Hey! You, up there on that unusually high horse. You can yammer on all you want to about YOUR product. What matters here is whether or not I should be constrained from creating or using technology that COULD be used to make copies or YOUR product.
You have an issue with someone using YOUR product without permission, take it up with them WHEN they actually do it and be sure to afford them all the due process protections you would like if you were accused of doing something unlawful.
Not sure what you are talking about. Bill Gates was all about the power of the internet back in the day. Heck, IE DOMINATED the browser market, for what, like 10 years.
Ahh, younglings.... Before your time there was a creature called Netscape. It was in those days that Microsoft was nowhere to be found and apparently mocked this internet thing as a fad.
Ancient history, I know, but us geezers need something to go on about besides lawns and snow-covered hills...
Ahh yes... gotta keep those welfare recipients out of the libraries and other such places me and people like me would like to go. Wouldn't want them to get too edumacated (read: get off the welfare) since... well... people like me need people to look down our noses at...
And that's different with respect to other countries, how? Good thing businesses are so honest in the US or EU countries that they are never giving bribes nor are their people in power accepting them. If only China could learn to be as honest, upstanding and incorruptible as the people in the US Congress and people like Obama and Bush they'd just have such a wonderful utopia.
Oh please just shut up and go away.... Ok, OS X is nice. It's pretty. It does a lot of things well. It "just works". It "gets out of my way". blah, blah, blah. Great, good to hear it... for the bazzilionth time...
Look if there actually exist Linux folk who haven't heard how uber-awesome OS X is, they invariably live under a rock in some deep hole... deliberately. They don't want to come out. For the many of the rest of us who don't live in said hole, guess what? We choose to use (openSuse/Ubuntu/Arch/Mandriva) Linux despite OS X. Why? Cuz we are absolute nutcases who have nothing better to do than to use the piece(s) of software we like.
Nonsense. If the survey was restricted to just the people who report a problem, then the report would say that 360 (and PS3 and Wii) the failure rate 100%.
Let's even suppose then that the sample of people in the report was biased towards people inclined to report a problem. If the actual 360 failure rate was about the same as the PS3 or Wii, the percentage of people in the survey reporting a problem on all three systems would be about the same, even if the sample is biased towards people reporting a problem. The inclusion of the PS3 and Wii in the survey controls for this kind of sample bias.
It is perhaps more credible to argue that the percentages may be biased high for all three systems.
A more significant statistic that could perhaps be taken away from the report is that the 360 fails 5 times as often as the PS3 and 7 times as often as the Wii.
BTW, unit-hours should barely make any difference when your talking about consumer electronics, which in this day and have MTBFs on the order of decades. If the 360 is arguably as reliable as similar consumer electronics, the vast majority should be obsolete long before they fail. No anectodal or statistical evidence I've seen comes close to supporting this.
Last time I checked there were no laptops or desktops that were either manufactured or "Designed by Microsoft". So how exactly will Microsoft cut Dell, HP Lenovo, Asus, etc. out of the equation? How exactly will it piss them off if Microsoft sells their products in a Microsoft-branded store?
"But the ones you listed don't have an overt propaganda mission...
...make it an expansion module to America's Army..."
I hope this took you at least several hours to write because it's difficult to imagine the two thoughts occurred within within seconds or minutes of each other...
While I'm no fan of this lockout, this is not antitrust related since the iPhone platform does not constitute a monopoly in the same, or similar, way that the Windows platform was declared to be.
Sure the iPhone platform is the only way to develop for the iPhone. But the iPhone (platform + device) has nowhere near the market share of phones that Windows PCs (platform + hardware) did.
Apple's bundling is not nearly as prohibitive to competition as Microsoft's bundling was. You can develop apps for Symbian, Palm, Blackberry, Android and have a decent chance at competing in a significant share of the phone market. If the iPhone ever gets more than 80% mobile phone market share, then we can start making comparisons to Microsoft.
I am arguing that a line needs to be created defining what arms are permitted to bear and what aren't.
This is simple. Constitution or no constitution, instruments of the state that are granted the ability to use force against its people should be restricted from arms in excess of what the people reserve for themselves.
The above clause should be inviolate for anyone with enough grey-matter to consider themselves human beings. Anyone that would surrender this are simply traitors to themselves and their own people.
