how much info can be gathered using a non Ms browser such as Firefox with a Non MS operating system such as Apple or Linux, and avoiding non MS- dominated web sites?
Pretty much everything anyone could want.
When you click on a prostate cancer site it isn't hard to guess your likely age and gender.
As we talk, they are working on a new agreement to share data from passengers on trans-Atlantic flights, a much more effective way to profile people, because it contains name, address, gender, destination, credit card number, everything, without needing to make any kind of assumption, everything is plain and clear.
In short, everything that an international traveler has had to disclose to authorities since the beginning of the modern era.
Identity. Citizenship. Financial responsibility. No legal barriers to travel. No medical barriers to travel. Etc.
I think we should make a law that politicians are not allowed to legislate about anything that they have not taken courses on (and passed). This goes especially true for technology but could be applied to other things like medicine, economy, etc.
I assume then that you would agree that the geek should not be permitted to make decisions for others outside his own narrow area of technical competence...
Mossberg asks him if the debate on frivolous software patents is anywhere on his radar and McCain says "No" in a manner that is very dissmissive of Mossberg's nerd question
Software patents are not on any candidate's radar this election cycle. There is the war, there is health care. A hundred other issues that draw more passion then anything the geek can offer.
This article is looking more and more like an attempt to advertise and sell Vista. No one else is buying it, so M$ has decided to try to push it on Slashdot users. Ha, fat chance.
MythTV is growing into much more than a PVR and it scares M$ the MAFIAA silly. It's getting video conferencing, games, email and browsing - which all look great on HD TV's
If this was anyone but twitter posting, I'd be asking if he had too much to drink.
Surface [Video] When this Vista tech hits the home market, it is going to be big. Surface makes interaction with the PC a social experience. more open and more casual than the Wii controller.
And so we return to reality. Heathkit died in the 'eighties. The home PC market is not a craft market. No one wants to deal with the assembly and configuration issues of systems this complex.
There are already designed-for-Vista systems on the market that upstage the generic XP box. HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC Review. There will be more to come. Products like ATI's CableCARD HDTV Digital Cable Tuner will eventually have an impact. A system that is realistically spec'd for Vista will be realistically spec'd for HD - whether the source is camcorder video, cable, broadcast, ot the net.
_____
IP laws are not going into the trash so long as audiences expect to see $100 million dollar productions on their 52 inch screen. In the thirties, forties, and fiftues, almost everything in American radio and television was produced by advertising agencies and down to the last detail designed to meet the needs of their mass-market sponsors.
You might want to think about that before you deny creative talents a direct and sustaining source of income.
The biggest contribution on the list is $9000; most are $2000 or less.
Chicken feed. In the 2004 election cycle $1.6 billion dollars was spent on broadcast TV adds alone. Elections
f you knew about the public opinion on the RIAA, why would you take money from them? It seems like the negative publicity f having taken money would outweigh whatever you could do with the money.
Can you hear the off-campus voter cheering every time the geek gets busted for thinking the world owes him the movie fix that they have to pay for at Blockbuster?
So... if most people don't even describe themselves as developers or even want this plugin... how does it's existence hurt MS again?
How many posters here began with BASIC in ROM?
How many with the programs and projects published in Creative Computing, Compute! and others - magazines which tried very to reach beyond the geek to a general readership that found interest and excitement in the personal computer?
I have seen nothing as polished and attractive to this audience as Coding4Fun since the eighties. I don't care how this plugin hurts Microsoft. I do care how it may hurt the 14 million recreational programmers who have found a welcome at MSDN.
The Express community isn't a professional development community.
It is a community of beginners, students and hobbyists: recreational programmers who have been given a powerful set of tools and support for free. Coding4Fun
To me these projects do look like fun.
Each rated according to the time, skill and, where appropriate, the materials and cost required to complete them.
The Express products are a drug to piss you off enough to pony up enough money for the real deal.
How about we begin with an honest reading of the blog?
Visual Studio Express was a labor of love. It was a small miracle getting Express to be available both for free and for commercial use for customers let alone the engineering work to get it up and running, We made a business decision to not allow 3rd party extensibility in Express. The reason we're able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages.
The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals. In fact over 80% of Express registrants don't describe themselves as a "developer". From a total number perspective, beginners are the largest segment of Express customers and they still find Express too complex, it has too many features, and they see development as a means to an end (I just want to create my kids soccer league Web site). Our Express customers haven't been asked for unit testing or extensiblity in much the same way as I didn't ask or even know to ask when I grew up programming BASIC on an Apple IIe.
