Non-compete agreements are fairly "normal" as you rightly point out, and clearly, I think MS possibly has a good legal case, but in a moralistic sense, I find it difficult to support the company when they themselves poach employees all the time. If MS can do it to Suse (and to Borland, as a previous poster pointed it out), why can't Google do it to them?
But then, while the question whether Slashdot commentors are being hypocritical certainly has merit sometimes, I don't think this is one of those times.
Legal contracts aside, I think it's fairly hypocritical of MS to sue Google for just the same predatory actions they routinely indulge in. I mean, wasn't SuSe's lead salesperson brought over to MS after he delivered the Munich contract to Suse?
Oh, there are loads more; as I've been mentioning elsewhere on this thread, most smartphones in the market now can actually play video. So yes, I agree; a video iPod is no great shakes really, in fact, it's more in terms of catching up with the times.
On a slightly different note, is it me, or is Slashdot always super-negative when it comes to new portable devices? Quite a surprisingly conservative reaction, must say, especially for a self-assembled geek community. Perhaps it's got to do with a sort-of generation-gap; guess most/.-tters are in the 25-35 age group, which most decidedly puts them in a generation that didn't grow up on mobiles.
Or perhaps you guys in the US still aren't into mobiles as much we in Asia and Europe are.;-)
People patronize the theater for social reasons; it is a place to enjoy a shared experience with your friends.
See, taht's where the argument breaks down. You automatically assume "watching video" equates to "watching movies". Not always true; people have television sets in their bedrooms for a reason. (And the reason is not necessarily porno).
To spur sales of the video iPod, Apple could offer 10 free jars of Vaselino for each purchase of a video iPod.
Guess we're in different markets (and cultures, perhaps), but I don't know, I somehow keep thinking that Apple has, in fact, no choice but to add video to an iPod.
I mean, think about it; when you now have smartphones with capacities of a gig and above that play movies and songs rather well, why would anyone want to buy a 20+ gig device that plays music alone? iPod's form factor is, naturally, a significant point here, but still, it can take Apple only so much; after a point, features will become important.
I don't know if this works for PSP's or not, but yup, it *is* possible to fit a full movie on a 256MB flash card. The concept is to re-render the movie to fit smaller screens; this apparently saves you a lot of space.
Guess you folks in the US are slightly behind in this respect, but out here in Asia, the shift to portable movies has already happened. Most office-goers around me spend time on their morning commute watching video on their PDA's, smart-phones, DVD players and portable media players, mostly by some creative re-rendering
Essentially, don't think "Britney Spears' new video", or "Sin City", but "the latest Smallville episode".
Yes, my bad, realised it still existed in Opera 8 after I posted this. Another way to get there is to click that eye-glass icon next to the Google search bar on the address bar; will pop up another toolbar that has the button for this.
Didn't know about why for what it was meant for, though, thanks for pointing it out. I stand corrected.
Not quite a HTML *editor*, but Opera 7 had something called author mode that was, well, apparently helpful for HTML-authors. (It seems to have mysteriously disappeared from Opera 7.5/8 though).
In short, Opera has always been, to put it delicately, rather ambitious on its feature-set, often to the point where even its marketing department is left sometimes clueless. But it mostly hasn't converted that to 'bloat', at least in terms of download sizes so far. One reason, perhaps, is coz they're heavily into developing for smart-phones, and as such, are in a way forced to remain small.
More significantly, memorization will probably serve you very little:
Look at it this way. The earliest known records of Indic scripts, Kharoshti and Brahmi, are from 500 BCE-ish. The Vedas, otoh, are at least a thousand years older than that. How would you explain the difference?
While I agree with your distinction between learning and memorizing in a school-going context, it must be said that the tradition of memorizing ancient Sanskrit slokas by select groups of scholars is one of the reasons why the Vedas have survived till this date.
(Incidentally, as a side-note, it's interesting to note that there are some parts of the Vedas that are still, by tradition, not written down; you could easily argue that the Vedas are, perhaps, the oldest surviving multimedia work)
Oh the situation has become muuuch better over the last two years; MS is big time into Indic computing, and there's been a fair bit of work done on the OSS front as well.
But otherwise, the broader point is well-taken; despite India's obvious linguistic diversity, Indian programmers dont necessarily have an advantage over other nationalities in i18n efforts.
Oh trust me, there are loads of sites that specifically lock-out Opera. It's been well-documented all over the web; most bank sites, MS-related sites (MSN in particular) and other stuff specifically send a degraded CSS to user-agents identifying themselves as "Opera". Admittedly though, the problem has gotten better lately; was worse with Ver6, but still, I find myself spoofing myself as MSIE every now and then.
