Bottom posting became the standard for usenet. This made sense because any single post needed to be relatively self-contained so new participants in a thread could make sense of it. When threads last for weeks (or months) with hundreds of messages, this is necessary to manage the large and changing number of participants.
Top-posting makes sense in email for the reasons outlined by the parent post. The distribution list for most emails is fixed and threads don't last very long.
My wife has an iPhone and I have a blackberry, so I speak from experience:
Basically, I can't type on the iPhone in portrait mode. In landscape, I can usually peck my way using index fingers, either one handed holding the phone in the other hand, or two handed if a lay the phone on a surface. Typing with thumbs (the preferred method of all bberry users) is simply not possible. FWIW I have average size fingers (I think!).
The iPhone is a wonderful piece of technology. It's easier to do almost everything on it except for the one thing that's essential for business use: type emails. As much as I'd love for my work to give me one for free, they'd have a revolt on their hands if they took away the blackberries.
The iPhone will be a blackberry killer only when you can slide up the touch screen up to reveal a tactile keyboard. With Jobs' aversion to buttons, I don't see that happening any time soon!
According to TFA, the ads will be in a separate panel in the reader, so we'll have our identical display and printed views.
This is an option _publishers_ of content will have. I think it's a great idea, actually. I'm quite happy looking at a few ads to get the content of Slashdot, the NYT, Washington Post, Gmail, Google search, practically the whole subscription-free part of the internet. If this model allows some publishers to put out stuff for free that they previously charged for, I think that's great.
I think you're missing the point. There's an element of expectations about future pricing that people had when they paid $600 for the phone - expectations driven by Apple's historical pricing behavior. Some people's willingness to pay $600 for the phone was driven in part by their expectation that they couldn't possibly get it for $200 less 10 weeks later. Apple violated those expectations, which is why early buyers are mad.
The processor market is actually a good example, but not for the reasons cited by other posters. In that case, consumer expectation is that prices continually drop in a largely predictable fashion, so the trade-off between buying now at a higher price and buying later at a lower price is well-understood and taken into account at time of purchase.
In the market, everything is relative to expectations. The point here is the Microsoft did much better than expected. The stock market rewarded them with a 4% increase in their stock price today. For a roughly $300 billion mature company, this is a HUGE jump in value - it amounts to an increase of about $12 billion in market cap.
From reading the headline, I thought this was the converse of a.xxx domain, which actually might not be such a bad idea. Rather than try to decide what should and should not go into a.xxx domain and have to worry about censorship, you use the.safe domain voluntarily for kid stuff and offer parents/schools software to restrict kid browsing. And it would hopefully limit the will-somebody-please-think-of-the-children complaints. There would be little danger of censorship since it would be difficult to justify limiting adults to using it.
I'm sure it's not a new idea, and perhaps I'm missing some of its pitfalls...
The university's position is completely untenable and will not last. They might not support Vista now, but come fall, their whole freshman class will have new Vista-equipped laptops. Are they going to force a fourth of their student user base to downgrade to XP? I don't think so.
I know the parent sounds like common sense, but cell phones are *not* banned on Amtrak trains in the US (except in the 'quiet car') and people are generally considerate. There will always be those who abuse the opportunity, but that's not a good enough reason for a total ban.
Well, consider that I would never buy a DRM'd song from iTunes now, but would be happy to buy a large number of songs on a continuing basis if DRM were scrapped. I doubt this is a rare sentiment.
Never attribute to charity what can be explained by good business reasons!
Typical Apple fanboy tortured logic. So if Microsoft wrote a EULA that said you could only use this copy of Vista with the current computer, had to buy any hardware upgrades through Microsoft, and needed to buy a new copy of Vista with any new computer you bought, you'd be happy? How exactly does Microsoft's DRM give you *less* rights than Apple's DRM?!
Second, you'll find the blog entry to be mostly 'spin' of the GAO report. The GAO report pretty much restricts itself to reporting what a 'panel of experts' they convened said about declining research productivity in pharmaceuticals - the usual industry criticisms are there together with the standard rebuttals, with the report presenting almost no consensus conclusions beyond the basic numbers/graphs on drug approvals. In fact, I tried multiple substring searches of the one quote in the blog entry claimed to be from the report and I couldn't find it. Maybe the blog writer too got confused about what someone said about the report and what the report itself says!
Sorry for the factual interruption. We now return you to the highly-moderated pharma-bashing party.
Sorry to spoil some of the Verizon-bashing, but I think people are forgetting a core issue:
The problem here is that $0.002/KB is the *correct* rate. It's what Verizon actually charges as a data rate. So the bill is correct. Having a blind faith in their billing department, especially when it comes to math and calculations, I see where the reps are coming from: we know the billing is right, this guy is trying to blind us with science, so let's stick to our guns.
