are the significant differences between fiction books and technical references. In the threads here someone mentions cheap paperbacks, being dropped at the beach, not worth stealing etc. All true for casual fiction. But much of this does not apply to what is mostly a reference book on some hardware/software.
For such reference materials there are two sides to this story:
A particularly good reference work that is about a particularly popular and long lasting subject would of course be worth getting in electronic form for free, especially if the 500-page tomb costs $50 and up retail (as such books often do). But I've bought my share of these and have (or had) bookshelves full of such reference works that I could often get my employer to buy, or claim as a deduction while consulting etc.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few of these reference book and ended up not using them a single time. I could just as well wait until I had a question on a particular subject and taken pen and paper into the nearest Barnes and Noble and written down the answer. I bought these books "just in case" as I'm sure many people do when they get a new OS or new kind of gadget that they think they might need some help with. Would Pogue or authors like him be willing to give refund for unused copies of his book? I rather doubt it.
I think if Pogue as more of a humorist than anything else, his books pretend to be reference works, but like his NYTimes articles are generally more like stand-up routines, long on wit, short on actual information. He is probably a special case, and as such, might not want to be held up to a true usefulness test.
Light reading, not worth stealing? Sure print it in cheap paperback and let people drop it at the beach.
Hard info, repeated reference material? Might do better as a paid subscription service online. People would pay to get the info they need and the more that service proved useful the more they would try and us it. Furthermore, in this form, the more likely it would be that you could support the content with ads rather than subscriptions. That's the direction the world is going for technical info, which means that Pogue should milk his job at NYT for all it is worth. More people are using tools on the web now and expecting to find answers on the web as well, either included with the tool, or for free elsewhere. We aren't abandoning books to save the rain forests, we are abandoning them to use something better and more convenient. Just as I'd rather be typing this than writing it out in long-hand with a fountain pen, I'd rather solve my next puzzling OS X conundrum by doing a Google search than thumbing through fifty dusty books on my bookshelf. In the not too distant future, you will sell your "books" online, or not at all.
And furthermore, more background on the reasons for the move would be fun. For example, do you have some inside information about California that we could all use? There has been quite a bit of earthquake activity around the world lately.
I can't tell the insinuations from the attempts at humor, but given the already extraordinary complexity of the thing it is hard to view that picture and not wonder what the *added* risk is for an accidental destruct signal vs and equal if not greater loss that could be suffered from such a complex and never used system failing to work. Since at the time of use, the Shuttle would not be connected to that console via actual wires, we are considering a set of two or three "radio" signals that would differentiate these various functions and then the wiring possibilities at the console vs the wiring possibilities in the Shuttle. I think I'd be less concerned that the Shuttle would fail to blow up and more concerned that is would blow up due to a wiring fault or an error in a signal processing circuit somewhere.
In seven pages of blathering on, the only thing worth reading in the article is this:
If--as I hope is the case--we are the only intelligent species that has ever evolved in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire observable universe, it does not follow that our survival is not in danger. Nothing in the preceding reasoning precludes there being steps in the Great Filter both behind us and ahead of us. It might be extremely improbable both that intelligent life should arise on any given planet and that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space.
So, six and a half pages to explain tis filter concept, and a single paragraph to point out it doesn't matter anyway.
Here is my theory, just based on personal experience, with no hard facts (but some rationales) to back it up:
Companies know more about their revenue sources than they are required to report. FASB rules require them to be consistent about how they report, but they are also allowed to change how they report from time to time. You can "book" revenue from a sale immediately, or spread it out over time, or put it off until all product is delivered if you want.
In the 2000 time-frame I worked for a large organization that signed a volume purchase agreement (VPA) with Microsoft. I don't know when MS started using these VPAs, but I do remember reading that they changed the way they "booked" them about that time too.
I remember us having to come up with a count, which was really an estimate, of how many Windows PCs we had. I know the count was more of a wild ass guess than it was a count, and the count was rounded up to satisfy MS and (theoretically) get a lower unit cost.
We were running 2000, and nowhere near ready to convert to XP, so in effect, we were paying a second time for software we already had. No worry though, says MS, the contract includes an upgrade to XP, whenever you decided to do it, that is, as long as it is within five years, after which you do another VPA. Do I have to spell out the rest of the story?
