I doubt Coolio got much he was quite upset about the song being released. He felt Gangsta Paradise was a serious song, and that Wierd Al's version killed the spirit in which it was made. I don't think he would have accepted any royalties for the rights to make Amish Paradise.
Just so you know verbal contacts can be enforced. I don't rembember the exact specifics (there encoded in the UCC which mostly codified English common law in to a national standard) but I think, that if the verbal agreement is for goods with more than $100 in value there must be some written reference to the contract. The written item doesn't have to be the contract, any reference to it works. Also I am not a lawyer, so don't blame me when your $99 verbal contract gets thrown out of court.
Most likely it will be Sun. They are planning to introduce a X86 linux workstation/entry level server, in May. This leaves AMD, Intel and Via, since Intel is their main rival, and via's chips are better suited for other purposes, AMD has to be the likely company, for this contract. I would guess that it will be introduced on athlon MP first, but hammer has to be on the roadmap for these systems.
I recall one study that showed that Staph bactiria dont attack until the reach a certain size, to prevent a small number from triggering an immune response, but I dont remember the study indicated the communication was airborne. The goal was to block the communication to attack to prevent staph infections.
Dell has an eight port Gb switch for about 500 not too long ago. I think they are loss leading their networking stuff to get you to pay up for their more expensive severs and storage. Here is a link so you can spec it yourself. You have to drop the support option to 1 year and shipping is extra but its an 8 port gigabit switch over coper.
Although my CD purchases have increased significantly since napster was started, I didn't have a CD player before it was founded. Just so you know music retailers in college towns experienced a quite significant decline in sales. Except college students most people didn't have a connection that would allow them to replace their CD connection with MP3s. The decline was especially large in singles, which makes sense, people generally started with hits of bands that they didn't like the whole CD well enough to pay $16. Certainly there are many variables that affect this includign the growth of Wal-mart and Costco, and the rise of Amazon, and E-bay etc. as a place to purchase music which was also led by connected people. So while it doesn't prove much it was an interesting study.
I also own nearly all the mp3s I have on CDs. Both because I got tired of the crappy rips and encodes, and out of an obligation to do the right thing.
Its similar to why that pentium 4 costs 200-600 when the silica inside might have gone for a penny if it were still sand. Its an exmpensive manufacturing process.
On a side note, Aluminum was once quite similar in cost, I believe it was Napolion, or one of the kings of France just before the revolution whose personal goblet was made of pure aluminum, lesser nobles got gold or silver.
Until you get an am-ex black card, it don't mean a thing. The black card (Centurian Card is American Express' highest card you have to be invited, and there is no credit limit, they will find anything for you, you get free first class upgrades, room upgrades, and European cells phones when you travel to Europe.
The catch one of several qualifiers is to spend more than $150,000 per year on their current american express cards.
I always stuck with the Laser cannons you could put on the interceptors, and hoarded my elerium for a rainy day. I think it was the laser cannon that had the best profit per hour of engineering time.
I wasted more time playing X-Com than about any other thing computer related for nearly two years. I finally stopped when my dreams included that flashing alien indicator in the bottom right. Its the only game that I got scared playing, the first night terror mission with etherials.
Too true, we had to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school, that had to be the worst book I ever read. In fact I didn't finish it, and its the only book that I'm not going to go back and try to finish. It was certainly not an appropriate book, in terms of level of difficulty only, for any sort of pre-college literature course.
On a side note, why is it that society holds extremely diffiuclt books to read and follow up as something good. I am quite positive that if I ever wrote an essay as convoluted as something by Joyce, there is no way I would pass the class, but his stuff is enshrined as a classic.
Microsoft has almost $40 billion in cash and US government bonds (one of the most liquid investments). No debt they could easily borrow up to $40 billion and earned about $6 billion last year. EA's market capitalization (stock market value) is about $9 billion, Sony's market capitalization is about $48 billion. Even factoring a 50% premium EA would could be purchased by microsoft with available cash. Sony is a more difficult purchase because of regulatory issues and corporate holding dfferences(most japanese companies have much higher cross holdings than US companies so it might not be possible to purchase). Sony has about the same amount of assets as Microsoft, but has less cash, about $6 billion, almost $20 billion in debt, and only earns about $1-2 billion a year.
This gives microsoft tremendous financial flexability to eat losses, while gaining market share. And it seems to me that both Sony's and Microsoft's goal is to use a successful platform in peoples living rooms to start delivering content movies, television, or even Office subscriptions. This is the incentive microsoft has to keep working on a market they will take losses on, they hope to eventually sell the software that serves the content their installed base of clients works with.
