They don't even have to cooperate, they just should give up putting effort into competing. The big mantra of any organisation should be "customer focus", but most seem to be "comptetition focused".
If MS put their efforts into great software, rather than trying to stomp competition, they could be something greter than they are.
If they put their resources into assisting the entire industry they could be even greater.
Hope it is better than Intel's other memory push
on
Intel Set To Demo PRAM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I once did that with a regular old wind-up alarm clock. It hit the sidewalk from four floors up. Springs and shit everywhere! Never was a late sleep in ever that sweet.
In any reasonably complex hunk of software, the chance of being able to confidently fix a oneliner and release it immediately is pretty low. Most software needs verification/testing of some sorts before a change can be mainstreamed.
I actually think that MS pushes out some patches too fast. My Windows laptop gets autopatched and the problematic parts of the system (wireless networking in particular) sometimes get screwed up for a while until the next patch set arrives. I don't think that MS is responsible for all the breakage. Often, MS makes a change which can break an existing driver or app. From a user's perspective all that you see is that a MS patch breaks the system.
There was once a really nice device called the HP 200LX. That had an 8MHz processor and could do most useful functions without eyecandy. Battery life was weeks with typical usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200Lx
There was also a cool device called the Psion 7 that could do most useful stuff and also had a good battery life.
Sure, both those devices are clunkers by today's standards but by using modern parts they could be made more slick and capable while still preserving battery life etc.
Bottom line is tht you don't need GHz to do most useful functions.
Even without being a terrorist, or doing things which might get you labelled being a terrorist, you could very easily do things which have similar goals to some terrorist group and could thus be "supportive of terrorism".
Example: "I think Bush should go!" well some terrorist group might have that goal too so by saying that I could be considered to be supporting the goals of some terrorist group and could open myself up to prosecution.
Oppressive societies have used and abused laws like this quite effectively. In Apartheid-era South Africa there was a law against furthering the aims of communism or the ANC. So if you spoke out against racism/the church you could be harrassed along the lines of reasoning that: the communists promote equality/ are anti-religion, you promoted equality/ are anti-religion, therefore you furthered the aims of communism.
I used to live in a gun carrying society. I carried a gun on occasions and even once shot a person in a civilian environment. Maybe, just maybe, I know a little bit more about it than rabid pro-gunners.
In some of the towns I lived in at least 30% of males on the street were carrying. Luckily almost all of those had been through military training and knew a few things about guns, target assesment, risk mitigation etc. Go into the kmart equivalent and the guy helping folk select a tie had a 357 on his hip. Quite a few people got shot by mistake.
In USA there's the problem that so few people with firearms have real firearm training. I am not that opposed to *very* well trained people carrying weapons, but am suggesting that the idea that it should be a citizen's right is broken.
One nutter starts shooting then half the dorm draws guns and start blazing away unsure as to who the original shooter is and start shooting each other. Cop snipers arrive and see a whole bunch of people running around with their guns blazing. Who should they shoot at?
Civilian firefights are not going to solve the problem unless you get people to wear good guy/bad guy armbands or something.
Sure, there are a few times, like perhaps this one, where a few lives might have been saved if someone had been armed, but there would likely have been more single event shootings (fight over a girl getting out of hand etc). When you work the averages, gun toting adds up to more deaths.
Lots of returns to Sony will hurt Sony's profits and piss off the shareholders.
Pissed off share holders, particularly those who might have personally encountered the DVD problem, are a very nasty bunch to deal with. They cause heads to roll when voting for new board members etc.
Mother Nature built in some sort of defence to stop the spread of disease etc. That will be as old as the hills. Perhaps though this mechanism is being falsely triggered by some modern source.
Blaming it on cellphones is a bit of a stretch though. There seem to be far more likely causes:
Pesticides/herbicides/fertilisers, particularly modern hormonal ones, could be disrupting the hives.
Cross breeding of bees (eg. Africanised killer bees) could disrupt bee/hive behaviour.
Monoculture farming cuts down of plant food diversity, leading to a less balanced diet. GM crops alter the composition of pollen & nectar.
If MS stops XP sales and forces a Vista change over then just waiting for other muppets to sort things is not a workable strategy.
These incompatabilities run deep. Even some Microsoft stuff does not work with Vista. eg. Platform Builder (used for Windows CE development) is XP only.
The important practical measure is $/W. There are many ways this might be impoved and improved efficiency is one of those - potentially. What I say is that efficiency improvements that improve $/W are important and those that don't are not (or very much less important).
Many improvements in efficiency are through more expensive processing etc resulting in more expensive PV. The World Solar Race favours the team with the best efficiency, even if that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much of the PV research is geared towards efficiency and this is the measure by which they compete (eg. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q4/061206b_nr. html).
This focus is detremental from a practical position of solving the energy crisis. While the big research dollars are focussed on efficiency we will continue to have PV that has useless $/W. It is far more important to ignore efficiency and focus on $/W.
I won't use PV if it costs me $20,000 to fit a PV array. If I could fit a $2000 PV array we'd be talking. So what if that takes up 50 square metres of roof space instead of 5? Cheap stuff could even be made into roofing tiles. It is reducing the $/W that makes PV practical.
The power convesion ratio is not really that important in itself. The only really important measure is $/watt.
If you can get low $/watts with low efficiency that would be OK. Tile your house with the stuff, use it as the external covering for buildings.
That is one of the major problems with PV showcases like the Australian solar race. they push efficiency more than $/watts which is my the winning cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Perhaps it is not young kids that should denied access to violent material. Small kids are not really strong enough to really hurt anyone (unless they have handguns etc). It's more of a problem giving the violent urge to the 16-25 year olds who're tanked up on testosterone and physically capable of hurting people.
