Wasn't it possible back then to create a Powerpoint presentation that would run standalone from a floppy disk (that is, Powerpoint didn't have to be installed on the target machine)?
I know most people carry their presentations with them on a laptop these days, but I always thought it was handy to be able to use on-site equipment if only as a backup. Now this notion only works if you install Powerpoint everywhere.
PS: I just went to check my Yahoo mail to see if the new inbox size is in effect. I can't even sign in.
One thing that has had too little press play is not just the notion that Google is offering more space. There is more to this than just a pricing scheme. Google thinks that their home-grown file system is better than anything else out there (and they are probably right). How better to prove that than to offer services that nobody else can match TECHNICALLY, regardless of the price point. What scares Yahoo and MSN (among others) is that their infrastructure would collapse under the load that Google is taking on. The question for Yahoo users and users of other mail services will have to ask is how slow am I willing for this service to be just to get a 100M mailbox? Google's is fast. Very fast. So much so that I am tending to use it more than even my local POP based mail program. I've never really liked web mail of any kind, but I'm begginging to change my mind. Something that never happened with the other web based mail services.
But the other thing to not forget is that Yahoo is ONLY doing this in response to Gmail. Prior to that Yahoo was actually taking away features and making more things only available to paying customers. I've been a Yahoo user almost since the beginning and have been constantly disappointed with any service that I paid them for. They have a tendency to bait and switch, or simply discontinue a service when it doesn't perform as they expected. I used their text paging service (for the year it was available) their local dial-up service (ditto) and am currently using Yahoo domains (which have been lowering their price in an effort to prevent erosion, rather than adding features).
I don't give a company credit for innovation when all they are doing is responding to REAL innovation. Gmail, from what I've seen so far is better, faster, has an interesting alternative to folders which may prove to be more effective, and has a commitment to continue adding features to their free service. Google has no add on services that you can pay for and I think they intend to keep it that way. They have Yahoo and MSN quaking in their boots and I think thats a good thing.
I'll stick with Gmail until something BETTER, not just AS GOOD comes along.
I think the Time article misses the point
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, I don't think blogging is going to replace Time magazine, CBS nightly news or the New York Times next week, but it DOES impact these institutions. Specifically, it raises the bar substantially on what readers will PAY for in their reading habits.
I used to get a daily paper, subscribe to several news magazines and watch the nightly news, well, nightly.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form. I know this by talking to non-internet news junkies. They'll start by saying "Did you hear about Bush falling off his bike..." and I'll interrupt to tell them more than they already know on the subject. Print media won't die next week, but the Internet has done much more to hurt print media than television ever did. There really is very little reason for printed publications these days other than those people who still don't use the Internet regularly, and I suspect the ratios will eventually put many of the print -only publication out of business unless they adapt to the Internet.
Getting the story first will still be important for news publications, including TV based ones. But the story they will drive to get first will be the one that breaks on the Net, while they will strive to offer more in-depth coverage than their competitors for the print edition (while it exists).
More importantly, blogging "commoditizes" opinion. Who needs Andy Rooney when there are thousands of bloggers our there that are just as funny, and in many cases more insightful too? News anchor people might eventually learn that we are not interested in the "spin" they put on stories. When you can read entire transcripts of hearing, do string searches, or even view almost all of the world in action Dan Rather and the like can't afford to spin so much or they lose their credibility (well they already have for me at least). C-SPAN started this trend, and watching our government in action taught me how bad the reporting really was. Getting news on the Net has multipled that affect many times over and I think that as a new Net savvy generation takes over there will be fewer and fewer "media giants" who can manipulate the news for their own agenda.
Getting there will be good. The ride will be bumpy though.
Actually the TOS for Gmail says that doing things to attract spam is a violation, so they could just close the account on that basis. Also, if you don't sign on for a certain period of time (a few months I think) the account gets deleted. I had a Yahoo ID for years before I ever knew there was an e-mail address associated with it. I never read the mail associated with my AIM id and I probably still have free hotmail and a few other things like that floating around. Failure of these companies to delete idle accounts is what causes all the good names to be taken. I think Google is more on-top of this than many of the others.
I vote on issues, and I vote to win. That can translate into a vote for any party. I would certainly vote for a Libertarian candidate that stood a chance to win. Until Libertarians win, they too are only paying lip service to the idea of small government. To win, Libertarians need to do more than run for President every 4 years. They need to run for city councils, mayors races and work their way up through state legislatures, governorships, etc. I HOPE that one day the Libertarians DO become a major party, and if they can displace either the Democrat or Republican party I will certainly vote regularly for them.
When is the last time you saw a Democrat even pay lip service to the idea of smaller government? The only part of the government that Democrats want to make smaller is the military, and if you check the Libertarian party platforms you will note that that is the ONE area of government that the Libertarians support (although they would certainly scale it back while eliminating most social programs completely).
We need more people who focus on issues rather than party allegiance. There are good INTENTIONS represented in all three parties mentioned here, but the issue here is performance, and as demonstrated by the aftermath of the 2000 elections, governments at both the state and national levels have a tendency to botch all that they touch. Small government doesn't mean that things don't get done, it just means they don't get done (primarily at least) by government.
No, PDA's are not finished, but I hope they will take their proper place as an INEXPENSIVE replacement for a day-timer style notebook and stop trying to be a replacement for a PC. I don't want to spend $200, much less $600 on something that is so easily lost, stolen or dropped. People who do are either gadget freaks, or are spending someone else's money. Of course, if you work for a company so overburdened by cash that they give you a desktop PC AND a laptop AND a $600 PDA you'd be foolish not to take it, but for the rest of us a sub $100 device is more than adequate. I'd really like to have the thing I carry around cost more like $50 or less so that I could be even more careless with it than I already am.