My guess is that the number of deals such as this is large (the entire Federal government agency by agency for a start) and when MS makes claims about the number of 2000, or XP, or Vista licenses out there it's all accounting tricks, after all, we didn't get an actual copy of any MS products for each machine we ran. Instead we installed off the net, or from copies of copies of copies of the original disks. No need to mess with those fancy laser printed product keys.
Yes, there was a costs "savings" for these VPAs, but the savings failed to take into account that fact that the machines were purchased with Windows already installed, previous licenses had paid for the software again, VPA1 had paid again, and VPA2 paid yet a fourth time. The savings MIGHT materialize if there were more frequent product releases from Microsoft (but guess who controls that) and only then only if the customer were able to upgrade almost immediately (something the technical people know wasn't going to happen, but then the company/government negotiators are not generally technical people).
So, when MS does their quarterly reports on how many licenses of various products they have sold I figure they are about as accurate as a weather forecast for this day next month.
The difference between these "booked" numbers and what MS deposits into the bank every quarter gives them a lot of room to paint a rosy picture when things are dropping off. If that is the case, and they make subsequent cuts or change their business in some drastic way those ruts in income stream can be smoothed out and the problem resolved without stockholders ever noticing.
Of course these book-cooking operations can't cure a monotonically decreasing income picture. The actions you have to take in the background get more and more drastic. MS COULD use the billions they have in the bank to pay off any shortfalls they have, but that doesn't impress the stock market. If instead, you do something to drastically change the way you keep your books, say merge with another large company, spend most of your cash, stock swaps, redundancy layoffs... Some of these actions MAY actually improve your picture, but even if they don't you get an excellent opportunity to obscure the picture even further and a chance to promise shareholders that once the merger costs are absorbed, things will be wonderful again.
That's what I think is going on here, and because I think Yahoo has been playing similar games, no matter if the merger goes through or not, both companies are going to face dismal futures unless they make ACTUAL changes to their business models rather than superficial ones. (And did mention the long term costs of ignoring your customers actual needs while you tinkered with your company spreadsheets?)
I would hope that Wordpress and other are ahead of Blogger on features. If you only do one thing, you had better do it very very well, especially if you have an option to charge people for its use. I have no desire to pay for the privilege of blogging and I'm not obsessed about how many readers I have (nor do I expect to ever make any money doing it), so Blogger is a good fit for me. If any of those three factors were different, I'd probably pick something else, including the possibility of renting a server and hacking together something totally unique.
Given their money, with fairly little effort I think Google could put Wordpress and other specialty blog programs out of business. Unlike Microsoft, I don't think part of Google's mindset is eliminating all competitors everywhere. A good example of that was the recent Campfire fiasco, where Google threw together a quick and dirty application example that was almost identical to a for-pay product from another company. The other company complained, Google nixed the example product (in this case as the function was so trivial, without a lot of bells and whistles, I don't think they should have).
The prices for individual tracks seem to vary between 89 and 99 cents (although all I have purchased were 89). You don't even need ANY special software to download a single track, those are just web based downloads, plain and simple.
The complaint had been about albums though, for which they force you to have the software, which seems rather odd. Album prices vary a lot, but my guess is that in most cases are less than the iTunes price and always less than the CD price.
The main advantage of buying the album rather than all the individual cuts, other than the convenience of a single click, is that you get a discount over the individual cut prices, same as iTunes. I guess if you want to get the album, they don't want to keep track of which tracks you have or have not already downloaded and so forcing you into the application makes their accounting easier. (That's the only rationale I've come up with).
One other thing I like about Amazon... If I get it in my head that I want a particular album or track, I can go to Amazon and almost always find it. If they have the download I am likely to buy it that way. If not though, I'm right there at the CD page and can have it mailed. Download or no download my shopping is done. If iTunes doesn't have it, I end up having to go to Amazon anyway. Considering that I immediately convert all my iTunes purchase to MP3, the Amazon experience is a lot faster in most cases.
