Remember who was and is behind SCO? Remember who has been constantly threatening to sue Linux for infringing on its patents?
200 million is PEANUTS for MS, a very low price to pay for making sure nobody else can afford to enter the market. Wanna bet that 200 million goes to pursue further lawsuits?
MS will call for patent reform roughly at the same it stops with FUD and breaking standards. Software patents work for Microsoft. The occasional payoff is just the price for their way of doing business. If software patents are removed ANYONE can go into the software market. Not something MS would enjoy at all.
I either think that you never did a big deal or sucked at it. You are NOT going to get that contract if the supplier knows that you have no choice.
Proof me wrong: Get MS to accept liability for anything wrong with their product. You can't. If you trucks blew up because of a security flaw, the truck company has to compensate you. Does MS compensate you for its security flaws?
it is easy to call someone a troll, especially if they come with inconvenient truths that hit just a little to close to home.
Jobs first talks about freedom and then that freedom is not the issue. So what is it?
In many ways we have been lucky with the PC. We could have ended up with Apple or Commodore controlling the market, both the software and the hardware. Good luck getting Linux to run on a closed platform. Just see how much harder it is to get Linux on a mac, and that is the mac of the company that did NOT end up controlling the entire market.
While I dislike Gates with a passion, he did create a platform that is remarkably open. Old Borgie never cared if you watched porn on his OS. Never felt the need to keep the kiddies safe from titties. While I agree with Apples decision to ban flash from their platform, there is a danger in this.
Tell me, would you tolerate the sugar company banning you from eating their sugar raw? No? Then explain why you tolerate Apple banning flash. And if you comment that you don't mind being banned from eating sugar raw because you don't do that anyway, then you just don't get it and never will. Please, do not vote or reproduce. Don't ask why, smarter people are telling you and you should listen.
When does the line cross between protecting customers and controlling them? Would it be okay for MS to warn you that your are about to install virus? How about if they refuse to allow you to do so? How about a cheater program? A crack? You can argue for controlling such software but should MS be allowed to do so? Should Apple?
A story below this one is the story of Google Docs not being fully compatible and that using it might result in data loss. Wouldn't it be nice if MS stopped you from loosing data by refusing to allow you to export your documents to other formats? Well would it?
Who owns the iPad? Apple or the consumer? If MS tried to control your PC in the same way, would you tolerate it? Would you take it from Dell? Then why do you take it from Apple?
Now you can ignore Apples control for now, because you can easily work around them. nobody has to have an iPad, iPhone, iPod or Mac. No really, you do not. So their control is "harmless". For now.
But if we start allowing companies to believe that they can continue to tell us what they can do their products we bought from them, well where does it end? You see, I am still fearful of the DRM computer. The idea that has been floating around for a while to create system where the user no longer has final say in what runs and what does not on his on hardware. There are powerful interests from media companies (and Steve "Disney" Jobs knows this more then most) to make this happen. What we DON'T need right now is for consumer to just roll over on total control over their own possessions for a shiny toy.
Pierce through the Steve Jobs reality distortion field and you are being sold DRM. It might be shiny DRM, but that doesn't change its nature.
It might be harmless now, but will it continue to be harmless? Read some of the wilder proposals from the content industries, including such things as filters on all hardware to screen for copyrighted content and block its display. Would you buy it? Would you buy it from Apple? You are already doing it. Step 1 complete.
This just goes to show that when you use Microsofts software, you are locked to using their products and their products only. Because the format is closed, other parties will always be playing catchup and can never guarantee 100% compatibility. So Googles snarky comment at the end reveals just how lethal lock-in can be. You are locked in, with no way out.
I can understand that you might resent loosing data in a migration or usage of another tool, but put the blame FIRST with Microsoft and THEN with yourself for having allowed yourself to get locked in.
In any other part of your business, you would avoid lock-in at all costs. Would you tolerate that your floors could only be provided by ONE company and that it means no body else can put in a carpet without it breaking gravity? Would you allow your truck fleet to be provided by only ONE company and have that company know it? A common trick in the trucking branch is when it is time to place a new order is to invite the truck company to your place of business and have a few rival trucks parked in sight. Just a hint that you and the sales rep know there is competition out there.
In IT? You happily invite the MS guy to give you a new deal in your all MS office that can only deal with MS formats... yeah. What is the word in the sales rep mind? Bonus? Sucker?
Governments do this all the time, they give their divisions rules that they must buy from a supplier who has won the bid. And gosh, once they have the bid for the next couple of years, service just goes out of the window. How surprising. Especially when you just know that the quality of service under the previous contract will play no role whatsoever under the new bidding round. Ever wonder why government often does so badly in efficiency? They think lock-in is a GOOD thing. You know how you get good service from a supplier? Make him sweat as to whether your next order will be going to him. It is how the game is played.
Really, take a long hard look at your own company. How certain are you that you can access your own info without aid from a third party? A paper archive is easy. No matter who supplies the binders, you can read it. Tape drives? How certain are you they continue to be compatible? Are your records required by law actually readable? Can you afford to ditch a supplier who doesn't make business sense anymore? Can you get the best deal if the supplier knows you need him?
