Yeah, what is the deal with that? Why do I have to have the CD in to play? Given the right software, which anyone can get, the CD is trivially easy to copy to my hard drive. Or I can download a no-CD crack off the Internet. Why do they make this little hoop for me to jump through? Look, I bought the game. I have the sales receipt and everything!
My theory is that the people who make DRM technologies are kind of like telephone sanitizers. We've just been paying them for so long that if we suddenly give up on this utterly wasteful technology, then we'll be stuck with a lot of out-of-work DRM people, and they'll be meddling in the kitchen cupboards, rearranging them so we can never find anything anymore.
I guess the difference there is that when Einstein, or someone who is a well-recognized expert in their field, writes an article for your encyclopedia, that gives your publication some boost in credibility. The people who are gaining recognition on Wikipedia are not necessarily recognized for expertise in their field, and they're not necessarily recognized for the quality of work they turn out, they're recognized for the volume of editing they do. Now, longevity may tend to imply that an editor is good at the job, but the weird rock star aura that surrounds some editors on Wikipedia is absurd.
I get the feeling that there's this grand, egalitarian philosophy behind Wikipedia--this ideal of a vast, distributed network of citizen editors who form a self-improving, self-policing community. The reality is different. The real purpose of the community is not clear to me.
You'll note that when you open up the Britannica, you don't find people's names attached to the articles there. Wikipedia, on the other hand, almost has ego built right in to the system. Look at Essjay's user page. There's an entire section dedicated to bragging about his edit count, his longevity with the project, his position in the top 1000, etc. Tell me, is Wikipedia about producing a great research product, or is it about who has the most marbles?
Why was this article posted? Because one user, ostensibly to "protect" himself from the Internet "in these trying times," misrepresented himself with a litany of credentials that he had no right to claim. Why? I find the "protection" excuse to be woefully inadequate. He could have protected himself simply by maintaining anonymity. But who wants to show up at the game with the same sized sack of marbles as any other poor schlub? Why not show up with ten times as many marbles, if you can? That's effectively what he did with his phony Ph.D and his teaching position on a mystery faculty somewhere.
I think that's what Wikipedia has become, to some people. It's a massively distributed Internet popularity contest, just like any other message board. In large part, they manage to come out with good articles, but for a lot of the people there, that's only part of the reason for contributing. The other part, and possibly the larger part, is composed of bragging rights, power over content and over other users, and other perks of being important in the hierarchy. This is the opposite of egalitarian. People joke on Wikipedia about a "cabal" of users that control the content. That word may be leaning toward the hysterical, but is it so far from the truth? How many editors believe that they exert some power of ownership over particular articles? Have you ever tried to make the slightest edit to an article where Wikipedia's big boys are playing? Good luck with that.
I may sound more negative than I really feel. I like Wikipedia, and I find it valuable, and I make edits there when I feel that they are appropriate. But I have no illusions as to the attitudes of many of the other users and the capricious ways in which they wield their power.
1) Typically, the reason management wants statistics on helpdesk call volume is so they can make staffing decisions. I was not management at the time, but was at the same tier as helpdesk management when I was asked to compile statistics for average call volume by hour. Two weeks before Christmas, management cut helpdesk staffing hours by something on the order of 25%. We managed not to fire anyone, but they certainly weren't happy. After that, we saw a significant increase in calls logged. When the employees were faced with the real consequences of not demonstrating their workload, they decided that logging calls was a better alternative to not having jobs.
2) One way to increase logging numbers is by making certain simple helpdesk tasks self-logging. For example, when a client wants their password changed, it's tempting for the helpdesk consultant to just change the password without ever opening a ticket. Why not write the password change utility so that it automatically opens a ticket, provides some minimal level of notes, and then presents this to the consultant? If you can make ticket tracking easier to do than to not do, people are more likely to do it. Don't make the logging process completely invisible to the consultant, though--the idea is to integrate these steps with their workflow so that they get used to doing them, not to hide them altogether. One presumes that for the more difficult problems, consultants are opening tickets, anyway.