Sony is wise to exit a market that is oversaturated as is. Let Microsoft and Palm fight over what is left. My guess is that eventually most people will be carrying around something from Casio because the price is right and the functionality is good enough. Palm and Microsoft will lose money fighting over the "road-warriors" which will ultimately lead to Palm going under followed by Microsoft losing interest. A fitting end to the insanity.
"The truth is that this is not a technical problem it is a political one. Almost any dumbass can program a voting system in like 2 hours I put the first hour in photoshop making fancy graphics the next hour is in what you stated. But the government doesn't work like that this is what happends.
1. A software company tries to push a solution to the government. (this could possibly be a good solution)...."
Thank you. I can attest that this is exactly how government works, particularly at the federal level. Which is why I take every opportunity to vote for less government rather than more. And yet, no matter how much evidence there is of governmental screw-ups I have to admit that the majority of Americans want MORE government, not less. What seems to matter to them are the good intentions of government rather than the bad outcomes. I suppose it is the same mentality that makes Microsoft so successful: We need more features NOW, we'll worry about debugging and security in the NEXT release. How ironic it is that so many people who speak out against bloated software are more than happy to vote for bloated government. In my mind the issues are the same, as are the results.
i>"Windows, what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?"
However, I will make a point that Microsoft got this large mostly through luck. They owned the popular OS which ran on the hardware platform that grew from the expected run of several 1000 IBM units to several 100 million cloned units worldwide. That success could have just as equally gone to Apple if the Apple II was a clonable platform, or to Digital Research if the Kildalls hadn't balked at IBM's NDA. Mr Gates was in the right place at the right time and knew someone willing to sell him the right product. You might call that "business genius" but honestly I think Gates isn't that smart. He might have had some inkling the deal with IBM was "important" but I doubt he realised it was worth tens of billions.
I've always thought this too. And even though Microsoft hires some very smart people, large strategic decisions are only made at the top. I've known personally a few, and read of many very bright creative people who could only stand a few years at Microsoft, and with the money they were being paid, could afford to "retire" after only a few years.
Regarding the "good enough" mentality though, I think the first thing that will be destroyed will be those companies and institutions that rely on that mentality. The federal government does think this way to a large extent and look at all the articles you can find on their budgets being out of control. I don't mean out of control as in large (of course they are that too) but out of control as in nobody knows where the money is or what it was spent on. The federal government should be a case study on how NOT to do data processing. Is it a coincidence that they are the worlds biggest suckers for MS products? Where I worked if you mentioned alternatives to Microsoft you could be essentially fired. Mentioning major flaws in the design of in-house systems would lead to the same results. The feds will be Microsoft's last big customer. Private companies live and die by Darwinian rules. Failure to get your DP right can and does result in failure of the entire enterprise. I think it is here that the trend away from Microsoft will start, and only after it is well under way will government institutions, which aren't allowed to die a natural death will, as they have before, play copy-cat and accept the alternatives being talked about in business journals and conferences. I look at school systems and bureaucracies in the same way. They don't go out of business when they screw up. Only very cash strapped school systems and libraries etc are willing to think out of the box on DP issues. The success stories here will be very helpful, but then Microsoft will thwart these by donating "free" software here and there to libraries, school systems etc. that might otherwise take the Open Source route.
Open source success will build slowly (much more slowly than most slashdotters would like) in three areas: technically oriented individuals who can't stand the constraints placed on them by closed source products, businesses who want to use the best software to achieve an advantage over rivals, and government institutions who have critical security requirements (EG military). The biggest push on US Government (other than military) to use non-Microsoft products will be when most of the rest of the worlds governments start doing so.
Well, to REALLY get the horse before the cart I'd hope that SOMEONE would focus on building computers WITHOUT FANS. Apple has done this, others have. Heat sinks and convection can go a long way, especially when the computers we are used to these days are vertically oriented to begin with. Put the hot stuff at the bottom of a case with a tube over them that allows the hot air to by sucked up to a vent at the top. A slow fan could kick in to assist if things started to overheat. There are fans that operate at a few undred RPM and are almost silent but still move a good amount of air.
Maybe there needs to be a new version of computer hobbiest called "Underclockers" who take a 3G processor designed to fry eggs and runs it at 700Mhz without a fan. Meanwhile I'm sitting here browsing Slashdot with a 3D mega triangle video card with its own fan and 64M of memory. Does anyone make a video card these days that is both (1) really fast, and (2) doesn't have all the horsepower and programming to do 3D rendering? Hardly. I don't MIND the 3D capabilities per-se, but I've known many people already that have had to replace their video cards after they burn out, and often I think the culprit here is accumulation of dust in and around the video cards fan. I get a BIT of dust on my case fan when I open it up from time to time, but the tiny fan on the video card is almost always close to being clogged with what they used to call "dust bunnies". Eventually some of these apparently accumulate to the point where the fan just ejects them onto whatever component is below. Some of these case designs go beyond what I'd call "bad" to downright incompetent. Or could it be deliberate planned obsolescence?
I'm still hanging onto my old Dells, some of which, as mentioned above are designed to be quiet (even with a fan). I'll get my wallet out again when the systems appear to be designed to last and run quietly. My stereo equipment puts out some heat as does my TV and THEY don't have fans. When the most complex thing I use my computer for makes it act a whole lot like a stereo system or TV you have to ask where did we go wrong here. (I know the answer, but I'll get labeled a troll if I say it, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader).
http://www.pcmag.co.uk/Products/Hardware/1145964 for example. But HP used to make one too, I couldn't find it just now. It was pretty cool. You could set it up in a central area and let everyone get to it. Scan in your document, and the scanner would send you the results as an E-MAIL attachment. This technology REALLY should have replaced faxing by now.
Anyway, if you make the process easy enough, maybe those lazy professors will do it for themselves. They will for a while at least, 'till the new-toy effect wears off.
Actually the last time I opened up a hard drive I noticed the recording surface was no longer the dull iron oxide I remember from long ago, or even the shinier material they used later but something that looked more like a mirror. It would probably be a mistake to aim a large lense at one of these.