Why do you think MS sells Windows for ever higher prices? They know they got you by the short and curlies.
Just a while ago we were warned by a computer scientist (whatever that is) that this huge oil reservoir is under so much pressure that if 3 miles or rock spits, it could blow up the planet and end life as we know it...
Presumably kdawson read this slashdot story... oh wait... editor reading story... I see where I went wrong there.
Lets face it, this is the US way. I remember countless jokes about the Mir space station that after years of faithful service was retired while the space shuttle was blowing up all over the place. When you can't be proud of your own stuff, ridicule what others do. It works.
The Venezuela incident seems without side effect so far, and the firing of all the engineers and directors? Well, BP didn't and that one blew up... so what is the relation? But no worry, logic has nothing to do with propaganda.
What do you expect from a country where fox-news is not a contradiction in terms?
Please show me how you program in XML, HTML, JSON. CSS is getting some extremely basic selectors but still I would hardly call it a programming language. Your defintion is for languages as in English. Programming languages are different. If you make this claim around real programmers, prepare to be ridiculed.
It sounds like you're just saying that we should pay more for consultants like you
And what is wrong with that?
But the point is, if you want open continued development, you are always going to have different platforms. Unless you want to freeze all browsers to HTML4 and somehow enforce them doing everything exactly the same, then what you want is impossible.
How are you going to force MS to update its javascript version?
And as for making Javascript type safe, sorry but the nature of many languages is to use this loose typing as a feature. Learn to work with it or move on to a different language.
Basically you are saying: If only all cars were exactly the same and controlled exactly the same, traffic would be a lot safer. Yes it would. Good luck getting it to happen though.
Meanwhile I work in the real world and don't believe in impossible dreams. Ever since computers have been invented someone wanted to create a magic programming solution that would make it as easy as a Star Trek Computers. I don't see it happening, but I will buy one from you when you build one. Meanwhile, I will collect a high fee to work with what we got, all so I can afford your magic system when you build it. That is fair isn't it?
The home-computers in general, as opposed to the PC/Mac, were on the whole a EU thing. Not sure why. Commodore is after all Canadian. Maybe PC/Mac was cheaper in the US. Maybe IBM and Apple found it difficult to sell in Europe. Maybe US business adopted the PC more so that the proffesional choice was more influential then in Europe.
The Amiga was a home computer, while it could of course be used to run a small office it never got the reputation of being for the office in great numbers, never heard of a case of a large office using them in the same way DOS and Apples and later Windows would be used. They were not for word-processing... well they were, but that was not how they were sold.
But such regional differences are hardly surprising. One of the fun things of travelling abroad is to go into a supermarket and just look at the differences. Go into a US store and you won't regonize half the foods, even if it is the same food because of the different ways they are branded.
Most of us buy stuff anyway because our friends recommend it, so the first product to get a foothold often becomes the leading product.
So yes, a european is far more likely to see a working Amiga then an American. So Amiga is a bit like your own toes.
Yes they are listening, just through republican ears. These are highly tuned and will hear roughly the following: Democrats who vote against this are against funding our troops, republicans who vote for this are voting for our space program!
Really, politics is a lot simpler then people think.
People do remember the Nazi's. It is all very well to talk about free speech, until you see what free speech can lead to.
Americans LOVE to talk about free speech, but oddly enough none of them seem to remember the McCarthy trials or indeed the dixy chicks. Free speech? No, just a different set of rules of what you can't say.
It has been proven recently in South Africa and Rwanda that free speech can all to easily lead to horrific things. SA has had race riots... well riots... the race is all black, incited by radio broadcasts. Same as what started the slaughter in Rwanda.
Free speech? To parody Islam? Doesn't seem to exist and a lot of freedom advocates want people to self censor themselves to avoid upsetting things. Free speech is very hard. True free speech is impossible. It would require ANY and ALL speech and publication of images and ideas which are not obviously illegal in another way to be not just allowed or even tolerated but ENABLED. Think about this, if I am free to say X but have no means of publishing it, it would STILL be censorship. Everyone with a printing press could simply limit my free speech, so at least some presses would have to be publicly owned and be required to print ANYTHING ANYBODY wants. Good luck with that.
Free speech is also more then just not being arrested for saying something, it also means the rest of society can't act against you. Like with the dixie chicks. Free speech as you long as you say what we want you to say or we will make your life impossible? No.
Really, kid, stop thinking about free speech in such simple terms. Be pro-free speech all you want, but do it with a solid understanding of the enormous so far unsolved problems this will bring. Meanwhile the rest of the world has learned to accept that freedom only exist up to a certain point. usually when you want to end other peoples freedom.
Maybe it is because in Europe we think of the holocaust, the killing of millions of people to take their property as a bad thing. Americans think of it has "how the west was won". Really, the only difference between Hitler and the US was that Hitler went east for Lebensraum.
Oh and free speech in the United States? Check the McCarthy trials. Yeah, cheer up US, you can say that all other races should be killed, but not that wealth should be distributed evenly.
I guess it is just about what you fear most. Taxes or the Holocaust.
GPS statistics? Really? What are those exactly? Your delusional brain can't still comprehend how GPS works? The receiver only receives, it simply measures the time differences between signals and calculates its position from that. Nothing is transmitted, nobody knows where the receiver is or even that its exists.