This is exactly the problem that I have with Star Trek. Captain Sisko pops down to Bajor, and stops at some peasant's house, and the ENTIRE design motif is the symbol of the planet Bajor. I mean, people have these things hanging all over the place. Their *windows* are bajor-symbol shaped, for God's sake. Where do you see anything like this on Earth? Where do you see this level of ultra-nationalism in our society? It's almost never a good sign. We've had some in the US since 2001, and I'm quite relieved that this blind "patriotism" is beginning to give way to reason. I'll cut that rant off there, but the point is, race is the defining characteristic of almost anybody on Star Trek these days, but the people of the Trek universe never seem to notice what a vast problem they have with racism.
The explanation for all of this is just that it makes a convenient shortcut for the writers: they don't have to spend any time on character development for minor characters in a given episode. Want a sneaky, conniving bad guy? Romulan. Want a greedy, selfish bad guy? Ferrengi. Want someone controlled by reason? Vulcan. Any race that you care to mention in Trek is characterized by a handful of primary traits that set them apart from everyone else. And almost every member of that race is an exemplar of their racial identity. I find it tiresome that so much of what happens in Trek is based entirely upon racial stereotypes. And I don't find it much of a consolation when they occasionally throw us a demented Vulcan or a noble Romulan.
The exception to this, of course, is the human race. Humans tend to be more realistic characters because they're not constrained by such narrow stereotypes. The stereotypes are still there, especially for people who are members of particular factions. But they're a little more tolerable.
Well, not for an Ethernet jack. But for computer support, which also ended up with tiered levels of service, departments certainly could try (and succeed at) finding other vendors to help them out. Unfortunately, xbox owners are not in a position to solicit bids from other service providers. They're locked in to the xbox live service.
It's Microsoft's right to run their service the way they want, of course. What I'm more concerned about is how this spreads in the rest of the industry. We haven't seen great problems with this on Sony's or Nintendo's consoles because it hasn't been possible so far. It will be interesting to see how PS3 and Wii influence the economy of xbox live.
It's really a similar thing to what's going on with "micro" payments for content. You can make the customer pay more if you make him or her believe that the extra money is actually buying something.
As an example, I used to work in a university IT department. The administration came up with this plan that basically pitted the various departments on campus against each other for funds, and we had one particular upper management guy in our IT department who went for that all the way. Everything, in his mind, suddenly got this ability to have value added. Give customers a baseline for free, and then nickel and dime them to death with extra levels of service. A 10 Mb Ethernet port? Free. 100 Mb? That'll cost you.
Invariably, it seems like what you end up with are companies who aren't offering increased levels of service for a small price, but are instead scaling back the basic level so that they can rake in more dough on micro payments without making better or more product. Monthly payments can degenerate to the same kind of deal when there are tiered levels of service, one of them being free. The service provider only has incentive to offer the most basic of features and service for free: just enough to get the customer to see how great the service could be if they paid a little money for it.
I'm not against micro payments or monthly fees on principle. I played WoW for a while, and never begrudged them their $15/mo. I know that it's the way the industry is going. And it's early, yet, so they don't know how to implement it, and we don't entirely know what to expect. But I suspect that when companies like EA push this far enough, and Tiger actually has to stop at the pro shop and buy a box of golf balls using xbox live points before playing, people are going to start pushing back. Hopefully, things will balance out sooner rather than later.
But that's the whole point of designing the function into the game in the first place... a person doesn't necessarily end up with a super-high level character just because they use a high level WoW character to import. As you point out, the people who want to do that can just buy a high level character on eBay or whatever. No, whatever effect the character has must be integrated into the concept of the game in such a way that you still get to start playing in the same kind of way that a completely fresh character does, but there is some kind of difference... and one that is meaningful, but doesn't negate a significant aspect of the game. I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example off the top of my head, but then it's just an idea.
And yes, I agree that Blizzard may not like the idea of having some other MMO mining their user accounts in that way. I suspect that it would be impossible to do while complying with Blizzard's TOS. I still think the basic principle, that people would be more likely to switch MMOGs if they didn't see it as abandoning a significant time investment, is sound.
Or... reward people for the time and money that they've put into WoW. Start up a new MMOG and allow people to submit their login information so that the new game can go scope out WoW experience, equipment, skills, playtime, etc. Use that information to give new players a leg up on the initial grind. As long as you planned for this sufficiently in advance, balancing should not be too big a problem.
