I think this article misses the point of email entirely. Email is good for sending a message from one place to another. I don't think the originators of email saw it as a document management tool, a revision manager or any of the other hundred things people try to jam into it. It's amazing what people've been able to do with such a simple set of protocols, but it's kind of like complaining that your car doesn't make a good hot dog stand. Sure, you can sell hotdogs from it, and you can put buns in the glove compartment or paint it cool colors or advertise on it, but at the end of the day, it's a thing that gets you from point a to b.
Blaming Microsoft because they've added things to make it possible to collaborate badly is just silly. They've just added a pink bun warmer to a honda civic. Extraneous and barely functional? Sure. Their fault this doesn't make it the perfect hot dog stand? Not really.
When I got into tech support in 1995, I was making $9 an hour to start. It just went up from there. By 99 when I got out and started programming, I was making about $22-24 an hour, still doing phone support. Granted, I went from product support to internal phone support, but it was still a decent living.
Has outsourcing really killed the support industry that much?
This is just the government protecting the top 2% of the richest people in america again, folks. It's what they do best!
When you don't see congress taking a piss on the little guy, they're in recess.
Does anyone believe for a second that most of the political constituency wants tighter control of their music? No. This isn't about what the people want. If it were, there wouldn't BE DRM or copyright extensions. I doubt ANYONE wants to see the windows media popup saying that their content license has to be checked once you move it to a new machine or to have all of their videos removed from their ipod when you move your purchased downloads to a new hard drive because you haven't authorized your computer (no kidding, this happened to me and it took 45 minutes to reload all the video I HAD on my ipod back on).
All these laws are being put into place to "protect" only people who's most reliably common trait is the word
", millionaire" attached to their name. I just wish the people would step up and SAY SOMETHING before our rights erode to only being able to listen to cd's without fear of imprisonment.
I came up with two possible thrusts for this change...
A. It's a euphemism for "big, american, penis" ala the South Park episode (in which american men basically swallowed any bullshit when someone complimented their collective johnsons).
or
B. If you take the letter N from Nintendo, turn it into lines and add a line (\/|/) it becomes a W. Add that to WII and you have WWII, which of course, is world war 2. Now because they know we won WWII, they could be saying:
You won WWII so we respect your big american penis
You won WWII, but we will get you back by turning your children into mindless gaming slogs
This is our pearl harbor attack against the XBox360
We just can't stop thinking about WWII and it completely keeps popping up symbolically in our cultural metaphors
I'm not really sure but I'm sure, but I do know one thing...the stylus for the Gameboy is WAY too easy to lose. They need to add some kind of homing device or spider-tracer that the gameboy picks up in order to prevent loss.
The real question here is: Is there any story run here that isn't fodder for an I-Hate-Microsoft rant? Microsoft had nothing to do with this article. The migration was Unix to Linux, yet you were able to correlate those two systems to a way you could criticize Microsoft.
Ok, so if I get this right, if I create an interface to provide interoperability between my programs, and my programs become popular enough that people want to connect to them for reasons I didn't intend (and don't want to have to support), why is it a good business decision to release an API for that interface? It seems like that might shooting myself in the foot if I'm giving it to others who intend (as the linux community does) to supplant me with my own technology.
To me, that's like bring a tank to war and then giving the enemy the keys to it.
Flame on!
I know has been told about the inherent unsafety of IE, but most people think Safari is safe.
Everyone I know has been told about the inherent safety of firefox, but most people didn't know that at one point, firefox had a bug that allowed you to script to other tabs.
Browsers are only safe until you find the next bug. IE has plenty, but Firefox, Safari, Opera et al. are not completely safe. There are just fewer hackers trying to prove that they aren't.
I'm still not sure why IE is being criticized for releasing a new, more secure version. Sure, there are still problems, but they are STILL IN BETA. Are people concerned that now that MS has absorbed tabs, rss and phishing protection, that firefox will lose market share? The browsing experience for IE won't do anything but force firefox to keep coming up with innovative ways to make the browsing experience better. What wrong with that?
