Microsoft sees about two-thirds of its revenues coming from abroad these days. It is a true multinational. It is completing a $300 million dollar research campus in Beijing.
The world is flat, as the geek likes to say.
He would have never entertained the idea of moving factories to China for cheap labor.
If they go out of US, to who M$ will complain to prevent unlicensed use of Windows? EU is much more user oriented then US.
What does "user oriented" have to do with unlicensed use?
The GPL is also a license, remember.
Software isn't the only product that is distributed under a license.
If you want to wreak ideological and nationalist havoc with commercial law in the middle of a deep and dangerous world-wide recession, you are a fool.
Companies doing business in the United States are entitled to the protection of the laws of the United States.
Microsoft complains to the same people it does so now.
Look around you.
Is that your Toyota I saw in the HSBC parking lot?
How many companies that you do business with are foreign owned and foreign based - or very soon will be?
Vancouver B.C. is 150 miles north of Redmond.
Microsoft doesn't need Ireland. It doesn't need Dubai.
You think it wouldn't be a kick for the Canadian to see one of the most prosperous companies in the states - in the world - relocate to the Great White North?
Microsoft has triple A corporate credit - Exxon-Mobil grade credit. Pfizer grade credit. It has a user base of 900 million.
There isn't a politician in the world who wouldn't want to land this prize for his home district - and the EU bureaucrat be damned.
So the idea is to make some kind of legal argument limiting the capability of the defendant to defend themselves?
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of pre-trial proceedings.
The purpose of which is to strip the issues down to their essentials and frame them properly before taking them into court.
Thus saving everyone a great deal of time and money.
For example. It is within bounds for a judge to tell you that even if what you say is true, it doesn't advance your case.
I wonder how much further they can push these strategies upon people and the courts before a angry mob with pitchforks try to storm their office buildings
Like the rotund, pear-shaped, geek could actually lift a pitchfork.
The mob is more likely to salute the geek with tar and feathers, and, if feasible, a noose. He makes a truly awful impression in court.
A pure open source enthusiast..will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it
That solves the problem for the activist.
Everyone else just wants to watch the movie.
Their voice counts too.
Software breaks down into fundamental categories: Programs for your business. Programs for your home.
Neither environment is much known as a hotbed of political correctness.
Ideological purity.
There is simply too much that needs to get done. There are other and a deeper rewards than self-flagellation while hovering over your keyboard.
The good tool is something to be treasured.
The cost doesn't matter all that much. That it limits your freedom in some insubstantial and arbritrary way doesn't really matter all that much either.
The tool can be replaced. What you can't retrieve is time.
no one I've spoken to has ever misinterpreted Hippyware. People either know what it means, or they ask. They never walk around thinking it means one thing when it means something else, a problem that both Open Source and Free Software share. Software Libre also works, but Hippyware rolls off the tongue a lot better
There aren't going to ask, they are going think that you are stoned. Which strikes me as a perfectly normal reaction to geek-speak.
Software not in the public domain comes with restrictions on its use and distribution. Free-as-in-Beer.
But not truly free in any larger or more significant way. It's just distribution under another form of private or public license.
Software Libre is the bumper sticker. The political pin.
The rallying point for your cause. That the passer-by in Hyde Park hasn't the slightest idea of what the hell it is you are talking about no longer really matters.
God alone knows what that means. Market share dominated by the home user and the enthusiast. Chrome very immature.
Internet Explorer. The browser you use at work. Rich tools for deployment and management by the system administrator...
In the simplest terms:
You can build a business ground up from the loading dock and point of sale to the clerks in accounting to the guys and gals in middle management and the executive suite and never leave the working environment of "MS Office."
That has enormous implications for recruitment, staffing and training at every level.
1352. You know he hasn't read the RTFA. You know he hasn't read the summary. The comments. Now you know - from someone who should know - that the true Slashdotter doesn't even know the elders hereabouts! The truly primal geeks.
Brett Bartlett, 30, had gone to the Livermore police station for his annual sex offender registration.