So if the police want to be able to use assault weapons, automatic weapons and so on, then the people SHOULD NOT be restricted from bearing such weapons. If the people want to restrict themselves to billy clubs then fine, just remember to similarly restrict the state from using anything more than billy clubs against you. For those worried about military grade weapons in the hands of people, in any civil society there should always be a constitutional restriction on the use of the military against its own people. If the government makes the mistake of directing the military against the people, the above clause provides that the people will secure access to military grade weapons in order to defend themselves.
People can interpret and reinterpret the U.S. constitution until they are blue in the face. When it comes to the use of force in a society, it is, and has always been, the state that is the greatest threat. I don't need some centuries old piece of paper scrabbled on by some dried-up old men to tell me what I, indeed what any human being, should already know.
Oh jesus h. christ I'm just sick of hearing all of this cavalier, generalized, retrgrade bullshit when it comes to Africa. cdrguru, know that not everyone in Africa is dying of AIDS and give up these vapid generalizations about the so-called 'common belief' of a contentinent of vastly different people.
Isn't it convenient that when it doesn't affect you (cayenne8) that you can cavalierly declare that it's just 'nature at play'. It's only 'thinning the herd' and, since your not a part of that 'herd' (or part of anything that would be called a 'herd'), it matters little whether that 'herd' dies of AIDS or some other disease. Look, you are not under any obligation to give a rat's ass about whether humans on the African continent are dying of AIDS or some other disease. There little need to try to excuse your lack of interest by conjuring this psuedo-intellectual 'thinning the herd' bullshit.
If your target market is 20 individuals whom you all know by name, isn't it standard to do something like have your salesmen get in touch with them for a face-to-face discussion?
Come on, these are executives we're talking about. There is no such thing as over-stroking their over-inflated ego and this kind of advertising strokes it in public, where they like it.
One wonders when someone will come up with a truly effective formula for measuring human intelligence
It won't happen, not because it's not possible, but because some group or another will have a lower mean score, and the cries of racism, sexism, ageism, redbluestateism, culturalism, OSism, haircolorism, footsizeism, dicksizeism, or whateverism will drown out the truth.
You know... the way it is right now.
Cries of those "isms" come less from political correctness and more from arbitrarily quantifiable definitions of 'intelligence'. May as well embark on the quest for a truly effective formula to measure "prettiness" or "goodness".
Superstition and blatant ignorance seems rather more your afflication than the so-called 3rd world of which I and many others are a part.
Ooh, ooh, I bet this message posting came about because a sufficiently large number of people like me were locked in a room with kompootrr for a sufficiently long time.
Ignorance indeed...
Yeah, it sure was horrible that the Huxtables represented a black family that was financially well off, with a father who was a doctor and a wife who was a lawyer. How dare they show black people who could speak English properly!
Yes, yes because only financially well off black families with a father who is a doctor and a wife who is a lawyer are adequately civilized. Yes, yes look at how empathetic you are because you champion the cause of showing black people speaking English properly. You sir, are an idiot.
And if you came into my business talking about how black people need to be more like the Huxtables and speak English properly I'd happily bounce you out too.
Look, it's entirely your right to be as much of a bigot as you bloody well please. Just don't be surprised when people call you on it.
If you want to be a member of that culture, then fine, go do it. But don't be surprised when people treat you like a member of that culture.
And how exactly should members of that culture be treated? Please, enlighten us!
If someone is black and they dress and behave in a civilized (i.e., "Huxtable") manner, then racism becomes a non-issue.
So the "Huxtables" are civilized? By whose standard? Yours? The "Huxtables" are fictional and you are an idiot.
It means that 90% of racism is culture, not skin color. And I have absolutely no problem with rejecting someone out on their ass based on their (or lack of) culture.
Ahh, cuz if you're an asshole to someone for no other reason than that they're from a different culture then that's just peachy (cuz any culture other than your own is simply a lack of culture).
Better to remain quiet an be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt. As it is, I'm quite sure, you are an idiot.
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
You mean like we're forced to pay for tax breaks, rights-of-way and other legal and illegal incentives for business to provide the same thing? Why not just cut the middle man out and avoid all the other kind of bitching we should be doing, but don't, when the oh-so-sacred business stands between us and government.