As a side note: Your friend counting on a beta product to protect him from phishing attacks is a little naive don't you think? If I install a beta of almost anything, most of the time I expect that I might have to reinstall the OS shortly after.
What I think Dvorak missed with his article is the fact that until MS started shipping browsers with its OS, the internet was largely inhabited by people (like us) on the slashdot forum. You had to download Netscape to use it and mostly only tech people were downloading browsers in those days (remember folks, this was like 94-95 timeframe). For better or worse, MS brought the internet to the general public. I tend to lament the commercial nature of the interweb these days, but without it, you probably wouldn't be able to do much of what you can do now online. Dvorak also mentions MS cobbling together their first browsers as if the other browsers on the markets were real winners. Before IE we had Netscape and Mosaic (I will never count Lynx as a web browser, so don't even try it). Mosaic was great if you wanted to go get coffee between clicks. Netscape was better but was full of security holes (anyone remember being able to access the system via javascript?) Microsoft took 4 versions to really get it right (well righter than the competition anyway), but with IE 4, officially surpassed (in my mind) the functionality of NS. I now believe that with the right javascript and a little chanting, you could truly open up a portal to hell when developing for NS 4.x. The same can be said of ActiveX, but the two biggest failures of activeX were that the browser didn't do enough to tell you that activeX was being used, and made it too easy for activeX to over-reach it's boundaries (because there WERE no boundaries). IE without activeX or with a sandbox approach would have been (mostly) fine. The problem they got into was that once they unleashed activeX, it was impossible to put back in the cage. Companies like macromedia were basing their entire businesses on an activeX control that ran in IE. Other companies followed suit. With activeX as their only plugin architecture, they were pretty much screwed. XP sp2, server 2k3 and ie7 have come a long way to help that out by essentially creating a list of "untrusted" sites and their phishing what-nots, but ultimately activeX will remain a problem as long as a user can click OK to installing components on their machine.
It's not like MS could really stay out of the browser market anyway. The fact that companies like Google are going to start offering an online word processor (writely?) vindicates their entry into the market if for no other reason than that they are now completely intertwined in the creation of the infrastructure. Add to that a major recurring push in computing was/is the dumb terminal where EVERYTHING is kept on the server side. As recently as a couple years ago Sun was pushing for a server-centric approach where all things were handled by their servers. That kind of runs counter to the ongoing installed base of their OS/"everything on the client" market. But Microsoft can also see that this is where it's going. They're talking about implementing office online themselves. It only makes sense to be able to control the interaction from client to server (both to ensure compatibility/optimization and to control the transition to Microsoft based services). Why would it make sense to deal yourself out of that? Sure, you could trust other browser manufacturers to write software that best takes advantage of your server software, but judging from the pro OSS/pro firefox contingent HERE, it probably wouldn't be too safe a bet.
Microsoft's real mistake was complacency. They got to the top of the and basically put IE on blocks, refusing to do much in the way of fixing the big problems with their browser. The windows XP sp2 security fixes were great, but did nothing to address the older OS/IE combinations. Microsoft is now fixing that problem. Dvorak sees this as raising the horse from the dead and beating the horse zombie but when your competitors all have horses, an undying horse zombie that's now come back stronger and with a greater protection against unholy attacks is far better than no horse at all.
Actually no. You can incorporate their library files in a PHP app. It requires a little more setup (like your own browser compat and postback handlers), but the page construction stuff is free to use from anyone.
After having watched the guy put together an Ajax application in 10 minutes (typing in all the code right in front of all 1700 of the people in the room) and then watching him open the exact page he created in Safari on a mac, I can pretty well assure you that it DOES work the way MS claims. Now that isn't to say that they haven't built any non-compliant components into it, but what I saw today will handle MOST of the basics of what you'd want on a data driven site without difficulty.
How about we stop trolling and actually check it out before tearing it down.
People. They are in PRE BETA stage. This compatability lab is there so that they can get developers to show them where they screwed up before they get into a real beta.