A lawyer and activisim group would be like the ACLU or Judicial Watch, they are groups that change laws or policy through lawsuits and things related to the courts. They could sue bureaucratic agencies over laws that they don't like (to prevent enforcement), defend cases aligned with their beliefs, and file amicus curae briefs (friend of the court for those who skipped civics the day the courts were discussed).
PACs take a more direct role in the law making process. They would do things like campaing and raise funds for frendly congressional representatives and senators, write the drafts for bills, and rally support in the media for and against bills they support or oppose.
In practical terms using the SSSCA (CBDTPA) as an example, a PAC would lobby opposition in congress or the senate before it passed, while the EFF would sue to prevent enforcment and hopefully get it overturned in the court system.
They use CDMA and the current 3G network is, I believe, a W-CDMA network. GSM and GPRS will migrate to CDMA 2000 as their 3G networks. Its only currently availible in Tokio, and works pretty well. I have heard complaints about the handsets short battery life and heat dissipation. Most of the reason that cellular technologies aren't as common in the US is the precense of cheap landline phone service, and much lower population density. Its tough and expensive to provide universal cellular coverage in the sparsely populated mountain region in the western US.
This has a lot less to do whit current laws, but with the old deals that Ma Bell made to keep thier monopoly in the early days of phones. They promised to provide universal service if they could remian the only provider of telecomm services. They were quite successful, more people have phone service than indoor plumbing. However because of this they don't buy cell phones in the same numbers as people in other countries.
Enjoy it whaile it lasts, the 845 Chipset loved by OEMs because they can lower systems costs by using cheaper DRAM doesn't have on-board video, once the 845G & GL are introduced with onboard video, the separate and generally pretty nice video cards that were offered will be no more.
On a side note last month Dell had a deal which was less than the component prices with out shipping on either. I think the biggest reasons for self assembly are Linux, BSD, or pirating windows and overclocking or choosing the individual components like better mobos etc. Also remember that the white box market keeps the big guys honest. I would guess that if components were not freely available prices for PCs would be much closer to those of sgi's or sun's unix boxes.
I would guess that it comes from the inability to see the non-verbal cues that people can't type. Most of communication is non verbal, I don't believe the 90% figures, but I would guess that its above 50%, when you read something that is typed you don't hear the intonation, or see the facial expressions and body language of the speaker. Because of this it is much easier to mistake a subtle joke with an angry rant, or an honest question.
For most of the MMORPGs as well as some of the clickfests, most of the appeal to long lasting players is the gambling. Think of the similarities of one of these games to a slot machine. You repeat a simple excercise, insert a quarter, click on a monster repeatedly, complete a quest, and a reward of varying value is randomly given to you.
This fills a response that keeps people playing. If you want to see this in action yourself, a simple experment requries three people and a chalk/whiteboard or large sheet of paper. Have each of them come into a room one at a time, and give the first a mark on for each word, the second a mark for every third word, and the last one random marks after words. In most cases the third person will talk for a much longer time than the other two.
This seems like a logistical nightmare to me. Think of all the programs that you use that have the potential to expire. This is just a guess but I would guess that the average linux distro uses something in the neighborhood of 1000 programs. Imagine trying to find and edit each program's kill setting.
Even if only 10% of these developers impliment the idea, you still have to find the 100 programs that have this feature and not knowing which means checking all of them or looking through the documentation. Especially if each time you updated the software you had to edit this out, it would become very unmanagable.
As best I can tell, please tell me if I'm wrong but that is almost exactly what EMC does for their NAS products. The processors are PowerPC, I think, but they use their own OS and controlling software. Hitachi has an excellent Storage primer, its very basic and written for nontechnical stock analysts (in pdf) here. Unfortunatly it hangs the conversion tool. It also crashed at work under Winn 98 (fine under Win2k) when printing at about page 185. The link is to the file which is quite large (about 6 megs). I found it to be rather useful but somewhat basic. Also, EMC usually charges at least $100k for their wheel. Veritas sells just the software. I would doubt its cheap, but probably less than writing your own comparable product.
I also feel this way, perhaps it varies from area to area, and obviously not all of them are competely dumb, but as an example the local guy at my staples told me that the differences between a Radeon and GeForce 2 didn't matter since ATI had bought N'Vidia. Thats just one of several examples of the info I've gotten from them. It makes me pity the poor souls who go in there thinking these guys know their stuff.
