Just for fun, I tried Honda Civic as a search. Actually, Bing sucks. Where the results differ, Bing has either a comparison between Civic and Integra windshields, or an ungodly list of used car sites
I have to call BS on this one.
Making the same search I saw - in this order:
2010 Honda Civic: Links To Specs-Safety-Reliability-Reviews Link To Local Dealer and Service Listings 2010 Honda Civic Sedan - Honda Site Honda Civic Wikipedia Honda Civic Family - Honda Site Images
And then a breakdown into subcategories:
Used Honda Civic Civic Parts Acessories Manuals
Everything is accessible from the first page and very attractively presented.
This is what happens when you make your search engine the default one for your web browser as well as make it difficult for someone to add or change this option.
The drop down menu in IE 8 Search will take you to this page:
Add your own search provider to your copy of Internet Explorer by following these steps:
1. Visit the desired search engine in another window or tab. 2. Use the search engine to search for TEST (all capital letters). 3. Paste the URL of the Search results page here
You can customize the name of your provider. You can select the character encoding, from about 50 or so choices. You can view the XML.
When Kodak introduced an instant-print camera, Polaroid used a patent lawsuit to shut down the whole product line.
Kodak settled out of court for $925 million.
$925 million. Amount Kodak paid to Polaroid in out-of-court settlement for infringement on Polaroid's instant camera patent. "Eastman Kodak Co. paid $925 million to Polaroid Corp. yesterday as part of a surprise out-of-court settlement of their historic 15-year legal battle over Kodak's infringement of Polaroid's patents on instant camera technology....Kodak's payment, meanwhile, included $873 million, the amount of damages awarded Cambridge-based Polaroid by federal Judge A. David Mazzone in January. (That was a revision of his original $909.5 million judgment, issued last October.) The balance represents $52 million in interest. Both companies had appealed Mazzone's ruling, the largest patent-infringement award ever. Polaroid said it deserved $12 billion, Kodak argued that it owed Polaroid $177 million. The companies said in separate statements that they were relieved to end their long court fight, which began in April 1976 when Polaroid sued Kodak, charging that its new instant camera violated several Polaroid patents." Largest settlement in patent lawsuit. (Lawrence Edelman, Globe Staff, "Kodak pays Polaroid $925m Part of a surprise out-of-court settlement ends 15-year legal hassle," The Boston Globe, July 16, 1991)How much have courts awarded to inventors for patent infringement?
Vista and Win 7 combined hold a 25% share in the December W3Schools stats. That ought to silence the geek who insists on calling Win 7 a "Service Pack."
But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Microsoft and the big box retailers have had a mutually profitable relationship for thirty years.
Strong after-market sales are A Good Thing.
Dual inventory and support structures are A Bad Thing.
Strong representation at every price point is A Good Thing. Being firmly anchored as a bottom feeder is a Very Bad Thing.
These are the basics. But almost no one enters the mass consumer market without learning the hard way.
I would think not as necessarily less of that is available for non-essential purchases which is the majority of the market for advertisers.
Where the heck does this idea come from?
These categories alone would seem to have some significance.
Food Clothing Insurance and Banking. Light, heat, water and power Construction and Maintenance Drugs and Cosmetics Employment Housing Home Furnishings and Appliances Medical and Social Services Transportation.
At least 30 million people expect and demand more and refuse to just "get a Windows machine" to be able to play a particular game or use a particular application, which is why more and more applications and games are being released for non-Windows operating systems.
Citation needed.
Windows has about 90% of the PC market. OSX 5%.
Linux 1% - fragmented among a commercially bewildering 200 or so distributions - of which maybe four or five have a significant presence in the home market.
Then there are The Great Divides between the netbook and the mid-line laptop and desktop market.
Console and PC Gaming.
Cell-phone, E-book and other mobile devices vs the general purpose PC of every sort.
The mobile market is growing rapidly but still amounts to only 1 or 2 percent of the whole.
The geek's "thirty million" are out there somewhere. But where?
There is money to made in supporting the Wii and PS3.
The Windows developer can cut very big slices out of the netbook, PC and console markets.
p2p users are targeted heavily by the anti piracy groups because p2p users are comprised largly by individuals with very shallow pockets. Google could potentially even the playing field here.
Avatar grossed $1 billion dollars in less than three weeks.
Tell me again about the level playing field.
Tell me again why Google wants to become Ground Zero for every fifty megaton bomb the rights holders choose to drop.
get him to set up two companies: one incorporated in Elbonia that has all the assets, and a shell development company with all the liabilities. Don't contest any lawsuit, just smile, punt the shell company into bankruptcy, and set up another one.
This may keep your creditors at bay for a time.
It will make you a "person of interest" to the IRS and others.
The geek as criminal mastermind is an interesting thing to contemplate.
