The MPAA owns CSS. They license it to these companies, and say "You can use our CSS stuff, but only sell it to people on this list". Sell outside the list, break the agreement, get sued. That's what's happening.
This is more like Apple suing Real because Real is using Apple's DRM without Apple's permission, though that's not the same either, but it's closer.
They've been selling these chips forever, and the MPAA has been happily collecting it's royalties for CSS. What I wonder is, why now?
That is, is the REAL MONEY motivating this - that is, the electronics manufacturers who make approved DVD players?
Sony's getting it's ass kicked in the market by WingWong's knockoff brand, because the knockoff isn't crippled. It may be a cheaper, lousier machine, but in the end - it plays that DVD your cousin Beauregard sent you from Region 5.
Hmm.. Despite the rhetoric around here, the entertainment industry only makes pennies to the tech industries dollar. Sony (the maker of CD and DVD burners) is much much larger than Sony (the publisher of DVDs and PS2 games) - hence the 'paradox' that protects us. They will never lobby to outlaw recording and duplication tech, since that's which side their bread is buttered on.
Why not take two seconds out of your day, scratch off the windows logo with some sandpaper, and draw whatever the hell you want with a sharpie. Be it Tux, the BSD devil guy, Mr Goatse, whatever floats your boat.
"Linux" keyboard my ass. If there's any piece of hardware that's OS agnostic, it's the keyboard and mouse.
Bind the hotkeys to whatever you want.
Sheesh. Lets charge 20 bucks more for a linux keyboard, and the only difference is a little penguin sticker on the top.
It was on slashdot twice! On the frontpage twice, in fact.
We reallllllly can't let go of a "Microsoft had a bug in product X" article, can we?
Let's talk about typos in OSS! I put gentoo on a firewall and now it tells me when it's "stoping openvpn". Get it! "stoping"! What's that? I know what stopping is! HAHAHHAA someone made a typo. Therefore the whole organization sucks!
And just like Halo on xbconnect, or other tunneling services.
Team CTF on Blood Gulch. That's it. Even suggest playing, oh say, free for all slayer on Hang 'em High with only pistols, and they'll lynch you.
It's the map with the vehicles, so that's why they like it. IMO, it's the map most conducive to lame-o camping and map hacks (jumping off the banshee to the top of the map where you can snipe with near impunity), which I guess is another reason why the l337 k1dd13z like it.
Re:Outsourcing
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 5, Informative
All my experiences with outsourcing was with outsourcing the QA and testing.
You can give them the product, a list of parameters or check boxes, and get results back in a couple days.
All the ease of building in regression testing, without all the work. And if the indians are cheaper than the time it would take me to design and implement the unit tests, then it's win-win according to PHBs.
In general, I agree with you though.
Re:Server upgrades _do_ matter
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well hotswapping disks is a feature of a RAID server, I wouldn't call that "upgrading".
I'd consider "upgrading" as far as this article is about, to be something like moving everything from Windows 2000 server to Windows 2003 for increased productivity and synnergy and reverse diagonal compatibility. (Or Slackware 9 to 10, or whatever)
Or replacing all your P3 Xeon servers with P4 Xeon servers because the box says they make the internet faster, etc.
Or any other such case where it wain't broke, but you still fixed it!
In the business world, 10% growth per annum is pretty huge. So your server needs probably keep in step with that somewhat. If your server process 1000 transactions a day now, chances are good it's going to be processing 1000 transactions a day in a year. So doubling its processing capacity every year with the latest round of tech isn't logical.
If the eMachines dies within a year, they'll tell you to take it up with eMachines.
Their extended plans dont take effect until the manufacturers warrantee has expired.
On top of that, if you get a 3 year extended plan, and the product carries a 2 year warrantee, the extended plan really only covers you that last year.
And get this, if you get a 1 year service plan on, oh say, a hard drive - which the manufacturer covers for 3 years... Heh, you're a fucking idiot who just gave Best Buy some easy money.
And these are the ones they tried to push on me with the "oh yeah, when they discontinue this drive, you can bring it back and we'll exchange it for the next biggest one, no charge!!"
That drives me nuts too. Why even tell me about an "instant rebates" in the first place? If my price out the door is 20 bucks, why do they say it's 40 bucks with a 20 dollar instant rebate? I'm not stupid enough to think they're giving me an awesome deal - it probably costs 20 bucks on newegg.