I didn't have to install a special software client (this turned me away from the amazon store),
I had a similar distaste for yet another vendor "utility". But as Amazon did at least make the effort to work cross-platform I decided to try it on my current stable Debian machine. I had to satisfy one dependency via "apt-get", after which the Amazon utility installed very gracefully, inserting menu items into my KDE desktop and all. As far as I can tell all it does is act as the download agent and drop the files into a special directory, using sub-directories named as artist and album name (which is exactly what I would have done by hand). The files are high quality MP3. Yes, a FLAC option would be nice but at the bit rate they use I don't think I could tell the difference.
I had been using iTunes previously, but I don't want to be locked into always having OS X available as I am one of those weird people who prefer Linux to OS X.
"I'm always interested in hearing from you on these and other issues."
Your products suck. They threaten people's hardware, waste their time, cost them too much both in dollars and in lost productivity. They have created a far too large an infrastructure of people who could be made more productive elsewhere (MCSE and the like = Amway pyramid schemes). Furthermore they pollute useful infrastructure used by non-Microsoft solutions by serving as a growth medium for malware and by causing millions of Windows users who can't rid themselves of your products to run helplessly to those who have for help. Ultimately as with any widespread systemic defect, your products cost lives.
"Seriously, unless the Google version clearly took a trademark or other creative content from them *or* literally took actual CODE from them, then who the hell cares?"
Apparently people who work for 37signals, and all their family and friends, and friends of friends. The Google group on this seemed to have about 3 to 1 diatribes about how evil it was to steal this pathetic concept. If I were Google I would have just told them to screw themselves... but the bad PR 37signals will get for being wuss programmers may be just as good.
I reserve the right to overreact whenever companies choose ordinary English language words as names for their companies or products and then expect the rest of us to stop using those words. "Windows", "Office", and "Apple" are three great examples of companies getting to big for their britches when it comes to product names.
New York has been called the Big Apple since before Steve Jobs was sperm and egg:
The Beatles had used the word, but always as "Apple Records". You almost never heard the record label referred to as just "Apple" except in the second or third use of the term in an article on the subject.
Likewise, "Apple Computer" wasn't too offensive when the company was still called that.
I am a supporter of the company, except when they do incredibly stupid things, which seems to be a more frequent occurrence as of late.
The last thing they need to have happen is to have themselves enter the consumer psyche as "Son of Microsoft", the new schoolyard bully. But that seems to be exactly where they are going. Maybe Steve should go have a talk with the other Steve (now that would be a good lawsuit!) about how hard it is to get your reputation back. Short answer: You can't. Better to protect the one you have while it is good.
And before you point it out: I know the dispute is over a logo, and not the name, but that is a side effect. If I name my snazzy new software "Car" it is totally irrational to expect GM and Toyota to stop using pictures of automobiles in their advertising. By picking a common name for your company or product you are so to speak building on the shoulders of giants, or one might invoke the term "prior art". If you want to do that, fine. But others should have just as much right to use that name (including representative logos) as you do. To me that is just common sense. I suspect it is to most people too.
In a perfect world, not only would Apple lose, but they would also lose their right to do business in New York, their stores would be confiscated and turned over to the homeless.
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:
"In Windows NT 4.0, drivers were moved into kernel mode to improve performance. However, when a kernel-mode driver fails, it can crash an entire system, whereas the failure of a user-mode driver causes only the current process to crash."
In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
don't know why people are getting their knickers in a knot over Google, when the main problem lies with the US backbone carriers,"
I think Google is just a convenient target since they are number one. It's sort of like blaming all the bad stuff that happens with PCs on Microsoft. Wait, that's a bad analogy. Everything bad that happens with PC actually is Microsoft's fault. Well, anyway, you get the idea.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but my disdain for management of Iraq and such aside, I didn't see anything about the Bush administration in the article."
You obviously don't know how the Internet works. It works using arbitrary computer epochs. Everything bad that has happened since Jan 1, 1900 is Bush's fault. Everything good that has happened since that date is thanks to Bill Clinton.
Of course the real problem with the rovers is that they run on gasoline and as we know the price is uh... astronomical on Mars thanks to the Bush foreign policy and his policy on illegal aliens. What we need is a President who will mandate a 35 cent a gallon gas price so we can all sit in lines around the block like we did in the 70s.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Sir or Madam:
We had hoped you wouldn't notice that, and would appreciate your not pointing it out to others.