I love the effect this is having on the industry...
I was happy to get a Gmail account finally and have been busy redirecting news service subscriptions and the like from some of my other "lesser" services. How pathetic it seems that I'm being asked to renew my $99/year mac.com account when the primary service provided by them is e-mail. I expected a lot more from the.mac account than I've gotten. My main reason for renewing it he first year was to support Apple. Even the iBlog product which was really cute at first got old real fast when I realized I'd have no control over the blog when I was away from the Apple computer. I've never shared the.Mac e-mail address with friends, so all I get there is announcements from Apple, a $99 donation would make more sense. Out of curiosity I tried the Spymac website (which the ZDNet article mentions is also overing a free Gig) and the page never finishes loading. One thing I don't think the PHBs have figured out yet is that you have to do MORE than offer a Gig to everyone, you have to actually have the infrastructure to support it. I wonder how many others will make that mistake and offer more than their server can handle. The 1-terabyte limit last night on GMail was pretty obviously an error. Google EMPLOYEES are said to have that much space, and they seem to have gotten the user lists co-mingled for a few hours (not everyone saw the 1-T limit, and experiments showed that it was acting as a 1-T limit, not just a typo) but it wouldn't surprise me if Google had the capacity NOW to up the ante to 10G should anyone actually respond with a similar offer. Nobody really has though...
I'm a VERY original user of Yahoo. I have an 8M Inbox there instead of the standard 4 as a result (I guess). I get tons of spam there and so far their efforts have done little to stop it. At one point the spam they filtered out automatically and into the "Bulk mail" folder was charged against the 8M limit. That meant I was almost always over my limit unless I checked it constantly. I noticed that now the Bulk Mail no longer counts. Good (overdue) move. I also PAY for a domain through Yahoo Domains. Their e-mail started out unlimited, years ago. Later they sent out a notice that there WAS a limit (in the 20-30M range I think) but I can't find that documented anywhere now. I saw the news articles on Yahoo expanding the free limits to 100M and the payed e-mail limits to 1G to "match" Google. Um... $35 a year for something doesn't "match" that same thing for free. I'm sure the Yahoo board of directors will figure that out soon.
Microsoft plans to steal some Google thunder by bundling a search engine with Windows. Apple did this too with OS X in the form of a program called Sherlock (nice name anyway). I tried it a few times. It was slow. Very. And the results were no better than Google. I wonder how many people use Sherlock just because it's there? Google works with any browser, on any operating system and isn't dependent on Internet circuits to Redmond being in good shape. The real worry for MS I suspect is the rumor that Google might offer other Windows-like services in the future. The technology is there. I signed up for Think-Free Office for a year at $50 and got storage (not a lot as I recall) and a Java based program that would read and write Word, Excell, PowerPoint and some other MS formatted files. It worked pretty well (I tested it on Windows, Linux, and OS X). I didn't renew the account, but the software still works locally. Essentially the $49 was for the disk space, but also included the software and (had I renewed) updates to the software. Were it not for OpenOffice, and the fact that I use Linux almost all the time, I would probably still keep an account. What if, in order to remain competitive in the home-user space, Microsoft is forced to give away Office, or at least bundle it free with all new computers (by whatever arm-twisting means they use to bundle Windows now)? It would b
Now THIS is an interesting article. It touches on several issues at once: Privacy, Honesty, Openness, Conspiracy, Propaganda, Media manipulation... I could go on.
We all want privacy don't we? Do you really want someone throwing a rock through your window because you said something negative about a group they are a member of on Slashdot?
Open Source is all about, well, openness right? It seems so ironic that a company based on the Open Source philosophy would do such a thing. But how many times have many of us said that Open Source is about freedom to create not about anti-commerce. If it is ever proven that Open Source companies CAN'T be profitable, then I think the future of Open Source will be bleak.
Media manipulation is both harder and easier with the popularity of the Internet. Anyone who wants to can be a publisher now. How many of you regular posters to Slashdot used to write letters to the editor of your local paper on a regular basis? I know I didn't. I've written more on issues I care about in the last 2 years than the previous...um... thirty something, combined. OK, its drivel, but if you multiply that by all the Internet users, there is some good stuff out there that would not be out there otherwise. The trick is of course to separate out the good stuff from the drivel. You know, signal to noise ratios and all that. Systems like Slashdot's moderation system help, but they are a long way from perfect yet. In particular...
Systems such as Slashdot are easy targets for conspiracy. We "rate" one another by name. My real identity MAY be secret, at least if I've been very very careful, but unless I do all my "Karma whoring" under this id and all my controversial posts anonymously, people are going to have a pretty good idea of what cmacb thinks about things. They may have a pretty good idea of what other Internet activities I engage in, who my online friends are, and a lot of other inferences not so easily drawn. Am I comfortable with this? Sometimes I'm not so sure...
The other day I posted what I thought was a perfectly normal reaction to a Slashdot article. I was a bit surprised that it got quickly modded up to a 5 (I really don't care that much about mod points other than the general "acceptability" of what I've said) I was even more surprised though to find myself personally insulted several times in the 14 posts that followed and then shocked to see the posts containing nothing more than insults modded up to 3, 4 and 5 while my original post dropped down to "1 troll". There was nothing the least bit resembling a troll in my post. I didn't bother to defend it though, as I don't want rocks through my window and I had clearly offended a group who, by their own writings, is capable of doing such a thing. Hopefully the fact that they had enough mod points among them to make my post disapear and their insults at me "informative" that they won't be tempted to hunt me down as well.