The other day I was at a similar sort of chain, and I see a sign wayyy down the aisle, "16 port 100mbit switch, 24.99". Not why I was there, but hey, that's a hell of a price to replace that crazy pile of 4 and 5 port hubs and switches that make up my home LAN's "backbone". Alas, it was like 100+ bucks, plus 30 dollars rebate here and 20 dollars there and 4 dollars hither and yon.
By the time I got all my money back, I probably could pick it up for 25 bucks out the door.
Of course, like an idiot, I'm holding out for a cheap gigabit switch, even though I have only one machine gigabit-capable. But thats another story.
I've fallen for the "service plan" scam before. And yeah, the salespeople lie straight out about it. They claim it covers anything.
I've been told, and this is as close as I can get to quoting "Yeah, like in 6 months they won't sell a 20 gig hard drive anymore, so if you brought yours back, we'd replace it for the next compatible model, and you'd get an upgrade to 40gigs or so for free!" This was completely in a *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* kind of way. Completely dishonest, and completely false.
I have a nephew who works at Best Buy, and these sorts of speeches are encouraged.
Anyhow, I got screwed over a monitor. Back when 14"-15" were the norm, I payed about $500 bucks for a nice NEC 17", from FutureShop (the Canadian answer to Best Buy). Being a poor college student, $500 bucks was a lot of cash, so another $50 for the extended warranty seemed like a wise idea.
A month down the road, the monitor starts going bad. It shuts itself off after a half an hour, sometimes not coming back on. So I lugged the thing back to FutureShop, and put it on the service desk. It was hot and that fucking thing was heavy.
I was told, that since it's still under manufacturers warranty, that they couldn't exchange it for me. I argued for a good hour with every jackass in the store. I showed them my replacement plan, which said nothing about "manufacturers warranty". I said replace it, and YOU deal with the manufacturer.
But no, I ended up having to ship it back to NEC at my own expense, who cross shipped me a refurbed monitor.
The next paragraph is even more offtopic!
The story goes on, the replacement had the same problem, as did the replacement after that. All I can say was that NEC was top notch. They kept good records of what went on, and never gave me a hassle. I remember the girl on the other end of the phone, after putting in my name, going "Oh, this is the 3rd one?". We talked about climate and where it is, and why they were overheating, etc.. The last time I called, the girl brought up my file, and immediately began apologizing. Turns out that particular model had a design flaw that made it overheat at higher resolutions. They hooked me up with it's replacement, which lasted me until early this year, when it started to ghost images.
Anyways. Every time I see the Simpson's episode where Homer is having Moe reinsert the crayon into his brain to make him stupid, and they know Homer is stupid enough when he exclaims "EXTENDED WARRANTEE! HOW CAN I LOSE!", I can't help but be reminded of my Future Shop adventures.
Manufacturers are so much better to deal with, and for most electronics, offer decent warrantees. Hell, Sony repaired a CD walkman for me for free, and it was six months out of warantee.
I've been thinking a lot about what a song is worth, and the only conclusion I can come to is... nothing.
Before the birth of the recording industry, what did it cost to listen to a song? Nothing. It may cost something to go to an event, a concert or opera, but to hear a song being sung cost nothing. The singer sang, you listened, and it cost you nothing.
So the recording technology shows up, and the recording industry is built up. The recording industry exists solely for the purpose of transporting the song from the studio to my speakers. So all the trucks and equipment and so on incur costs, and that's what I pay for. But not for the songs themselves.
What's a metallica song worth? Nothing, I've already heard them all. Going to a Metallica concert might be worth 50 bucks. Maybe buying the bobblehead dolls and Metallica Pop Tarts is worth a few bucks. I can see a 5" plasic disc in a case with liner notes and photos having value. The music recorded on that disc, however does not.
To download off the internet, it's reasonable to expect to be compensated for bandwidth. But I can't see the songs themselves having any intrinsic value. A Van Gogh painting has value because there's only one of them. A photograph of one has nothing. Similarly, watching the artist perform has some value, but a snapshot of their performance (a song recording) doesn't.
I must be missing something, but I can't think of what. Music is worth nothing. Artists don't profit from "music", they profit from performances and mercahndizing. The only ones who profit selling "music" are middlemen and distributors who are increasingly irrelevant. Therefore, the service they provide may or may not have value, but the "music" itself does not.