So that means one of two things:Br>
1. Smart people aren't trading in child pornography or
2. Smart people weren't caught to begin with, and still aren't
The geek ought to have learned by now that smart is more often synonymous with arrogance than intelligence.
Man, I can think of a ton of things that I could write myself using XNA.
I think to sum up what you have in Surface is very social-oriented - family-oriented - interaction with the computer. It can be a table. It could be a wall. But it is going to appeal very strongly to those attracted to the Wii.
Since most consumers aren't buying WinVista if they can avoid it.
But, if that were true, chip sales by Intel and AMD would be down... oh, wait, they are
But the Geek is just whistling in the dark when he claims that those that will be entering the market for a new PC won't be looking at Vista.
What draws these customers isn't the warmed-over XP box.
It's the tech they couldn't afford or which didn't exist the last time went shopping. The affordable big screen-wide screen LCD. HD media play. DX-10 at mid-line prices. The hybrid SATA hard drive. Etc. Etc.
from what I understand (though I may very well be mistaken), the table can read various things on it.
it can read barcodes, now. perhaps RFID and other tags later.
that alone would be sufficient for an interactive gaming table.
But the ability to communicate with objects on the table is very interesting. set your camera on the table and the photos stream out in a way that everyone can see and manipulate them.
Frankly, this device is sounding more and more like the iLoo (joke) from Microsoft.
Geeks were saying the same things about the Wii. But the fact is that interaction with the PC is still fundamentally 1 on 1. Surface makes it a social experience.
I don't object to the use of cameras, which should scale well and are dirt cheap.
What really is that different about your car of today and one from the 50s?
Fit and finish.
No after-market rust-proofing required.
Rear and side views are generally very good.
Steering is precise and predictable even with power assist. The same for brakes.
Your kid won't be sending the car into the shop because he stripped the gears when he was learning to drive on a car with a manual transmission.
Runs fine on the cheapest unleaded gas you can buy.
No flat tires. No snow tires. No chains.
User-serviceable parts are few.
Meaning that there is no fanbelt to break, no manual choke and a carburetor valve that is guaranteed to stick when the only evidence of local habitation is the Burma Shave signs you passed fifteen miles back.
I expect the idea of any resources being available to the application
is an anathema to Redmond so they will fix this problem to ensure that VISTA
keeps its design goal to consume 90% of available resources.
resources are meant to be used, not hoarded. if RAM is available for a cache, RAM should be used for a cache.
People's expectations increase, games are advertised on TV and some of them are looking extremely good>
The adds will look even better when they are broadcast in HD to a market that is moving to HD. The casual gamer - the social gamer - is going to want the big screen - the big sound - of HD when it is priced within reach - and that can't be very far off.
Sigh. It's not like you can't change the source code. You know, the source code? That stuff that people are always blabbering about being "open"? Why bother with open source if you don't even take advantage of it for something this simple?
If open source is for programmers only, than the proprietary software vendor has absolutely nothing to fear from the competition.
5% of a market of hundreds of billions of dollars is meaningful, whether you think so or not.
But is your program selling in a market worth hundreds of billions - or is it selling in a market worth hundreds of thousands?
How much has Sun spent on Star Office and OpenOffice.org?
Have the kind of money it takes to compete in that arena? If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter how big the pot of gold lies at rainbow's end. You'll never see a dime of it.
Side effect would be pushing the shareware producers out of the Windows market by pressure of irresistible competition.
The shareware product includes the sequel to Sam & Max; Freelance Police. The programmer may be willing to work "for free." The writer, the artist, the animator, the actor, the musician generally expects to see a paycheck.
There is something to be said for producing for a market. The focus on the user, not the developer. It is never enough to "scratch your itch." Sales provides immediate - and often brutal feedback.
When I was shopping around for a solitaire suite - not a great programming challenge - I found SolSuite at $20 at Download.com and never looked back.
I know the graphics are probably derived from the Dover clip art collections, but they are handsome and well chosen and I will take that as a plus.
when the average customer buys a standard PC they have no choise on what OS they get. Because most average Joe's are not Slashdotters, they stick with Windows, therefore the "dominant" OS but not by customer's choise. So have a PC manufacturer offer Linux, OS X, and Windows, and the picture would be much different.
Apple and Microsoft came out of the gate about the same time in the mid '70s.
Apple had a solid head start in the mass market with the Apple II. The Mac was given a big-budget launch in 1984. The PC clone running MSDOS and later Windows stomped them both into mush, at least as far as sales were concerned.
Joe made a choice and his choice was Microsoft and Windows.
With direct sales down, Dell has begun moving into retail outlets like Walmart - while OEM Linux at Walmart makes a quiet exit, not having made any noticeable impression.