IE7 hasn't even been completed and people are acting like it's already broken. I love Firefox as much as everyone else, but to proclaim IE7 dead before arrival is a huge mistake.
Besides, isn't anyone the least bit happy that they've fixed stuff that forced the box hack and other BS css stopgap measures? Isn't anyone happy that they're implementing the httprequest object? You're ignoring the fact that really, for the first time, Microsoft is actually paying attention to the fact that we DON'T want to have to code two different interfaces to get AJAX data. Sure, for the next couple years you're going to have to deal with the ActiveX MSXML dom, but the idea is that 3-4 years when you have a 60-70% market shift to ie7 from 6 and 5, pages you create won't have to be as broken. There'll be a smaller number of hacks or sacrifices to the lowest common denominator.
Think ahead people. This will echo into the next releases when we can all not have to ask questions like "if (window.ActiveXObject)" if all we want to do is go out and get a little data:)
If you're doing extensive admin stuff, you can also log in as an Admin explicitly of course, and since XP you can switch between users quite easily without logging out.
This is only true if you're not logging into a domain. If you are (AFAIK) there is no way of maintaining multiple concurrent logins.
"But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix."
I'd love to see a cops episode where they burst in on someone with their pants down then pan down to reveal a senator compromising himself for a hit of that sweet, sweet legislation.
Even though it's normally treason, if you had an iPod full of files from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, you could probably sell it on eBay and get off scott free 'cause if the US Government didn't want you spreading their secrets, they'd tell you to stop right?
This is probably the weakest excuse I've ever heard for sharing copyrighted materials. Either the guy is stupid, or he's got the lamest case of denial ever.
I guess if it's on an iPod, it's not really a copy cause it's got that DRM stuff right? The feds would show up and just be blinded by the cool of the new g5 video iPod in all it's glory.
(In an unrelated note: Hurry up Fox! I want House MD episodes on iTunes yesterday!)
I think the feds should be granted warrants to enter the 180's employee's homes and build furniture in them. This furniture would be covered with fleas, ticks and head lice and be generally annoying to the person who lived there and there family. They would also be painted in ugly colors and make noises anytime someone entered the home or used another piece of furniture. Additionally, the furniture and appliances would be built in such a way that it would be difficult or impossible to remove from the homes without causing damage.
It's funny, I feel exactly the opposite. I fell in love with the US show, then got the original from Blockbuster online and I just can't watch it. I normally LOVE British TV, but I guess once you choose a flavor, it's hard to get into the other. I found myself missing Jim and Pam and the rest from the American show so I just plugged in my video out jack from my ipod video and watched the American version instead.:)
On that note, I too got into the Office because of my video ipod. I was taking a flight and was tired of trying to get enough space on the tray for my laptop, so I downloaded a couple office episodes and watched them on the plane. Now I just let the show run when I'm at work instead of listening to music. I watch the show when it comes on too...and it's also gotten me into My Name is Earl because I caught the ending of that one week and realized it was Jason Lee, one of my favorite actors from the Kevin Smith movies.
Controlled by a web connection? Can you say URL redirection? If all you have to do is hack a website in order to take over a legion of Korean Attack Robots (KAR ), let me know when they come online. I'll have the dopest robot soccer team in history!
Not trying to be a troll here, but maybe that just means we shouldn't compare you to Einstein. It's possible that you don't have the same outside the box simple genius that we use to define Einstein.
I probably don't either having used the phrase "outside the box".
I keep hearing all of this noise about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD but it appears that Holographic discs are coming out next year with a capacity that far outsteps either of the competing formats.
If you're going to wait...Might as well wait for the best.
With so many people turning from books to video games - particularly fantasy games based on Dnd and Tolkien, it makes perfect sense that a book store would turn to the most popular fantasy rpg as a natural market. With Dnd, you need at least 3 books to play (player's handbook, dungeon master's guide, monster manual) and once you get into those, there are about 20 other books (all costing between 20 and 40 bucks) that you can buy if you dig it. All that and you're capturing part of a market that's already into the genre and new players that are interested in investigating the roots of WoW - not to mention the poor kids and kids who're grounded from their video games.