Sincerely,
Microsoft Marketing
are the significant differences between fiction books and technical references. In the threads here someone mentions cheap paperbacks, being dropped at the beach, not worth stealing etc. All true for casual fiction. But much of this does not apply to what is mostly a reference book on some hardware/software.
For such reference materials there are two sides to this story:
A particularly good reference work that is about a particularly popular and long lasting subject would of course be worth getting in electronic form for free, especially if the 500-page tomb costs $50 and up retail (as such books often do). But I've bought my share of these and have (or had) bookshelves full of such reference works that I could often get my employer to buy, or claim as a deduction while consulting etc.
On the other hand, I've bought quite a few of these reference book and ended up not using them a single time. I could just as well wait until I had a question on a particular subject and taken pen and paper into the nearest Barnes and Noble and written down the answer. I bought these books "just in case" as I'm sure many people do when they get a new OS or new kind of gadget that they think they might need some help with. Would Pogue or authors like him be willing to give refund for unused copies of his book? I rather doubt it.
I think if Pogue as more of a humorist than anything else, his books pretend to be reference works, but like his NYTimes articles are generally more like stand-up routines, long on wit, short on actual information. He is probably a special case, and as such, might not want to be held up to a true usefulness test.
Light reading, not worth stealing? Sure print it in cheap paperback and let people drop it at the beach.
Hard info, repeated reference material? Might do better as a paid subscription service online. People would pay to get the info they need and the more that service proved useful the more they would try and us it. Furthermore, in this form, the more likely it would be that you could support the content with ads rather than subscriptions. That's the direction the world is going for technical info, which means that Pogue should milk his job at NYT for all it is worth. More people are using tools on the web now and expecting to find answers on the web as well, either included with the tool, or for free elsewhere. We aren't abandoning books to save the rain forests, we are abandoning them to use something better and more convenient. Just as I'd rather be typing this than writing it out in long-hand with a fountain pen, I'd rather solve my next puzzling OS X conundrum by doing a Google search than thumbing through fifty dusty books on my bookshelf. In the not too distant future, you will sell your "books" online, or not at all.
...or seahorses.
Also remember Ballmer makes his kids use it.
I think Bill has switched to Google at home though.
And furthermore, more background on the reasons for the move would be fun. For example, do you have some inside information about California that we could all use? There has been quite a bit of earthquake activity around the world lately.
I can't tell the insinuations from the attempts at humor, but given the already extraordinary complexity of the thing it is hard to view that picture and not wonder what the *added* risk is for an accidental destruct signal vs and equal if not greater loss that could be suffered from such a complex and never used system failing to work. Since at the time of use, the Shuttle would not be connected to that console via actual wires, we are considering a set of two or three "radio" signals that would differentiate these various functions and then the wiring possibilities at the console vs the wiring possibilities in the Shuttle. I think I'd be less concerned that the Shuttle would fail to blow up and more concerned that is would blow up due to a wiring fault or an error in a signal processing circuit somewhere.
I knew my tap water tasted funny.
No, I think it's more like moving to a gated community vs changing the lock on your doors every day or two.
So, six and a half pages to explain tis filter concept, and a single paragraph to point out it doesn't matter anyway.
To Technology Review: Cancel My Subscription.
A career in Real Estate?
Here is my theory, just based on personal experience, with no hard facts (but some rationales) to back it up:
Companies know more about their revenue sources than they are required to report. FASB rules require them to be consistent about how they report, but they are also allowed to change how they report from time to time. You can "book" revenue from a sale immediately, or spread it out over time, or put it off until all product is delivered if you want.
In the 2000 time-frame I worked for a large organization that signed a volume purchase agreement (VPA) with Microsoft. I don't know when MS started using these VPAs, but I do remember reading that they changed the way they "booked" them about that time too.
I remember us having to come up with a count, which was really an estimate, of how many Windows PCs we had. I know the count was more of a wild ass guess than it was a count, and the count was rounded up to satisfy MS and (theoretically) get a lower unit cost.
We were running 2000, and nowhere near ready to convert to XP, so in effect, we were paying a second time for software we already had. No worry though, says MS, the contract includes an upgrade to XP, whenever you decided to do it, that is, as long as it is within five years, after which you do another VPA. Do I have to spell out the rest of the story?