Almost like importing your WoW character into the new game, but the new game need not be a fantasy game, or necessarily anything too similar to WoW. I think that one reason why people get tied to playing one particular MMOG is because of the amount of time that they've invested in their character. Allowing people to trade that time in might entice them to try out your service.
If you live in the UK, agreeing to this survey may involve a little more than you would expect.
After reading TFA, I am still puzzled about this statement. What does it mean? The article doesn't even imply this vague disclaimer. Would the submitter care to enlighten us on how the survey involves more than we would expect?
as itself being partisan in assuming the "rumours" are "unfounded" and the death was owing to "natural causes". Please note that I am not suggesting an opinion either way on the facts of Kenneth Lay's death, only pointing out that accusations of partisanship in the media (including "The Washington Post" and even "Slashdot"!) work both ways!
It's not partisanship to report the facts of a situation as we understand them. The rumors are unfounded because they are rumors with no credible foundation. People familiar with the details of the man's death have reported that he died of a heart attack. Any other cause of death, particularly as reported by anonymous people who weren't close enough to the event to have reliable knowledge of the details, is just speculation.
So, no. You could not read the summary and accuse it of partisanship with regard to Kenneth Lay.
The biggest unreliability with Windows is the stupid things that users do.
But, don't you see? That's the point! As developers, we work in a system with two basic components: the hardware/software, and the users. Collectively, we have control over the hardware and the software. We have very little control over the users. The solution to these problems is not to demand that users become educated in all aspects of the systems they're running; they have neither the time nor the inclination. The solution is also not developing the ultimately Secure system, because such a thing is unlikely ever to exist.
What we can do, though, is develop a system that is secure enough for the average user to type their documents and do their email without worrying about all the malware that's out there. That means having an OS that, even if it's not impenetrable out of the box, it can at least bootstrap itself to some moderate level of security before becoming a botnet zombie.
We'll always be able to point the finger at users, but keep in mind that a lot of those users find it completely unreasonable that they have to know how to configure a firewall or a spam filter. They expect us to do our jobs well enough that the system just works. We may never get there, but from the current state of things, I'd say we could certainly do a lot better than we are now.
Actually, if you go back and look at the rest of his blog, you'll find that he claims to be a developer. In fact, when he attended University of Tulsa, he was apparently surprised to find that some few students there were actually smarter than he was! So he's clearly a very smart developer!
No, but really, if you browse the rest of his blog, he just comes off sounding like a dumbass. Well, more of a dumbass than he sounds like just from this nonsense about unique visitors to his web site.
Fire Berman and Braga and remove them at least 1000 miles from any star trek property, they're only in it for a paycheck.
I'd never noticed before, but the president of Paramount is a woman named "Gail Berman." Coincidence, then, that Rick Berman continues to lead Star Trek projects even though he's demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of what most people think Star Trek ought to be?
TFA says that the OP wants these: Productivity (spreadsheet), Graphics, Utilities (spam, anti-virus, FTP etc), Games, Online enhancements (e.g. toolbars etc), Other.
I'm not entirely sure what he wants to do, but most of these categories are just as mature under MacOS as they are under Windows. A spreadsheet application? Well, you've got Excel, you've got OO, and that's about it, for the big one and the up-and-coming, unless Lotus/Quattro is still hanging around out there somewhere. I don't know what state of the art is for spreadsheets on MacOS, but it's gotta be pretty similar to Windows. It's much the same with graphics programs and online programs, really. Utilities? What are you going to do with them? Why do you need a spam filter under Windows if you're checking your mail under MacOS? Do you actually envision booting into Windows and using it for long periods of time?
The only category that I see here where Windows definitely has a lot of options above and beyond MacOS is games. So go for that. Go down to the local video game store and look for some things on the PC shelf that aren't on the Macintosh shelf, and buy them. Over all, you probably aren't missing much.
This post sounds like the OP has a solution (Boot Camp) looking for a problem. And unless you've got a specific problem that really needs solving with Boot Camp, what's the point in using it?
InPhase Technologies claims to have broken the record for the highest data density of any commercial storage technology after successfully recording 515Gb of data per square inch.
Though the headline on the article claims 0.5TB, it seems that the more likely figure is 0.5Tb.
I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure how the phrase "what kernel developers call userland" is pejorative. What is the agenda that you see lurking behind this "twisted" fact?