And that is why most people tend to be more relative about privacy issues, because nutters like you make so much fuss about nothing that it drowns everything else out.
GPS database...
Really.
Anyone want to bet this guy has a mobile phone on him 24/7 with a contract? Turns of his GPS so the state can't track him, but keeps a personal identifier that can turned on religiously.
The final figure will be of a women of normal enough proportions not to give serious artifacts in the base model being stretched but as slim as possible.
That is the problem with trying to use base model for all body types you want to create. You can't because the curves don't curve. It is why TES (Fallout 3) has whole body replacers and 3d renders have a lot of different body types made by third parties. Because you can't just take a full figured body and turn it into a slim one with things looking odd.
It is also known that standing straight up like this is both unnatural and unattractive. There is a reason Playboy never uses a pose like this and only the most hardup jack-off to medical/photograph reference books.
The ideal "western" body type is already well known. Bar the fatty lovers, on the whole men tend to prefer women that do not get harpooned when they go swimming in the sea. What a suprise.
this experiment would be a whole lot more intresting if they had generated better bodies, not just stretch one base model into freaks (some of the builds are impossible, I seen several females with a inward crotch where as even slender women tend to curve out there).
You would get a better result with displaying all the playmaters from Playboy, then you could get a real feeling for how tastes changed. But that study already has been done by the editors, you can see the body shape changing over the years. Tit size has also gone down. When they could show more of the rest, the size of the tits got less important and since big tits are basically fat, this means the body weight could go down as well.
Don't they have Playboy in Australia? Would explain a lot.
The cops don't think is important at all. They are ordered to, by people who owe their elections to donations by big business and when you make a low salary it is not wise to question every single order.
Not a single beat officer goes around in the morning thinking: "Geez, what am I going to do today, arrest a rapist or collect a mislaid prototype phone for Jobs".
And if you really don't like this abuse of privilege by Jobs, then don't buy any Apple products. Not even the really shiny ones.
Frankly I amazed that the press ain't all over this... oh wait the press that survives on Apple ads. Freedom of the press and all. The press gets stolen stuff all the time, most leaked documents can be considered stolen and of course there is no proof so far that theft has actually taken place. In a decent country a company calling a search warrant on a lost piece of property would be hounded to death. Bet that ain't going to happen?
Games are not that expensive and in fact an increase in such revenue was predicted because when money is tight you buy a new game rather then go on holiday.
But buy what game?
I still got a stack of old CD's just because and if I look at them, I see countless genre's that seem to have disappeared. Especially if you track mainstream game. Practically every title released by Microprose is gone. Flight sims? RPG's? Adventures?
And please if you point out Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins and Fallout 3, then you hopefully also realize that this list is pretty complete. For a couple of years.
Turnbased games like Ufo: Enemy Unknown and Jagged Alliance sold well but never got a sequel... or rather never got a sequel that deserves the name.
I still buy games but have noticed that more and more I am just not intrested because new games are not of the type that I want to play. Fine that you go for the younger crowd, but they don't got the money do they?
I think it is the same as with the music industry. They release fewer titles especially in some genres and then wonder why sales decline. It would be like McDonals dropping all its food products and then wondering why they don't make as much from toilet visits.
And then there are even dumber companies like Rockstar who don't launch Red Dead Redemption on the PC but have a long history of releasing titles on the PC eventually. So I am not going to buy it at launch, because I prefer the PC. And if it really doesn't come out for the PC in two years? Oh well, to old by then anyway.
Sometimes you really got to wonder who the hell let these morons in charge of the sales department.
Actually, web development is pretty easy. Just that you got to stay away from the "do it all frameworks" that you want to "customize".
Either build it yourself or use off the shelf, but when you try to combine the two you get a mass.
The tools/languages he mentions all do their own things. And since when are html, xml, json and css a language? Might as well call headers in C a separate language.
Neither is cross-browser all that hard or rather, it doesn't need to be.
As an experienced web-developer I see some very simple problems with web-development:
I want program X, now make it do Y. If you want wordpress, use wordpress. Yet what many a customer wants is to use Windows XP, then have it modded to be OS-X, with no budget, with MS supporting it. If you want to use off the shelf software then you got to use it as it is, or spend on customizing it and then accept that you got a custom solution that nobody can help you with.
A cheap developer is often a bad developer. There is a reason I charge a high hourly rate, I know what I am doing and more importantly, what I shouldn't do. This doesn't mean I am the best programmer you can hire. A programmer punches code. A developer gets you a working site. Anyone can punch out code but you will all to often end up with something that just doesn't work.
Outsource only if you are a master at cross-culture communication. Indians, Chinese, East-europeans, they just ain't got the same attitude as you do. Granted I only see the bad examples, were someone has outsourced a project, it turned bad and I am asked to clean it up, but there is so much work with this that i wonder if it ever goes right. And the outsourced code is often so fucking bad, you got to wonder how old the people involved were.