A friend I chat with online is in a band, and they've been moderately successful, and opened for some fairly big artists and are completing their first album. He'll DCC the songs to anyone who'll listen to them. Why would he do this? Because they themselves have no value.
If you say that music has value, it makes no sense. Because according to the industry, all music has the same value. A song according to Apple is worth 99 cents. But music is subjective. I wouldnt pay 5 cents for a band I don't like, I might even pay more for one that I do - heck, I already have by spending 20 bucks for a disc with 10 songs on it.
Music is a personal expression, just like a thought or opinion. Thoughts have no monetary value.
Music has no monetary value, and just look at all the handwaving and idiocy that's occuring because of societies need to attach a price tag to everything.
But that 21k you spend on software isn't an annual cost. Sure, the first year you only make 39k before taxes (about 12 bucks after, in my experience), but there's probably compelling reason to buy new versions of all those applications the very next year.
Hell, every business incurs costs. A good friend just started his own landscaping business, and dropped about $50,000 up front, on trucks and equipment. But those aren't annual costs, he should expect to only be paying a fraction of that per year in maintainance.
Even the MS upgrade mill only turns over every 5 years or so. So take your 20-30k figure, divide it by 5, and you look at $4,000 a year, which isn't so bad.
Hardware drivers are a special sort of animal. The drivers describe what the silicon in a Radeon or GeForce chip does. So open sourcing the driver is practically handing out a schematic to their bread and butter GPUs, and after a few months the market is flooded with cheap asian Radeon clones.
At least, according to them, that's the problem.
That's going to be the case for plenty of hardware down the road, and something linux needs to address.. Perhaps with a pseudo microkernel model that allows users to dynamically install binary drivers, that is. Of course, my dream is of an open driver model so all drivers work regardless of the OS.
If they're so successful, why the need to go public?
As the shareholders get more and more say, they'll try to make it as simple as "more ads == more money". That's the road Yahoo went down, well that and the silly "internet portal" thing.
You're right. It is pretty hard to make a profit with no customers. That's when you haul out the lawyers like Netscape, Sun or SCO.
They all turned to litigation as a source of revenue, whether they sued MS or linux users is pretty much irrelevant.
I'd like to see Google stay the way it is, and simply improve incrementally as it has been doing.. But I'm afraid the writings on the wall.
They got a whole new rulebook. If they want to keep the war chest full, they have to make investors happy, and investors may not share the founders world view.
Netscape used to be the best browser, and that's why I used it. I remember IE 1.0, it was fucking aweful. Then IE 2.0, still aweful. Then IE 3.0, which IMO, was right about on parity with Netscape.
Then IE 4.0 came out, and I switched, because it was better than what Netscape had. Netscape stopped developing, and channeled it's dollars into a legal fight with MSFT.
So, blah blah, AOL comes along and dismantles Netscape. The OSS community takes over the day to day of mozilla.org, and the focus is once again on development.
Now I use FireFox, and more and more switch daily. Hell, articles run in MS's own Slate magazine recommending FireFox.
I use it because it's the best browser, IMO. Just about everyone I've showed it to has switched. Because they think it's better than IE. They like the speed, they like the tabs, they like the popup blocking, etc. I don't even have to sound like a tinfoil hat and rant about security. The fact that it's a better browser has been enough to convince people.
Thats why I never bought into that "Microsoft killed netscape by bundling IE" bullshit. I never used IE because it was bundled, I used it because it was better and didn't bork my box like NS did.
So how does that relate to Google? If Google focuses on legal fights with MSFT, or other silly nonsense a la "you set the default home page to msn.com and thats an abuse of yer monopoly", then Google is doomed. Who cares what my homepage is, I use google because it's the best search engine (right now). The day it's no longer the best search engine, IMO, I'll stop using it.
Hopefully they spend the money on developers, not lawyers.
Umm, they'll use this money to turn a profit for their shareholders.
That can be done through improvement and research, but only if you consider "finding ways to shove advertisements down your throat any way possible" improvement and research.
Google is now a wholly different entity. It's about the bucks and nothing else now.
While the invention has been described in connection with what is presently considered to be the most practical and preferred embodiment
I read "this patent describes the gizmo we've built so far"
it is to be understood that the invention is not to be limited to the disclosed embodiment, but on the contrary, is intended to cover various modifications and equivalent arrangements included within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
We might add some really cool stuff to aforementioned prototype gizmo, and if we do we reserve the right to append that stuff onto the patent.
