Has anybody checked that this it's not patented? I'd hate to have to the pay licensing costs retroactively cause I've been throwing 'em around pretty liberally.
That the ROI is abysmal is beyond a doubt. What's just as alarming to me is that they spent $8B. Successfully launching a new platform shouldn't take anywhere near that amount. Look around- people are doing embedded, non-MS O/Ses on all sorts of intriguing new platforms w/innovative new applications and spending a tiny fraction of what MS spent to get Xbox going. That's the way the industry should be - FOSS has served as a very effective catalyst for indy product development. I feel the tier 1 vendors have always resisted this sort of thing and done what they could to stifle it because it means the R&D / ROI cycle is much much faster then they want it to be. There's always some rock star cooking up something new in his garage that can threaten them and they can't reap as much profit off something new they took forever and spent a bundle to make happen.
Careful- I know smart people from LA, including ones that drive over-sized vehicles. Some of them even feel religion has a place in the world. As far as evolving the English language- that's neither here nor there but probably explainable given the cultural mash-up going on down there which is a defining characteristic of that part of the country and one I believe that should be applauded.
While it's comical how tightly they cling to their religion I think the question that has to come before the one of religion in schools is whether parents have the right to impress belief systems on their children. I believe they do- even when passing on their beliefs puts their children at a disadvantage relative to those with exposure to a more scientific curriculum. Isn't our country supposed to be about tolerance, freedom to believe what we want and empowering local gov't as much as possible? I think we should try to avoid ridiculing their beliefs and let them run their little corner they want to.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Sometimes I feel like the tax rate never changes- they always tax us as much as we will bear. When they need money for a war, tax revenue is reallocated. Sure, it might be costing me something somewhere but you'd be hard pressed to identify or quantify it.
Funny question- I participated in the Gulf War as active duty military. The short answer is "I don't know how much it cost me." I understand the point- and obviously it has cost the US a great deal, but has it effected me directly in any way as a citizen? It doesn't feel like it.
I've done some time in Europe. I don't remember the quality of life being higher than the USes in as a broad a way as you suggest. Sure, some things are better. But some things are worse. To talk about it any more detail than that would require un-bundling the countries represented by the use of the term "Europe." As an American, I believe I pay less than half of what Europeans pay for gas. That's just one example, but it's an important one that a lot of other "qualify of life" metrics derive from.
Granted our government could stand some Spring cleaning but I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from condescending to the 300 M people that populate one of if not the most industrious country on the planet.
Do you know that for sure? I have a sneaking suspicion that as soon as mankind masters interstellar travel a bunch of meatballs from Jersey are likely to do just that to some other planet.
I bet not all of them will be back in line. They lost customers the minute they shipped a product that shouldn't have made it through QA. Superior engineering & QA is how many people justify the Apple Tax & if Apple has decided to do less QA then they will lose customers. That they are suppressing the voice of their customers will cost them more customers- perhaps even more than due to the former cause. I'd be willing to bet that the lost "brand equity" over this issue will cost them more in the long run then doing proper QA in the first place (call it justice, karma, etc.). Your point is well taken though- it won't cost them as much as would other companies because of the blind loyalty of many of their customers.
So you've resigned yourself that consumers just have to live with shockingly high premature failure rates? Good luck with that strategy. I'm going to continue only using vendors that supply products which have a decent chance of lasting a few years and when they do break don't suffer subsequent failures shortly afterward.
If you read more closely than I suspect you have, this thread is not about debating whether hardware failure is inevitable, its about whether Dell is doing their job of assuring reasonable quality and the ethics of their order fulfillment policies.
Sure - discrete components can be faulty and even boards, etc... but pretty much the whole PC industry gets their parts & sub-assemblies from vendors the do assemble discrete components. Since IBM put the spec out there for commodity PCs to be built from off the shelf components back in the early 80's, the job of the vendor changed from significant electronic engineering to mostly selecting packaging, cooling & most importantly QA/QC. So while they can't be blamed for faulty manufacturing they can certainly be held accountable for poor quality control. Additionally, if the allusions in this post about Dell knowingly selling broken equipment are true- I suspect there's a 2nd, more significant & potentially criminal offense of which I'm not qualified to comment on.
Agreed. I think the analysis of the meaningful content in a Tweet "stream" should be compared to a similar analysis on regular verbal communication. I think we'd find the results alarmingly similar. It's not Tweets that bore people to death, it's people that bore people to death.