Know your tools. Really, what truck driver doesn't know anything about trucks? For that matter, what shipping company director doesn't know anything about trucks? We often don't realize how much we know about stuff, does a shop owner know a thing or to about real estate? That a door should be 2 meters tall or more? That it is handy if the door opens if you push on it? That lights inyour shop are handy? All basics stuff, but many have no idea at all about their own website. And if you don't know the basics, then how can you judge wether you got value for money? it would be like hiring someone to maintain a garden when you have never seen a garden, don't even know what the word means.
Time/Costs/Money. The web for a lot of customers is often what their little nephew did with the wedding pictures. Cute but hardly something that you want to build your company on. A webshop/site is expensive, especially if you want it customized. Renting a physical store isn't all that hard, but when you are done making it your store you are looking at a huge bill, and the same goes for your online presence.
Know what you want. Developers like me charge by the hour, so if you spend all day calling me up trying to determine the font/color of a something on your site, that will get you neat bill at the end. Yes, just for changing the color. If I don't charge you direct, I will do it indirect. KNOW what you want. If you are building a house, you don't tell the brick layer to tear the walls down again because you want to try a different look do you?
And finally. CONTENT. Get your content ready in time. I seen plenty of projects delayed endlessly because the content takes to long to be produced. A site needs content and anytime between delivery of the site and you getting it up and running is lost revenue.
Really, web development ain't all that hard, but the customers often make it far more expensive then it needs to be.
Put the controller and its access in the dashboard and seal it. If you want to access it, you got to break the seal. If the seal is broken, then you know somebody accessed it. Make the seals identifiable and unique and you can track who did it and at least see if someone messed with it because the seal has changed.
This works good enough for the utility companies who use this method to make their meters tamper proof. No DRM needed, you can still access the hardware if you need to, just that everybody who needs to know, knows it.
I have had lots of MP3 players, most broke due to me breaking them, the iPod is the ONLY one to break on its own. I still got a Zen player that still works to this day.
Oh and the iPod's screen started showing dead pixels, something I never had problems with on other players as well.
No, Apple does make some intresting products, but there are some fan's who go WAY to far in their obsession.
Same with multi-touch and gestures, both existed and were used long before Apple ever got involved. And having a macbook, I must say that the trackpad is still a bloody awful device with it often doing the wrong thing. No such problems with a mouse/trackball, even when doing gestures in Opera.
As this disaster shows, oil is getting hard to reach. BP wasn't drilling there for the fun of it. They would have much preffered a simple oil rig on land, but those resources are running out. There is more oil, but it is getting harder and harder to reach while at the same time demand keeps going up. This means that unless something changes, supply and demand could cross.
It is also reasonable to presume that the oil reserves are limited, we know the method by which it was created is not infinite or renawable (not at the rate we consume it anyway), so going with current estimates we can predict roughly when we will start running out, NOT because all oil will be gone, but because what remains will be so costly to get that it is no longer affordable. Only after oil has become far to expensive to extract will it ever possibly run out. Simply put, when it costs the same as gold to extract, we can't be running petrol cars anymore.
But to keep it simple for the press, peak oil == running out.
What you say is all very true, but the problem is that we don't have engineers in software. And that doesn't just mean the title, it means the laws that require a software product to have been vetted by an engineer.
If I build something, I must have my drawings vetted. The government won't allow me to start construction until someone has signed of on it. And this means that the law ensures that highly paid engineers are responsible for quality.
In software development, a lot is done by a 18 yr old who works for a tenner or less an hour. Go ahead, try to find a freelance sites for engineers offering low low rates. Now do that for software development.
Constant cost cutting has made software development an exercise in "it worked for me".
While I find this story to be an intresting development I am fairly sure the company that bought this software went for the lowest bidder. So they basically are claiming that this cheap 10 cent hamburger they bought is not in fact made from the finest parts of the cow. Gosh. How shocking!
Because first you did indeed host your own site, but YOU were a university or other large institution as they were the only ones to have access to the net.
If you mean the unwashed masses with everyone then the first hosting was the home page, provided by your ISP.
Geocities and the like came after that, when ISP's turned more towards low-cost and provided to little flexibility or capacity.
Next up was the blog, the home-page re-invented.
Myspace took a look in.
I think that with ip6 we might actually indeed get something like Opera's unite instead. I already use the same Opera thanks to its sync feature, why not host my profile from my web browser as well and people connecting to my own router which has its own IP and can be reached by anyone? The next facebook would possibly
not host the content, but index it instead. It would allow far more freedom as to how you publish information, but also make it less standarized.
Basically, since you list is far longer, it seems we get something new, or something old in a new coat, every couple of years. So presumably the perfect method has not yet been found.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority and the majority is not who you think it is.
You only got to read the letters page of your local newsrag to get an idea of what would happen if the people REALLY got a vote. How can you do anything in a NIMBY world? Someone is always going to be against something and demand everyone listen.
Look at the US, the voters split almost exactly in republican en democrats and that is already causing enough problems when the two parties are exactly the same. In the UK you now got three parties and the only way to rule is for two parties with different agenda's to work together. You can bet on both sides getting very upset when in order to work together, they got to agree on policies that they don't agree with.