We're in the process of making a lot of changes to the way that we distribute GIS data on the web, and are considering some of the open source stuff (in part because, as you say, ESRI is never "easy"). I agree with you that a lot of the worry about data compatibility is ESRI FUD trying to keep you spending the tens of thousands of dollars that their software costs. It'll be interesting to see what develops on the web--what does it mean when anybody can set up these web services, and not just government agencies with vastly deep pockets?
The big deal about web mapping services for GIS shops is whether or not they work with the back end systems. In my state, more than 90% of the state, county, and local GIS departments run on ESRI software for their actual data services, so for them, putting data on the web with ESRI's ARCIMS web software is an easy way to go. Unfortunately, ESRI software is massively expensive. Fortunately, you can buy it in modules, so the web service is seperate from the database. Government agencies at all levels could probably benefit from open source web mapping tools, as long as those tools are compatible with the back end. Another very popular open source GIS web application is UMN's MapServer.
I've been having discussions about that in my job recently. With AJAX as the new web development buzzword, people are coming to me and asking if we can put AJAX into every project. A lot of the web-based applications that I work on would not benefit from asynchronous communication--they really work best using the traditional synchronous request/response model.
But I've implemented a few shiny upgrades to older web apps that we run, and people love 'em, and want AJAX in everything. There are a few applications that we maintain that make significant use of JavaScript, and people want to 'upgrade' the JS to AJAX. I've explained over and over again that AJAX is just a particular thing that you can do with JS, it's not something that you replace JS with.
AJAX is a really cool development method, but it's like any other tool--there are certain situations where it helps, and others where you just don't need it.
I'm curious about one aspect of having.mp3 replacements of the defective CDs that you've purchased. TFA says you have to physically return the CD to Sony in order to get access to a set of.mp3 files for that disc. So what becomes of your license? I mean, we've been making a big deal for days now about how your.mp3 files are only legal if you've got the original disc, as well. So, what, are they going to send you some kind of certificate that says you have a right to own these.mp3s? Or how could you possibly prove that your files were legal?
There's muttering here about digital watermarks or somesuch to uniquely identify each set of.mp3s with a particular customer. But then who has the proof that your files are yours? Sony? I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a new, DRM-less CD that I could rip to my computer, so I'd have proof that I own the CD.
On another note, the digital watermark doesn't seem like it would be effective. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to send in a real copy of the CD and download the.mp3s using bogus contact information. You UPS a disc to Sony with completely unverifiable and incorrect return information, they email your brand-new Hotmail account with the.mp3 download URL, you get the files on a public terminal, walk away, and never look back. You can share these.mp3s with anyone you want to, and Sony will never be able to identify you as the originator. Though all of that seems like more trouble than it's worth, since you could accomplish the same thing by getting a DRM-less copy of the CD, ripping it, and distributing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what is the deal with that? Why do I have to have the CD in to play? Given the right software, which anyone can get, the CD is trivially easy to copy to my hard drive. Or I can download a no-CD crack off the Internet. Why do they make this little hoop for me to jump through? Look, I bought the game. I have the sales receipt and everything!
My theory is that the people who make DRM technologies are kind of like telephone sanitizers. We've just been paying them for so long that if we suddenly give up on this utterly wasteful technology, then we'll be stuck with a lot of out-of-work DRM people, and they'll be meddling in the kitchen cupboards, rearranging them so we can never find anything anymore.
Hint: poop before you have anal sex.
I guess the difference there is that when Einstein, or someone who is a well-recognized expert in their field, writes an article for your encyclopedia, that gives your publication some boost in credibility. The people who are gaining recognition on Wikipedia are not necessarily recognized for expertise in their field, and they're not necessarily recognized for the quality of work they turn out, they're recognized for the volume of editing they do. Now, longevity may tend to imply that an editor is good at the job, but the weird rock star aura that surrounds some editors on Wikipedia is absurd.
I get the feeling that there's this grand, egalitarian philosophy behind Wikipedia--this ideal of a vast, distributed network of citizen editors who form a self-improving, self-policing community. The reality is different. The real purpose of the community is not clear to me.
You'll note that when you open up the Britannica, you don't find people's names attached to the articles there. Wikipedia, on the other hand, almost has ego built right in to the system. Look at Essjay's user page. There's an entire section dedicated to bragging about his edit count, his longevity with the project, his position in the top 1000, etc. Tell me, is Wikipedia about producing a great research product, or is it about who has the most marbles?