I don't understand why schools let themselves get enslaved by proprietary software when kids could learn a whole lot more by experimenting with different solutions to problems.
The primary grades teach primary subjects. Reading, writing, arithmetic.
The core curricula is not and likely never will be computer-centric. In the developed world, the value of the PC in the lower grades is still very much in dispute. The primary function of the OLPC is to be an e-text reader.
There's a fine distinction between writing an entertaining or interesting book and writing a book that has literary merit, just as there's a difference between an entertaining film or a film that has artistic merit.
The usual distinction is that the story that satisfies the audience lives and the story which satisfies the critic dies.
then, in your opinion, at what age does this immaturity magically disappear?
It might be more useful to ask how much "freedom" you have at eighteen.
Most kids - if they are lucky - will be moving on to college, trade-schools, the military or an entry-level job. They will not be "on their own" in any meaningful way.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much everything anyone could want.
When you click on a prostate cancer site it isn't hard to guess your likely age and gender.
In short, everything that an international traveler has had to disclose to authorities since the beginning of the modern era.
Identity. Citizenship. Financial responsibility. No legal barriers to travel. No medical barriers to travel. Etc.
I assume then that you would agree that the geek should not be permitted to make decisions for others outside his own narrow area of technical competence...
Software patents are not on any candidate's radar this election cycle. There is the war, there is health care. A hundred other issues that draw more passion then anything the geek can offer.
MythTV is growing into much more than a PVR and it scares M$ the MAFIAA silly. It's getting video conferencing, games, email and browsing - which all look great on HD TV's
If this was anyone but twitter posting, I'd be asking if he had too much to drink.
Surface [Video] When this Vista tech hits the home market, it is going to be big. Surface makes interaction with the PC a social experience. more open and more casual than the Wii controller.
In the near term, there is Windows Home Server. HP MediaSmart Server Brand name product. No assembly required...
And so we return to reality. Heathkit died in the 'eighties. The home PC market is not a craft market. No one wants to deal with the assembly and configuration issues of systems this complex.
There are already designed-for-Vista systems on the market that upstage the generic XP box. HP TouchSmart IQ770 PC Review. There will be more to come. Products like ATI's CableCARD HDTV Digital Cable Tuner will eventually have an impact. A system that is realistically spec'd for Vista will be realistically spec'd for HD - whether the source is camcorder video, cable, broadcast, ot the net.
_____
IP laws are not going into the trash so long as audiences expect to see $100 million dollar productions on their 52 inch screen. In the thirties, forties, and fiftues, almost everything in American radio and television was produced by advertising agencies and down to the last detail designed to meet the needs of their mass-market sponsors.
You might want to think about that before you deny creative talents a direct and sustaining source of income.
and if TiVo's budiness model is successful - and cannot be eliminated - where does that leave the developer who commits to GPL3?
Chicken feed. In the 2004 election cycle $1.6 billion dollars was spent on broadcast TV adds alone. Elections
f you knew about the public opinion on the RIAA, why would you take money from them? It seems like the negative publicity f having taken money would outweigh whatever you could do with the money.
Depending on your definition, no more than 20% of the U.S. population has broadband service. US Falls to 25th in Broadband Penetration Worldwide
Can you hear the off-campus voter cheering every time the geek gets busted for thinking the world owes him the movie fix that they have to pay for at Blockbuster?
The politicians do.
How many posters here began with BASIC in ROM?
How many with the programs and projects published in Creative Computing, Compute! and others - magazines which tried very to reach beyond the geek to a general readership that found interest and excitement in the personal computer?
I have seen nothing as polished and attractive to this audience as Coding4Fun since the eighties. I don't care how this plugin hurts Microsoft. I do care how it may hurt the 14 million recreational programmers who have found a welcome at MSDN.
The Express community isn't a professional development community.
It is a community of beginners, students and hobbyists: recreational programmers who have been given a powerful set of tools and support for free. Coding4Fun
To me these projects do look like fun.
Each rated according to the time, skill and, where appropriate, the materials and cost required to complete them.
How about we begin with an honest reading of the blog?
Visual Studio Express was a labor of love. It was a small miracle getting Express to be available both for free and for commercial use for customers let alone the engineering work to get it up and running, We made a business decision to not allow 3rd party extensibility in Express. The reason we're able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages.
The vast majority of our customer base, now with 14 million downloads, isn't even professional developers, its non-professionals. In fact over 80% of Express registrants don't describe themselves as a "developer". From a total number perspective, beginners are the largest segment of Express customers and they still find Express too complex, it has too many features, and they see development as a means to an end (I just want to create my kids soccer league Web site). Our Express customers haven't been asked for unit testing or extensiblity in much the same way as I didn't ask or even know to ask when I grew up programming BASIC on an Apple IIe.