He was convicted in 2005 in Santa Clara County for having oral sex with a person under 16 years old. That conviction requires him to register as a sex offender.
While Bartlett was in the police station, detectives asked if they could do a search of his vehicle.
Inside the vehicle, detectives found a computer that they say had numerous images of child pornography.
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
"AN ACT To enhance Federal Trade Commission enforcement against illegal spam, spyware, and cross-border fraud and deception, and for other purposes." U.S. SAFE WEB Act of 2006 [Final - Full Text]
It means that the market chose to not buy the CBS product that the FCC had mandated as the new color TV standard
There was no CBS consumer product. But closed circuit CBS color broadcasts of operations were were a staple of medical conventions from 1948-1956. 1948 Zenith - USA
We really need to target the younger audiences and schools if we want to make progress. It's something that windows did early on, and something that worked very well.
It worked so well that my four year niece carries an XP netbook to her pre-school. But - seriously now - where do you find a younger generation of users that doesn't already have a substantial investment in Windows?
The trial attorney's primary asset is his experience in court - his ability to win cases.
But that makes it difficult to hit a bank for a loan.
So he - like generations of skilled craftsmen and professionals before him - seeks financing outside the normal banking system.
There is the side issue of collection from the client who isn't paying his bill. Corporate litigation at the highest level tends to more rather more work and expense than the collision at Third and Main.
Gah. Does the phrase "independent contractor" ring a bell with anyone here? Or are you all still living in the Dorm?
And when "RCA television" was adopted, it was market driven.
Market driven?
What the heck does that mean?
There had been experimental broadcasts of mechanical television when Harding was President. All-electronic television takes recognizable shape with Philo Farnsworth in the mid-thirties.
But if you are talking about a driving - relentless - force to get radio and TV into every American home, to define the standards for radio and TV broadcasting - in technology and in content - you are talking about RCA and NBC.
From 1954 to 1965 the color TV set was an RCA TV set. The only network with a regular schedule of color broadcasts, NBC.
Ages ago I came across a CCTV technician's video catalog with had a CBS color receiver for sale.
It was a massive thing - even for a kid who remembered his grandad's console radio.
But the screen was tiny - much smaller than the screen on which his older brother might have watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie or his mom and dad The Honeymooners, or Amahl and the Night Visitors.
With the back open, you could see this huge, muscular, electric motor and giant belt driven fly-wheel thingy.
Tactically, it was a disaster.
Summoning up all the failures and frustrations of mechanical television.
---and another reminder, if anyone needed it, that funding and corporate support for R&D at CBS was shallow.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed in sequential color. But it implied a big investment in color-only TV at UHF frequencies.
VHF gave you very deep - commercially viable - penetration beyond the major cities without building an expensive network of repeaters. The consumer-grade vacuum tube UHF tuner of 1952 was a downer as well.
The Wikipedia notes that Goldmark's 1940 color demo had a resolution of 343 lines. Peter Carl Goldmark That's a little disappointing, even by pre-war standards.
I've never liked the animated look of "Curse" or these sequels.
You'd be in the minority, I think.
Reviewers at the time had nothing but praise for character design, art and animation that wouldn't have looked out of place in an A-list animated feature.
At the time I thought it was a reflection of changing viewing habits, that no one was using VCRs to record television shows anymore
When you make the move to HD and the digital cable PVR there really isn't much reason to fire up your old VCR. In some ways, it would be easier and less painful to track down the external eSATA or Firewire drive that can give you five to ten times the storage of encrypted HD content.
People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
If Blu-Ray has become important, the geek really ought to be paying attention. Because it implies a lot about the future form factor of the home PC, the convergence of the home PC and video game console, PC audio and graphics, and the prospects for OEM Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Having a patchwork of private providers mixed in would be a nightmare
It was a nightmare for the American city in the nineteenth century.
Rival volunteer companies arriving on the scene were more likely to do battle with each other than with the fire.