20 kpsi is not that big a deal. Equipment happens to be manufactured right here on Earth with ratings in that ball park (c.f. http://www.highpressure.com/valves_fittings.asp?ID=10&ptype=v§ion=2). Your allegation about 20 kpsi destroying anything man can make is an inaccurate and overly-dramatic one.
So would a naked black hole be known to have a "Non-Event Horizon?" Sounds like a suitable term for new title launches from 3-D Realms...
Re:Dont stay in the past, Use Linux
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1
Thank you for letting us know that you don't care about Windows but even the most ardent Linux supporters have to deal with other OSes if they work in a corporate environment. Let's assume that the Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em L. vs. W. battle is over tomorrow and the entire corporate world is convinced of the benefits of FOSS. It would then still take years for the transition to complete so I would expect to see at least some discussion here @/. about the OS that > 90% of the world's desktops run for some time yet. Despite some of the evangelizing that goes on here (and I wave the FOSS flag myself often enough), it's a technology site and that includes, for now at least, some discussion of the OS with the largest install base.
I disagree with the assumption that only commercial software can innovate. Like Walt Disney "borrowing" fairy tales, commercial software often "borrows" from open source code. For example: ftp, rcp and rsh in Windows originally were ported from BSD. And how about all the hot features from FOSS web browsers being imitated by commercial browsers? Or KDE 4 features finding their way to Vista & W7?
Though much of his reasoning is sound, I'm not sure I agree with the author's conclusion. My reasoning for expecting it to go differently is fairly simple: while Flash blockers are generally the most popular plug-ins for any browser that has the option, you generally don't see many HTML blocking extensions in a web browser. Once the corp. world realizes that, I believe value of increased eye-balls-on-ads will be the dominant factor even though Designers will have to re-tool.
IMO they are being compared because CxOs & MBAs enjoy vying for King of MarketCap Hill and because these are the same decision makers that command advertising dollars, the mass media tags along.
I can appreciate this concern and would suggest that there's a middle ground: It is possible to monitor your network traffic and setup firewall rules to stop this sort of thing if you're that concerned. I do this myself from time to time and am always surprised at what I see going back to the mother ship at . It's not just Google you should worry about.
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RIAA Plants Seeds of Inaccuracy- News @ 11.
Has anybody checked that this it's not patented? I'd hate to have to the pay licensing costs retroactively cause I've been throwing 'em around pretty liberally.
That the ROI is abysmal is beyond a doubt. What's just as alarming to me is that they spent $8B. Successfully launching a new platform shouldn't take anywhere near that amount. Look around- people are doing embedded, non-MS O/Ses on all sorts of intriguing new platforms w/innovative new applications and spending a tiny fraction of what MS spent to get Xbox going. That's the way the industry should be - FOSS has served as a very effective catalyst for indy product development. I feel the tier 1 vendors have always resisted this sort of thing and done what they could to stifle it because it means the R&D / ROI cycle is much much faster then they want it to be. There's always some rock star cooking up something new in his garage that can threaten them and they can't reap as much profit off something new they took forever and spent a bundle to make happen.
While it's comical how tightly they cling to their religion I think the question that has to come before the one of religion in schools is whether parents have the right to impress belief systems on their children. I believe they do- even when passing on their beliefs puts their children at a disadvantage relative to those with exposure to a more scientific curriculum. Isn't our country supposed to be about tolerance, freedom to believe what we want and empowering local gov't as much as possible? I think we should try to avoid ridiculing their beliefs and let them run their little corner they want to.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Sometimes I feel like the tax rate never changes- they always tax us as much as we will bear. When they need money for a war, tax revenue is reallocated. Sure, it might be costing me something somewhere but you'd be hard pressed to identify or quantify it.
Funny question- I participated in the Gulf War as active duty military. The short answer is "I don't know how much it cost me." I understand the point- and obviously it has cost the US a great deal, but has it effected me directly in any way as a citizen? It doesn't feel like it.
I've done some time in Europe. I don't remember the quality of life being higher than the USes in as a broad a way as you suggest. Sure, some things are better. But some things are worse. To talk about it any more detail than that would require un-bundling the countries represented by the use of the term "Europe." As an American, I believe I pay less than half of what Europeans pay for gas. That's just one example, but it's an important one that a lot of other "qualify of life" metrics derive from.
Granted our government could stand some Spring cleaning but I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from condescending to the 300 M people that populate one of if not the most industrious country on the planet.
Windows isn't a choice- it's an OEM default.
Do you know that for sure? I have a sneaking suspicion that as soon as mankind masters interstellar travel a bunch of meatballs from Jersey are likely to do just that to some other planet.
