Crap, ok, sorry to rant on you Slashdot, but could you stop using the word "then" when you mean "than"? It really really makes you look illiterate. Even if English is not your first language it is not a difficult rule. If I have a large quantity of "A" compared with "B", I have more A *than* B.
If B follows temporally after A, we say the sequence of events is "A *then* B". Sorry Slashdot, I know we have a thing about Grammar Nazis, it's just that this drives me nuts sometimes...
Strangely I decided not to read the EULA before applying the second patch in 2 days. Ok, i didn't read it for the first patch in 2 days either. I hope this doesn't make me liable for...anything.
It seems to me the lesson is that you not only need to be smart, but you need to be willing to do the work to find opportunities, and willing to act upon them. Also, you need to have a little luck to be in the right place at the right time.
Not to beat a very bad fanboi cliche to death, but Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Steve saw an opportunity to sell a computer to the masses in the 70s and kick start the personal computer market. Bill saw an opportunity to tie his DOS to the IBM PC when he saw more business people wanted the PC over an Apple II. Steve saw the opportunity to create a graphical UI after visiting PARC and find a way to sell it, but wasn't nearly successful this time, because conditions were not in his favor (thanks to Bill Gates well timed opportunity). Bill then copied Steve's project and used his previous well timed success to do what Steve didn't quite have the leverage to do, get the GUI out to the masses.
Also look at Steve recognizing the market for ripping and mixing CDs, and the coming of the MP3, to create a music player at the right time that's easy to use, and to come up with a marketing plan that made everyone want it.
Both these men have skills and experience I'll never have. But they'd be nothing if the opportunity didn't arise. They'd be even less if the opportunity did arise, and no one took advantage of it. They'd just be here like the rest of us pontificating on how some other guy is a genius or not, struggling to install their copy of Ubuntu or something.
I guess my point is that this isn't something entirely new. This sounds like another book about the butterfly effect, so I'm not sure how useful it would be, though I'm sure its interesting entertainment.
The thing is, we don't what would have happened if the opportunities presented to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't pan out. They might have seized entirely different opportunities.
It's impossible to predict the future, and impossible to predict what would have happened in the past if something had happened differently.
I wouldn't accept K-Mart putting a radio tracking collar on me, WTF do on-line marketers think they're any different?
I think a closer analogy would be using a loyalty card at k-mart; they track your spending habits, you save money on various purchases. It's hardly a radio tracking collar.
For the record I do use loyalty cards to buy groceries (and save money) while being fully aware that my spending habits are being tracked.
You can't really expect someone to change OS or buy a new machine when they have a technical problem with one piece of software.
I think the best way to promote open-source is to show and recommend some of the higher quality packages available.
Example:
My dad recently asked me for an Office97 disk I had laying around from who knows where. I'm going to recommend OpenOffice instead--free, legal and looks good on Windows (fonts suck on my Mandrake 8.0 though).
Example:
Everyone loves the tabbed browsing and popup suppression on Mozilla.
Also visit the opencd project
I don't know if anyone has listened to the stream from Dr. Dobb's technetcast:
http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_stream.html?stream_ id=666
Listen to about the first 3 minutes: MS stripped all the middleware out (W2K kernel in this case) in a very short time for XBox. I guess it's not "impossible."
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Crap, ok, sorry to rant on you Slashdot, but could you stop using the word "then" when you mean "than"? It really really makes you look illiterate. Even if English is not your first language it is not a difficult rule. If I have a large quantity of "A" compared with "B", I have more A *than* B. If B follows temporally after A, we say the sequence of events is "A *then* B". Sorry Slashdot, I know we have a thing about Grammar Nazis, it's just that this drives me nuts sometimes...
Yeah, a better law would have been:
"....teens who receive explicit images won't be charged if they took reasonable steps to delete it"
still more reasonable: teens who receive explicit images won't be charged.
Or maybe you could learn something about life by reading books that never go out of date?
Read "The Old Man and the Sea" and learn how a man can persist at his work and life despite the hardships thrown at him?
Read "The Great Gatsby" to gain some perspective on how yearning after wealth for its own sake is a futile pursuit?
Read just about anything. Your definition of the word "learn" is far narrower than it ought to be.
"The man who does not read is no better off than the man who cannot read."
Strangely I decided not to read the EULA before applying the second patch in 2 days. Ok, i didn't read it for the first patch in 2 days either. I hope this doesn't make me liable for...anything.
It seems to me the lesson is that you not only need to be smart, but you need to be willing to do the work to find opportunities, and willing to act upon them. Also, you need to have a little luck to be in the right place at the right time.
Not to beat a very bad fanboi cliche to death, but Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Steve saw an opportunity to sell a computer to the masses in the 70s and kick start the personal computer market. Bill saw an opportunity to tie his DOS to the IBM PC when he saw more business people wanted the PC over an Apple II. Steve saw the opportunity to create a graphical UI after visiting PARC and find a way to sell it, but wasn't nearly successful this time, because conditions were not in his favor (thanks to Bill Gates well timed opportunity). Bill then copied Steve's project and used his previous well timed success to do what Steve didn't quite have the leverage to do, get the GUI out to the masses.
Also look at Steve recognizing the market for ripping and mixing CDs, and the coming of the MP3, to create a music player at the right time that's easy to use, and to come up with a marketing plan that made everyone want it.
Both these men have skills and experience I'll never have. But they'd be nothing if the opportunity didn't arise. They'd be even less if the opportunity did arise, and no one took advantage of it. They'd just be here like the rest of us pontificating on how some other guy is a genius or not, struggling to install their copy of Ubuntu or something.
I guess my point is that this isn't something entirely new. This sounds like another book about the butterfly effect, so I'm not sure how useful it would be, though I'm sure its interesting entertainment.
The thing is, we don't what would have happened if the opportunities presented to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't pan out. They might have seized entirely different opportunities.
It's impossible to predict the future, and impossible to predict what would have happened in the past if something had happened differently.
Ummm, I think she moved to Vegas. Just us Polar Bears up here now.
Offer a compromise. Tell him he can have six eights.
You can't really expect someone to change OS or buy a new machine when they have a technical problem with one piece of software. I think the best way to promote open-source is to show and recommend some of the higher quality packages available. Example: My dad recently asked me for an Office97 disk I had laying around from who knows where. I'm going to recommend OpenOffice instead--free, legal and looks good on Windows (fonts suck on my Mandrake 8.0 though). Example: Everyone loves the tabbed browsing and popup suppression on Mozilla. Also visit the opencd project
I don't know if anyone has listened to the stream from Dr. Dobb's technetcast: http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_stream.html?stream_ id=666
Listen to about the first 3 minutes: MS stripped all the middleware out (W2K kernel in this case) in a very short time for XBox. I guess it's not "impossible."