They were of a kind with the Beer and Clam Chowder marching societies that passed for a state militia.
Ballmer sounds like an unpatriotic ass.
Buy American, eh?
Microsoft sees about two-thirds of its revenues coming from abroad these days. It is a true multinational. It is completing a $300 million dollar research campus in Beijing.
The world is flat, as the geek likes to say.
He would have never entertained the idea of moving factories to China for cheap labor.
Allow me to introduce you to the strike at Homestead Mill [and] a new Judas Iscariot
If they go out of US, to who M$ will complain to prevent unlicensed use of Windows?
EU is much more user oriented then US.
What does "user oriented" have to do with unlicensed use?
The GPL is also a license, remember.
Software isn't the only product that is distributed under a license.
If you want to wreak ideological and nationalist havoc with commercial law in the middle of a deep and dangerous world-wide recession, you are a fool.
Companies doing business in the United States are entitled to the protection of the laws of the United States.
Microsoft complains to the same people it does so now.
Look around you.
Is that your Toyota I saw in the HSBC parking lot?
How many companies that you do business with are foreign owned and foreign based - or very soon will be?
Vancouver B.C. is 150 miles north of Redmond.
Microsoft doesn't need Ireland. It doesn't need Dubai.
You think it wouldn't be a kick for the Canadian to see one of the most prosperous companies in the states - in the world - relocate to the Great White North?
Microsoft has triple A corporate credit - Exxon-Mobil grade credit. Pfizer grade credit. It has a user base of 900 million.
There isn't a politician in the world who wouldn't want to land this prize for his home district - and the EU bureaucrat be damned.
Hey we're really hurting on the economy, let's ban the idiots that dare run a successful business and bring needed tax revenue in!
The economic argument is a boneheaded tactical blunder.
It is the argument the tobacco company makes. The pornographer.
There is no business practice so corrupt and debased that hasn't been defended the same way.
The economic argument fails on the facts.
The Wii is the best selling console platform.
The Wii could all its M rated titles - and it would remain the best selling console platform. The most popular items in Wii. Updated hourly.
The ultra violent action game doesn't hold that strong a position even in the PC market. The most popular items in PC Games. Updated hourly.
So the idea is to make some kind of legal argument limiting the capability of the defendant to defend themselves?
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of pre-trial proceedings.
The purpose of which is to strip the issues down to their essentials and frame them properly before taking them into court.
Thus saving everyone a great deal of time and money.
For example. It is within bounds for a judge to tell you that even if what you say is true, it doesn't advance your case.
I wonder how much further they can push these strategies upon people and the courts before a angry mob with pitchforks try to storm their office buildings
Like the rotund, pear-shaped, geek could actually lift a pitchfork.
The mob is more likely to salute the geek with tar and feathers, and, if feasible, a noose. He makes a truly awful impression in court.
A pure open source enthusiast..will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it
That solves the problem for the activist.
Everyone else just wants to watch the movie.
Their voice counts too.
Software breaks down into fundamental categories: Programs for your business. Programs for your home.
Neither environment is much known as a hotbed of political correctness.
Ideological purity.
There is simply too much that needs to get done. There are other and a deeper rewards than self-flagellation while hovering over your keyboard.
The good tool is something to be treasured.
The cost doesn't matter all that much. That it limits your freedom in some insubstantial and arbritrary way doesn't really matter all that much either.
The tool can be replaced. What you can't retrieve is time.
no one I've spoken to has ever misinterpreted Hippyware. People either know what it means, or they ask. They never walk around thinking it means one thing when it means something else, a problem that both Open Source and Free Software share. Software Libre also works, but Hippyware rolls off the tongue a lot better
There aren't going to ask, they are going think that you are stoned. Which strikes me as a perfectly normal reaction to geek-speak.
Software not in the public domain comes with restrictions on its use and distribution. Free-as-in-Beer.
But not truly free in any larger or more significant way. It's just distribution under another form of private or public license.