My guess is that the number of deals such as this is large (the entire Federal government agency by agency for a start) and when MS makes claims about the number of 2000, or XP, or Vista licenses out there it's all accounting tricks, after all, we didn't get an actual copy of any MS products for each machine we ran. Instead we installed off the net, or from copies of copies of copies of the original disks. No need to mess with those fancy laser printed product keys.
Yes, there was a costs "savings" for these VPAs, but the savings failed to take into account that fact that the machines were purchased with Windows already installed, previous licenses had paid for the software again, VPA1 had paid again, and VPA2 paid yet a fourth time. The savings MIGHT materialize if there were more frequent product releases from Microsoft (but guess who controls that) and only then only if the customer were able to upgrade almost immediately (something the technical people know wasn't going to happen, but then the company/government negotiators are not generally technical people).
So, when MS does their quarterly reports on how many licenses of various products they have sold I figure they are about as accurate as a weather forecast for this day next month.
The difference between these "booked" numbers and what MS deposits into the bank every quarter gives them a lot of room to paint a rosy picture when things are dropping off. If that is the case, and they make subsequent cuts or change their business in some drastic way those ruts in income stream can be smoothed out and the problem resolved without stockholders ever noticing.
Of course these book-cooking operations can't cure a monotonically decreasing income picture. The actions you have to take in the background get more and more drastic. MS COULD use the billions they have in the bank to pay off any shortfalls they have, but that doesn't impress the stock market. If instead, you do something to drastically change the way you keep your books, say merge with another large company, spend most of your cash, stock swaps, redundancy layoffs... Some of these actions MAY actually improve your picture, but even if they don't you get an excellent opportunity to obscure the picture even further and a chance to promise shareholders that once the merger costs are absorbed, things will be wonderful again.
That's what I think is going on here, and because I think Yahoo has been playing similar games, no matter if the merger goes through or not, both companies are going to face dismal futures unless they make ACTUAL changes to their business models rather than superficial ones. (And did mention the long term costs of ignoring your customers actual needs while you tinkered with your company spreadsheets?)
I just keep looking at my thin avatar and thinking "hey! I can have all the twinkies I want!"
I would hope that Wordpress and other are ahead of Blogger on features. If you only do one thing, you had better do it very very well, especially if you have an option to charge people for its use. I have no desire to pay for the privilege of blogging and I'm not obsessed about how many readers I have (nor do I expect to ever make any money doing it), so Blogger is a good fit for me. If any of those three factors were different, I'd probably pick something else, including the possibility of renting a server and hacking together something totally unique.
Given their money, with fairly little effort I think Google could put Wordpress and other specialty blog programs out of business. Unlike Microsoft, I don't think part of Google's mindset is eliminating all competitors everywhere. A good example of that was the recent Campfire fiasco, where Google threw together a quick and dirty application example that was almost identical to a for-pay product from another company. The other company complained, Google nixed the example product (in this case as the function was so trivial, without a lot of bells and whistles, I don't think they should have).
I'm not sure what the term means, but I'm fairly sure I have a lot of it.
The prices for individual tracks seem to vary between 89 and 99 cents (although all I have purchased were 89). You don't even need ANY special software to download a single track, those are just web based downloads, plain and simple.
The complaint had been about albums though, for which they force you to have the software, which seems rather odd. Album prices vary a lot, but my guess is that in most cases are less than the iTunes price and always less than the CD price.
The main advantage of buying the album rather than all the individual cuts, other than the convenience of a single click, is that you get a discount over the individual cut prices, same as iTunes. I guess if you want to get the album, they don't want to keep track of which tracks you have or have not already downloaded and so forcing you into the application makes their accounting easier. (That's the only rationale I've come up with).
One other thing I like about Amazon... If I get it in my head that I want a particular album or track, I can go to Amazon and almost always find it. If they have the download I am likely to buy it that way. If not though, I'm right there at the CD page and can have it mailed. Download or no download my shopping is done. If iTunes doesn't have it, I end up having to go to Amazon anyway. Considering that I immediately convert all my iTunes purchase to MP3, the Amazon experience is a lot faster in most cases.