In the movies, of course, he is the lard ass who shuts down the fences before he makes his escape from Jurassic Park.
I'd rather see the nice old b&w Twilight Zones, grainy old BSG, the 1 or 2 seasons of Firefly, than ALL NEW DISNEY PIXAR TWILIGHT ZONE 3D ON ICE !!eleventy!!!
The geek who doesn't want to see more SF from Pixar needs to get his head examined.
All Popular Mechanics does is demonstrate that the people populating the middle and left of the IQ Gaussian are active consumers. In this, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the National Enquirer, Fox News, and other amazingly low quality media outlets.
This is really quire unfair when you look at the magazine historically.
Popular Mechanics published science and craft projects for both kids and adults for the better part of 100 years.
The books, with titles like The Boy Mechanic, have been reprinted often - and the originals are treasured.
Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it.
Mozilla is backed by Big Daddy Google.
That buys a lot of muscle. Do you think you can cut it?
A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011. Approximately 85% of Mozilla's revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract, this equates to approximately US$56.8 million.Mozilla Foundation
Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla's consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others.State of Mozilla and 2008 Financial Statements
During the 1990s, developing nations began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely.
Were these manufacturers producing new drugs or generic versions of the western Big Pharm product?
There is a difference - and it is a difference that matters.
Big Pharm has the money to research and develop new drugs.
It has the resources - though perhaps not always the will - to test its new products in meaningful and ethical ways.
There is a western market for the AIDS drug or vaccine.
But it does not take the same shape, it is not as large or as urgent as what is needed in Africa.
There are other diseases of course which are almost entirely third-world - and Big Pharm is not a charity.
If you want - if you need - its participation, you have to offer incentives. You have to help pay the bills.
I have been concerned for years about this, because you often hear prosecutors and "expert" witness testimony to the effect that "the odds are billions to one against this being someone else".
Imagine a murder in Buffalo, NY, population about 290,000.
Imagine that you have three credible matches:
1 The priest in North Dakota. 2 The engineering officer from downstate now serving in Afghanistan. 3 The real estate agent and deer hunter in suburban Amherst NY who lives five miles from the densely wooded creek bed where the body was found.
The universe of possible - plausible - suspects in any case is often quite small. The forensic evidence may expose other significant connections.
2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens
Terrorists had the means and the opportunity in 2001:
Four smaller buildings and a hotel, all built nearby around a central landscaped plaza, completed the complex. The mall at the World Trade Center, which was located immediately below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway stations and a stop on the PATH trains to New Jersey. Some 50,000 people worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited or passed through each day. The complex had its own zip code, 10048.World Trade Center History
Slashdot Mirror
Just for fun, I tried Honda Civic as a search. Actually, Bing sucks. Where the results differ, Bing has either a comparison between Civic and Integra windshields, or an ungodly list of used car sites
I have to call BS on this one.
Making the same search I saw - in this order:
2010 Honda Civic: Links To Specs-Safety-Reliability-Reviews
Link To Local Dealer and Service Listings
2010 Honda Civic Sedan - Honda Site
Honda Civic Wikipedia
Honda Civic Family - Honda Site
Images
And then a breakdown into subcategories:
Used Honda Civic
Civic Parts
Acessories
Manuals
Everything is accessible from the first page and very attractively presented.
This is what happens when you make your search engine the default one for your web browser as well as make it difficult for someone to add or change this option.
The drop down menu in IE 8 Search will take you to this page:
Add-ons Gallery: Search Providers
Here's a sampling of the English language options. You have 25 languages to chose from:
Amazon
Google
Hulu
New Egg
New York Times
Wikipedia
Win 7 Comparability
Create your own Search Provider
Add your own search provider to your copy of Internet Explorer by following these steps:
1. Visit the desired search engine in another window or tab.
2. Use the search engine to search for TEST (all capital letters).
3. Paste the URL of the Search results page here
You can customize the name of your provider. You can select the character encoding, from about 50 or so choices. You can view the XML.
When Kodak introduced an instant-print camera, Polaroid used a patent lawsuit to shut down the whole product line.
Kodak settled out of court for $925 million.
$925 million. Amount Kodak paid to Polaroid in out-of-court settlement for infringement on Polaroid's instant camera patent. "Eastman Kodak Co. paid $925 million to Polaroid Corp. yesterday as part of a surprise out-of-court settlement of their historic 15-year legal battle over Kodak's infringement of Polaroid's patents on instant camera technology. ...Kodak's payment, meanwhile, included $873 million, the amount of damages awarded Cambridge-based Polaroid by federal Judge A. David Mazzone in January. (That was a revision of his original $909.5 million judgment, issued last October.) The balance represents $52 million in interest. Both companies had appealed Mazzone's ruling, the largest patent-infringement award ever. Polaroid said it deserved $12 billion, Kodak argued that it owed Polaroid $177 million. The companies said in separate statements that they were relieved to end their long court fight, which began in April 1976 when Polaroid sued Kodak, charging that its new instant camera violated several Polaroid patents." Largest settlement in patent lawsuit. (Lawrence Edelman, Globe Staff, "Kodak pays Polaroid $925m Part of a surprise out-of-court settlement ends 15-year legal hassle," The Boston Globe, July 16, 1991) How much have courts awarded to inventors for patent infringement?