I understand completely, I hate reading the op/ed pieces in Business week. They aren't just pro free enterprise. While I am pretty conservative, they are always just looking for business subsidies. Even if I agree with their premise, it still makes me mad to read their begging, without any good reasons as to why its good for anyone else.
6' in diameter fifty foot high oaks are not used for paper. Fast growing 10-20 year old trees like poplars are. They are grown on farms until their growth slows harvested and replanted. Reducing paper consomption to 0 would not save any old growth trees. They are all used for construction, furniture, and other lumber purposes. Its just that there is a lot less support for slowing construction or buying non wood furniture than there is for paper recycling.
Also, most of the CO2 cycle takes place in the worlds oceans, not forests. Don't get me wrong forests are important, but most of the imporatance comes from recrational and ecological uses, like the bird example you mentioned.
I think he is talking about much larger rolls Like those used in newspaper printing. They are about 6' 2 m in diameter.
An answer to slashdot's liquidity problems
on
30-pin SIMMs
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot should become a replacement Ebay, they have an large audiance, and people are already using it to buy and sell stuff. Now they just have to get a cut of the sales, and that will pay for more servers/storage/bandwidth/cars/food.
I had to write a pretty large paper on the anti-trust trial for a class. Which meant that I had to read both the DOJ & MSFT's proposed findings of fact. In the DOJ's one of the stories was about IBM and Compaq, who both came close to losing their windows license. The Compaq part is detailed here, starting in section 203. Compaq started a marketing agreement with AOL at the height of the browser wars, after the threatend loss of their license they capitulated and were granted the lowest price for Windows of all OEMs.
The IBM part is detailed starting in section 67. IBM didn't get a license untill 15 minues before windows 95's launch! Because they wanted to bundle smart suite.
Before reading this I supported Microsoft in the trial, after reading about these two companies, I realized that they had been quite blatent in their monpolizing of whatever they wanted to get today.
The one that gets me is people who don't turn their phone off in church. Now, I understand its easy to forget to turn the thing off, but then they answer it and procede to have a conversation, in church! While I respect everyone's decision of religion, what kind of person decides to attend church but then that whom ever is on the other end of the phone is more important than God.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt Coolio got much he was quite upset about the song being released. He felt Gangsta Paradise was a serious song, and that Wierd Al's version killed the spirit in which it was made. I don't think he would have accepted any royalties for the rights to make Amish Paradise.
Just so you know verbal contacts can be enforced. I don't rembember the exact specifics (there encoded in the UCC which mostly codified English common law in to a national standard) but I think, that if the verbal agreement is for goods with more than $100 in value there must be some written reference to the contract. The written item doesn't have to be the contract, any reference to it works. Also I am not a lawyer, so don't blame me when your $99 verbal contract gets thrown out of court.
Most likely it will be Sun. They are planning to introduce a X86 linux workstation/entry level server, in May. This leaves AMD, Intel and Via, since Intel is their main rival, and via's chips are better suited for other purposes, AMD has to be the likely company, for this contract. I would guess that it will be introduced on athlon MP first, but hammer has to be on the roadmap for these systems.
I recall one study that showed that Staph bactiria dont attack until the reach a certain size, to prevent a small number from triggering an immune response, but I dont remember the study indicated the communication was airborne. The goal was to block the communication to attack to prevent staph infections.
Dell has an eight port Gb switch for about 500 not too long ago. I think they are loss leading their networking stuff to get you to pay up for their more expensive severs and storage. Here is a link so you can spec it yourself. You have to drop the support option to 1 year and shipping is extra but its an 8 port gigabit switch over coper.
Although my CD purchases have increased significantly since napster was started, I didn't have a CD player before it was founded. Just so you know music retailers in college towns experienced a quite significant decline in sales. Except college students most people didn't have a connection that would allow them to replace their CD connection with MP3s. The decline was especially large in singles, which makes sense, people generally started with hits of bands that they didn't like the whole CD well enough to pay $16. Certainly there are many variables that affect this includign the growth of Wal-mart and Costco, and the rise of Amazon, and E-bay etc. as a place to purchase music which was also led by connected people. So while it doesn't prove much it was an interesting study. I also own nearly all the mp3s I have on CDs. Both because I got tired of the crappy rips and encodes, and out of an obligation to do the right thing.