I had a similar distaste for yet another vendor "utility". But as Amazon did at least make the effort to work cross-platform I decided to try it on my current stable Debian machine. I had to satisfy one dependency via "apt-get", after which the Amazon utility installed very gracefully, inserting menu items into my KDE desktop and all. As far as I can tell all it does is act as the download agent and drop the files into a special directory, using sub-directories named as artist and album name (which is exactly what I would have done by hand). The files are high quality MP3. Yes, a FLAC option would be nice but at the bit rate they use I don't think I could tell the difference.
I had been using iTunes previously, but I don't want to be locked into always having OS X available as I am one of those weird people who prefer Linux to OS X.
Everyone knows that Bill gates "solved" spam years ago...
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256579_software23.asp
Your products suck. They threaten people's hardware, waste their time, cost them too much both in dollars and in lost productivity. They have created a far too large an infrastructure of people who could be made more productive elsewhere (MCSE and the like = Amway pyramid schemes). Furthermore they pollute useful infrastructure used by non-Microsoft solutions by serving as a growth medium for malware and by causing millions of Windows users who can't rid themselves of your products to run helplessly to those who have for help. Ultimately as with any widespread systemic defect, your products cost lives.
Please go to hell. And take Windows with you.
Thanks for listening.
"Seriously, unless the Google version clearly took a trademark or other creative content from them *or* literally took actual CODE from them, then who the hell cares?"
Apparently people who work for 37signals, and all their family and friends, and friends of friends. The Google group on this seemed to have about 3 to 1 diatribes about how evil it was to steal this pathetic concept. If I were Google I would have just told them to screw themselves... but the bad PR 37signals will get for being wuss programmers may be just as good.
This is a subject CMACB is interested in, but he is tied up right now. I'll let him know about it tomorrow morning at breakfast.
--
CMACB's toaster
I reserve the right to overreact whenever companies choose ordinary English language words as names for their companies or products and then expect the rest of us to stop using those words. "Windows", "Office", and "Apple" are three great examples of companies getting to big for their britches when it comes to product names.
New York has been called the Big Apple since before Steve Jobs was sperm and egg:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Apple
The Beatles had used the word, but always as "Apple Records". You almost never heard the record label referred to as just "Apple" except in the second or third use of the term in an article on the subject.
Likewise, "Apple Computer" wasn't too offensive when the company was still called that.
I am a supporter of the company, except when they do incredibly stupid things, which seems to be a more frequent occurrence as of late.
The last thing they need to have happen is to have themselves enter the consumer psyche as "Son of Microsoft", the new schoolyard bully. But that seems to be exactly where they are going. Maybe Steve should go have a talk with the other Steve (now that would be a good lawsuit!) about how hard it is to get your reputation back. Short answer: You can't. Better to protect the one you have while it is good.
And before you point it out: I know the dispute is over a logo, and not the name, but that is a side effect. If I name my snazzy new software "Car" it is totally irrational to expect GM and Toyota to stop using pictures of automobiles in their advertising. By picking a common name for your company or product you are so to speak building on the shoulders of giants, or one might invoke the term "prior art". If you want to do that, fine. But others should have just as much right to use that name (including representative logos) as you do. To me that is just common sense. I suspect it is to most people too.
A rare case where no other term will quite do.
In a perfect world, not only would Apple lose, but they would also lose their right to do business in New York, their stores would be confiscated and turned over to the homeless.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/eb1936c0-e19c-4a17-a1a8-39292e4929a41033.mspx?mfr=true
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
don't know why people are getting their knickers in a knot over Google, when the main problem lies with the US backbone carriers,"
I think Google is just a convenient target since they are number one. It's sort of like blaming all the bad stuff that happens with PCs on Microsoft. Wait, that's a bad analogy. Everything bad that happens with PC actually is Microsoft's fault. Well, anyway, you get the idea.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but my disdain for management of Iraq and such aside, I didn't see anything about the Bush administration in the article."
You obviously don't know how the Internet works. It works using arbitrary computer epochs. Everything bad that has happened since Jan 1, 1900 is Bush's fault. Everything good that has happened since that date is thanks to Bill Clinton.
Of course the real problem with the rovers is that they run on gasoline and as we know the price is uh... astronomical on Mars thanks to the Bush foreign policy and his policy on illegal aliens. What we need is a President who will mandate a 35 cent a gallon gas price so we can all sit in lines around the block like we did in the 70s.