Why was this article posted? Because one user, ostensibly to "protect" himself from the Internet "in these trying times," misrepresented himself with a litany of credentials that he had no right to claim. Why? I find the "protection" excuse to be woefully inadequate. He could have protected himself simply by maintaining anonymity. But who wants to show up at the game with the same sized sack of marbles as any other poor schlub? Why not show up with ten times as many marbles, if you can? That's effectively what he did with his phony Ph.D and his teaching position on a mystery faculty somewhere.
I think that's what Wikipedia has become, to some people. It's a massively distributed Internet popularity contest, just like any other message board. In large part, they manage to come out with good articles, but for a lot of the people there, that's only part of the reason for contributing. The other part, and possibly the larger part, is composed of bragging rights, power over content and over other users, and other perks of being important in the hierarchy. This is the opposite of egalitarian. People joke on Wikipedia about a "cabal" of users that control the content. That word may be leaning toward the hysterical, but is it so far from the truth? How many editors believe that they exert some power of ownership over particular articles? Have you ever tried to make the slightest edit to an article where Wikipedia's big boys are playing? Good luck with that.
I may sound more negative than I really feel. I like Wikipedia, and I find it valuable, and I make edits there when I feel that they are appropriate. But I have no illusions as to the attitudes of many of the other users and the capricious ways in which they wield their power.
Two things from my prior helpdesk experience:
1) Typically, the reason management wants statistics on helpdesk call volume is so they can make staffing decisions. I was not management at the time, but was at the same tier as helpdesk management when I was asked to compile statistics for average call volume by hour. Two weeks before Christmas, management cut helpdesk staffing hours by something on the order of 25%. We managed not to fire anyone, but they certainly weren't happy. After that, we saw a significant increase in calls logged. When the employees were faced with the real consequences of not demonstrating their workload, they decided that logging calls was a better alternative to not having jobs.
2) One way to increase logging numbers is by making certain simple helpdesk tasks self-logging. For example, when a client wants their password changed, it's tempting for the helpdesk consultant to just change the password without ever opening a ticket. Why not write the password change utility so that it automatically opens a ticket, provides some minimal level of notes, and then presents this to the consultant? If you can make ticket tracking easier to do than to not do, people are more likely to do it. Don't make the logging process completely invisible to the consultant, though--the idea is to integrate these steps with their workflow so that they get used to doing them, not to hide them altogether. One presumes that for the more difficult problems, consultants are opening tickets, anyway.
Just two ideas.
This is exactly the problem that I have with Star Trek. Captain Sisko pops down to Bajor, and stops at some peasant's house, and the ENTIRE design motif is the symbol of the planet Bajor. I mean, people have these things hanging all over the place. Their *windows* are bajor-symbol shaped, for God's sake. Where do you see anything like this on Earth? Where do you see this level of ultra-nationalism in our society? It's almost never a good sign. We've had some in the US since 2001, and I'm quite relieved that this blind "patriotism" is beginning to give way to reason. I'll cut that rant off there, but the point is, race is the defining characteristic of almost anybody on Star Trek these days, but the people of the Trek universe never seem to notice what a vast problem they have with racism.
The explanation for all of this is just that it makes a convenient shortcut for the writers: they don't have to spend any time on character development for minor characters in a given episode. Want a sneaky, conniving bad guy? Romulan. Want a greedy, selfish bad guy? Ferrengi. Want someone controlled by reason? Vulcan. Any race that you care to mention in Trek is characterized by a handful of primary traits that set them apart from everyone else. And almost every member of that race is an exemplar of their racial identity. I find it tiresome that so much of what happens in Trek is based entirely upon racial stereotypes. And I don't find it much of a consolation when they occasionally throw us a demented Vulcan or a noble Romulan.
The exception to this, of course, is the human race. Humans tend to be more realistic characters because they're not constrained by such narrow stereotypes. The stereotypes are still there, especially for people who are members of particular factions. But they're a little more tolerable.
It's a common error to mistake false as in truth or false as in teeth. In this case, the poster meant false as in teeth.
Leap years, man. Leap years.