I think freenet works on a slightly different premise that the location of the file is unknown even to a user inserting a file into the network, much less anyone else. That means the file that I upload won't neccesarily reside on my machine for retrieval but on an area (or several areas) of the network that provides the shortest path to the most requests for that piece of information (which is of course encrypted). Requests go directly to the wherever the info is rather than necessarily to me.
MUTE would work quite differently in that nobody neccesarily knows who/where I am. Each node simply knows that the neighbouring nodes know more or less about who/where I am, and as such passes the information in the direction "most likely" to get the info to me. If my node happens to receive info intended for me, then the journey's over.
What's not so clear is how to stop propogation of info along nodes that have no idea who/where I am (broadcast nodes), since this amounts to (bandwidth) waste, especially if the info has long since gotten to its destination.
Cool idea though, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they work out these issues.
Beyond that, when they flipped the switch they had no backup plan in case things went wrong, little to no redundant systems, tested new system with little or no feedback from their users - the customer care reps, and far too inadequate far too late training - reps got training on the new system a week or two before they flipped the switch!
Customer care reps are starting to look soldiers with PTSD. Imagine every call you field is a pissed off customer who just waited on the line for 2-3 hours only to tell them "I'm sorry our systems are currently down, there's very little I can help you with!"
Something tells me someone with an MBA (and not much else) is making the IT decisions...
My partner works at AT&T Wireless. Trust me, they are technically incompetent on a very large scale. Even with the economy in the sh!tter several of their employees are up and quitting in droves frustated with the technical issues, and there are lots of 'em...
I continue to have trouble understanding this red herring called liability and its supposedly unique difficulties with Open Source Software. Just about every End User License Agreement that I've seen accompanying proprietary software includes a Limitation of Liability clause that prevents the user from sueing the software company for any damages caused by use of the piece of software.
Proprietary Software companies threatened by Open Source have held this bait out in front of users/companies considering use of Open Source Software, knowing full well they are no more responsible for damages that their products may cause than an OSS conterpart. The sad thing is that some people are biting.
Look, the real-world fact is that a company that chooses to use a piece of software, OSS or proprietary, in the pursuit of their business can almost never hold the creators of that piece of software liable for damages. It is business and much like many other aspcects of business they assume the risks of running a business.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! You, up there on that unusually high horse. You can yammer on all you want to about YOUR product. What matters here is whether or not I should be constrained from creating or using technology that COULD be used to make copies or YOUR product.
You have an issue with someone using YOUR product without permission, take it up with them WHEN they actually do it and be sure to afford them all the due process protections you would like if you were accused of doing something unlawful.
yes
Not sure what you are talking about. Bill Gates was all about the power of the internet back in the day. Heck, IE DOMINATED the browser market, for what, like 10 years.
Ahh, younglings.... Before your time there was a creature called Netscape. It was in those days that Microsoft was nowhere to be found and apparently mocked this internet thing as a fad.
Ancient history, I know, but us geezers need something to go on about besides lawns and snow-covered hills...
Ahh yes... gotta keep those welfare recipients out of the libraries and other such places me and people like me would like to go. Wouldn't want them to get too edumacated (read: get off the welfare) since... well... people like me need people to look down our noses at...
If the current generated is faster than light, does it imply that information carried by the current could potentially be faster than light?
And that's different with respect to other countries, how? Good thing businesses are so honest in the US or EU countries that they are never giving bribes nor are their people in power accepting them. If only China could learn to be as honest, upstanding and incorruptible as the people in the US Congress and people like Obama and Bush they'd just have such a wonderful utopia.
How is this flamebait?
Oh please just shut up and go away.... Ok, OS X is nice. It's pretty. It does a lot of things well. It "just works". It "gets out of my way". blah, blah, blah. Great, good to hear it... for the bazzilionth time...
Look if there actually exist Linux folk who haven't heard how uber-awesome OS X is, they invariably live under a rock in some deep hole... deliberately. They don't want to come out. For the many of the rest of us who don't live in said hole, guess what? We choose to use (openSuse/Ubuntu/Arch/Mandriva) Linux despite OS X. Why? Cuz we are absolute nutcases who have nothing better to do than to use the piece(s) of software we like.
Nonsense. If the survey was restricted to just the people who report a problem, then the report would say that 360 (and PS3 and Wii) the failure rate 100%.