I'd look for them to ramp this up. Heck...I'd be surprised if they didn't create gaming areas and offer some discounts to gamers who play there. How convenient would it be to duck out of the game and buy a monster manual 2 if you needed something new?
Hard core dnd players will never leave for video games (at least permanantly). All they need to do is keep some stick ups around for the gamer funk.
At home I'm still running two win2k boxes (for me) and a Mepis cd boot box for my wife and daughter. I have XP on a laptop because it came with Tablet PC edition, but honestly, 2k is so solid (spyware and the occasional worm notwithstading), there's no reason to even bother upgrading. If you a) use a firewall and b) don't let activeX controls install on your machine there's a good chance you can avoid most of the lameness.
My wife and daughter get Mepis because they disable a an do plenty of b. I love Mepis for the desktop because it lets them surf the web without me having to worry about permanant damage to my machine. That said, I use WAY too many windows development environment apps for work to easily run Linux without a lot of extra work/file conversion/app installation/headaches.
Actually, recently a few people were restrained from talking about the new Harry Potter when they were sold the book prematurely. So yes, in some cases (under Canadian and US law at least), it is illegal to reminisce about something you saw last week...at least out loud.
Ok, your entire rant was made from one misinterpretation. "them" meant Microsoft.:)
Also, I didn't make the initial Coke/Pepsi analogy, I just said that it was a valid representation of Microsoft's marketing and brand association strategy. Though, to a degree I think you're trivializing the impact FOOD has on has on our modern economy or our children. I also was not saying that a heterogenous software environment was inherently unreliable, just that Microsoft might see it as such and thus move to protect itself from the possibility. Microsoft is a corporate control freak. They know that not even their OWN software works all the time, but at least they'd feel as if it were in their control. OPS (Other people's software) offers no such comfort and I imagine that Microsoft sees this first hand when someone calls them when AOL crashes.
Once again, I'm not advocating the practice of exclusivity, just validating the argument that Coke/Pepsi is a valid analogy for exclusivity with Microsoft. I'd LOVE to be able to get Coke at Taco Bell, but until that becomes a reality, I'll drink Pepsi's Raspberry Iced Tea. I'll also keep using photoshop every day on my Win XP box...cause that's just how I roll:)
Ok, pepsi spun off another independent company called Tricon Global (Wiki) in 1997 so this isn't really a matter of apples to oranges and hasn't been for a long time. Coke doesn't own McDonalds or the many, many restaurants that serve it exclusively. The fact is, in almost EVERY market there are exclusivity contracts built in to secure the market, maintain brand identity, and more importantly, brand association. If some McDonald's or BK's sold Pepsi, it'd be bad for Coke AND McDonalds because the idea behind these companies is consistent global experience.
When you equate this with Microsoft, you can see how they not only want market share, but brand association and consistency. Market share is one thing, but if you have a brand association with schools (ie, when you think of computers in schools, you think of Microsoft), you have a powerful persistent mindset that breeds familiarity. Familiarity breeds resistance to change. Microsoft also wants conistency. They don't know if some Gimp programmer writes good code. They also don't want to risk photoshop eating the entire scratch drive and crashing their product. If they move to protect their environment, it's likely they're trying to protect their brand through creating and controlling the software that goes on it. The Coke analogy to this would be something like "Cherry Coke". If someone else wanted to throw their own cherry syrup in there, it might make it too sweet or make coke taste bad in some other way, so Coke gives the customer a premixed cherry coke as an alternative. I can't speak to a non-syrup agreement with McDonald's but if you're already getting cherry coke from the manufacturer, why would you bother making your own? (Yes, I know other places DO have cherry syrup, but some people also run Gimp and photoshop.) In the end, IMO, the Coke and Pepsi argument works perfectly to illustrate exclusivity contracts and how a company can use them as a powerful business marketing tool.