Well, not for an Ethernet jack. But for computer support, which also ended up with tiered levels of service, departments certainly could try (and succeed at) finding other vendors to help them out. Unfortunately, xbox owners are not in a position to solicit bids from other service providers. They're locked in to the xbox live service.
It's Microsoft's right to run their service the way they want, of course. What I'm more concerned about is how this spreads in the rest of the industry. We haven't seen great problems with this on Sony's or Nintendo's consoles because it hasn't been possible so far. It will be interesting to see how PS3 and Wii influence the economy of xbox live.
It's really a similar thing to what's going on with "micro" payments for content. You can make the customer pay more if you make him or her believe that the extra money is actually buying something.
As an example, I used to work in a university IT department. The administration came up with this plan that basically pitted the various departments on campus against each other for funds, and we had one particular upper management guy in our IT department who went for that all the way. Everything, in his mind, suddenly got this ability to have value added. Give customers a baseline for free, and then nickel and dime them to death with extra levels of service. A 10 Mb Ethernet port? Free. 100 Mb? That'll cost you.
Invariably, it seems like what you end up with are companies who aren't offering increased levels of service for a small price, but are instead scaling back the basic level so that they can rake in more dough on micro payments without making better or more product. Monthly payments can degenerate to the same kind of deal when there are tiered levels of service, one of them being free. The service provider only has incentive to offer the most basic of features and service for free: just enough to get the customer to see how great the service could be if they paid a little money for it.
I'm not against micro payments or monthly fees on principle. I played WoW for a while, and never begrudged them their $15/mo. I know that it's the way the industry is going. And it's early, yet, so they don't know how to implement it, and we don't entirely know what to expect. But I suspect that when companies like EA push this far enough, and Tiger actually has to stop at the pro shop and buy a box of golf balls using xbox live points before playing, people are going to start pushing back. Hopefully, things will balance out sooner rather than later.
Did you, by any chance, work for Intel around about the time of the first Pentium release?
But that's the whole point of designing the function into the game in the first place... a person doesn't necessarily end up with a super-high level character just because they use a high level WoW character to import. As you point out, the people who want to do that can just buy a high level character on eBay or whatever. No, whatever effect the character has must be integrated into the concept of the game in such a way that you still get to start playing in the same kind of way that a completely fresh character does, but there is some kind of difference... and one that is meaningful, but doesn't negate a significant aspect of the game. I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example off the top of my head, but then it's just an idea.
And yes, I agree that Blizzard may not like the idea of having some other MMO mining their user accounts in that way. I suspect that it would be impossible to do while complying with Blizzard's TOS. I still think the basic principle, that people would be more likely to switch MMOGs if they didn't see it as abandoning a significant time investment, is sound.
Or... reward people for the time and money that they've put into WoW. Start up a new MMOG and allow people to submit their login information so that the new game can go scope out WoW experience, equipment, skills, playtime, etc. Use that information to give new players a leg up on the initial grind. As long as you planned for this sufficiently in advance, balancing should not be too big a problem.
Almost like importing your WoW character into the new game, but the new game need not be a fantasy game, or necessarily anything too similar to WoW. I think that one reason why people get tied to playing one particular MMOG is because of the amount of time that they've invested in their character. Allowing people to trade that time in might entice them to try out your service.
It's not partisanship to report the facts of a situation as we understand them. The rumors are unfounded because they are rumors with no credible foundation. People familiar with the details of the man's death have reported that he died of a heart attack. Any other cause of death, particularly as reported by anonymous people who weren't close enough to the event to have reliable knowledge of the details, is just speculation.
So, no. You could not read the summary and accuse it of partisanship with regard to Kenneth Lay.
The biggest unreliability with Windows is the stupid things that users do.
But, don't you see? That's the point! As developers, we work in a system with two basic components: the hardware/software, and the users. Collectively, we have control over the hardware and the software. We have very little control over the users. The solution to these problems is not to demand that users become educated in all aspects of the systems they're running; they have neither the time nor the inclination. The solution is also not developing the ultimately Secure system, because such a thing is unlikely ever to exist.
What we can do, though, is develop a system that is secure enough for the average user to type their documents and do their email without worrying about all the malware that's out there. That means having an OS that, even if it's not impenetrable out of the box, it can at least bootstrap itself to some moderate level of security before becoming a botnet zombie.