And what unpopular action? That is the problem with voters, each and every single one of them claims that something HE doesn't like is unpopular with EVERYONE. But there are people in favor of this game ban. And on the whole they tend to argue their case better then some gamer who rants he wants to shoot people in the head for points. This is one of the reasons workers form unions, so the worker can appoint the one among them who can walk and chew gum at the same time and talk to their betters, I mean bosses.
Really, I can understand the politicians not listening to all the voters, because it would be like seeing the guests on Jerry Springer as life style advisers. Do you really want to take policy advice from someone who doesn't shit about anything but thinks his views are the only one who matters? Not unless that person can argue really well and most gamers can't.
Why do you think lobbyists exist? To have people in place who can talk the talk to get your view across. It is not enough to send in a ranting letter because there are countless ranting letters with claims for actions so extreme and weird you would be tempted to just push the big red button and nuke your own country, it is the only way to be sure.
About the best way to get your opinion ignored is to claim you represent everyone, because that is always known to be a lie if you are the first they heard from. And almost all political decisions are unpopular. If you were to create an extra public holiday with guaranteed sunny weather and a gf for every nerd to date, you would still be torn apart by people who claim they represent everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember who was and is behind SCO? Remember who has been constantly threatening to sue Linux for infringing on its patents?
200 million is PEANUTS for MS, a very low price to pay for making sure nobody else can afford to enter the market. Wanna bet that 200 million goes to pursue further lawsuits?
MS will call for patent reform roughly at the same it stops with FUD and breaking standards. Software patents work for Microsoft. The occasional payoff is just the price for their way of doing business. If software patents are removed ANYONE can go into the software market. Not something MS would enjoy at all.
I either think that you never did a big deal or sucked at it. You are NOT going to get that contract if the supplier knows that you have no choice.
Proof me wrong: Get MS to accept liability for anything wrong with their product. You can't. If you trucks blew up because of a security flaw, the truck company has to compensate you. Does MS compensate you for its security flaws?
it is easy to call someone a troll, especially if they come with inconvenient truths that hit just a little to close to home.
Jobs first talks about freedom and then that freedom is not the issue. So what is it?
In many ways we have been lucky with the PC. We could have ended up with Apple or Commodore controlling the market, both the software and the hardware. Good luck getting Linux to run on a closed platform. Just see how much harder it is to get Linux on a mac, and that is the mac of the company that did NOT end up controlling the entire market.
While I dislike Gates with a passion, he did create a platform that is remarkably open. Old Borgie never cared if you watched porn on his OS. Never felt the need to keep the kiddies safe from titties. While I agree with Apples decision to ban flash from their platform, there is a danger in this.
Tell me, would you tolerate the sugar company banning you from eating their sugar raw? No? Then explain why you tolerate Apple banning flash. And if you comment that you don't mind being banned from eating sugar raw because you don't do that anyway, then you just don't get it and never will. Please, do not vote or reproduce. Don't ask why, smarter people are telling you and you should listen.
When does the line cross between protecting customers and controlling them? Would it be okay for MS to warn you that your are about to install virus? How about if they refuse to allow you to do so? How about a cheater program? A crack? You can argue for controlling such software but should MS be allowed to do so? Should Apple?
A story below this one is the story of Google Docs not being fully compatible and that using it might result in data loss. Wouldn't it be nice if MS stopped you from loosing data by refusing to allow you to export your documents to other formats? Well would it?
Who owns the iPad? Apple or the consumer? If MS tried to control your PC in the same way, would you tolerate it? Would you take it from Dell? Then why do you take it from Apple?
Now you can ignore Apples control for now, because you can easily work around them. nobody has to have an iPad, iPhone, iPod or Mac. No really, you do not. So their control is "harmless". For now.
But if we start allowing companies to believe that they can continue to tell us what they can do their products we bought from them, well where does it end? You see, I am still fearful of the DRM computer. The idea that has been floating around for a while to create system where the user no longer has final say in what runs and what does not on his on hardware. There are powerful interests from media companies (and Steve "Disney" Jobs knows this more then most) to make this happen. What we DON'T need right now is for consumer to just roll over on total control over their own possessions for a shiny toy.
Pierce through the Steve Jobs reality distortion field and you are being sold DRM. It might be shiny DRM, but that doesn't change its nature.
It might be harmless now, but will it continue to be harmless? Read some of the wilder proposals from the content industries, including such things as filters on all hardware to screen for copyrighted content and block its display. Would you buy it? Would you buy it from Apple? You are already doing it. Step 1 complete.
This just goes to show that when you use Microsofts software, you are locked to using their products and their products only. Because the format is closed, other parties will always be playing catchup and can never guarantee 100% compatibility. So Googles snarky comment at the end reveals just how lethal lock-in can be. You are locked in, with no way out.
I can understand that you might resent loosing data in a migration or usage of another tool, but put the blame FIRST with Microsoft and THEN with yourself for having allowed yourself to get locked in.
In any other part of your business, you would avoid lock-in at all costs. Would you tolerate that your floors could only be provided by ONE company and that it means no body else can put in a carpet without it breaking gravity? Would you allow your truck fleet to be provided by only ONE company and have that company know it? A common trick in the trucking branch is when it is time to place a new order is to invite the truck company to your place of business and have a few rival trucks parked in sight. Just a hint that you and the sales rep know there is competition out there.