What is incorrect is that this person was *quoted* 0.002 cents/KB. His whole argument should've been focused on saying that he was told it would be 100 times cheaper than it actually was.
Math stupidity: yes. Intentional "larceny": I don't think so.
Walmart (iTunes competitor): I need to sell DRM tracks (the RIAA won't license to me otherwise), but those DRM tracks must be playable on the World's best selling PMP (iPod). Solution? pay for DoubleTwist.
SanDisk (iPod competitor): I need to sell a player that will play DRM tracks from the World's largest online music store (iTunes). Solution? pay for DoubleTwist.
Apple has refused to license FairPlay for these two purposes. DoubleTwist forces Apple's hand.
DoubleTwist has the potential to 'decouple' iTunes from the iPod. Want to buy DRM tracks on iTunes then play them on your Sansa? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to SanDisk so you can do just that. Want to buy DRM tracks from Walmart that will play on your iPod? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to Walmart so it can offer tracks in Apple's DRM for sale.
This could be huge for consumers and a huge blow for Apple. I expect extended court fights!
The code that prevents music downloaded from Apple's iTunes store being played on any portable player other than an iPod has been "cracked". Apple has not commented on claims that Jon Lech Johansen has "reverse engineered" the FairPlay system. Prominent hacker Mr Johansen has made a name circumventing software used to restrict the use of digital media. His company, DoubleTwist, said that it planned to license the code to other digital music player manufacturers.
[End Quote]
Perhaps that's why the company is called *Double*Twist. It will allow both iTunes tracks to play on non-iPods and non-iTune tracks to be encrypted using Apple's DRM and therefore be playable on iPods.
The major population problem facing the developed world (and even China) is not over-population, but population aging. This is driven by increased longevity *and* low birth rates. If you check the UN projections for the next 50 years or so, the picture looks bleak for Japan and Europe, with an increasing number of seniors per productive worker. The US picture is bad, but not as bad as the rest of the developed world - thanks in large part to higher birth rates and immigration.
What can I say? Malthus is alive and well on Slashdot...
Obviously not for a single version, but for the most current version when each vulnerability was discovered. Not counting betas.
Obsession with Market Share Growth
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
Given that Firefox is somewhere around 10% of the browser market (and that is a *huge* absolute number of installations, sufficient to support active development), why do we care if its share grows? In fact, there are distinct benefits to being only 10% of the market: you're not the main target of 'badware through the browser' exploits.
At some point, I was somewhat surprised that Mozilla made a good amount of money from its search box, and it may make sense for them to seek greater market share for that reason. If that is the case, more power to them, but let's be aware of motivations.
Do you see Fedora Core as targeted at a particular type of Linux user (developers, server admins, desktop users, multimedia, etc) or are you trying to be all things to all people? Stated another way, what do you see as FC's main (current and future) strengths and weakneses compared to other distros?
When Redhat dropped their supported free desktop version and split their offerings into the 'community' Fedora Core and the 'professional' RHEL, everybody beat up on them then, and continues to do so (see the Ubuntu-as-Redhat-Killer article from earlier today). Yet it seems like many Linux distros with commercial aspirations are doing the same (Suse, and now Linspire).
"Western Union routinely delays or blocks transfers between customers whose names even partially match names on the Treasury list" - That's a pretty wide net to cast.
My real question is whether this is in *any* way effective. It seems that the worst that could happen to a real terrorist is that once they're blocked, they'll realize they're on a watch list and act accordingly - ie send their money some other way.
Since it doesn't make sense as an anti-terrorism policy, I'm guessing Western Union is just trying to prevent having egg on their face again after it was discovered that one of the 9/11 hijackers used them twice. I want to hold them accountable for this 'profiling' but the fact is their business in the Arab world is probably suffering because of this policy - they're stuck between the 'rock' of US government and public pressure, and the 'hard place' of losing millions of dollars in the Arab world.
Wow, an AC posts completely unsubstantiated 'facts', condems a system that:
- made the US the sole world superpower - made the West's standard of living what it is - is responsible for almost every useful innovation of the last 2 centuries - is lifting 100s of millions out of poverty in China and India - is the single explanation of the vast economic chasm between North and South Korea - etc and so on
*and* offers no alternative, yet is already at +4 Insightful.
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom posting became the standard for usenet. This made sense because any single post needed to be relatively self-contained so new participants in a thread could make sense of it. When threads last for weeks (or months) with hundreds of messages, this is necessary to manage the large and changing number of participants.
Top-posting makes sense in email for the reasons outlined by the parent post. The distribution list for most emails is fixed and threads don't last very long.