It made me realize that Slashdot, and several other systems I use just like it, are broken in a serious way. The moderation is good, but allowing me to filter posts based on WHO and individual is is just plain wrong. Some of the best posts I've seen on Slashdot are AC and some of the worst are by other people with good Karma. But I'm more interested in rating the post than the person. Why can't Slashdot (and systems like it) tally the ratings on my posts in such a way that nobody even knows what my ID is? Essentially combining the moderation and meta moderation and providing anonymity at the same time. I thiink that if you rated a particular poster poorly some number of times you would stop seeing their posts, without even knowing who they are or that you had done so. Some people ONLY want to see posts they AGREE with, and those people could rate posts accordingly and they would gradually get their wish. Others (like me) would rate on the "quality" of the posts without regard to agreeing or disagreeing with the content, and event
The shame in all of this is that there was no easy way to formally get the scammer arrested, or at least get him on the record with the authorities there. Ebay is off the hook on this since they were not used for the transaction, the postal service was lied to, etc.
Had the scamee attempted to go through formal channels he would have probably gotten nowhere. In a system such as this that doesn't work very well, it becomes tempting to take matters into your own hands. The thinking goes: Maybe if we can scam a few more of the scammers the scamming will stop. But it won't. In this case the scammer learned a lesson. He'll do a better job of his web page next time, do more to protect himself against the tax and insurance issues. Only next time he will actually succeed in ripping someone off, and his bad experience this time will be more than made up for.
And, if somethingawful was behind this then I question the legitimacy of the whole thing. I've been to their site to investigate some other shenanigans and all I could see were PR stunts designed to generate page hits and drive traffic to advertisers. Every stunt they pull is shortly followed by finding their links all over the place in posts like yours encouraging people to "check this out". Most people over 14 will be offended by what they find there. I hope they haven't hoodwinked the/. editors by this story.
But only with our patent system. It's a self fulfilling prophesy that if you create an artificial limit on the availability of anything (in this case ideas) that what little remains will become more "valuable". If international trade continues to be the way of the world, only an international patent system with some "World Court" form of adjudication can make it work. Otherwise, we here in the US will continue our circle jerk in our own courts while unfettered innovation will take place somewhere else.
Somethings got to give here. I wish I knew what it would be.
The cue ball hits the earth the first time. The second time, the earth explodes, and the third time it fades out in the manner of an old TV picture (or maybe it's supposed to look like a warp drive effect?). None of the flash animations are particularly large, or interesting. The button joke is cute.
I didn't see much info on the movie at all, other than a single cast photo. Hopefully there will be more.
I called them a couple years ago about a registration issue. I had installed the product more than three times (legitimately, because it had been removed from two of the older computers at this point). I got a third party company who said the computer that they needed to verify my authenticity was down. I was given some sort of fallback universal key (I don't know if it was time limited etc.)
I asked what would happen if at some point in the future I needed to install the program again and was told I would have to call back each time. I asked if Microsoft had a commitment to always have someone there to answer the phone. She didn't know.
That's when I decided to stop using MS products. It was the best event in my 10 years as a customer of the company. I immediately uninstalled the program (FrontPage of all things) and within 15 minutes had located an Open Source program that I actually liked better. The Web browser, word processor and operating system soon followed. It took a few months to adjust, but it was well worth it.
I hope they keep up the good work. Make the product buggy, insecure, hard to use and too expensive. Maybe the US won't be so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to adopting open standards if MS cooperates by alienating their own customer base.
Did anyone else try and click through the links on their web site? Almost none of them worked for me. I've heard of this organization, but don't really know anything about them. Could it be just 4 or 5 (or even less) otherwise unemployed Georgetown Law graduates pimping for research money? They sure could use a new webmaster.
Forget getting a nice short ID, minimum ID is 6 characters, which ruled out most of my standard picks.
Also spotted an error of sort in the article:
"Gmail also lacks a built-in virus scanner. This is a must-have feature that should be added as soon as possible. Such a filter already exists on MSN Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Given the large number of viruses out there, Gmail should provide some protection against them when users receive attachments. A virus scanner might not catch everything but it will catch quite a lot and every little bit of protection helps."
It could be that this is something that has changed between the time of the review and now (I just got my ID yesterday), but the actually prohibit sending/receiving of executables AT ALL either as an EXE or in any of the popular compression formats.
I suppose you could eventually figure out a way around this. I also figure that they don't want the liability of keeping up with the latest virus definitions. I don't blame them. I don't run Windows anyway.
You are right of course. I didn't mean to say that workers in India have a good deal. I was really referring to the double standard that exists here (USA) of management requiring workers to show up for 8 hours a day, often to work on PC equipment that is inferior to what they have at home, while at the same time, off-shoring work to people they had never seen and would likely never see.
As has been pointed out in other threads some of the most successful off-shoring efforts have been as a result of the need to accurately define the requirements to these unseen workers. Many organizations have realized in doing so just how poor their standard planning process has been.
I just talked to a colleague yesterday who told me he was reviewing a project plan that just came out. I mentioned that I had heard he had a lot of the responsibility for the next release. He corrected me... no,he was reviewing the project plan that had just come out for the product release that was already in testing. In other words they had a planning and design process in name only, just to satisfy paperwork requirements from above.
The reason software coming out of some organizations is so crappy is that they use crappy methodologies to develop it. Organizations that claim they have CMM level 3 and above certifications (IMHO) often do so only by co-opting the certifying agency with phony paperwork. Participants in this then go around bad-mouthing CMM type methods, and with good reason, since they haven't actually witnessed them being applied.
Use of better design and development methodologies are, in fact, the key in to allowing workers to work from home, work flex hours, or be located thousands of miles away, because, properly applied, what gets measured is the quality of the product rather than some arbitrary amount of face-time.
Slashdot Mirror
Same goes for the whole office suite doesn't it?
Wasn't it possible back then to create a Powerpoint presentation that would run standalone from a floppy disk (that is, Powerpoint didn't have to be installed on the target machine)?
I know most people carry their presentations with them on a laptop these days, but I always thought it was handy to be able to use on-site equipment if only as a backup. Now this notion only works if you install Powerpoint everywhere.
