat.
The only real question -- the really important one -- is do they natively speak modern English, or do they speak something which sounds a little bit different from some other Earth language? That is how you can tell just how utterly alien they are.
It's pronounced "Boorgle."
Kinda like FaceBorg.
And how much would these MS prototypes cost the end-user? One that may be really awesome isn't going to be very practical if it is $700...
And have they done ergonomics testing to see if these concepts hurt your wrist after a day of use?
And how easy/hard is the configuration software? The user learning experience?
Comparing a real shipping product to vaporware is just silly.
I have an image in my head of a mind-controlled input device that simply takes the cursor wherever I want it, moves pages on a whim, and oh yeah it also does direct mind-to-text input. It also works in 3D environments, and allows multiple users to input into the same session. Mine is clearly better than any of these offerings. I win.
It's the principle of the thing. I am not suggesting anyone actually do this.
What I am commenting on is that Microsoft Licensing is absolutely brutal in their enforcement of their licensing policies. They demand (and enforce) complete compliance to the letter of the license. And then they go and do the shenanigans in TFA to get out of paying taxes.
Piracy is rampant in China, so MS adjusted their prices there. See, for example: Microsoft cuts prices in China to fight piracy.
"Microsoft said it had slashed the price for Office 2007 Home and Student Edition to 199 yuan ($29) from 699 yuan ($102)."
So then Microsoft would have no problem with me buying my MS licenses in China and using them in the US, right?
Yeah, riiiiiight.
Yeah, but who can complain? After all, it's free!
There is this series of tubes... Programs can travel over them right into your machine. ;)
I've worked in IT for over a decade, and it's not my experience or lack thereof that made me say that some may scoff.
Some may. And will. A lot of IT people are very opinionated, particularly about what is and isn't "good enough" to qualify for their definitions.
Heck, a lot of IT people still don't take any Macs seriously at all (even now when they're Intel boxes running UNIX). I used to administer a room full of Macs providing a full suite of services to a corporation... and had people telling me I didn't have any *servers* because Macs are graphics machines.
It's pronounced Boorgle... and resistance is futile.
On this form, titles are truncated to a set length. However, the title field itself does not impose a length limit, so the truncation can slip-by the unsuspecting submitter and result in unwittingly truncated titles.