Well, you certainly seem receptive to Microsoft's moaning about the high expense of running an IM service... which is a farce. They would say exactly the same thing about hosting web sites, and allow only MSIE if they thought people would fall for it. Somehow IRC has managed to get along all these years without MS' deep pockets.
The simple fact is that, like everything else, they are the de facto owners of this market because of their monopoly OS. Otherwise, everybody would just laugh at the idea of an IM client that refuses to interoperate with anything, just like some new email client that makes "special" emails only readable by itself. Kinda makes you shudder to think what the Internet would be like if MS had bothered to participate in its construction instead of clinging to the notion of distributing everything on CDs.
Re:The beginning of a true Mesh network?
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 1
It'd be interesting to see how far we can grow a wireless grid network. What kind of latency would this kind of network have? Probably too high for gaming..
Not to mention bandwidth.
Mesh networks are a dumb idea. "Hey, I have an idea, let's redo our national road system with ONLY residential streets! Then we wouldn't need any overpasses or onramps!"
You don't need to worry about individuals, but do you ever wonder what will happen to this country as a whole when we finally reach the point of producing nothing of value?
Re:Software Design != Rocket Design OR does it?
on
X Prize and John Carmack
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
For spaceflight, we need people who think like the old school programmers. The ones that actually planned their programs before they wrote them. When it took twenty-four hours (or more) between when you submitted your card deck and when you got your output (or a core dump) you learned to be damned careful with your code. The modern attitude of "keep tweaking it until it compiles; we'll fix the bugs in 2.0" won't wash in spaceflight.
Or maybe space exploration is bogged down precisely because it's too expensive, cumbersome, and exclusive just like computers in the 50s. Like programming with punch cards.
Software developers have learned that the Waterfall model *doesn't work* because it's too slow, expensive, and inflexible. Sound like any space programs you know?
There is a continum between experimentation and analysis. So long as space is dominated by risk-averse govt. bureaucracies, your vision of space exploration will continue to slowly plod along. But remember when the real progress happened: in the 60s, when rockets blew up quite often. The consequence of a failed unmanned flight is only financial, and that means failure can be justified by overall savings.
KDE and Gnome are essentially a standard desktop, the same one as Windows. They're so similar it doesn't make any difference for basic tasks. Start menu, task bar, system tray... check, check, check.
*Functionality*, such as.doc compatibility, is way more important than trivial UI issues.
I run my own mail server on my cable internet so I can make up a different email every time. For instance, the email address I give to Barnes and Noble is barnesandnoble@mydomain.com.
The problem is, just because I want to see my order confirmation email doesn't mean I want them to spam me once a week for the rest of my life. I have ordered from enough companies that this is now a substantial source of annoyance! Half.com is the worst, you have to read their email because you might have made a sale or need to re-list something, but they often send junkmail too. Yet no blacklist or whitelist or encrypted authentication will do a thing to help it.
I'm glad you mentioned the return address forging. Over the past few days at work I started to get "returned" email and failure notifications for mail that I never sent! I even did a manual virus scan which turned up nothing. Now I know why, and tomorrow I'll look at the headers on those messages.
Being so data-hungry is a potentially crippling disadvantage to the bayesian approach. Anything that requires 1000 messages of each type just to get started is useless to lots of people. It would take me half a year to prime the thing on my home email address.
What I wonder is whether it really matters who wrote the code. We all know hired programmers generally have no rights over what they produce. Ritchie and Thompson were probably employed by AT&T (right?) when they wrote the code, so what are the odds that SCO will claim ownership through some sequence of licenses and buyouts?
Heck, before the lawsuit started I just know there was somebody out there who owned the trademark UNIX, but I didn't even know it referred to specific code anymore.
Honestly this whole thing mystifies me. After reading about it every day on Slashdot, I still don't really understand what SCO thinks they own and who SCO is upset with. Is it 30 lines of code or 2e6? Is it a contract dispute or a holy war against the GPL? Are they suing Big Blue or anybody and everybody with a Slackware install?
Because normally the user doesn't know or care that they want 'SomePerlModule' in the first place, they're just trying to install a package that depends on some.pm file with no obvious relation to the name of the module that provides it.
I think you're under the illusion that "best party school" is meant to be prestigious. Yet somehow I doubt you'll find that "award" in any recruitment materials.
This may surprise you, but the median household income for the US in 2001 was $42,228, and most families have more than one child. The 80th percentile begins at $83,500.
I think the world of site licensing in which sizeable businesses live is quite a bit different. But whether this guitar string company was big enough for a site license I don't know. (Maybe not, or else the BSA wouldn't have kicked down their door).
That's fine, but obviously you must expect the same attitude from employees in return... no unpaid overtime from salaried employees, no sharing of ideas that might more profitably be persued by employees on their own time... in short, exact conformance to the letter of contract, and nothing more.
There's nothing to stop you from distributing Windows without Explorer? Tell that to Microsoft, I seem to remember it was an issue during the trial.
As for Office, I guess you can uninstall portions, but you're still paying for them. Microsoft only unbundles in extreme circumstances, like when they think people have other options:
In June, the Munich city government said it will migrate 14,000 Windows desktops to Linux beginning in early 2004. The city decided Linux would be less expensive over time, even though Microsoft's bid was nearly $12 million less than those from IBM and SuSE Latest News about SuSE Linux, which is based in Germany.