That said, I've never understood why Opera did that by default; I'd say the easiest way forward to tell your users about switching user-agent strings. Then again, Opera has never been rather successful in marketing all of its features (OperaShow, for instance, is one of the most under-marketed browser features ever), so there.
Classic flamebait argument. You haven't addressed the parent's points AT ALL ("Does FF Deer Park have some features that was first implemented in Opera?"), and yet, managed to not only mock him, but also raised a completely un-related point on marketshares. So, is FF implementing ("copying") features first seen in Opera? I have an open mind, I'm posting this on FF 1.0 btw, and frankly would have appreciated proper refutations of that argument, something that, I might note, I still haven't seen from any FF fanboi on this thread.
As for why Opera is less popular than Firefox, well, I'm no marketing droid. Perhaps it's got to do with the initial momentum and current focus? Arguably, Firefox's core users are converts from the original NS4.7 users; Opera, otoh, has had to start from ground up. Also, Opera's current major focus seems to be on mobiles; I do believe the numbers will be entirely different if you look at that market instead of focussing on W3Schools' logs alone.
In any case, ease-of-use and features don't always correlate to marketshares, or else everyone would, presumably, be using Linux and/or OS X.
I'd say it would be "hacking" only if the applicants were specifically told not to access the information on the website, either through a stated policy thing or in some other way. This, as I understand it, wasn't the case; all they were told was that the information would be available at a particular URL after a certain date, not "there might, or might not, be information at a certain site, but in either case, you are not to access that information after mm/dd/yyyy".
Your point is rather well-taken in the sense that there are many here who seem to be arguing that ethics is a function of computer security, but I doubt if it was that simple.
But at that point the margins will be too low for either Apple or Microsoft. Instead, the handsets will probably have your telco's logo and be made by the zillion by Golden Gragon Ltd contract mega manufacturers, Shen Zhen China. They won't need more than a tiny bit of local storage since you'll keep everything at home. The rest of it wil just be a few chips and an antennae in a piece of plastic.
The best part is that they'll be all over India and Brazil and the Ukraine just as fast as they hit the US.
It's called O2 XDA/XphoneII in the British Commonwealth, iMate in the US, T-Mobile something in Germany.
Oh, first off, software (or more precisely, UI) is never written for different languages these days, but for different cultures, which is basically a form of language-country tuple. So the UI for Uruguay and for Spain would be, in theory, different, even though they speak Spanish in both countries, coz es-UR (Spanish, Uruguay) is a different "culture" from es-ES (Spanish, Spain).
Second, most current comp users in the so-called Third World are, presumably, bi-, or tri-linguals, so I doubt if anyone would appreciate that. For instance, I speak four languages fluently, and would prefer to read documentation in its original language, mostly coz I'd rather interpret the author's intent, instead of the translator's interpretation. I'm not sure I'd want to pay for the privilege of reading English documentation in English.
Essentially, I believe it'd be very hard to link cultures (and I mean in an i18n sense) to purchasing power; not even the MPAA does that for DVD's.
Most Windows installations default to en-US (English-US), mostly for the fact that there's no hi-IN (Hindi-India) or te-IN (Telugu-India) localisation for the Windows UI.
And even if there is, folks like me would prefer it to be en-IN; it'd be hell trying to remember my secondary school Hindi lessons just to send some email. If you've ever worked on an fr-FR (French-France) or es-ES (Spanish-Spain, if that's the culture string) machine, you'll know what I mean.
OTOH, sa-IN (Sanskrit-India), would be fun for its history-nerd value; imagine saying, 'tvam base aham ownz-a chati!!!' or something in a flamefest on anveeshaNa yantras (search engines) on slashdot.org.in.:-|
I ask this as someone who's extraordinarily ignorant of the political process in the US, but isnt there some way by which Senators can discuss/modify sections within a law?
The point of actually discussing a proposed law, at least in the Westminister system, is to thresh out fine print like this one. Or at least, that's how we avoided software-patenting in India; the government decided to lump software patents along with our TRIPS-related law on drug-patents. The Opposition [*] correctly cried foul, and now we have limited drugs-patenting, but no software-patents.
[*] - Okay, technically the Communists aren't Opposition, but are effectively functioning as one, what with BJP and crowd absconding the Parliament.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-compete agreements are fairly "normal" as you rightly point out, and clearly, I think MS possibly has a good legal case, but in a moralistic sense, I find it difficult to support the company when they themselves poach employees all the time. If MS can do it to Suse (and to Borland, as a previous poster pointed it out), why can't Google do it to them?
On a slightly different note, is it me, or is Slashdot always super-negative when it comes to new portable devices? Quite a surprisingly conservative reaction, must say, especially for a self-assembled geek community. Perhaps it's got to do with a sort-of generation-gap; guess most /.-tters are in the 25-35 age group, which most decidedly puts them in a generation that didn't grow up on mobiles.