My wife has an iPhone and I have a blackberry, so I speak from experience:
Basically, I can't type on the iPhone in portrait mode. In landscape, I can usually peck my way using index fingers, either one handed holding the phone in the other hand, or two handed if a lay the phone on a surface. Typing with thumbs (the preferred method of all bberry users) is simply not possible. FWIW I have average size fingers (I think!).
The iPhone is a wonderful piece of technology. It's easier to do almost everything on it except for the one thing that's essential for business use: type emails. As much as I'd love for my work to give me one for free, they'd have a revolt on their hands if they took away the blackberries.
The iPhone will be a blackberry killer only when you can slide up the touch screen up to reveal a tactile keyboard. With Jobs' aversion to buttons, I don't see that happening any time soon!
So what's the longest '+5 funny' cascade in slashdot history?
According to TFA, the ads will be in a separate panel in the reader, so we'll have our identical display and printed views.
This is an option _publishers_ of content will have. I think it's a great idea, actually. I'm quite happy looking at a few ads to get the content of Slashdot, the NYT, Washington Post, Gmail, Google search, practically the whole subscription-free part of the internet. If this model allows some publishers to put out stuff for free that they previously charged for, I think that's great.
I think you're missing the point. There's an element of expectations about future pricing that people had when they paid $600 for the phone - expectations driven by Apple's historical pricing behavior. Some people's willingness to pay $600 for the phone was driven in part by their expectation that they couldn't possibly get it for $200 less 10 weeks later. Apple violated those expectations, which is why early buyers are mad.
The processor market is actually a good example, but not for the reasons cited by other posters. In that case, consumer expectation is that prices continually drop in a largely predictable fashion, so the trade-off between buying now at a higher price and buying later at a lower price is well-understood and taken into account at time of purchase.
"Choice" in the presence of network externalities is a problem. Think 'blu ray' vs 'hd dvd', not Ford vs Chevy.
In the market, everything is relative to expectations. The point here is the Microsoft did much better than expected. The stock market rewarded them with a 4% increase in their stock price today. For a roughly $300 billion mature company, this is a HUGE jump in value - it amounts to an increase of about $12 billion in market cap.
From reading the headline, I thought this was the converse of a .xxx domain, which actually might not be such a bad idea. Rather than try to decide what should and should not go into a .xxx domain and have to worry about censorship, you use the .safe domain voluntarily for kid stuff and offer parents/schools software to restrict kid browsing. And it would hopefully limit the will-somebody-please-think-of-the-children complaints. There would be little danger of censorship since it would be difficult to justify limiting adults to using it.
...
I'm sure it's not a new idea, and perhaps I'm missing some of its pitfalls
The university's position is completely untenable and will not last. They might not support Vista now, but come fall, their whole freshman class will have new Vista-equipped laptops. Are they going to force a fourth of their student user base to downgrade to XP? I don't think so.
Just hold off on the downgrade.
I know the parent sounds like common sense, but cell phones are *not* banned on Amtrak trains in the US (except in the 'quiet car') and people are generally considerate. There will always be those who abuse the opportunity, but that's not a good enough reason for a total ban.
Well, consider that I would never buy a DRM'd song from iTunes now, but would be happy to buy a large number of songs on a continuing basis if DRM were scrapped. I doubt this is a rare sentiment.
Never attribute to charity what can be explained by good business reasons!
Typical Apple fanboy tortured logic. So if Microsoft wrote a EULA that said you could only use this copy of Vista with the current computer, had to buy any hardware upgrades through Microsoft, and needed to buy a new copy of Vista with any new computer you bought, you'd be happy? How exactly does Microsoft's DRM give you *less* rights than Apple's DRM?!
First, let's start with a link to the report itself, rather than a blog entry about the report:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0749.pdf
Second, you'll find the blog entry to be mostly 'spin' of the GAO report. The GAO report pretty much restricts itself to reporting what a 'panel of experts' they convened said about declining research productivity in pharmaceuticals - the usual industry criticisms are there together with the standard rebuttals, with the report presenting almost no consensus conclusions beyond the basic numbers/graphs on drug approvals. In fact, I tried multiple substring searches of the one quote in the blog entry claimed to be from the report and I couldn't find it. Maybe the blog writer too got confused about what someone said about the report and what the report itself says!
Sorry for the factual interruption. We now return you to the highly-moderated pharma-bashing party.
Disclaimer: I work for a pharma company
Sorry to spoil some of the Verizon-bashing, but I think people are forgetting a core issue:
The problem here is that $0.002/KB is the *correct* rate. It's what Verizon actually charges as a data rate. So the bill is correct. Having a blind faith in their billing department, especially when it comes to math and calculations, I see where the reps are coming from: we know the billing is right, this guy is trying to blind us with science, so let's stick to our guns.