Let's even suppose then that the sample of people in the report was biased towards people inclined to report a problem. If the actual 360 failure rate was about the same as the PS3 or Wii, the percentage of people in the survey reporting a problem on all three systems would be about the same, even if the sample is biased towards people reporting a problem. The inclusion of the PS3 and Wii in the survey controls for this kind of sample bias.
It is perhaps more credible to argue that the percentages may be biased high for all three systems.
A more significant statistic that could perhaps be taken away from the report is that the 360 fails 5 times as often as the PS3 and 7 times as often as the Wii.
BTW, unit-hours should barely make any difference when your talking about consumer electronics, which in this day and have MTBFs on the order of decades. If the 360 is arguably as reliable as similar consumer electronics, the vast majority should be obsolete long before they fail. No anectodal or statistical evidence I've seen comes close to supporting this.
Last time I checked there were no laptops or desktops that were either manufactured or "Designed by Microsoft". So how exactly will Microsoft cut Dell, HP Lenovo, Asus, etc. out of the equation? How exactly will it piss them off if Microsoft sells their products in a Microsoft-branded store?
I hope this took you at least several hours to write because it's difficult to imagine the two thoughts occurred within within seconds or minutes of each other...
Apple's bundling is not nearly as prohibitive to competition as Microsoft's bundling was. You can develop apps for Symbian, Palm, Blackberry, Android and have a decent chance at competing in a significant share of the phone market. If the iPhone ever gets more than 80% mobile phone market share, then we can start making comparisons to Microsoft.
This is simple. Constitution or no constitution, instruments of the state that are granted the ability to use force against its people should be restricted from arms in excess of what the people reserve for themselves.
The above clause should be inviolate for anyone with enough grey-matter to consider themselves human beings. Anyone that would surrender this are simply traitors to themselves and their own people.
So if the police want to be able to use assault weapons, automatic weapons and so on, then the people SHOULD NOT be restricted from bearing such weapons. If the people want to restrict themselves to billy clubs then fine, just remember to similarly restrict the state from using anything more than billy clubs against you. For those worried about military grade weapons in the hands of people, in any civil society there should always be a constitutional restriction on the use of the military against its own people. If the government makes the mistake of directing the military against the people, the above clause provides that the people will secure access to military grade weapons in order to defend themselves.
People can interpret and reinterpret the U.S. constitution until they are blue in the face. When it comes to the use of force in a society, it is, and has always been, the state that is the greatest threat. I don't need some centuries old piece of paper scrabbled on by some dried-up old men to tell me what I, indeed what any human being, should already know.
peace and respect
Oh jesus h. christ I'm just sick of hearing all of this cavalier, generalized, retrgrade bullshit when it comes to Africa. cdrguru, know that not everyone in Africa is dying of AIDS and give up these vapid generalizations about the so-called 'common belief' of a contentinent of vastly different people.
Isn't it convenient that when it doesn't affect you (cayenne8) that you can cavalierly declare that it's just 'nature at play'. It's only 'thinning the herd' and, since your not a part of that 'herd' (or part of anything that would be called a 'herd'), it matters little whether that 'herd' dies of AIDS or some other disease. Look, you are not under any obligation to give a rat's ass about whether humans on the African continent are dying of AIDS or some other disease. There little need to try to excuse your lack of interest by conjuring this psuedo-intellectual 'thinning the herd' bullshit.
If your target market is 20 individuals whom you all know by name, isn't it standard to do something like have your salesmen get in touch with them for a face-to-face discussion?
Come on, these are executives we're talking about. There is no such thing as over-stroking their over-inflated ego and this kind of advertising strokes it in public, where they like it.
One wonders when someone will come up with a truly effective formula for measuring human intelligence
It won't happen, not because it's not possible, but because some group or another will have a lower mean score, and the cries of racism, sexism, ageism, redbluestateism, culturalism, OSism, haircolorism, footsizeism, dicksizeism, or whateverism will drown out the truth. You know... the way it is right now.
Cries of those "isms" come less from political correctness and more from arbitrarily quantifiable definitions of 'intelligence'. May as well embark on the quest for a truly effective formula to measure "prettiness" or "goodness".
Yes, yes... Profit, by any means necessary... Is it just me or is anyone else tired of this "it's their job" nonsense?
Yes, or course, the American Heritage Dictionary...