Its similar to why that pentium 4 costs 200-600 when the silica inside might have gone for a penny if it were still sand. Its an exmpensive manufacturing process. On a side note, Aluminum was once quite similar in cost, I believe it was Napolion, or one of the kings of France just before the revolution whose personal goblet was made of pure aluminum, lesser nobles got gold or silver.
Until you get an am-ex black card, it don't mean a thing. The black card (Centurian Card is American Express' highest card you have to be invited, and there is no credit limit, they will find anything for you, you get free first class upgrades, room upgrades, and European cells phones when you travel to Europe.
The catch one of several qualifiers is to spend more than $150,000 per year on their current american express cards.
I always stuck with the Laser cannons you could put on the interceptors, and hoarded my elerium for a rainy day. I think it was the laser cannon that had the best profit per hour of engineering time. I wasted more time playing X-Com than about any other thing computer related for nearly two years. I finally stopped when my dreams included that flashing alien indicator in the bottom right. Its the only game that I got scared playing, the first night terror mission with etherials.
Too true, we had to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school, that had to be the worst book I ever read. In fact I didn't finish it, and its the only book that I'm not going to go back and try to finish. It was certainly not an appropriate book, in terms of level of difficulty only, for any sort of pre-college literature course.
On a side note, why is it that society holds extremely diffiuclt books to read and follow up as something good. I am quite positive that if I ever wrote an essay as convoluted as something by Joyce, there is no way I would pass the class, but his stuff is enshrined as a classic.
Microsoft has almost $40 billion in cash and US government bonds (one of the most liquid investments). No debt they could easily borrow up to $40 billion and earned about $6 billion last year. EA's market capitalization (stock market value) is about $9 billion, Sony's market capitalization is about $48 billion. Even factoring a 50% premium EA would could be purchased by microsoft with available cash. Sony is a more difficult purchase because of regulatory issues and corporate holding dfferences(most japanese companies have much higher cross holdings than US companies so it might not be possible to purchase). Sony has about the same amount of assets as Microsoft, but has less cash, about $6 billion, almost $20 billion in debt, and only earns about $1-2 billion a year.
This gives microsoft tremendous financial flexability to eat losses, while gaining market share. And it seems to me that both Sony's and Microsoft's goal is to use a successful platform in peoples living rooms to start delivering content movies, television, or even Office subscriptions. This is the incentive microsoft has to keep working on a market they will take losses on, they hope to eventually sell the software that serves the content their installed base of clients works with.
A lawyer and activisim group would be like the ACLU or Judicial Watch, they are groups that change laws or policy through lawsuits and things related to the courts. They could sue bureaucratic agencies over laws that they don't like (to prevent enforcement), defend cases aligned with their beliefs, and file amicus curae briefs (friend of the court for those who skipped civics the day the courts were discussed).
PACs take a more direct role in the law making process. They would do things like campaing and raise funds for frendly congressional representatives and senators, write the drafts for bills, and rally support in the media for and against bills they support or oppose.
In practical terms using the SSSCA (CBDTPA) as an example, a PAC would lobby opposition in congress or the senate before it passed, while the EFF would sue to prevent enforcment and hopefully get it overturned in the court system.
They use CDMA and the current 3G network is, I believe, a W-CDMA network. GSM and GPRS will migrate to CDMA 2000 as their 3G networks. Its only currently availible in Tokio, and works pretty well. I have heard complaints about the handsets short battery life and heat dissipation. Most of the reason that cellular technologies aren't as common in the US is the precense of cheap landline phone service, and much lower population density. Its tough and expensive to provide universal cellular coverage in the sparsely populated mountain region in the western US.
This has a lot less to do whit current laws, but with the old deals that Ma Bell made to keep thier monopoly in the early days of phones. They promised to provide universal service if they could remian the only provider of telecomm services. They were quite successful, more people have phone service than indoor plumbing. However because of this they don't buy cell phones in the same numbers as people in other countries.
Enjoy it whaile it lasts, the 845 Chipset loved by OEMs because they can lower systems costs by using cheaper DRAM doesn't have on-board video, once the 845G & GL are introduced with onboard video, the separate and generally pretty nice video cards that were offered will be no more.
On a side note last month Dell had a deal which was less than the component prices with out shipping on either. I think the biggest reasons for self assembly are Linux, BSD, or pirating windows and overclocking or choosing the individual components like better mobos etc.
Also remember that the white box market keeps the big guys honest. I would guess that if components were not freely available prices for PCs would be much closer to those of sgi's or sun's unix boxes.