What is incorrect is that this person was *quoted* 0.002 cents/KB. His whole argument should've been focused on saying that he was told it would be 100 times cheaper than it actually was.
Math stupidity: yes. Intentional "larceny": I don't think so.
Favorite quote in this context:
"The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men." -- Charles De Gaulle
Walmart (iTunes competitor): I need to sell DRM tracks (the RIAA won't license to me otherwise), but those DRM tracks must be playable on the World's best selling PMP (iPod). Solution? pay for DoubleTwist.
SanDisk (iPod competitor): I need to sell a player that will play DRM tracks from the World's largest online music store (iTunes). Solution? pay for DoubleTwist.
Apple has refused to license FairPlay for these two purposes. DoubleTwist forces Apple's hand.
DoubleTwist has the potential to 'decouple' iTunes from the iPod. Want to buy DRM tracks on iTunes then play them on your Sansa? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to SanDisk so you can do just that. Want to buy DRM tracks from Walmart that will play on your iPod? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to Walmart so it can offer tracks in Apple's DRM for sale.
This could be huge for consumers and a huge blow for Apple. I expect extended court fights!
I don't know about TFA, but here is the first paragraph from a similar story on the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6083110.stm
[Begin Quote]
The code that prevents music downloaded from Apple's iTunes store being played on any portable player other than an iPod has been "cracked".
Apple has not commented on claims that Jon Lech Johansen has "reverse engineered" the FairPlay system.
Prominent hacker Mr Johansen has made a name circumventing software used to restrict the use of digital media.
His company, DoubleTwist, said that it planned to license the code to other digital music player manufacturers.
[End Quote]
Perhaps that's why the company is called *Double*Twist. It will allow both iTunes tracks to play on non-iPods and non-iTune tracks to be encrypted using Apple's DRM and therefore be playable on iPods.
The major population problem facing the developed world (and even China) is not over-population, but population aging. This is driven by increased longevity *and* low birth rates. If you check the UN projections for the next 50 years or so, the picture looks bleak for Japan and Europe, with an increasing number of seniors per productive worker. The US picture is bad, but not as bad as the rest of the developed world - thanks in large part to higher birth rates and immigration.
...
What can I say? Malthus is alive and well on Slashdot
Obviously not for a single version, but for the most current version when each vulnerability was discovered. Not counting betas.
Given that Firefox is somewhere around 10% of the browser market (and that is a *huge* absolute number of installations, sufficient to support active development), why do we care if its share grows? In fact, there are distinct benefits to being only 10% of the market: you're not the main target of 'badware through the browser' exploits.
At some point, I was somewhat surprised that Mozilla made a good amount of money from its search box, and it may make sense for them to seek greater market share for that reason. If that is the case, more power to them, but let's be aware of motivations.
Do you see Fedora Core as targeted at a particular type of Linux user (developers, server admins, desktop users, multimedia, etc) or are you trying to be all things to all people? Stated another way, what do you see as FC's main (current and future) strengths and weakneses compared to other distros?
When Redhat dropped their supported free desktop version and split their offerings into the 'community' Fedora Core and the 'professional' RHEL, everybody beat up on them then, and continues to do so (see the Ubuntu-as-Redhat-Killer article from earlier today). Yet it seems like many Linux distros with commercial aspirations are doing the same (Suse, and now Linspire).
Maybe Redhat was onto something?
From the article:
"Western Union routinely delays or blocks transfers between customers whose names even partially match names on the Treasury list" - That's a pretty wide net to cast.
My real question is whether this is in *any* way effective. It seems that the worst that could happen to a real terrorist is that once they're blocked, they'll realize they're on a watch list and act accordingly - ie send their money some other way.
Since it doesn't make sense as an anti-terrorism policy, I'm guessing Western Union is just trying to prevent having egg on their face again after it was discovered that one of the 9/11 hijackers used them twice. I want to hold them accountable for this 'profiling' but the fact is their business in the Arab world is probably suffering because of this policy - they're stuck between the 'rock' of US government and public pressure, and the 'hard place' of losing millions of dollars in the Arab world.
Wow, an AC posts completely unsubstantiated 'facts', condems a system that:
- made the US the sole world superpower
- made the West's standard of living what it is
- is responsible for almost every useful innovation of the last 2 centuries
- is lifting 100s of millions out of poverty in China and India
- is the single explanation of the vast economic chasm between North and South Korea
- etc and so on
*and* offers no alternative, yet is already at +4 Insightful.
Nice.