2. Smart people weren't caught to begin with, and still aren't
The geek ought to have learned by now that smart is more often synonymous with arrogance than intelligence.
I think to sum up what you have in Surface is very social-oriented - family-oriented - interaction with the computer. It can be a table. It could be a wall. But it is going to appeal very strongly to those attracted to the Wii.
But, if that were true, chip sales by Intel and AMD would be down
Gas prices are up, home sales down, the economic outlook is uncertain. U.S. Economic Growth Weakest in Over 4 Years So all discretionary spending is down.
But the Geek is just whistling in the dark when he claims that those that will be entering the market for a new PC won't be looking at Vista.
What draws these customers isn't the warmed-over XP box.
It's the tech they couldn't afford or which didn't exist the last time went shopping. The affordable big screen-wide screen LCD. HD media play. DX-10 at mid-line prices. The hybrid SATA hard drive. Etc. Etc.
it can read barcodes, now. perhaps RFID and other tags later.
that alone would be sufficient for an interactive gaming table.
But the ability to communicate with objects on the table is very interesting. set your camera on the table and the photos stream out in a way that everyone can see and manipulate them.
Frankly, this device is sounding more and more like the iLoo (joke) from Microsoft.
Geeks were saying the same things about the Wii. But the fact is that interaction with the PC is still fundamentally 1 on 1. Surface makes it a social experience.
I don't object to the use of cameras, which should scale well and are dirt cheap.
Fit and finish.
No after-market rust-proofing required.
Rear and side views are generally very good. Steering is precise and predictable even with power assist. The same for brakes.
Your kid won't be sending the car into the shop because he stripped the gears when he was learning to drive on a car with a manual transmission.
Runs fine on the cheapest unleaded gas you can buy.
No flat tires. No snow tires. No chains.
User-serviceable parts are few.
Meaning that there is no fanbelt to break, no manual choke and a carburetor valve that is guaranteed to stick when the only evidence of local habitation is the Burma Shave signs you passed fifteen miles back.
resources are meant to be used, not hoarded. if RAM is available for a cache, RAM should be used for a cache.
The adds will look even better when they are broadcast in HD to a market that is moving to HD. The casual gamer - the social gamer - is going to want the big screen - the big sound - of HD when it is priced within reach - and that can't be very far off.
But how close are you to getting a product on the market - and can you compete with Microsoft on price? Computer GUI Revolution Continues With Microsoft Surface's Touchscreen, Object Recognition
If open source is for programmers only, than the proprietary software vendor has absolutely nothing to fear from the competition.
But is your program selling in a market worth hundreds of billions - or is it selling in a market worth hundreds of thousands?
How much has Sun spent on Star Office and OpenOffice.org?
Have the kind of money it takes to compete in that arena? If the answer is no, then it doesn't matter how big the pot of gold lies at rainbow's end. You'll never see a dime of it.
The shareware product includes the sequel to Sam & Max; Freelance Police. The programmer may be willing to work "for free." The writer, the artist, the animator, the actor, the musician generally expects to see a paycheck.
There is something to be said for producing for a market. The focus on the user, not the developer. It is never enough to "scratch your itch." Sales provides immediate - and often brutal feedback.
When I was shopping around for a solitaire suite - not a great programming challenge - I found SolSuite at $20 at Download.com and never looked back.
I know the graphics are probably derived from the Dover clip art collections, but they are handsome and well chosen and I will take that as a plus.
Apple and Microsoft came out of the gate about the same time in the mid '70s.
Apple had a solid head start in the mass market with the Apple II. The Mac was given a big-budget launch in 1984. The PC clone running MSDOS and later Windows stomped them both into mush, at least as far as sales were concerned.
Joe made a choice and his choice was Microsoft and Windows.
With direct sales down, Dell has begun moving into retail outlets like Walmart - while OEM Linux at Walmart makes a quiet exit, not having made any noticeable impression.
The primary grades teach primary subjects. Reading, writing, arithmetic.
The core curricula is not and likely never will be computer-centric. In the developed world, the value of the PC in the lower grades is still very much in dispute. The primary function of the OLPC is to be an e-text reader.
The usual distinction is that the story that satisfies the audience lives and the story which satisfies the critic dies.
It might be more useful to ask how much "freedom" you have at eighteen.
Most kids - if they are lucky - will be moving on to college, trade-schools, the military or an entry-level job. They will not be "on their own" in any meaningful way.