Sure, Microsoft come off as a$$es because of it, but in the end when your kids learn to type papers in Microsoft Word, it all pays off for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this article misses the point of email entirely. Email is good for sending a message from one place to another. I don't think the originators of email saw it as a document management tool, a revision manager or any of the other hundred things people try to jam into it. It's amazing what people've been able to do with such a simple set of protocols, but it's kind of like complaining that your car doesn't make a good hot dog stand. Sure, you can sell hotdogs from it, and you can put buns in the glove compartment or paint it cool colors or advertise on it, but at the end of the day, it's a thing that gets you from point a to b.
Blaming Microsoft because they've added things to make it possible to collaborate badly is just silly. They've just added a pink bun warmer to a honda civic. Extraneous and barely functional? Sure. Their fault this doesn't make it the perfect hot dog stand? Not really.
When I got into tech support in 1995, I was making $9 an hour to start. It just went up from there. By 99 when I got out and started programming, I was making about $22-24 an hour, still doing phone support. Granted, I went from product support to internal phone support, but it was still a decent living.
Has outsourcing really killed the support industry that much?
This is just the government protecting the top 2% of the richest people in america again, folks. It's what they do best!
When you don't see congress taking a piss on the little guy, they're in recess.
Does anyone believe for a second that most of the political constituency wants tighter control of their music? No. This isn't about what the people want. If it were, there wouldn't BE DRM or copyright extensions. I doubt ANYONE wants to see the windows media popup saying that their content license has to be checked once you move it to a new machine or to have all of their videos removed from their ipod when you move your purchased downloads to a new hard drive because you haven't authorized your computer (no kidding, this happened to me and it took 45 minutes to reload all the video I HAD on my ipod back on).
All these laws are being put into place to "protect" only people who's most reliably common trait is the word ", millionaire" attached to their name. I just wish the people would step up and SAY SOMETHING before our rights erode to only being able to listen to cd's without fear of imprisonment.
A . It's a euphemism for "big, american, penis" ala the South Park episode (in which american men basically swallowed any bullshit when someone complimented their collective johnsons).
or
B. If you take the letter N from Nintendo, turn it into lines and add a line (\/|/) it becomes a W. Add that to WII and you have WWII, which of course, is world war 2. Now because they know we won WWII, they could be saying:
I'm not really sure but I'm sure, but I do know one thing...the stylus for the Gameboy is WAY too easy to lose. They need to add some kind of homing device or spider-tracer that the gameboy picks up in order to prevent loss.
The real question here is: Is there any story run here that isn't fodder for an I-Hate-Microsoft rant? Microsoft had nothing to do with this article. The migration was Unix to Linux, yet you were able to correlate those two systems to a way you could criticize Microsoft.
Way to stay in your comfort zone.
Ok, so if I get this right, if I create an interface to provide interoperability between my programs, and my programs become popular enough that people want to connect to them for reasons I didn't intend (and don't want to have to support), why is it a good business decision to release an API for that interface? It seems like that might shooting myself in the foot if I'm giving it to others who intend (as the linux community does) to supplant me with my own technology. To me, that's like bring a tank to war and then giving the enemy the keys to it. Flame on!
I know has been told about the inherent unsafety of IE, but most people think Safari is safe.
Everyone I know has been told about the inherent safety of firefox, but most people didn't know that at one point, firefox had a bug that allowed you to script to other tabs.
Browsers are only safe until you find the next bug. IE has plenty, but Firefox, Safari, Opera et al. are not completely safe. There are just fewer hackers trying to prove that they aren't.
I'm still not sure why IE is being criticized for releasing a new, more secure version. Sure, there are still problems, but they are STILL IN BETA. Are people concerned that now that MS has absorbed tabs, rss and phishing protection, that firefox will lose market share? The browsing experience for IE won't do anything but force firefox to keep coming up with innovative ways to make the browsing experience better. What wrong with that? As a side note: Your friend counting on a beta product to protect him from phishing attacks is a little naive don't you think? If I install a beta of almost anything, most of the time I expect that I might have to reinstall the OS shortly after.