Every year, retail stores sell less, and online retailers sell more.
Best Buy online lists 35 Windows netbooks.
TigerDirect 112 new Win 7 laptops.
Walmart.com 24 Windows netbooks, 66 Windows laptops [some overlap here] and 30 Windows desktops.
Dell can't hide a $50 Microsoft tax in a $250 netbook as easily.
"The Microsoft Tax" is the goofiest idea to emerge from the geek mind:
By the time product reaches the shelves you save next to nothing on Linux.
That's the sad truth behind the geek's pursuit of the elusive "Windows refund."
Walmart, with its unmatched purchasing power, championed OEM Linux for years, but in the end threw in the towel.
The netbook is a second or third purchase.
This works out just fine if Windows is your primary OS and you own Office Home & Student with a three seat license.
If you download your casual games from D2D or Steam.
Maybe you just need a little more exercise.
and that folks, is why Nintendo rakes in the big bucks. cutting itself a slice of the health and fitness market.
In this past decade Microsoft lost market share
OS Platform Stats W3 Schools
Mar 2003 Linux 2% OSX 2%
Dec 2009 Linux 4% OSX 6%
Jan 2009 Win 7 0% OSX 6%
Dec 2009 Win 7 9% OSX 6%
Vista and Win 7 combined hold a 25% share in the December W3Schools stats. That ought to silence the geek who insists on calling Win 7 a "Service Pack."
But when Best Buy starts selling Chrome OS netbooks with a big Google brand on it, Microsoft will start shitting themselves.
Microsoft and the big box retailers have had a mutually profitable relationship for thirty years.
Strong after-market sales are A Good Thing.
Dual inventory and support structures are A Bad Thing.
Strong representation at every price point is A Good Thing. Being firmly anchored as a bottom feeder is a Very Bad Thing.
These are the basics. But almost no one enters the mass consumer market without learning the hard way.
Does that mean the Microsoft icon changes to a Borg Ballmer?
It means that the geek's recycled jokes from a decade back are still worth a cheap mod-up.
The sun rises. The sun sets.
Did they mention his important work in the field of chairodynamics?
Some things speak for themselves.
Microsoft's revenues, $56 billion.
Its profit margin 24%. Debt $6 billion, cash-on-hand $33 billion. MSFT Key Statistics
I would think not as necessarily less of that is available for non-essential purchases which is the majority of the market for advertisers.
Where the heck does this idea come from?
These categories alone would seem to have some significance.
Food
Clothing
Insurance and Banking.
Light, heat, water and power
Construction and Maintenance
Drugs and Cosmetics
Employment
Housing
Home Furnishings and Appliances
Medical and Social Services
Transportation.
There are lots of really awesome things about Linux. Running proprietary software and supporting DRM infested platforms are not among them.
The Windows user doesn't give a damn about the purity of your development model or licensing.
Why should he? His platform is agnostic.
Damn near everything in FOSS is his for the asking. But so is the best-of-breed in commercial and proprietary software at every price point.
When the Windows user clicks on the movie the movie plays.
That is the practical meaning of DRM, whether the program is delivered through your home PC or the set top box with its embedded Linux OS.
The geek may be prepared to spend endless hours trying to find a "free" solution. The right codec. The right player. The right file.
If he valued his time at minimum wage he might as well be doing his shopping at WalMart.
At least 30 million people expect and demand more and refuse to just "get a Windows machine" to be able to play a particular game or use a particular application, which is why more and more applications and games are being released for non-Windows operating systems.
Citation needed.
Windows has about 90% of the PC market. OSX 5%.
Linux 1% - fragmented among a commercially bewildering 200 or so distributions - of which maybe four or five have a significant presence in the home market.
Then there are The Great Divides between the netbook and the mid-line laptop and desktop market.
Console and PC Gaming.
Cell-phone, E-book and other mobile devices vs the general purpose PC of every sort.
The mobile market is growing rapidly but still amounts to only 1 or 2 percent of the whole.
The geek's "thirty million" are out there somewhere. But where?
There is money to made in supporting the Wii and PS3.
The Windows developer can cut very big slices out of the netbook, PC and console markets.
The OSX developer has the Mac and the iPhone.
p2p users are targeted heavily by the anti piracy groups because p2p users are comprised largly by individuals with very shallow pockets. Google could potentially even the playing field here.