Superstition and blatant ignorance seems rather more your afflication than the so-called 3rd world of which I and many others are a part. Ooh, ooh, I bet this message posting came about because a sufficiently large number of people like me were locked in a room with kompootrr for a sufficiently long time. Ignorance indeed...
Yeah, it sure was horrible that the Huxtables represented a black family that was financially well off, with a father who was a doctor and a wife who was a lawyer. How dare they show black people who could speak English properly!
Yes, yes because only financially well off black families with a father who is a doctor and a wife who is a lawyer are adequately civilized. Yes, yes look at how empathetic you are because you champion the cause of showing black people speaking English properly. You sir, are an idiot.
And if you came into my business talking about how black people need to be more like the Huxtables and speak English properly I'd happily bounce you out too.
Look, it's entirely your right to be as much of a bigot as you bloody well please. Just don't be surprised when people call you on it.
What the??? How on earth is this insightful?
If you want to be a member of that culture, then fine, go do it. But don't be surprised when people treat you like a member of that culture.
And how exactly should members of that culture be treated? Please, enlighten us!
If someone is black and they dress and behave in a civilized (i.e., "Huxtable") manner, then racism becomes a non-issue.
So the "Huxtables" are civilized? By whose standard? Yours? The "Huxtables" are fictional and you are an idiot.
It means that 90% of racism is culture, not skin color. And I have absolutely no problem with rejecting someone out on their ass based on their (or lack of) culture.
Ahh, cuz if you're an asshole to someone for no other reason than that they're from a different culture then that's just peachy (cuz any culture other than your own is simply a lack of culture).
Better to remain quiet an be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt. As it is, I'm quite sure, you are an idiot.
Sadly, they are talking about pre-billed, manditory WiFi, in which residents of a city are forced by the state to fund a WiFi connection with their taxes, whether they have better alternatives available or not.
You mean like we're forced to pay for tax breaks, rights-of-way and other legal and illegal incentives for business to provide the same thing? Why not just cut the middle man out and avoid all the other kind of bitching we should be doing, but don't, when the oh-so-sacred business stands between us and government.
blah...
I think freenet works on a slightly different premise that the location of the file is unknown even to a user inserting a file into the network, much less anyone else. That means the file that I upload won't neccesarily reside on my machine for retrieval but on an area (or several areas) of the network that provides the shortest path to the most requests for that piece of information (which is of course encrypted). Requests go directly to the wherever the info is rather than necessarily to me.
MUTE would work quite differently in that nobody neccesarily knows who/where I am. Each node simply knows that the neighbouring nodes know more or less about who/where I am, and as such passes the information in the direction "most likely" to get the info to me. If my node happens to receive info intended for me, then the journey's over.
What's not so clear is how to stop propogation of info along nodes that have no idea who/where I am (broadcast nodes), since this amounts to (bandwidth) waste, especially if the info has long since gotten to its destination.
Cool idea though, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they work out these issues.
Beyond that, when they flipped the switch they had no backup plan in case things went wrong, little to no redundant systems, tested new system with little or no feedback from their users - the customer care reps, and far too inadequate far too late training - reps got training on the new system a week or two before they flipped the switch! Customer care reps are starting to look soldiers with PTSD. Imagine every call you field is a pissed off customer who just waited on the line for 2-3 hours only to tell them "I'm sorry our systems are currently down, there's very little I can help you with!" Something tells me someone with an MBA (and not much else) is making the IT decisions...
My partner works at AT&T Wireless. Trust me, they are technically incompetent on a very large scale. Even with the economy in the sh!tter several of their employees are up and quitting in droves frustated with the technical issues, and there are lots of 'em...
I continue to have trouble understanding this red herring called liability and its supposedly unique difficulties with Open Source Software. Just about every End User License Agreement that I've seen accompanying proprietary software includes a Limitation of Liability clause that prevents the user from sueing the software company for any damages caused by use of the piece of software.
Proprietary Software companies threatened by Open Source have held this bait out in front of users/companies considering use of Open Source Software, knowing full well they are no more responsible for damages that their products may cause than an OSS conterpart. The sad thing is that some people are biting.
Look, the real-world fact is that a company that chooses to use a piece of software, OSS or proprietary, in the pursuit of their business can almost never hold the creators of that piece of software liable for damages. It is business and much like many other aspcects of business they assume the risks of running a business.