We'll always be able to point the finger at users, but keep in mind that a lot of those users find it completely unreasonable that they have to know how to configure a firewall or a spam filter. They expect us to do our jobs well enough that the system just works. We may never get there, but from the current state of things, I'd say we could certainly do a lot better than we are now.
Actually, if you go back and look at the rest of his blog, you'll find that he claims to be a developer. In fact, when he attended University of Tulsa, he was apparently surprised to find that some few students there were actually smarter than he was! So he's clearly a very smart developer!
No, but really, if you browse the rest of his blog, he just comes off sounding like a dumbass. Well, more of a dumbass than he sounds like just from this nonsense about unique visitors to his web site.
I'm not entirely sure what he wants to do, but most of these categories are just as mature under MacOS as they are under Windows. A spreadsheet application? Well, you've got Excel, you've got OO, and that's about it, for the big one and the up-and-coming, unless Lotus/Quattro is still hanging around out there somewhere. I don't know what state of the art is for spreadsheets on MacOS, but it's gotta be pretty similar to Windows. It's much the same with graphics programs and online programs, really. Utilities? What are you going to do with them? Why do you need a spam filter under Windows if you're checking your mail under MacOS? Do you actually envision booting into Windows and using it for long periods of time?
The only category that I see here where Windows definitely has a lot of options above and beyond MacOS is games. So go for that. Go down to the local video game store and look for some things on the PC shelf that aren't on the Macintosh shelf, and buy them. Over all, you probably aren't missing much.
This post sounds like the OP has a solution (Boot Camp) looking for a problem. And unless you've got a specific problem that really needs solving with Boot Camp, what's the point in using it?
I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure how the phrase "what kernel developers call userland" is pejorative. What is the agenda that you see lurking behind this "twisted" fact?
We're in the process of making a lot of changes to the way that we distribute GIS data on the web, and are considering some of the open source stuff (in part because, as you say, ESRI is never "easy"). I agree with you that a lot of the worry about data compatibility is ESRI FUD trying to keep you spending the tens of thousands of dollars that their software costs. It'll be interesting to see what develops on the web--what does it mean when anybody can set up these web services, and not just government agencies with vastly deep pockets?
The big deal about web mapping services for GIS shops is whether or not they work with the back end systems. In my state, more than 90% of the state, county, and local GIS departments run on ESRI software for their actual data services, so for them, putting data on the web with ESRI's ARCIMS web software is an easy way to go. Unfortunately, ESRI software is massively expensive. Fortunately, you can buy it in modules, so the web service is seperate from the database. Government agencies at all levels could probably benefit from open source web mapping tools, as long as those tools are compatible with the back end. Another very popular open source GIS web application is UMN's MapServer.
But I've implemented a few shiny upgrades to older web apps that we run, and people love 'em, and want AJAX in everything. There are a few applications that we maintain that make significant use of JavaScript, and people want to 'upgrade' the JS to AJAX. I've explained over and over again that AJAX is just a particular thing that you can do with JS, it's not something that you replace JS with.
AJAX is a really cool development method, but it's like any other tool--there are certain situations where it helps, and others where you just don't need it.
I'm curious about one aspect of having .mp3 replacements of the defective CDs that you've purchased. TFA says you have to physically return the CD to Sony in order to get access to a set of .mp3 files for that disc. So what becomes of your license? I mean, we've been making a big deal for days now about how your .mp3 files are only legal if you've got the original disc, as well. So, what, are they going to send you some kind of certificate that says you have a right to own these .mp3s? Or how could you possibly prove that your files were legal?
.mp3s with a particular customer. But then who has the proof that your files are yours? Sony? I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a new, DRM-less CD that I could rip to my computer, so I'd have proof that I own the CD.
.mp3s using bogus contact information. You UPS a disc to Sony with completely unverifiable and incorrect return information, they email your brand-new Hotmail account with the .mp3 download URL, you get the files on a public terminal, walk away, and never look back. You can share these .mp3s with anyone you want to, and Sony will never be able to identify you as the originator. Though all of that seems like more trouble than it's worth, since you could accomplish the same thing by getting a DRM-less copy of the CD, ripping it, and distributing it.
There's muttering here about digital watermarks or somesuch to uniquely identify each set of
On another note, the digital watermark doesn't seem like it would be effective. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to send in a real copy of the CD and download the