Like I said, it's not some sneaky trick. Gizmo Alpha 1 had wheels with locked axles, Gizmo Alpha 2 had independant pausi-traction.
The real problem for trainee nurses is the reluctance, we're programmed since birth that you dont go around stabbing sharp metal things into people. The skill itself is trivial, hell if a strung out junkie can inject themselves, how hard can it be?
Practicing on dummies will never replace practicing on other students, boyfriends, etc. That addresses the real problem, the fear of hurting someone. Which was likely the reason your trainee was so nervous.
Yeah, in 10 years we'll have magical auto-navigating cars, everyone will be hardwired to the internet so that memorizing things will be obsolete.
We have the technology to telecommute now. Why isn't it more popular? Because clients and most business is best conducted face-to-face. It's much easier to collaborate with your peers when you're all in the same room, than over some videoconfernce, and I dont care if said videoconference is in 1080p HDTV with dolby 5.1 surround sound. That wont change in 10, 20, 30, 500 years.
And the education system will be radically reinvented in a mere 10 years. Yeah, right. Here's my prediction, there will be no appreciable education system. "No Child Left Behind" will be the rallying cry then as it is now. They'll just hand out diplomas to everyone at birth so that noone will feel stupid or have their feelings hurt.
Sure. Can't wait for the future. Where's my jet pack and my three-course-meal-in-a-pill?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh?
The MPAA owns CSS. They license it to these companies, and say "You can use our CSS stuff, but only sell it to people on this list". Sell outside the list, break the agreement, get sued. That's what's happening.
This is more like Apple suing Real because Real is using Apple's DRM without Apple's permission, though that's not the same either, but it's closer.
They've been selling these chips forever, and the MPAA has been happily collecting it's royalties for CSS. What I wonder is, why now?
That is, is the REAL MONEY motivating this - that is, the electronics manufacturers who make approved DVD players?
Sony's getting it's ass kicked in the market by WingWong's knockoff brand, because the knockoff isn't crippled. It may be a cheaper, lousier machine, but in the end - it plays that DVD your cousin Beauregard sent you from Region 5.
Hmm.. Despite the rhetoric around here, the entertainment industry only makes pennies to the tech industries dollar. Sony (the maker of CD and DVD burners) is much much larger than Sony (the publisher of DVDs and PS2 games) - hence the 'paradox' that protects us. They will never lobby to outlaw recording and duplication tech, since that's which side their bread is buttered on.
Why not take two seconds out of your day, scratch off the windows logo with some sandpaper, and draw whatever the hell you want with a sharpie. Be it Tux, the BSD devil guy, Mr Goatse, whatever floats your boat.
"Linux" keyboard my ass. If there's any piece of hardware that's OS agnostic, it's the keyboard and mouse.
Bind the hotkeys to whatever you want.
Sheesh. Lets charge 20 bucks more for a linux keyboard, and the only difference is a little penguin sticker on the top.
It was on slashdot twice! On the frontpage twice, in fact.
We reallllllly can't let go of a "Microsoft had a bug in product X" article, can we?
Let's talk about typos in OSS! I put gentoo on a firewall and now it tells me when it's "stoping openvpn". Get it! "stoping"! What's that? I know what stopping is! HAHAHHAA someone made a typo. Therefore the whole organization sucks!
The real problem. The TSA, for whatever reason, is exempt from the FOIA.
This means they don't have to tell the public the rules. How the list system works, what the hell is going on. How people are chosen.
There's no transparency. If there was, people would know what was wrong, bitch about it, and get it fixed one way or the other.
...striking pleasing postures for the investment community.
Yeah, who needs customers so long as some chump is giving us venture capital!
Now order me up another one of those Aeromonto chairs and install a Pac Man in the executives washroom!
We do computers! The laws of economy do not apply!
And just like Halo on xbconnect, or other tunneling services.
Team CTF on Blood Gulch. That's it. Even suggest playing, oh say, free for all slayer on Hang 'em High with only pistols, and they'll lynch you.
It's the map with the vehicles, so that's why they like it. IMO, it's the map most conducive to lame-o camping and map hacks (jumping off the banshee to the top of the map where you can snipe with near impunity), which I guess is another reason why the l337 k1dd13z like it.