Microsoft's bid, which Ballmer delivered personally, started at $36.6 million and was slashed to $23.7 million at the 11th-hour, including an unusual offer to unbundle Word from Microsoft Office.
So no, MS is not a very good choice for customization.
Yes, but what I wondered is if the extra bits per pixel read from the CCD array might help when interpolating the colors. 8 bits is pretty good for final output, but the CCD values aren't directly output, they're combined with the neighboring pixels behind different color filters. It's a shame we don't really get a 24 bit rgb sample for each pixel, but since we're synthesizing a 24 bit rgb image from monochrome samples maybe it's good that they're 14 instead of only 8 bits and there is some benefit?
Oh, dear, somebody else is ignoring my claim to complete ownership of the Bond series! I was one of 5000 extras in a big battle scene and have decided I'm unhappy with my lack of recognition, and my real career isn't going that well, so to get to the point, pay me $700 or face my wrath!
Slashdot Mirror
The simple fact is that, like everything else, they are the de facto owners of this market because of their monopoly OS. Otherwise, everybody would just laugh at the idea of an IM client that refuses to interoperate with anything, just like some new email client that makes "special" emails only readable by itself. Kinda makes you shudder to think what the Internet would be like if MS had bothered to participate in its construction instead of clinging to the notion of distributing everything on CDs.
Mesh networks are a dumb idea. "Hey, I have an idea, let's redo our national road system with ONLY residential streets! Then we wouldn't need any overpasses or onramps!"
Good times...
You don't need to worry about individuals, but do you ever wonder what will happen to this country as a whole when we finally reach the point of producing nothing of value?
Software developers have learned that the Waterfall model *doesn't work* because it's too slow, expensive, and inflexible. Sound like any space programs you know?
There is a continum between experimentation and analysis. So long as space is dominated by risk-averse govt. bureaucracies, your vision of space exploration will continue to slowly plod along. But remember when the real progress happened: in the 60s, when rockets blew up quite often. The consequence of a failed unmanned flight is only financial, and that means failure can be justified by overall savings.
*Functionality*, such as .doc compatibility, is way more important than trivial UI issues.
My first reaction is that a lot of people in charge of large software projects would be interested in methods to predict completion dates.
The problem is, just because I want to see my order confirmation email doesn't mean I want them to spam me once a week for the rest of my life. I have ordered from enough companies that this is now a substantial source of annoyance! Half.com is the worst, you have to read their email because you might have made a sale or need to re-list something, but they often send junkmail too. Yet no blacklist or whitelist or encrypted authentication will do a thing to help it.
This story has nothing to do with AI.
I'm glad you mentioned the return address forging. Over the past few days at work I started to get "returned" email and failure notifications for mail that I never sent! I even did a manual virus scan which turned up nothing. Now I know why, and tomorrow I'll look at the headers on those messages.
Microsoft lock-in detrimental to Microsoft's goals? I think not. Are you familar with the phrase, "It's not done until Lotus 1,2,3 won't run."
Being so data-hungry is a potentially crippling disadvantage to the bayesian approach. Anything that requires 1000 messages of each type just to get started is useless to lots of people. It would take me half a year to prime the thing on my home email address.
Heck, before the lawsuit started I just know there was somebody out there who owned the trademark UNIX, but I didn't even know it referred to specific code anymore.
Honestly this whole thing mystifies me. After reading about it every day on Slashdot, I still don't really understand what SCO thinks they own and who SCO is upset with. Is it 30 lines of code or 2e6? Is it a contract dispute or a holy war against the GPL? Are they suing Big Blue or anybody and everybody with a Slackware install?
Because normally the user doesn't know or care that they want 'SomePerlModule' in the first place, they're just trying to install a package that depends on some .pm file with no obvious relation to the name of the module that provides it.
I think you're under the illusion that "best party school" is meant to be prestigious. Yet somehow I doubt you'll find that "award" in any recruitment materials.
This may surprise you, but the median household income for the US in 2001 was $42,228, and most families have more than one child. The 80th percentile begins at $83,500.
Shoot, the monkey face looked a lot better in the blurry 1976 Viking view. And they call this progress!?
I think the world of site licensing in which sizeable businesses live is quite a bit different. But whether this guitar string company was big enough for a site license I don't know. (Maybe not, or else the BSA wouldn't have kicked down their door).
That's fine, but obviously you must expect the same attitude from employees in return... no unpaid overtime from salaried employees, no sharing of ideas that might more profitably be persued by employees on their own time... in short, exact conformance to the letter of contract, and nothing more.
As for Office, I guess you can uninstall portions, but you're still paying for them. Microsoft only unbundles in extreme circumstances, like when they think people have other options:
So no, MS is not a very good choice for customization.Yes, but what I wondered is if the extra bits per pixel read from the CCD array might help when interpolating the colors. 8 bits is pretty good for final output, but the CCD values aren't directly output, they're combined with the neighboring pixels behind different color filters. It's a shame we don't really get a 24 bit rgb sample for each pixel, but since we're synthesizing a 24 bit rgb image from monochrome samples maybe it's good that they're 14 instead of only 8 bits and there is some benefit?
Are we still talking about China? 'Cuz I can't imagine why they would care.
Oh, dear, somebody else is ignoring my claim to complete ownership of the Bond series! I was one of 5000 extras in a big battle scene and have decided I'm unhappy with my lack of recognition, and my real career isn't going that well, so to get to the point, pay me $700 or face my wrath!
Prediction: the US space program will become the main customer.