Software Libre is the bumper sticker. The political pin.
The rallying point for your cause. That the passer-by in Hyde Park hasn't the slightest idea of what the hell it is you are talking about no longer really matters.
You are totally and happily self-absorbed.
Chrome. Safari. Firefox.
"The edge of the web."
God alone knows what that means. Market share dominated by the home user and the enthusiast. Chrome very immature.
Internet Explorer. The browser you use at work. Rich tools for deployment and management by the system administrator...
In the simplest terms:
You can build a business ground up from the loading dock and point of sale to the clerks in accounting to the guys and gals in middle management and the executive suite and never leave the working environment of "MS Office."
That has enormous implications for recruitment, staffing and training at every level.
And before you ask, no, I'm not new here.
1352. You know he hasn't read the RTFA. You know he hasn't read the summary. The comments. Now you know - from someone who should know - that the true Slashdotter doesn't even know the elders hereabouts! The truly primal geeks.
FIX YOUR FUCKIN' CODE
I can't get Slashdot to display pages consistently in a single session.
It's definitely a downer.
The geekiest - most FOSS and standards-obsessed site on the web - can't do plain text against a colored background and get it right.
just great, instead of training dogs to help guide handicapped people, they use them for useless stuff like this.
Way to go, humanity!
Tell me why the geek thinks that no one but a geek can multi-task.
Hasn't the skill.
Hasn't the resources.
Service animals have been performing jobs like these for ten thousand years.
The nomad tracking game. The canary in the mine.
What has changed is our appreciation of the animal's senses.
His intelligence.
But the truth, of course, is that the geek only trots out this argument when the nose points towards him.
The nose knows.
What makes this "Insightful?"
Broadcast television is almost entirely supported by advertising. The evangelical religious broadcaster has his own product to sell.
Your PBS station subsists on a lighter diet of adds, foundation grants, government funding and nickel and dime contributions from viewers.
Broadcast is inherently mass media.
Multicast digital might give you sixteen broadcast choices where there were only four before. But that is about the limit.
You have to deliver big numbers or advertisers drift away. When too many advertisers drift away, the screen goes dark.
Competition from cable, satellite, home video, the video game and the Internet makes it very hard to get what you need.
Games and reality shows are cheap to produce. But even WalMart knows that there is only so much room at the bottom.
Historically, the big spenders in television were the automakers, tobacco companies, and brewers.
It's still startling to see Fred Flintstone light it up for Winston. Flintstones Cigarette Commercial
Take major league sports out of the picture, and these props have been mostly kicked away.
Why?
Three stories from Google News, all dated June 4. There is nothing special about any of them, even the last:
Buffalo man gets 11 years for distributing child porn
Local man convicted for having child porn
Sex Offender Caught with Porn During Registry, Police
Brett Bartlett, 30, had gone to the Livermore police station for his annual sex offender registration.
He was convicted in 2005 in Santa Clara County for having oral sex with a person under 16 years old. That conviction requires him to register as a sex offender.
While Bartlett was in the police station, detectives asked if they could do a search of his vehicle.
Inside the vehicle, detectives found a computer that they say had numerous images of child pornography.
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
Federal Trade Commission [Home]
A Brief Overiview of the Federal Trade Commission's
Investigative and Law Enforcement Authority (1) [1995]
Statutes Enforced or Administered by the Commission [Home]
"AN ACT To enhance Federal Trade Commission enforcement against illegal spam, spyware, and cross-border fraud and deception, and for other purposes."
U.S. SAFE WEB Act of 2006 [Final - Full Text]
It means that the market chose to not buy the CBS product that the FCC had mandated as the new color TV standard
There was no CBS consumer product. But closed circuit CBS color broadcasts of operations were were a staple of medical conventions from 1948-1956. 1948 Zenith - USA
We really need to target the younger audiences and schools if we want to make progress. It's something that windows did early on, and something that worked very well.
It worked so well that my four year niece carries an XP netbook to her pre-school.