All my experiences with outsourcing was with outsourcing the QA and testing.
You can give them the product, a list of parameters or check boxes, and get results back in a couple days.
All the ease of building in regression testing, without all the work. And if the indians are cheaper than the time it would take me to design and implement the unit tests, then it's win-win according to PHBs.
In general, I agree with you though.
Well hotswapping disks is a feature of a RAID server, I wouldn't call that "upgrading".
I'd consider "upgrading" as far as this article is about, to be something like moving everything from Windows 2000 server to Windows 2003 for increased productivity and synnergy and reverse diagonal compatibility. (Or Slackware 9 to 10, or whatever)
Or replacing all your P3 Xeon servers with P4 Xeon servers because the box says they make the internet faster, etc.
Or any other such case where it wain't broke, but you still fixed it!
In the business world, 10% growth per annum is pretty huge. So your server needs probably keep in step with that somewhat. If your server process 1000 transactions a day now, chances are good it's going to be processing 1000 transactions a day in a year. So doubling its processing capacity every year with the latest round of tech isn't logical.
If the eMachines dies within a year, they'll tell you to take it up with eMachines.
Their extended plans dont take effect until the manufacturers warrantee has expired.
On top of that, if you get a 3 year extended plan, and the product carries a 2 year warrantee, the extended plan really only covers you that last year.
And get this, if you get a 1 year service plan on, oh say, a hard drive - which the manufacturer covers for 3 years... Heh, you're a fucking idiot who just gave Best Buy some easy money.
And these are the ones they tried to push on me with the "oh yeah, when they discontinue this drive, you can bring it back and we'll exchange it for the next biggest one, no charge!!"
That drives me nuts too. Why even tell me about an "instant rebates" in the first place? If my price out the door is 20 bucks, why do they say it's 40 bucks with a 20 dollar instant rebate? I'm not stupid enough to think they're giving me an awesome deal - it probably costs 20 bucks on newegg.
The other day I was at a similar sort of chain, and I see a sign wayyy down the aisle, "16 port 100mbit switch, 24.99". Not why I was there, but hey, that's a hell of a price to replace that crazy pile of 4 and 5 port hubs and switches that make up my home LAN's "backbone". Alas, it was like 100+ bucks, plus 30 dollars rebate here and 20 dollars there and 4 dollars hither and yon.
By the time I got all my money back, I probably could pick it up for 25 bucks out the door.
Of course, like an idiot, I'm holding out for a cheap gigabit switch, even though I have only one machine gigabit-capable. But thats another story.
I've fallen for the "service plan" scam before. And yeah, the salespeople lie straight out about it. They claim it covers anything.
I've been told, and this is as close as I can get to quoting "Yeah, like in 6 months they won't sell a 20 gig hard drive anymore, so if you brought yours back, we'd replace it for the next compatible model, and you'd get an upgrade to 40gigs or so for free!" This was completely in a *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* kind of way. Completely dishonest, and completely false.
I have a nephew who works at Best Buy, and these sorts of speeches are encouraged.
Anyhow, I got screwed over a monitor. Back when 14"-15" were the norm, I payed about $500 bucks for a nice NEC 17", from FutureShop (the Canadian answer to Best Buy). Being a poor college student, $500 bucks was a lot of cash, so another $50 for the extended warranty seemed like a wise idea.
A month down the road, the monitor starts going bad. It shuts itself off after a half an hour, sometimes not coming back on. So I lugged the thing back to FutureShop, and put it on the service desk. It was hot and that fucking thing was heavy.
I was told, that since it's still under manufacturers warranty, that they couldn't exchange it for me. I argued for a good hour with every jackass in the store. I showed them my replacement plan, which said nothing about "manufacturers warranty". I said replace it, and YOU deal with the manufacturer.
But no, I ended up having to ship it back to NEC at my own expense, who cross shipped me a refurbed monitor.
The next paragraph is even more offtopic!
The story goes on, the replacement had the same problem, as did the replacement after that. All I can say was that NEC was top notch. They kept good records of what went on, and never gave me a hassle. I remember the girl on the other end of the phone, after putting in my name, going "Oh, this is the 3rd one?". We talked about climate and where it is, and why they were overheating, etc.. The last time I called, the girl brought up my file, and immediately began apologizing. Turns out that particular model had a design flaw that made it overheat at higher resolutions. They hooked me up with it's replacement, which lasted me until early this year, when it started to ghost images.