What I think Dvorak missed with his article is the fact that until MS started shipping browsers with its OS, the internet was largely inhabited by people (like us) on the slashdot forum. You had to download Netscape to use it and mostly only tech people were downloading browsers in those days (remember folks, this was like 94-95 timeframe). For better or worse, MS brought the internet to the general public. I tend to lament the commercial nature of the interweb these days, but without it, you probably wouldn't be able to do much of what you can do now online. Dvorak also mentions MS cobbling together their first browsers as if the other browsers on the markets were real winners. Before IE we had Netscape and Mosaic (I will never count Lynx as a web browser, so don't even try it). Mosaic was great if you wanted to go get coffee between clicks. Netscape was better but was full of security holes (anyone remember being able to access the system via javascript?) Microsoft took 4 versions to really get it right (well righter than the competition anyway), but with IE 4, officially surpassed (in my mind) the functionality of NS. I now believe that with the right javascript and a little chanting, you could truly open up a portal to hell when developing for NS 4.x. The same can be said of ActiveX, but the two biggest failures of activeX were that the browser didn't do enough to tell you that activeX was being used, and made it too easy for activeX to over-reach it's boundaries (because there WERE no boundaries). IE without activeX or with a sandbox approach would have been (mostly) fine. The problem they got into was that once they unleashed activeX, it was impossible to put back in the cage. Companies like macromedia were basing their entire businesses on an activeX control that ran in IE. Other companies followed suit. With activeX as their only plugin architecture, they were pretty much screwed. XP sp2, server 2k3 and ie7 have come a long way to help that out by essentially creating a list of "untrusted" sites and their phishing what-nots, but ultimately activeX will remain a problem as long as a user can click OK to installing components on their machine.
It's not like MS could really stay out of the browser market anyway. The fact that companies like Google are going to start offering an online word processor (writely?) vindicates their entry into the market if for no other reason than that they are now completely intertwined in the creation of the infrastructure. Add to that a major recurring push in computing was/is the dumb terminal where EVERYTHING is kept on the server side. As recently as a couple years ago Sun was pushing for a server-centric approach where all things were handled by their servers. That kind of runs counter to the ongoing installed base of their OS/"everything on the client" market. But Microsoft can also see that this is where it's going. They're talking about implementing office online themselves. It only makes sense to be able to control the interaction from client to server (both to ensure compatibility/optimization and to control the transition to Microsoft based services). Why would it make sense to deal yourself out of that? Sure, you could trust other browser manufacturers to write software that best takes advantage of your server software, but judging from the pro OSS/pro firefox contingent HERE, it probably wouldn't be too safe a bet.
Microsoft's real mistake was complacency. They got to the top of the and basically put IE on blocks, refusing to do much in the way of fixing the big problems with their browser. The windows XP sp2 security fixes were great, but did nothing to address the older OS/IE combinations. Microsoft is now fixing that problem. Dvorak sees this as raising the horse from the dead and beating the horse zombie but when your competitors all have horses, an undying horse zombie that's now come back stronger and with a greater protection against unholy attacks is far better than no horse at all.
Actually no. You can incorporate their library files in a PHP app. It requires a little more setup (like your own browser compat and postback handlers), but the page construction stuff is free to use from anyone.
After having watched the guy put together an Ajax application in 10 minutes (typing in all the code right in front of all 1700 of the people in the room) and then watching him open the exact page he created in Safari on a mac, I can pretty well assure you that it DOES work the way MS claims. Now that isn't to say that they haven't built any non-compliant components into it, but what I saw today will handle MOST of the basics of what you'd want on a data driven site without difficulty.
How about we stop trolling and actually check it out before tearing it down.
People. They are in PRE BETA stage. This compatability lab is there so that they can get developers to show them where they screwed up before they get into a real beta.
:)
IE7 hasn't even been completed and people are acting like it's already broken. I love Firefox as much as everyone else, but to proclaim IE7 dead before arrival is a huge mistake.