Nevermind, I answered my own question.
From the article:
"... they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. "
PPS: Much later same day. Seems like all of Yahoo is down, or at least very very slow.
I can't get to my Yahoo e-mail at all (Gmail is responding just fine).
This is going to be fun to watch.
I hope MSN offers 10G e-mail accounts soon!
PS: I just went to check my Yahoo mail to see if the new inbox size is in effect. I can't even sign in.
One thing that has had too little press play is not just the notion that Google is offering more space. There is more to this than just a pricing scheme. Google thinks that their home-grown file system is better than anything else out there (and they are probably right). How better to prove that than to offer services that nobody else can match TECHNICALLY, regardless of the price point. What scares Yahoo and MSN (among others) is that their infrastructure would collapse under the load that Google is taking on. The question for Yahoo users and users of other mail services will have to ask is how slow am I willing for this service to be just to get a 100M mailbox? Google's is fast. Very fast. So much so that I am tending to use it more than even my local POP based mail program. I've never really liked web mail of any kind, but I'm begginging to change my mind. Something that never happened with the other web based mail services.
But the other thing to not forget is that Yahoo is ONLY doing this in response to Gmail. Prior to that Yahoo was actually taking away features and making more things only available to paying customers. I've been a Yahoo user almost since the beginning and have been constantly disappointed with any service that I paid them for. They have a tendency to bait and switch, or simply discontinue a service when it doesn't perform as they expected. I used their text paging service (for the year it was available) their local dial-up service (ditto) and am currently using Yahoo domains (which have been lowering their price in an effort to prevent erosion, rather than adding features).
I don't give a company credit for innovation when all they are doing is responding to REAL innovation. Gmail, from what I've seen so far is better, faster, has an interesting alternative to folders which may prove to be more effective, and has a commitment to continue adding features to their free service. Google has no add on services that you can pay for and I think they intend to keep it that way. They have Yahoo and MSN quaking in their boots and I think thats a good thing.
I'll stick with Gmail until something BETTER, not just AS GOOD comes along.
Well, I don't think blogging is going to replace Time magazine, CBS nightly news or the New York Times next week, but it DOES impact these institutions. Specifically, it raises the bar substantially on what readers will PAY for in their reading habits.
I used to get a daily paper, subscribe to several news magazines and watch the nightly news, well, nightly.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form. I know this by talking to non-internet news junkies. They'll start by saying "Did you hear about Bush falling off his bike..." and I'll interrupt to tell them more than they already know on the subject. Print media won't die next week, but the Internet has done much more to hurt print media than television ever did. There really is very little reason for printed publications these days other than those people who still don't use the Internet regularly, and I suspect the ratios will eventually put many of the print -only publication out of business unless they adapt to the Internet.
Getting the story first will still be important for news publications, including TV based ones. But the story they will drive to get first will be the one that breaks on the Net, while they will strive to offer more in-depth coverage than their competitors for the print edition (while it exists).
More importantly, blogging "commoditizes" opinion. Who needs Andy Rooney when there are thousands of bloggers our there that are just as funny, and in many cases more insightful too? News anchor people might eventually learn that we are not interested in the "spin" they put on stories. When you can read entire transcripts of hearing, do string searches, or even view almost all of the world in action Dan Rather and the like can't afford to spin so much or they lose their credibility (well they already have for me at least). C-SPAN started this trend, and watching our government in action taught me how bad the reporting really was. Getting news on the Net has multipled that affect many times over and I think that as a new Net savvy generation takes over there will be fewer and fewer "media giants" who can manipulate the news for their own agenda.
Getting there will be good. The ride will be bumpy though.
Actually the TOS for Gmail says that doing things to attract spam is a violation, so they could just close the account on that basis. Also, if you don't sign on for a certain period of time (a few months I think) the account gets deleted. I had a Yahoo ID for years before I ever knew there was an e-mail address associated with it. I never read the mail associated with my AIM id and I probably still have free hotmail and a few other things like that floating around. Failure of these companies to delete idle accounts is what causes all the good names to be taken. I think Google is more on-top of this than many of the others.
I think Microsoft has a solid claim for prior art on vapor technology.
"So I assume you vote Libertarian?"
Why would you assume that?
Should I assume you vote for the Green party?
I vote on issues, and I vote to win. That can translate into a vote for any party. I would certainly vote for a Libertarian candidate that stood a chance to win. Until Libertarians win, they too are only paying lip service to the idea of small government. To win, Libertarians need to do more than run for President every 4 years. They need to run for city councils, mayors races and work their way up through state legislatures, governorships, etc. I HOPE that one day the Libertarians DO become a major party, and if they can displace either the Democrat or Republican party I will certainly vote regularly for them.
When is the last time you saw a Democrat even pay lip service to the idea of smaller government? The only part of the government that Democrats want to make smaller is the military, and if you check the Libertarian party platforms you will note that that is the ONE area of government that the Libertarians support (although they would certainly scale it back while eliminating most social programs completely).
We need more people who focus on issues rather than party allegiance. There are good INTENTIONS represented in all three parties mentioned here, but the issue here is performance, and as demonstrated by the aftermath of the 2000 elections, governments at both the state and national levels have a tendency to botch all that they touch. Small government doesn't mean that things don't get done, it just means they don't get done (primarily at least) by government.
No, PDA's are not finished, but I hope they will take their proper place as an INEXPENSIVE replacement for a day-timer style notebook and stop trying to be a replacement for a PC. I don't want to spend $200, much less $600 on something that is so easily lost, stolen or dropped. People who do are either gadget freaks, or are spending someone else's money. Of course, if you work for a company so overburdened by cash that they give you a desktop PC AND a laptop AND a $600 PDA you'd be foolish not to take it, but for the rest of us a sub $100 device is more than adequate. I'd really like to have the thing I carry around cost more like $50 or less so that I could be even more careless with it than I already am.