In IT? You happily invite the MS guy to give you a new deal in your all MS office that can only deal with MS formats... yeah. What is the word in the sales rep mind? Bonus? Sucker?
Governments do this all the time, they give their divisions rules that they must buy from a supplier who has won the bid. And gosh, once they have the bid for the next couple of years, service just goes out of the window. How surprising. Especially when you just know that the quality of service under the previous contract will play no role whatsoever under the new bidding round. Ever wonder why government often does so badly in efficiency? They think lock-in is a GOOD thing. You know how you get good service from a supplier? Make him sweat as to whether your next order will be going to him. It is how the game is played.
Really, take a long hard look at your own company. How certain are you that you can access your own info without aid from a third party? A paper archive is easy. No matter who supplies the binders, you can read it. Tape drives? How certain are you they continue to be compatible? Are your records required by law actually readable? Can you afford to ditch a supplier who doesn't make business sense anymore? Can you get the best deal if the supplier knows you need him?
Why do you think MS sells Windows for ever higher prices? They know they got you by the short and curlies.
Just a while ago we were warned by a computer scientist (whatever that is) that this huge oil reservoir is under so much pressure that if 3 miles or rock spits, it could blow up the planet and end life as we know it...
Presumably kdawson read this slashdot story... oh wait... editor reading story... I see where I went wrong there.
Lets face it, this is the US way. I remember countless jokes about the Mir space station that after years of faithful service was retired while the space shuttle was blowing up all over the place. When you can't be proud of your own stuff, ridicule what others do. It works.
The Venezuela incident seems without side effect so far, and the firing of all the engineers and directors? Well, BP didn't and that one blew up... so what is the relation? But no worry, logic has nothing to do with propaganda.
What do you expect from a country where fox-news is not a contradiction in terms?
Please show me how you program in XML, HTML, JSON. CSS is getting some extremely basic selectors but still I would hardly call it a programming language. Your defintion is for languages as in English. Programming languages are different. If you make this claim around real programmers, prepare to be ridiculed.
It sounds like you're just saying that we should pay more for consultants like you
And what is wrong with that?
But the point is, if you want open continued development, you are always going to have different platforms. Unless you want to freeze all browsers to HTML4 and somehow enforce them doing everything exactly the same, then what you want is impossible.
How are you going to force MS to update its javascript version?
And as for making Javascript type safe, sorry but the nature of many languages is to use this loose typing as a feature. Learn to work with it or move on to a different language.
Basically you are saying: If only all cars were exactly the same and controlled exactly the same, traffic would be a lot safer. Yes it would. Good luck getting it to happen though.
Meanwhile I work in the real world and don't believe in impossible dreams. Ever since computers have been invented someone wanted to create a magic programming solution that would make it as easy as a Star Trek Computers. I don't see it happening, but I will buy one from you when you build one. Meanwhile, I will collect a high fee to work with what we got, all so I can afford your magic system when you build it. That is fair isn't it?
10 bucks an hour for freelance work. That is minimum wage.
The home-computers in general, as opposed to the PC/Mac, were on the whole a EU thing. Not sure why. Commodore is after all Canadian. Maybe PC/Mac was cheaper in the US. Maybe IBM and Apple found it difficult to sell in Europe. Maybe US business adopted the PC more so that the proffesional choice was more influential then in Europe.
The Amiga was a home computer, while it could of course be used to run a small office it never got the reputation of being for the office in great numbers, never heard of a case of a large office using them in the same way DOS and Apples and later Windows would be used. They were not for word-processing... well they were, but that was not how they were sold.
But such regional differences are hardly surprising. One of the fun things of travelling abroad is to go into a supermarket and just look at the differences. Go into a US store and you won't regonize half the foods, even if it is the same food because of the different ways they are branded.
Most of us buy stuff anyway because our friends recommend it, so the first product to get a foothold often becomes the leading product.
So yes, a european is far more likely to see a working Amiga then an American. So Amiga is a bit like your own toes.
Yes they are listening, just through republican ears. These are highly tuned and will hear roughly the following: Democrats who vote against this are against funding our troops, republicans who vote for this are voting for our space program!
Really, politics is a lot simpler then people think.
People do remember the Nazi's. It is all very well to talk about free speech, until you see what free speech can lead to.
Americans LOVE to talk about free speech, but oddly enough none of them seem to remember the McCarthy trials or indeed the dixy chicks. Free speech? No, just a different set of rules of what you can't say.
It has been proven recently in South Africa and Rwanda that free speech can all to easily lead to horrific things. SA has had race riots... well riots... the race is all black, incited by radio broadcasts. Same as what started the slaughter in Rwanda.
Free speech? To parody Islam? Doesn't seem to exist and a lot of freedom advocates want people to self censor themselves to avoid upsetting things. Free speech is very hard. True free speech is impossible. It would require ANY and ALL speech and publication of images and ideas which are not obviously illegal in another way to be not just allowed or even tolerated but ENABLED. Think about this, if I am free to say X but have no means of publishing it, it would STILL be censorship. Everyone with a printing press could simply limit my free speech, so at least some presses would have to be publicly owned and be required to print ANYTHING ANYBODY wants. Good luck with that.