Besides, isn't anyone the least bit happy that they've fixed stuff that forced the box hack and other BS css stopgap measures? Isn't anyone happy that they're implementing the httprequest object? You're ignoring the fact that really, for the first time, Microsoft is actually paying attention to the fact that we DON'T want to have to code two different interfaces to get AJAX data. Sure, for the next couple years you're going to have to deal with the ActiveX MSXML dom, but the idea is that 3-4 years when you have a 60-70% market shift to ie7 from 6 and 5, pages you create won't have to be as broken. There'll be a smaller number of hacks or sacrifices to the lowest common denominator.
Think ahead people. This will echo into the next releases when we can all not have to ask questions like "if (window.ActiveXObject)" if all we want to do is go out and get a little data
If you're doing extensive admin stuff, you can also log in as an Admin explicitly of course, and since XP you can switch between users quite easily without logging out. This is only true if you're not logging into a domain. If you are (AFAIK) there is no way of maintaining multiple concurrent logins.
"But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix."
I'd love to see a cops episode where they burst in on someone with their pants down then pan down to reveal a senator compromising himself for a hit of that sweet, sweet legislation.
Even though it's normally treason, if you had an iPod full of files from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, you could probably sell it on eBay and get off scott free 'cause if the US Government didn't want you spreading their secrets, they'd tell you to stop right?
This is probably the weakest excuse I've ever heard for sharing copyrighted materials. Either the guy is stupid, or he's got the lamest case of denial ever.
I guess if it's on an iPod, it's not really a copy cause it's got that DRM stuff right? The feds would show up and just be blinded by the cool of the new g5 video iPod in all it's glory.
(In an unrelated note: Hurry up Fox! I want House MD episodes on iTunes yesterday!)
I think the feds should be granted warrants to enter the 180's employee's homes and build furniture in them. This furniture would be covered with fleas, ticks and head lice and be generally annoying to the person who lived there and there family. They would also be painted in ugly colors and make noises anytime someone entered the home or used another piece of furniture. Additionally, the furniture and appliances would be built in such a way that it would be difficult or impossible to remove from the homes without causing damage.
Maybe we could send them some Sony DRM cd's too.
It's funny, I feel exactly the opposite. I fell in love with the US show, then got the original from Blockbuster online and I just can't watch it. I normally LOVE British TV, but I guess once you choose a flavor, it's hard to get into the other. I found myself missing Jim and Pam and the rest from the American show so I just plugged in my video out jack from my ipod video and watched the American version instead. :)
On that note, I too got into the Office because of my video ipod. I was taking a flight and was tired of trying to get enough space on the tray for my laptop, so I downloaded a couple office episodes and watched them on the plane. Now I just let the show run when I'm at work instead of listening to music. I watch the show when it comes on too...and it's also gotten me into My Name is Earl because I caught the ending of that one week and realized it was Jason Lee, one of my favorite actors from the Kevin Smith movies.
Bless you iPod.
Controlled by a web connection? Can you say URL redirection? If all you have to do is hack a website in order to take over a legion of Korean Attack Robots (KAR ), let me know when they come online. I'll have the dopest robot soccer team in history!
Not trying to be a troll here, but maybe that just means we shouldn't compare you to Einstein. It's possible that you don't have the same outside the box simple genius that we use to define Einstein.
I probably don't either having used the phrase "outside the box".
Nah, his l337-speak was TPM encrypted for his protection.
I keep hearing all of this noise about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD but it appears that Holographic discs are coming out next year with a capacity that far outsteps either of the competing formats. If you're going to wait...Might as well wait for the best.
With so many people turning from books to video games - particularly fantasy games based on Dnd and Tolkien, it makes perfect sense that a book store would turn to the most popular fantasy rpg as a natural market. With Dnd, you need at least 3 books to play (player's handbook, dungeon master's guide, monster manual) and once you get into those, there are about 20 other books (all costing between 20 and 40 bucks) that you can buy if you dig it. All that and you're capturing part of a market that's already into the genre and new players that are interested in investigating the roots of WoW - not to mention the poor kids and kids who're grounded from their video games.