Sony is wise to exit a market that is oversaturated as is. Let Microsoft and Palm fight over what is left. My guess is that eventually most people will be carrying around something from Casio because the price is right and the functionality is good enough. Palm and Microsoft will lose money fighting over the "road-warriors" which will ultimately lead to Palm going under followed by Microsoft losing interest. A fitting end to the insanity.
"The truth is that this is not a technical problem it is a political one. Almost any dumbass can program a voting system in like 2 hours I put the first hour in photoshop making fancy graphics the next hour is in what you stated. But the government doesn't work like that this is what happends.
1. A software company tries to push a solution to the government. (this could possibly be a good solution)...."
Thank you. I can attest that this is exactly how government works, particularly at the federal level. Which is why I take every opportunity to vote for less government rather than more. And yet, no matter how much evidence there is of governmental screw-ups I have to admit that the majority of Americans want MORE government, not less. What seems to matter to them are the good intentions of government rather than the bad outcomes. I suppose it is the same mentality that makes Microsoft so successful: We need more features NOW, we'll worry about debugging and security in the NEXT release. How ironic it is that so many people who speak out against bloated software are more than happy to vote for bloated government. In my mind the issues are the same, as are the results.
i>"Windows, what keeps you away from it? Concerns about stability? Security? Dislike of Microsoft's business practices? Or are you simply a fan of your chosen platform and just don't care about Windows one way or the other?"
Yes.
However, I will make a point that Microsoft got this large mostly through luck. They owned the popular OS which ran on the hardware platform that grew from the expected run of several 1000 IBM units to several 100 million cloned units worldwide. That success could have just as equally gone to Apple if the Apple II was a clonable platform, or to Digital Research if the Kildalls hadn't balked at IBM's NDA. Mr Gates was in the right place at the right time and knew someone willing to sell him the right product. You might call that "business genius" but honestly I think Gates isn't that smart. He might have had some inkling the deal with IBM was "important" but I doubt he realised it was worth tens of billions.
I've always thought this too. And even though Microsoft hires some very smart people, large strategic decisions are only made at the top. I've known personally a few, and read of many very bright creative people who could only stand a few years at Microsoft, and with the money they were being paid, could afford to "retire" after only a few years.
Regarding the "good enough" mentality though, I think the first thing that will be destroyed will be those companies and institutions that rely on that mentality. The federal government does think this way to a large extent and look at all the articles you can find on their budgets being out of control. I don't mean out of control as in large (of course they are that too) but out of control as in nobody knows where the money is or what it was spent on. The federal government should be a case study on how NOT to do data processing. Is it a coincidence that they are the worlds biggest suckers for MS products? Where I worked if you mentioned alternatives to Microsoft you could be essentially fired. Mentioning major flaws in the design of in-house systems would lead to the same results. The feds will be Microsoft's last big customer. Private companies live and die by Darwinian rules. Failure to get your DP right can and does result in failure of the entire enterprise. I think it is here that the trend away from Microsoft will start, and only after it is well under way will government institutions, which aren't allowed to die a natural death will, as they have before, play copy-cat and accept the alternatives being talked about in business journals and conferences. I look at school systems and bureaucracies in the same way. They don't go out of business when they screw up. Only very cash strapped school systems and libraries etc are willing to think out of the box on DP issues. The success stories here will be very helpful, but then Microsoft will thwart these by donating "free" software here and there to libraries, school systems etc. that might otherwise take the Open Source route.
Open source success will build slowly (much more slowly than most slashdotters would like) in three areas: technically oriented individuals who can't stand the constraints placed on them by closed source products, businesses who want to use the best software to achieve an advantage over rivals, and government institutions who have critical security requirements (EG military). The biggest push on US Government (other than military) to use non-Microsoft products will be when most of the rest of the worlds governments start doing so.
Well, to REALLY get the horse before the cart I'd hope that SOMEONE would focus on building computers WITHOUT FANS. Apple has done this, others have. Heat sinks and convection can go a long way, especially when the computers we are used to these days are vertically oriented to begin with. Put the hot stuff at the bottom of a case with a tube over them that allows the hot air to by sucked up to a vent at the top. A slow fan could kick in to assist if things started to overheat. There are fans that operate at a few undred RPM and are almost silent but still move a good amount of air.
Maybe there needs to be a new version of computer hobbiest called "Underclockers" who take a 3G processor designed to fry eggs and runs it at 700Mhz without a fan. Meanwhile I'm sitting here browsing Slashdot with a 3D mega triangle video card with its own fan and 64M of memory. Does anyone make a video card these days that is both (1) really fast, and (2) doesn't have all the horsepower and programming to do 3D rendering? Hardly. I don't MIND the 3D capabilities per-se, but I've known many people already that have had to replace their video cards after they burn out, and often I think the culprit here is accumulation of dust in and around the video cards fan. I get a BIT of dust on my case fan when I open it up from time to time, but the tiny fan on the video card is almost always close to being clogged with what they used to call "dust bunnies". Eventually some of these apparently accumulate to the point where the fan just ejects them onto whatever component is below. Some of these case designs go beyond what I'd call "bad" to downright incompetent. Or could it be deliberate planned obsolescence?
I'm still hanging onto my old Dells, some of which, as mentioned above are designed to be quiet (even with a fan). I'll get my wallet out again when the systems appear to be designed to last and run quietly. My stereo equipment puts out some heat as does my TV and THEY don't have fans. When the most complex thing I use my computer for makes it act a whole lot like a stereo system or TV you have to ask where did we go wrong here. (I know the answer, but I'll get labeled a troll if I say it, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader).
http://www.pcmag.co.uk/Products/Hardware/1145964
for example. But HP used to make one too, I couldn't find it just now. It was pretty cool. You could set it up in a central area and let everyone get to it. Scan in your document, and the scanner would send you the results as an E-MAIL attachment. This technology REALLY should have replaced faxing by now.