But that observation aside, I expect that the correlation between game violence and realworld violence is pretty weak. My kids (11 and 15) play shoot-em-ups and don't go around beating people up.
I once shot a real person in the real world in a civilian situation and would do so again in the right situations, yet I find games, and shoot-em-ups in particular, very boring. Shooting a real person is a very different act to blowing away pixels for points.
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If MS put their efforts into great software, rather than trying to stomp competition, they could be something greter than they are.
If they put their resources into assisting the entire industry they could be even greater.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
I once did that with a regular old wind-up alarm clock. It hit the sidewalk from four floors up. Springs and shit everywhere! Never was a late sleep in ever that sweet.
Rather make one out of Lego Mindstorms. At lest then when you smash it, it only de-bricks and you can build it back together again!
I actually think that MS pushes out some patches too fast. My Windows laptop gets autopatched and the problematic parts of the system (wireless networking in particular) sometimes get screwed up for a while until the next patch set arrives. I don't think that MS is responsible for all the breakage. Often, MS makes a change which can break an existing driver or app. From a user's perspective all that you see is that a MS patch breaks the system.
While you say that you wish to communicate, we really know that deep down you want to plug&play, preferably doing some hotplugging too.
USB2.0 makes this easy and if you're in a hurry, or are unsure as to who should play host and who should play slave then you can try USB on the Go.
There was also a cool device called the Psion 7 that could do most useful stuff and also had a good battery life.
Sure, both those devices are clunkers by today's standards but by using modern parts they could be made more slick and capable while still preserving battery life etc.
Bottom line is tht you don't need GHz to do most useful functions.
Example: "I think Bush should go!" well some terrorist group might have that goal too so by saying that I could be considered to be supporting the goals of some terrorist group and could open myself up to prosecution.
Oppressive societies have used and abused laws like this quite effectively. In Apartheid-era South Africa there was a law against furthering the aims of communism or the ANC. So if you spoke out against racism/the church you could be harrassed along the lines of reasoning that: the communists promote equality/ are anti-religion, you promoted equality/ are anti-religion, therefore you furthered the aims of communism.
In some of the towns I lived in at least 30% of males on the street were carrying. Luckily almost all of those had been through military training and knew a few things about guns, target assesment, risk mitigation etc. Go into the kmart equivalent and the guy helping folk select a tie had a 357 on his hip. Quite a few people got shot by mistake.
In USA there's the problem that so few people with firearms have real firearm training. I am not that opposed to *very* well trained people carrying weapons, but am suggesting that the idea that it should be a citizen's right is broken.
Civilian firefights are not going to solve the problem unless you get people to wear good guy/bad guy armbands or something.
Sure, there are a few times, like perhaps this one, where a few lives might have been saved if someone had been armed, but there would likely have been more single event shootings (fight over a girl getting out of hand etc). When you work the averages, gun toting adds up to more deaths.
In my day they reprogrammed us to be who they wanted us to be!
Many old mortars such as lime absorb CO2 and get harder with time. If lime mortar cracks while young, it will absorb CO2 and fill up those cracks.
Pissed off share holders, particularly those who might have personally encountered the DVD problem, are a very nasty bunch to deal with. They cause heads to roll when voting for new board members etc.
Does this mean that software bought to run on a Windows PC should also run on a Mac, Linux PC, whatever?
Blaming it on cellphones is a bit of a stretch though. There seem to be far more likely causes:
Pesticides/herbicides/fertilisers, particularly modern hormonal ones, could be disrupting the hives.
Cross breeding of bees (eg. Africanised killer bees) could disrupt bee/hive behaviour.
Monoculture farming cuts down of plant food diversity, leading to a less balanced diet. GM crops alter the composition of pollen & nectar.
http://www.forthegirls.com/
we have more opportunity!
If MS stops XP sales and forces a Vista change over then just waiting for other muppets to sort things is not a workable strategy.
These incompatabilities run deep. Even some Microsoft stuff does not work with Vista. eg. Platform Builder (used for Windows CE development) is XP only.
You don't always get a second chance to change things. I hunch that the internet is too well advanced to rip it up and start over.
Many improvements in efficiency are through more expensive processing etc resulting in more expensive PV. The World Solar Race favours the team with the best efficiency, even if that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much of the PV research is geared towards efficiency and this is the measure by which they compete (eg. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q4/061206b_nr. html).
This focus is detremental from a practical position of solving the energy crisis. While the big research dollars are focussed on efficiency we will continue to have PV that has useless $/W. It is far more important to ignore efficiency and focus on $/W.
I won't use PV if it costs me $20,000 to fit a PV array. If I could fit a $2000 PV array we'd be talking. So what if that takes up 50 square metres of roof space instead of 5? Cheap stuff could even be made into roofing tiles. It is reducing the $/W that makes PV practical.
It is a real shame that Boeing will spend huge dollars to inflate their egos with high efficiency while more practical programs like http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Press_Releases /04-04-07.html struggle.
If you can get low $/watts with low efficiency that would be OK. Tile your house with the stuff, use it as the external covering for buildings.
That is one of the major problems with PV showcases like the Australian solar race. they push efficiency more than $/watts which is my the winning cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But that observation aside, I expect that the correlation between game violence and realworld violence is pretty weak. My kids (11 and 15) play shoot-em-ups and don't go around beating people up.
I once shot a real person in the real world in a civilian situation and would do so again in the right situations, yet I find games, and shoot-em-ups in particular, very boring. Shooting a real person is a very different act to blowing away pixels for points.
Google server building mysteriously burns down
All emails were first printed, shredded then burnt. You are not going to get any more deleted than that!
Sales of fake IDs up!