I would guess that it comes from the inability to see the non-verbal cues that people can't type. Most of communication is non verbal, I don't believe the 90% figures, but I would guess that its above 50%, when you read something that is typed you don't hear the intonation, or see the facial expressions and body language of the speaker. Because of this it is much easier to mistake a subtle joke with an angry rant, or an honest question.
For most of the MMORPGs as well as some of the clickfests, most of the appeal to long lasting players is the gambling. Think of the similarities of one of these games to a slot machine. You repeat a simple excercise, insert a quarter, click on a monster repeatedly, complete a quest, and a reward of varying value is randomly given to you. This fills a response that keeps people playing. If you want to see this in action yourself, a simple experment requries three people and a chalk/whiteboard or large sheet of paper. Have each of them come into a room one at a time, and give the first a mark on for each word, the second a mark for every third word, and the last one random marks after words. In most cases the third person will talk for a much longer time than the other two.
This seems like a logistical nightmare to me. Think of all the programs that you use that have the potential to expire. This is just a guess but I would guess that the average linux distro uses something in the neighborhood of 1000 programs. Imagine trying to find and edit each program's kill setting. Even if only 10% of these developers impliment the idea, you still have to find the 100 programs that have this feature and not knowing which means checking all of them or looking through the documentation. Especially if each time you updated the software you had to edit this out, it would become very unmanagable.
As best I can tell, please tell me if I'm wrong but that is almost exactly what EMC does for their NAS products. The processors are PowerPC, I think, but they use their own OS and controlling software. Hitachi has an excellent Storage primer, its very basic and written for nontechnical stock analysts (in pdf) here. Unfortunatly it hangs the conversion tool. It also crashed at work under Winn 98 (fine under Win2k) when printing at about page 185. The link is to the file which is quite large (about 6 megs). I found it to be rather useful but somewhat basic. Also, EMC usually charges at least $100k for their wheel. Veritas sells just the software. I would doubt its cheap, but probably less than writing your own comparable product.
I also feel this way, perhaps it varies from area to area, and obviously not all of them are competely dumb, but as an example the local guy at my staples told me that the differences between a Radeon and GeForce 2 didn't matter since ATI had bought N'Vidia. Thats just one of several examples of the info I've gotten from them. It makes me pity the poor souls who go in there thinking these guys know their stuff.
I understand completely, I hate reading the op/ed pieces in Business week. They aren't just pro free enterprise. While I am pretty conservative, they are always just looking for business subsidies. Even if I agree with their premise, it still makes me mad to read their begging, without any good reasons as to why its good for anyone else.
6' in diameter fifty foot high oaks are not used for paper. Fast growing 10-20 year old trees like poplars are. They are grown on farms until their growth slows harvested and replanted. Reducing paper consomption to 0 would not save any old growth trees. They are all used for construction, furniture, and other lumber purposes. Its just that there is a lot less support for slowing construction or buying non wood furniture than there is for paper recycling.
Also, most of the CO2 cycle takes place in the worlds oceans, not forests. Don't get me wrong forests are important, but most of the imporatance comes from recrational and ecological uses, like the bird example you mentioned.
I think he is talking about much larger rolls Like those used in newspaper printing. They are about 6' 2 m in diameter.
Slashdot should become a replacement Ebay, they have an large audiance, and people are already using it to buy and sell stuff. Now they just have to get a cut of the sales, and that will pay for more servers/storage/bandwidth/cars/food.
I had to write a pretty large paper on the anti-trust trial for a class. Which meant that I had to read both the DOJ & MSFT's proposed findings of fact. In the DOJ's one of the stories was about IBM and Compaq, who both came close to losing their windows license. The Compaq part is detailed here, starting in section 203. Compaq started a marketing agreement with AOL at the height of the browser wars, after the threatend loss of their license they capitulated and were granted the lowest price for Windows of all OEMs.
The IBM part is detailed starting in section 67. IBM didn't get a license untill 15 minues before windows 95's launch! Because they wanted to bundle smart suite. Before reading this I supported Microsoft in the trial, after reading about these two companies, I realized that they had been quite blatent in their monpolizing of whatever they wanted to get today.
The one that gets me is people who don't turn their phone off in church. Now, I understand its easy to forget to turn the thing off, but then they answer it and procede to have a conversation, in church! While I respect everyone's decision of religion, what kind of person decides to attend church but then that whom ever is on the other end of the phone is more important than God.