Free speech is also more then just not being arrested for saying something, it also means the rest of society can't act against you. Like with the dixie chicks. Free speech as you long as you say what we want you to say or we will make your life impossible? No.
Really, kid, stop thinking about free speech in such simple terms. Be pro-free speech all you want, but do it with a solid understanding of the enormous so far unsolved problems this will bring. Meanwhile the rest of the world has learned to accept that freedom only exist up to a certain point. usually when you want to end other peoples freedom.
Maybe it is because in Europe we think of the holocaust, the killing of millions of people to take their property as a bad thing. Americans think of it has "how the west was won". Really, the only difference between Hitler and the US was that Hitler went east for Lebensraum.
Oh and free speech in the United States? Check the McCarthy trials. Yeah, cheer up US, you can say that all other races should be killed, but not that wealth should be distributed evenly.
I guess it is just about what you fear most. Taxes or the Holocaust.
GPS statistics? Really? What are those exactly? Your delusional brain can't still comprehend how GPS works? The receiver only receives, it simply measures the time differences between signals and calculates its position from that. Nothing is transmitted, nobody knows where the receiver is or even that its exists.
And that is why most people tend to be more relative about privacy issues, because nutters like you make so much fuss about nothing that it drowns everything else out.
GPS database...
Really.
Anyone want to bet this guy has a mobile phone on him 24/7 with a contract? Turns of his GPS so the state can't track him, but keeps a personal identifier that can turned on religiously.
The final figure will be of a women of normal enough proportions not to give serious artifacts in the base model being stretched but as slim as possible.
That is the problem with trying to use base model for all body types you want to create. You can't because the curves don't curve. It is why TES (Fallout 3) has whole body replacers and 3d renders have a lot of different body types made by third parties. Because you can't just take a full figured body and turn it into a slim one with things looking odd.
It is also known that standing straight up like this is both unnatural and unattractive. There is a reason Playboy never uses a pose like this and only the most hardup jack-off to medical/photograph reference books.
The ideal "western" body type is already well known. Bar the fatty lovers, on the whole men tend to prefer women that do not get harpooned when they go swimming in the sea. What a suprise.
this experiment would be a whole lot more intresting if they had generated better bodies, not just stretch one base model into freaks (some of the builds are impossible, I seen several females with a inward crotch where as even slender women tend to curve out there).
You would get a better result with displaying all the playmaters from Playboy, then you could get a real feeling for how tastes changed. But that study already has been done by the editors, you can see the body shape changing over the years. Tit size has also gone down. When they could show more of the rest, the size of the tits got less important and since big tits are basically fat, this means the body weight could go down as well.
Don't they have Playboy in Australia? Would explain a lot.
The cops don't think is important at all. They are ordered to, by people who owe their elections to donations by big business and when you make a low salary it is not wise to question every single order.
Not a single beat officer goes around in the morning thinking: "Geez, what am I going to do today, arrest a rapist or collect a mislaid prototype phone for Jobs".
And if you really don't like this abuse of privilege by Jobs, then don't buy any Apple products. Not even the really shiny ones.
Frankly I amazed that the press ain't all over this... oh wait the press that survives on Apple ads. Freedom of the press and all. The press gets stolen stuff all the time, most leaked documents can be considered stolen and of course there is no proof so far that theft has actually taken place. In a decent country a company calling a search warrant on a lost piece of property would be hounded to death. Bet that ain't going to happen?
Games are not that expensive and in fact an increase in such revenue was predicted because when money is tight you buy a new game rather then go on holiday.
But buy what game?
I still got a stack of old CD's just because and if I look at them, I see countless genre's that seem to have disappeared. Especially if you track mainstream game. Practically every title released by Microprose is gone. Flight sims? RPG's? Adventures?
And please if you point out Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins and Fallout 3, then you hopefully also realize that this list is pretty complete. For a couple of years.
Turnbased games like Ufo: Enemy Unknown and Jagged Alliance sold well but never got a sequel... or rather never got a sequel that deserves the name.
I still buy games but have noticed that more and more I am just not intrested because new games are not of the type that I want to play. Fine that you go for the younger crowd, but they don't got the money do they?
I think it is the same as with the music industry. They release fewer titles especially in some genres and then wonder why sales decline. It would be like McDonals dropping all its food products and then wondering why they don't make as much from toilet visits.
And then there are even dumber companies like Rockstar who don't launch Red Dead Redemption on the PC but have a long history of releasing titles on the PC eventually. So I am not going to buy it at launch, because I prefer the PC. And if it really doesn't come out for the PC in two years? Oh well, to old by then anyway.
Sometimes you really got to wonder who the hell let these morons in charge of the sales department.
Actually, web development is pretty easy. Just that you got to stay away from the "do it all frameworks" that you want to "customize".
Either build it yourself or use off the shelf, but when you try to combine the two you get a mass.
The tools/languages he mentions all do their own things. And since when are html, xml, json and css a language? Might as well call headers in C a separate language.
Neither is cross-browser all that hard or rather, it doesn't need to be.
As an experienced web-developer I see some very simple problems with web-development:
Really, web development ain't all that hard, but the customers often make it far more expensive then it needs to be.