Anyway, if you make the process easy enough, maybe those lazy professors will do it for themselves. They will for a while at least, 'till the new-toy effect wears off.
Actually the last time I opened up a hard drive I noticed the recording surface was no longer the dull iron oxide I remember from long ago, or even the shinier material they used later but something that looked more like a mirror. It would probably be a mistake to aim a large lense at one of these.
I love the effect this is having on the industry...
.mac account than I've gotten. My main reason for renewing it he first year was to support Apple. Even the iBlog product which was really cute at first got old real fast when I realized I'd have no control over the blog when I was away from the Apple computer. I've never shared the .Mac e-mail address with friends, so all I get there is announcements from Apple, a $99 donation would make more sense. Out of curiosity I tried the Spymac website (which the ZDNet article mentions is also overing a free Gig) and the page never finishes loading. One thing I don't think the PHBs have figured out yet is that you have to do MORE than offer a Gig to everyone, you have to actually have the infrastructure to support it. I wonder how many others will make that mistake and offer more than their server can handle. The 1-terabyte limit last night on GMail was pretty obviously an error. Google EMPLOYEES are said to have that much space, and they seem to have gotten the user lists co-mingled for a few hours (not everyone saw the 1-T limit, and experiments showed that it was acting as a 1-T limit, not just a typo) but it wouldn't surprise me if Google had the capacity NOW to up the ante to 10G should anyone actually respond with a similar offer. Nobody really has though...
I was happy to get a Gmail account finally and have been busy redirecting news service subscriptions and the like from some of my other "lesser" services. How pathetic it seems that I'm being asked to renew my $99/year mac.com account when the primary service provided by them is e-mail. I expected a lot more from the
I'm a VERY original user of Yahoo. I have an 8M Inbox there instead of the standard 4 as a result (I guess). I get tons of spam there and so far their efforts have done little to stop it. At one point the spam they filtered out automatically and into the "Bulk mail" folder was charged against the 8M limit. That meant I was almost always over my limit unless I checked it constantly. I noticed that now the Bulk Mail no longer counts. Good (overdue) move. I also PAY for a domain through Yahoo Domains. Their e-mail started out unlimited, years ago. Later they sent out a notice that there WAS a limit (in the 20-30M range I think) but I can't find that documented anywhere now. I saw the news articles on Yahoo expanding the free limits to 100M and the payed e-mail limits to 1G to "match" Google. Um... $35 a year for something doesn't "match" that same thing for free. I'm sure the Yahoo board of directors will figure that out soon.
Microsoft plans to steal some Google thunder by bundling a search engine with Windows. Apple did this too with OS X in the form of a program called Sherlock (nice name anyway). I tried it a few times. It was slow. Very. And the results were no better than Google. I wonder how many people use Sherlock just because it's there? Google works with any browser, on any operating system and isn't dependent on Internet circuits to Redmond being in good shape. The real worry for MS I suspect is the rumor that Google might offer other Windows-like services in the future. The technology is there. I signed up for Think-Free Office for a year at $50 and got storage (not a lot as I recall) and a Java based program that would read and write Word, Excell, PowerPoint and some other MS formatted files. It worked pretty well (I tested it on Windows, Linux, and OS X). I didn't renew the account, but the software still works locally. Essentially the $49 was for the disk space, but also included the software and (had I renewed) updates to the software. Were it not for OpenOffice, and the fact that I use Linux almost all the time, I would probably still keep an account. What if, in order to remain competitive in the home-user space, Microsoft is forced to give away Office, or at least bundle it free with all new computers (by whatever arm-twisting means they use to bundle Windows now)? It would b
Now THIS is an interesting article. It touches on several issues at once: Privacy, Honesty, Openness, Conspiracy, Propaganda, Media manipulation... I could go on.
...um... thirty something, combined. OK, its drivel, but if you multiply that by all the Internet users, there is some good stuff out there that would not be out there otherwise. The trick is of course to separate out the good stuff from the drivel. You know, signal to noise ratios and all that. Systems like Slashdot's moderation system help, but they are a long way from perfect yet. In particular...
We all want privacy don't we? Do you really want someone throwing a rock through your window because you said something negative about a group they are a member of on Slashdot?
Open Source is all about, well, openness right? It seems so ironic that a company based on the Open Source philosophy would do such a thing. But how many times have many of us said that Open Source is about freedom to create not about anti-commerce. If it is ever proven that Open Source companies CAN'T be profitable, then I think the future of Open Source will be bleak.
Media manipulation is both harder and easier with the popularity of the Internet. Anyone who wants to can be a publisher now. How many of you regular posters to Slashdot used to write letters to the editor of your local paper on a regular basis? I know I didn't. I've written more on issues I care about in the last 2 years than the previous
Systems such as Slashdot are easy targets for conspiracy. We "rate" one another by name. My real identity MAY be secret, at least if I've been very very careful, but unless I do all my "Karma whoring" under this id and all my controversial posts anonymously, people are going to have a pretty good idea of what cmacb thinks about things. They may have a pretty good idea of what other Internet activities I engage in, who my online friends are, and a lot of other inferences not so easily drawn. Am I comfortable with this? Sometimes I'm not so sure...
The other day I posted what I thought was a perfectly normal reaction to a Slashdot article. I was a bit surprised that it got quickly modded up to a 5 (I really don't care that much about mod points other than the general "acceptability" of what I've said) I was even more surprised though to find myself personally insulted several times in the 14 posts that followed and then shocked to see the posts containing nothing more than insults modded up to 3, 4 and 5 while my original post dropped down to "1 troll". There was nothing the least bit resembling a troll in my post. I didn't bother to defend it though, as I don't want rocks through my window and I had clearly offended a group who, by their own writings, is capable of doing such a thing. Hopefully the fact that they had enough mod points among them to make my post disapear and their insults at me "informative" that they won't be tempted to hunt me down as well.