Or perhaps you guys in the US still aren't into mobiles as much we in Asia and Europe are. ;-)
I mean, think about it; when you now have smartphones with capacities of a gig and above that play movies and songs rather well, why would anyone want to buy a 20+ gig device that plays music alone? iPod's form factor is, naturally, a significant point here, but still, it can take Apple only so much; after a point, features will become important.
I don't know if this works for PSP's or not, but yup, it *is* possible to fit a full movie on a 256MB flash card. The concept is to re-render the movie to fit smaller screens; this apparently saves you a lot of space.
Essentially, don't think "Britney Spears' new video", or "Sin City", but "the latest Smallville episode".
Dude, that's so 1994. :-)
Didn't know about why for what it was meant for, though, thanks for pointing it out. I stand corrected.
In short, Opera has always been, to put it delicately, rather ambitious on its feature-set, often to the point where even its marketing department is left sometimes clueless. But it mostly hasn't converted that to 'bloat', at least in terms of download sizes so far. One reason, perhaps, is coz they're heavily into developing for smart-phones, and as such, are in a way forced to remain small.
That depends: does SkyOS have OS nature?
Were you trying to be ironic?
While I agree with your distinction between learning and memorizing in a school-going context, it must be said that the tradition of memorizing ancient Sanskrit slokas by select groups of scholars is one of the reasons why the Vedas have survived till this date.
(Incidentally, as a side-note, it's interesting to note that there are some parts of the Vedas that are still, by tradition, not written down; you could easily argue that the Vedas are, perhaps, the oldest surviving multimedia work)
[Wouldn't mind a Terraserver and MS Flight Simulator integration either of course, just to be geek-politically-agnostic. ;-)]
But otherwise, the broader point is well-taken; despite India's obvious linguistic diversity, Indian programmers dont necessarily have an advantage over other nationalities in i18n efforts.
That said, I've never understood why Opera did that by default; I'd say the easiest way forward to tell your users about switching user-agent strings. Then again, Opera has never been rather successful in marketing all of its features (OperaShow, for instance, is one of the most under-marketed browser features ever), so there.
M'tians are nice people. They like to think they're part of the greater Indian global family! ;-)
As for why Opera is less popular than Firefox, well, I'm no marketing droid. Perhaps it's got to do with the initial momentum and current focus? Arguably, Firefox's core users are converts from the original NS4.7 users; Opera, otoh, has had to start from ground up. Also, Opera's current major focus seems to be on mobiles; I do believe the numbers will be entirely different if you look at that market instead of focussing on W3Schools' logs alone.
In any case, ease-of-use and features don't always correlate to marketshares, or else everyone would, presumably, be using Linux and/or OS X.
Your point is rather well-taken in the sense that there are many here who seem to be arguing that ethics is a function of computer security, but I doubt if it was that simple.
So instead of saying,
you actually say, and be done with it.Oh, just to clarify, when I said "documentation", I meant offline documentation, aka, help files. :-)
Second, most current comp users in the so-called Third World are, presumably, bi-, or tri-linguals, so I doubt if anyone would appreciate that. For instance, I speak four languages fluently, and would prefer to read documentation in its original language, mostly coz I'd rather interpret the author's intent, instead of the translator's interpretation. I'm not sure I'd want to pay for the privilege of reading English documentation in English.
Essentially, I believe it'd be very hard to link cultures (and I mean in an i18n sense) to purchasing power; not even the MPAA does that for DVD's.
Most Windows installations default to en-US (English-US), mostly for the fact that there's no hi-IN (Hindi-India) or te-IN (Telugu-India) localisation for the Windows UI.
And even if there is, folks like me would prefer it to be en-IN; it'd be hell trying to remember my secondary school Hindi lessons just to send some email. If you've ever worked on an fr-FR (French-France) or es-ES (Spanish-Spain, if that's the culture string) machine, you'll know what I mean.
OTOH, sa-IN (Sanskrit-India), would be fun for its history-nerd value; imagine saying, 'tvam base aham ownz-a chati!!!' or something in a flamefest on anveeshaNa yantras (search engines) on slashdot.org.in. :-|
Your boss doesnt mind you posting to Slashdot all day. Heck, he even responds to AC's for you!
The point of actually discussing a proposed law, at least in the Westminister system, is to thresh out fine print like this one. Or at least, that's how we avoided software-patenting in India; the government decided to lump software patents along with our TRIPS-related law on drug-patents. The Opposition [*] correctly cried foul, and now we have limited drugs-patenting, but no software-patents.
[*] - Okay, technically the Communists aren't Opposition, but are effectively functioning as one, what with BJP and crowd absconding the Parliament.