Nonsense, a scam would have been caught by the on crack Slashdot editing staff. /sarc
Preview, it is your friend.
Put the controller and its access in the dashboard and seal it. If you want to access it, you got to break the seal. If the seal is broken, then you know somebody accessed it. Make the seals identifiable and unique and you can track who did it and at least see if someone messed with it because the seal has changed.
This works good enough for the utility companies who use this method to make their meters tamper proof. No DRM needed, you can still access the hardware if you need to, just that everybody who needs to know, knows it.
I have had lots of MP3 players, most broke due to me breaking them, the iPod is the ONLY one to break on its own. I still got a Zen player that still works to this day.
Oh and the iPod's screen started showing dead pixels, something I never had problems with on other players as well.
No, Apple does make some intresting products, but there are some fan's who go WAY to far in their obsession.
Same with multi-touch and gestures, both existed and were used long before Apple ever got involved. And having a macbook, I must say that the trackpad is still a bloody awful device with it often doing the wrong thing. No such problems with a mouse/trackball, even when doing gestures in Opera.
Drink the Koolaid but don't bathe in it.
As this disaster shows, oil is getting hard to reach. BP wasn't drilling there for the fun of it. They would have much preffered a simple oil rig on land, but those resources are running out. There is more oil, but it is getting harder and harder to reach while at the same time demand keeps going up. This means that unless something changes, supply and demand could cross.
It is also reasonable to presume that the oil reserves are limited, we know the method by which it was created is not infinite or renawable (not at the rate we consume it anyway), so going with current estimates we can predict roughly when we will start running out, NOT because all oil will be gone, but because what remains will be so costly to get that it is no longer affordable. Only after oil has become far to expensive to extract will it ever possibly run out. Simply put, when it costs the same as gold to extract, we can't be running petrol cars anymore.
But to keep it simple for the press, peak oil == running out.
What you say is all very true, but the problem is that we don't have engineers in software. And that doesn't just mean the title, it means the laws that require a software product to have been vetted by an engineer.
If I build something, I must have my drawings vetted. The government won't allow me to start construction until someone has signed of on it. And this means that the law ensures that highly paid engineers are responsible for quality.
In software development, a lot is done by a 18 yr old who works for a tenner or less an hour. Go ahead, try to find a freelance sites for engineers offering low low rates. Now do that for software development.
Constant cost cutting has made software development an exercise in "it worked for me".
While I find this story to be an intresting development I am fairly sure the company that bought this software went for the lowest bidder. So they basically are claiming that this cheap 10 cent hamburger they bought is not in fact made from the finest parts of the cow. Gosh. How shocking!
Because first you did indeed host your own site, but YOU were a university or other large institution as they were the only ones to have access to the net.
If you mean the unwashed masses with everyone then the first hosting was the home page, provided by your ISP.
Geocities and the like came after that, when ISP's turned more towards low-cost and provided to little flexibility or capacity.
Next up was the blog, the home-page re-invented.
Myspace took a look in.
I think that with ip6 we might actually indeed get something like Opera's unite instead. I already use the same Opera thanks to its sync feature, why not host my profile from my web browser as well and people connecting to my own router which has its own IP and can be reached by anyone? The next facebook would possibly not host the content, but index it instead. It would allow far more freedom as to how you publish information, but also make it less standarized.
Basically, since you list is far longer, it seems we get something new, or something old in a new coat, every couple of years. So presumably the perfect method has not yet been found.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority and the majority is not who you think it is.
You only got to read the letters page of your local newsrag to get an idea of what would happen if the people REALLY got a vote. How can you do anything in a NIMBY world? Someone is always going to be against something and demand everyone listen.
Look at the US, the voters split almost exactly in republican en democrats and that is already causing enough problems when the two parties are exactly the same. In the UK you now got three parties and the only way to rule is for two parties with different agenda's to work together. You can bet on both sides getting very upset when in order to work together, they got to agree on policies that they don't agree with.
And what unpopular action? That is the problem with voters, each and every single one of them claims that something HE doesn't like is unpopular with EVERYONE. But there are people in favor of this game ban. And on the whole they tend to argue their case better then some gamer who rants he wants to shoot people in the head for points. This is one of the reasons workers form unions, so the worker can appoint the one among them who can walk and chew gum at the same time and talk to their betters, I mean bosses.
Really, I can understand the politicians not listening to all the voters, because it would be like seeing the guests on Jerry Springer as life style advisers. Do you really want to take policy advice from someone who doesn't shit about anything but thinks his views are the only one who matters? Not unless that person can argue really well and most gamers can't.
Why do you think lobbyists exist? To have people in place who can talk the talk to get your view across. It is not enough to send in a ranting letter because there are countless ranting letters with claims for actions so extreme and weird you would be tempted to just push the big red button and nuke your own country, it is the only way to be sure.
About the best way to get your opinion ignored is to claim you represent everyone, because that is always known to be a lie if you are the first they heard from. And almost all political decisions are unpopular. If you were to create an extra public holiday with guaranteed sunny weather and a gf for every nerd to date, you would still be torn apart by people who claim they represent everyone.