Anyways. Every time I see the Simpson's episode where Homer is having Moe reinsert the crayon into his brain to make him stupid, and they know Homer is stupid enough when he exclaims "EXTENDED WARRANTEE! HOW CAN I LOSE!", I can't help but be reminded of my Future Shop adventures.
Manufacturers are so much better to deal with, and for most electronics, offer decent warrantees. Hell, Sony repaired a CD walkman for me for free, and it was six months out of warantee.
It will be useless for the vast majority of people.
That don't know how to set up a bridging VPN, that is.
I don't know much of Rendezvous specifics, but I'd imagine it couldn't be too hard to tunnel to a virtual "hub".
Maybe not Kazaa-scale P2P, but easy enough for a couple dozen like-minded buddies to share their Metallica albums (or whatever).
I've been thinking a lot about what a song is worth, and the only conclusion I can come to is ... nothing.
Before the birth of the recording industry, what did it cost to listen to a song? Nothing. It may cost something to go to an event, a concert or opera, but to hear a song being sung cost nothing. The singer sang, you listened, and it cost you nothing.
So the recording technology shows up, and the recording industry is built up. The recording industry exists solely for the purpose of transporting the song from the studio to my speakers. So all the trucks and equipment and so on incur costs, and that's what I pay for. But not for the songs themselves.
What's a metallica song worth? Nothing, I've already heard them all. Going to a Metallica concert might be worth 50 bucks. Maybe buying the bobblehead dolls and Metallica Pop Tarts is worth a few bucks. I can see a 5" plasic disc in a case with liner notes and photos having value. The music recorded on that disc, however does not.
To download off the internet, it's reasonable to expect to be compensated for bandwidth. But I can't see the songs themselves having any intrinsic value. A Van Gogh painting has value because there's only one of them. A photograph of one has nothing. Similarly, watching the artist perform has some value, but a snapshot of their performance (a song recording) doesn't.
I must be missing something, but I can't think of what. Music is worth nothing. Artists don't profit from "music", they profit from performances and mercahndizing. The only ones who profit selling "music" are middlemen and distributors who are increasingly irrelevant. Therefore, the service they provide may or may not have value, but the "music" itself does not.
A friend I chat with online is in a band, and they've been moderately successful, and opened for some fairly big artists and are completing their first album. He'll DCC the songs to anyone who'll listen to them. Why would he do this? Because they themselves have no value.
If you say that music has value, it makes no sense. Because according to the industry, all music has the same value. A song according to Apple is worth 99 cents. But music is subjective. I wouldnt pay 5 cents for a band I don't like, I might even pay more for one that I do - heck, I already have by spending 20 bucks for a disc with 10 songs on it.
Music is a personal expression, just like a thought or opinion. Thoughts have no monetary value.
Music has no monetary value, and just look at all the handwaving and idiocy that's occuring because of societies need to attach a price tag to everything.
But that 21k you spend on software isn't an annual cost. Sure, the first year you only make 39k before taxes (about 12 bucks after, in my experience), but there's probably compelling reason to buy new versions of all those applications the very next year.
Hell, every business incurs costs. A good friend just started his own landscaping business, and dropped about $50,000 up front, on trucks and equipment. But those aren't annual costs, he should expect to only be paying a fraction of that per year in maintainance.
Even the MS upgrade mill only turns over every 5 years or so. So take your 20-30k figure, divide it by 5, and you look at $4,000 a year, which isn't so bad.
Hardware drivers are a special sort of animal. The drivers describe what the silicon in a Radeon or GeForce chip does. So open sourcing the driver is practically handing out a schematic to their bread and butter GPUs, and after a few months the market is flooded with cheap asian Radeon clones.
At least, according to them, that's the problem.
That's going to be the case for plenty of hardware down the road, and something linux needs to address.. Perhaps with a pseudo microkernel model that allows users to dynamically install binary drivers, that is. Of course, my dream is of an open driver model so all drivers work regardless of the OS.
If they're so successful, why the need to go public?
As the shareholders get more and more say, they'll try to make it as simple as "more ads == more money". That's the road Yahoo went down, well that and the silly "internet portal" thing.
You're right. It is pretty hard to make a profit with no customers. That's when you haul out the lawyers like Netscape, Sun or SCO.