Avatar grossed $1 billion dollars in less than three weeks.
Tell me again about the level playing field.
Tell me again why Google wants to become Ground Zero for every fifty megaton bomb the rights holders choose to drop.
Don't ask any permission. Just do it and have a good lawyer ready.
Good lawyers cost money.
The best lawyers will tell you to drop this idea before it costs you even more money - and time.
get him to set up two companies: one incorporated in Elbonia that has all the assets, and a shell development company with all the liabilities. Don't contest any lawsuit, just smile, punt the shell company into bankruptcy, and set up another one.
This may keep your creditors at bay for a time.
It will make you a "person of interest" to the IRS and others.
The geek as criminal mastermind is an interesting thing to contemplate.
In the movies, of course, he is the lard ass who shuts down the fences before he makes his escape from Jurassic Park.
The geek who doesn't want to see more SF from Pixar needs to get his head examined.
It's amazing how better written old Popular Mechanics were, a lot closer to what Make magazine is now, at least in spirit.
Popular Mechanics has been scanned for Google Books.
You might begin with September 1930: The cover? Fritz Lang's rocketship from The Woman in the Moon.
Feature articles on Outer Space, The Britannic, lightning hazards in flying, oil tankers, clouds, spies, skiing .... 175 pages in all.
The writing is crisp and clear, art and illustration first rate.
All Popular Mechanics does is demonstrate that the people populating the middle and left of the IQ Gaussian are active consumers. In this, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the National Enquirer, Fox News, and other amazingly low quality media outlets.
This is really quire unfair when you look at the magazine historically.
Popular Mechanics published science and craft projects for both kids and adults for the better part of 100 years.
The books, with titles like The Boy Mechanic, have been reprinted often - and the originals are treasured.
Mission Furniture: How to Make It
How To Draw Cartoons the U.S. Army Way!
Popular Mechanics Build-It-Yourself Ranch-Type House
Or exercise some good ol' open source muscle and fork it.
Mozilla is backed by Big Daddy Google.
That buys a lot of muscle. Do you think you can cut it?
A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011. Approximately 85% of Mozilla's revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract, this equates to approximately US$56.8 million. Mozilla Foundation
Our revenue and expenses are consistent with 2007, showing steady growth. Mozilla's consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2008 were $78.6 million, up approximately 5% from 2007 reported revenues of $75.1 million. The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others. State of Mozilla and 2008 Financial Statements
During the 1990s, developing nations began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely.
Were these manufacturers producing new drugs or generic versions of the western Big Pharm product?
There is a difference - and it is a difference that matters.
Big Pharm has the money to research and develop new drugs.
It has the resources - though perhaps not always the will - to test its new products in meaningful and ethical ways.
There is a western market for the AIDS drug or vaccine.
But it does not take the same shape, it is not as large or as urgent as what is needed in Africa.
There are other diseases of course which are almost entirely third-world - and Big Pharm is not a charity.
If you want - if you need - its participation, you have to offer incentives. You have to help pay the bills.
Allow me to suggest Sourceforge for the truly retro experience.
This is one of those areas where patents are good. They prevent everybody else from doing this shit. :-
They prevent everybody else from using Google's way of doing this shit.
Without a license.
The patent protects only their implementation of the idea.
It does not protect the idea itself.
I have been concerned for years about this, because you often hear prosecutors and "expert" witness testimony to the effect that "the odds are billions to one against this being someone else".
Imagine a murder in Buffalo, NY, population about 290,000.
Imagine that you have three credible matches:
1 The priest in North Dakota.
2 The engineering officer from downstate now serving in Afghanistan.
3 The real estate agent and deer hunter in suburban Amherst NY who lives five miles from the densely wooded creek bed where the body was found.
The universe of possible - plausible - suspects in any case is often quite small. The forensic evidence may expose other significant connections.
OpenGL is a graphics-specific API (like Direct3D). If you want sound, network, etc. support, try SDL or Qt.
There is something to be said for a standard tool kit of apps that provides one-stop shopping for the developer.
PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics
2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens
Terrorists had the means and the opportunity in 2001:
Four smaller buildings and a hotel, all built nearby around a central landscaped plaza, completed the complex. The mall at the World Trade Center, which was located immediately below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway stations and a stop on the PATH trains to New Jersey.
Some 50,000 people worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited or passed through each day. The complex had its own zip code, 10048. World Trade Center History
It's not illegal if the government does it.
Diagnostic imaging is not pornography.
The medical textbook is not pornography. The introduction of forensic evidence is not pornography.
There have always been exceptions like these.
The Balloon Boy episode is a trivial example of why children cannot be exempt from screening.
Kids will do anything for their parents with little or no understanding or regard for the consequences.