I'd look for them to ramp this up. Heck...I'd be surprised if they didn't create gaming areas and offer some discounts to gamers who play there. How convenient would it be to duck out of the game and buy a monster manual 2 if you needed something new?
Hard core dnd players will never leave for video games (at least permanantly). All they need to do is keep some stick ups around for the gamer funk.
At home I'm still running two win2k boxes (for me) and a Mepis cd boot box for my wife and daughter. I have XP on a laptop because it came with Tablet PC edition, but honestly, 2k is so solid (spyware and the occasional worm notwithstading), there's no reason to even bother upgrading. If you a) use a firewall and b) don't let activeX controls install on your machine there's a good chance you can avoid most of the lameness. My wife and daughter get Mepis because they disable a an do plenty of b. I love Mepis for the desktop because it lets them surf the web without me having to worry about permanant damage to my machine. That said, I use WAY too many windows development environment apps for work to easily run Linux without a lot of extra work/file conversion/app installation/headaches.
Actually, recently a few people were restrained from talking about the new Harry Potter when they were sold the book prematurely. So yes, in some cases (under Canadian and US law at least), it is illegal to reminisce about something you saw last week...at least out loud.
How's that for thought police in action?
Ok, your entire rant was made from one misinterpretation. "them" meant Microsoft. :)
:)
Also, I didn't make the initial Coke/Pepsi analogy, I just said that it was a valid representation of Microsoft's marketing and brand association strategy. Though, to a degree I think you're trivializing the impact FOOD has on has on our modern economy or our children. I also was not saying that a heterogenous software environment was inherently unreliable, just that Microsoft might see it as such and thus move to protect itself from the possibility. Microsoft is a corporate control freak. They know that not even their OWN software works all the time, but at least they'd feel as if it were in their control. OPS (Other people's software) offers no such comfort and I imagine that Microsoft sees this first hand when someone calls them when AOL crashes.
Once again, I'm not advocating the practice of exclusivity, just validating the argument that Coke/Pepsi is a valid analogy for exclusivity with Microsoft. I'd LOVE to be able to get Coke at Taco Bell, but until that becomes a reality, I'll drink Pepsi's Raspberry Iced Tea. I'll also keep using photoshop every day on my Win XP box...cause that's just how I roll
Ok, pepsi spun off another independent company called Tricon Global (Wiki) in 1997 so this isn't really a matter of apples to oranges and hasn't been for a long time. Coke doesn't own McDonalds or the many, many restaurants that serve it exclusively. The fact is, in almost EVERY market there are exclusivity contracts built in to secure the market, maintain brand identity, and more importantly, brand association. If some McDonald's or BK's sold Pepsi, it'd be bad for Coke AND McDonalds because the idea behind these companies is consistent global experience.
When you equate this with Microsoft, you can see how they not only want market share, but brand association and consistency. Market share is one thing, but if you have a brand association with schools (ie, when you think of computers in schools, you think of Microsoft), you have a powerful persistent mindset that breeds familiarity. Familiarity breeds resistance to change. Microsoft also wants conistency. They don't know if some Gimp programmer writes good code. They also don't want to risk photoshop eating the entire scratch drive and crashing their product. If they move to protect their environment, it's likely they're trying to protect their brand through creating and controlling the software that goes on it. The Coke analogy to this would be something like "Cherry Coke". If someone else wanted to throw their own cherry syrup in there, it might make it too sweet or make coke taste bad in some other way, so Coke gives the customer a premixed cherry coke as an alternative. I can't speak to a non-syrup agreement with McDonald's but if you're already getting cherry coke from the manufacturer, why would you bother making your own? (Yes, I know other places DO have cherry syrup, but some people also run Gimp and photoshop.) In the end, IMO, the Coke and Pepsi argument works perfectly to illustrate exclusivity contracts and how a company can use them as a powerful business marketing tool.
Sure, Microsoft come off as a$$es because of it, but in the end when your kids learn to type papers in Microsoft Word, it all pays off for them.