They all turned to litigation as a source of revenue, whether they sued MS or linux users is pretty much irrelevant.
I'd like to see Google stay the way it is, and simply improve incrementally as it has been doing.. But I'm afraid the writings on the wall.
They got a whole new rulebook. If they want to keep the war chest full, they have to make investors happy, and investors may not share the founders world view.
Let's go offtopic with Netscape.
Netscape used to be the best browser, and that's why I used it. I remember IE 1.0, it was fucking aweful. Then IE 2.0, still aweful. Then IE 3.0, which IMO, was right about on parity with Netscape.
Then IE 4.0 came out, and I switched, because it was better than what Netscape had. Netscape stopped developing, and channeled it's dollars into a legal fight with MSFT.
So, blah blah, AOL comes along and dismantles Netscape. The OSS community takes over the day to day of mozilla.org, and the focus is once again on development.
Now I use FireFox, and more and more switch daily. Hell, articles run in MS's own Slate magazine recommending FireFox.
I use it because it's the best browser, IMO. Just about everyone I've showed it to has switched. Because they think it's better than IE. They like the speed, they like the tabs, they like the popup blocking, etc. I don't even have to sound like a tinfoil hat and rant about security. The fact that it's a better browser has been enough to convince people.
Thats why I never bought into that "Microsoft killed netscape by bundling IE" bullshit. I never used IE because it was bundled, I used it because it was better and didn't bork my box like NS did.
So how does that relate to Google? If Google focuses on legal fights with MSFT, or other silly nonsense a la "you set the default home page to msn.com and thats an abuse of yer monopoly", then Google is doomed. Who cares what my homepage is, I use google because it's the best search engine (right now). The day it's no longer the best search engine, IMO, I'll stop using it.
Hopefully they spend the money on developers, not lawyers.
Umm, they'll use this money to turn a profit for their shareholders.
That can be done through improvement and research, but only if you consider "finding ways to shove advertisements down your throat any way possible" improvement and research.
Google is now a wholly different entity. It's about the bucks and nothing else now.
Does Cringley think he's like journalisms top brass? Most people don't know who the hell he is.
If it wasn't for slashdot posting about it every time he updates his column, I wouldn't know who he is.
We're talking about Cringley. So, uh, no.
How is that different from what I said?
While the invention has been described in connection with what is presently considered to be the most practical and preferred embodiment
I read "this patent describes the gizmo we've built so far"
it is to be understood that the invention is not to be limited to the disclosed embodiment, but on the contrary, is intended to cover various modifications and equivalent arrangements included within the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
We might add some really cool stuff to aforementioned prototype gizmo, and if we do we reserve the right to append that stuff onto the patent.
Like I said, it's not some sneaky trick. Gizmo Alpha 1 had wheels with locked axles, Gizmo Alpha 2 had independant pausi-traction.
Now tell me that Tony Blair is a fucking genious and the most skilled world leader evar.
Mr Kettle. With your snaggly ugly teeth.
(I'm not American, BTW)
The real problem for trainee nurses is the reluctance, we're programmed since birth that you dont go around stabbing sharp metal things into people. The skill itself is trivial, hell if a strung out junkie can inject themselves, how hard can it be?
Practicing on dummies will never replace practicing on other students, boyfriends, etc. That addresses the real problem, the fear of hurting someone. Which was likely the reason your trainee was so nervous.
This is being developed in the UK, so needless to say, dentistry is the very last thing on their minds.
Note to any british who take offense: Relax, I'm just making a reference to your horrible, disgusting, misshapen, snaggly, rotten, green teeth.
Yeah, in 10 years we'll have magical auto-navigating cars, everyone will be hardwired to the internet so that memorizing things will be obsolete.
We have the technology to telecommute now. Why isn't it more popular? Because clients and most business is best conducted face-to-face. It's much easier to collaborate with your peers when you're all in the same room, than over some videoconfernce, and I dont care if said videoconference is in 1080p HDTV with dolby 5.1 surround sound. That wont change in 10, 20, 30, 500 years.
And the education system will be radically reinvented in a mere 10 years. Yeah, right. Here's my prediction, there will be no appreciable education system. "No Child Left Behind" will be the rallying cry then as it is now. They'll just hand out diplomas to everyone at birth so that noone will feel stupid or have their feelings hurt.
Sure. Can't wait for the future. Where's my jet pack and my three-course-meal-in-a-pill?