I bet not all of them will be back in line. They lost customers the minute they shipped a product that shouldn't have made it through QA. Superior engineering & QA is how many people justify the Apple Tax & if Apple has decided to do less QA then they will lose customers. That they are suppressing the voice of their customers will cost them more customers- perhaps even more than due to the former cause. I'd be willing to bet that the lost "brand equity" over this issue will cost them more in the long run then doing proper QA in the first place (call it justice, karma, etc.). Your point is well taken though- it won't cost them as much as would other companies because of the blind loyalty of many of their customers.
You incarcerate those responsible- ie. the corporate officers.
So you've resigned yourself that consumers just have to live with shockingly high premature failure rates? Good luck with that strategy. I'm going to continue only using vendors that supply products which have a decent chance of lasting a few years and when they do break don't suffer subsequent failures shortly afterward.
If you read more closely than I suspect you have, this thread is not about debating whether hardware failure is inevitable, its about whether Dell is doing their job of assuring reasonable quality and the ethics of their order fulfillment policies.
Sure - discrete components can be faulty and even boards, etc... but pretty much the whole PC industry gets their parts & sub-assemblies from vendors the do assemble discrete components. Since IBM put the spec out there for commodity PCs to be built from off the shelf components back in the early 80's, the job of the vendor changed from significant electronic engineering to mostly selecting packaging, cooling & most importantly QA/QC. So while they can't be blamed for faulty manufacturing they can certainly be held accountable for poor quality control. Additionally, if the allusions in this post about Dell knowingly selling broken equipment are true- I suspect there's a 2nd, more significant & potentially criminal offense of which I'm not qualified to comment on.
Reminds me of the cartoon where Dilbert had his PHB searching around under the desk for the token that fell out of the office token ring network.
Anybody remember the term "Water Proof?". You think we'd have learned a few things by now and be using "Tamper Resistant" instead of "Tamper Proof."
Agreed. I think the analysis of the meaningful content in a Tweet "stream" should be compared to a similar analysis on regular verbal communication. I think we'd find the results alarmingly similar. It's not Tweets that bore people to death, it's people that bore people to death.
20 kpsi is not that big a deal. Equipment happens to be manufactured right here on Earth with ratings in that ball park (c.f. http://www.highpressure.com/valves_fittings.asp?ID=10&ptype=v§ion=2). Your allegation about 20 kpsi destroying anything man can make is an inaccurate and overly-dramatic one.
Hey, a little courtesy please? I happen to be Bongo-Bongoian and don't appreciate being trivialized.
So would a naked black hole be known to have a "Non-Event Horizon?" Sounds like a suitable term for new title launches from 3-D Realms ...
Thank you for letting us know that you don't care about Windows but even the most ardent Linux supporters have to deal with other OSes if they work in a corporate environment. Let's assume that the Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em L. vs. W. battle is over tomorrow and the entire corporate world is convinced of the benefits of FOSS. It would then still take years for the transition to complete so I would expect to see at least some discussion here @ /. about the OS that > 90% of the world's desktops run for some time yet. Despite some of the evangelizing that goes on here (and I wave the FOSS flag myself often enough), it's a technology site and that includes, for now at least, some discussion of the OS with the largest install base.
I disagree with the assumption that only commercial software can innovate. Like Walt Disney "borrowing" fairy tales, commercial software often "borrows" from open source code. For example: ftp, rcp and rsh in Windows originally were ported from BSD. And how about all the hot features from FOSS web browsers being imitated by commercial browsers? Or KDE 4 features finding their way to Vista & W7?
This could be the silver bullet for all the HTPC (ie. XBMC) enthusiasts out there looking for a remote! I know that's how I'll justify my order.
Though much of his reasoning is sound, I'm not sure I agree with the author's conclusion. My reasoning for expecting it to go differently is fairly simple: while Flash blockers are generally the most popular plug-ins for any browser that has the option, you generally don't see many HTML blocking extensions in a web browser. Once the corp. world realizes that, I believe value of increased eye-balls-on-ads will be the dominant factor even though Designers will have to re-tool.
IMO they are being compared because CxOs & MBAs enjoy vying for King of MarketCap Hill and because these are the same decision makers that command advertising dollars, the mass media tags along.
I can appreciate this concern and would suggest that there's a middle ground: It is possible to monitor your network traffic and setup firewall rules to stop this sort of thing if you're that concerned. I do this myself from time to time and am always surprised at what I see going back to the mother ship at . It's not just Google you should worry about.