It made me realize that Slashdot, and several other systems I use just like it, are broken in a serious way. The moderation is good, but allowing me to filter posts based on WHO and individual is is just plain wrong. Some of the best posts I've seen on Slashdot are AC and some of the worst are by other people with good Karma. But I'm more interested in rating the post than the person. Why can't Slashdot (and systems like it) tally the ratings on my posts in such a way that nobody even knows what my ID is? Essentially combining the moderation and meta moderation and providing anonymity at the same time. I thiink that if you rated a particular poster poorly some number of times you would stop seeing their posts, without even knowing who they are or that you had done so. Some people ONLY want to see posts they AGREE with, and those people could rate posts accordingly and they would gradually get their wish. Others (like me) would rate on the "quality" of the posts without regard to agreeing or disagreeing with the content, and event
The shame in all of this is that there was no easy way to formally get the scammer arrested, or at least get him on the record with the authorities there. Ebay is off the hook on this since they were not used for the transaction, the postal service was lied to, etc.
/. editors by this story.
Had the scamee attempted to go through formal channels he would have probably gotten nowhere. In a system such as this that doesn't work very well, it becomes tempting to take matters into your own hands. The thinking goes: Maybe if we can scam a few more of the scammers the scamming will stop. But it won't. In this case the scammer learned a lesson. He'll do a better job of his web page next time, do more to protect himself against the tax and insurance issues. Only next time he will actually succeed in ripping someone off, and his bad experience this time will be more than made up for.
And, if somethingawful was behind this then I question the legitimacy of the whole thing. I've been to their site to investigate some other shenanigans and all I could see were PR stunts designed to generate page hits and drive traffic to advertisers. Every stunt they pull is shortly followed by finding their links all over the place in posts like yours encouraging people to "check this out". Most people over 14 will be offended by what they find there. I hope they haven't hoodwinked the
But only with our patent system. It's a self fulfilling prophesy that if you create an artificial limit on the availability of anything (in this case ideas) that what little remains will become more "valuable". If international trade continues to be the way of the world, only an international patent system with some "World Court" form of adjudication can make it work. Otherwise, we here in the US will continue our circle jerk in our own courts while unfettered innovation will take place somewhere else.
Somethings got to give here. I wish I knew what it would be.
The cue ball hits the earth the first time. The second time, the earth explodes, and the third time it fades out in the manner of an old TV picture (or maybe it's supposed to look like a warp drive effect?). None of the flash animations are particularly large, or interesting. The button joke is cute.
I didn't see much info on the movie at all, other than a single cast photo. Hopefully there will be more.
I called them a couple years ago about a registration issue. I had installed the product more than three times (legitimately, because it had been removed from two of the older computers at this point). I got a third party company who said the computer that they needed to verify my authenticity was down. I was given some sort of fallback universal key (I don't know if it was time limited etc.)
I asked what would happen if at some point in the future I needed to install the program again and was told I would have to call back each time. I asked if Microsoft had a commitment to always have someone there to answer the phone. She didn't know.
That's when I decided to stop using MS products. It was the best event in my 10 years as a customer of the company. I immediately uninstalled the program (FrontPage of all things) and within 15 minutes had located an Open Source program that I actually liked better. The Web browser, word processor and operating system soon followed. It took a few months to adjust, but it was well worth it.
I hope they keep up the good work. Make the product buggy, insecure, hard to use and too expensive. Maybe the US won't be so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to adopting open standards if MS cooperates by alienating their own customer base.
Here, have a virtual mod point.
Did anyone else try and click through the links on their web site? Almost none of them worked for me. I've heard of this organization, but don't really know anything about them. Could it be just 4 or 5 (or even less) otherwise unemployed Georgetown Law graduates pimping for research money? They sure could use a new webmaster.
Forget getting a nice short ID, minimum ID is 6 characters, which ruled out most of my standard picks.
Also spotted an error of sort in the article:
"Gmail also lacks a built-in virus scanner. This is a must-have feature that should be added as soon as possible. Such a filter already exists on MSN Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Given the large number of viruses out there, Gmail should provide some protection against them when users receive attachments. A virus scanner might not catch everything but it will catch quite a lot and every little bit of protection helps."
It could be that this is something that has changed between the time of the review and now (I just got my ID yesterday), but the actually prohibit sending/receiving of executables AT ALL either as an EXE or in any of the popular compression formats.
I suppose you could eventually figure out a way around this. I also figure that they don't want the liability of keeping up with the latest virus definitions. I don't blame them. I don't run Windows anyway.
You are right of course. I didn't mean to say that workers in India have a good deal. I was really referring to the double standard that exists here (USA) of management requiring workers to show up for 8 hours a day, often to work on PC equipment that is inferior to what they have at home, while at the same time, off-shoring work to people they had never seen and would likely never see.
,he was reviewing the project plan that had just come out for the product release that was already in testing. In other words they had a planning and design process in name only, just to satisfy paperwork requirements from above.
As has been pointed out in other threads some of the most successful off-shoring efforts have been as a result of the need to accurately define the requirements to these unseen workers. Many organizations have realized in doing so just how poor their standard planning process has been.
I just talked to a colleague yesterday who told me he was reviewing a project plan that just came out. I mentioned that I had heard he had a lot of the responsibility for the next release. He corrected me... no
The reason software coming out of some organizations is so crappy is that they use crappy methodologies to develop it. Organizations that claim they have CMM level 3 and above certifications (IMHO) often do so only by co-opting the certifying agency with phony paperwork. Participants in this then go around bad-mouthing CMM type methods, and with good reason, since they haven't actually witnessed them being applied.
Use of better design and development methodologies are, in fact, the key in to allowing workers to work from home, work flex hours, or be located thousands of miles away, because, properly applied, what gets measured is the quality of the product rather than some arbitrary amount of face-time.