But - seriously now - where do you find a younger generation of users that doesn't already have a substantial investment in Windows?
If you could buy a typical sized netbook that could just do email and browse the internet...nobody would care which OS it used.
This is the product that is DOA but won't lie down.
The product the stock boy at WalMart drop-kicks into the dumpster.
It's the 99 pound weakling Charles Atlas pounds into the sand. The clapped-out Yugo the geek drives to work.
The trial attorney's primary asset is his experience in court - his ability to win cases.
But that makes it difficult to hit a bank for a loan.
So he - like generations of skilled craftsmen and professionals before him - seeks financing outside the normal banking system.
There is the side issue of collection from the client who isn't paying his bill. Corporate litigation at the highest level tends to more rather more work and expense than the collision at Third and Main.
Gah. Does the phrase "independent contractor" ring a bell with anyone here? Or are you all still living in the Dorm?
DVB-T wouldn't work properly in the mostly-rural U.S.
The fundamental distinctions between US and European/World broadcast standards has always been rooted in this elemental fact of American geography.
And when "RCA television" was adopted, it was market driven.
Market driven?
What the heck does that mean?
There had been experimental broadcasts of mechanical television when Harding was President. All-electronic television takes recognizable shape with Philo Farnsworth in the mid-thirties.
But if you are talking about a driving - relentless - force to get radio and TV into every American home, to define the standards for radio and TV broadcasting - in technology and in content - you are talking about RCA and NBC.
From 1954 to 1965 the color TV set was an RCA TV set. The only network with a regular schedule of color broadcasts, NBC.
Ages ago I came across a CCTV technician's video catalog with had a CBS color receiver for sale.
It was a massive thing - even for a kid who remembered his grandad's console radio.
But the screen was tiny - much smaller than the screen on which his older brother might have watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie or his mom and dad The Honeymooners, or Amahl and the Night Visitors.
With the back open, you could see this huge, muscular, electric motor and giant belt driven fly-wheel thingy.
Tactically, it was a disaster.
Summoning up all the failures and frustrations of mechanical television.
---and another reminder, if anyone needed it, that funding and corporate support for R&D at CBS was shallow.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed in sequential color. But it implied a big investment in color-only TV at UHF frequencies.
VHF gave you very deep - commercially viable - penetration beyond the major cities without building an expensive network of repeaters. The consumer-grade vacuum tube UHF tuner of 1952 was a downer as well.
The Wikipedia notes that Goldmark's 1940 color demo had a resolution of 343 lines. Peter Carl Goldmark That's a little disappointing, even by pre-war standards.
But later I learned that both Monkey Island and the POTC film were referring to much earlier source material: the POTC ride at Disneyland.
The broad outlines of the pirate adventure were in place while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean:
Captain Charles Johnson and The General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates [1724]
Doug Fairbanks made a memorable Black Pirate. [1926] Errol Flynn's Captain Blood [1935] and The Sea Hawk [1940] are as good as it gets.
Stevenson's Treasure Island was published in 1883.
It has never been out of print, never left the theatrical stage in all the years since. Film, radio, and TV adaptations are almost beyond counting.
Wallace Beery for MGM in 1934 and Robert Newton in 1950 became Long John Silver for two generations of kids.
I've never liked the animated look of "Curse" or these sequels.
You'd be in the minority, I think.
Reviewers at the time had nothing but praise for character design, art and animation that wouldn't have looked out of place in an A-list animated feature.
At the time I thought it was a reflection of changing viewing habits, that no one was using VCRs to record television shows anymore
When you make the move to HD and the digital cable PVR there really isn't much reason to fire up your old VCR. In some ways, it would be easier and less painful to track down the external eSATA or Firewire drive that can give you five to ten times the storage of encrypted HD content.
People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
If Blu-Ray has become important, the geek really ought to be paying attention. Because it implies a lot about the future form factor of the home PC, the convergence of the home PC and video game console, PC audio and graphics, and the prospects for OEM Linux.