To me, this whole discussion leads to the more general problem of the lack of built in and easy to use general data synchronization capabilities in applications and/or operating systems. It would make more sense for this to be an OS level function so it would be truly universal. Of course its nice having web access our email, and the benefits of also storing it on your own hardware are there - the problem is keeping them in sync. I'm not aware of any existing software/service that does this presently short of running your own Exchange server at home, and again, we get back to the ISP/server issue. But it doesn't just go for email, I want this capability for everything on my PC: music, video, documents. Heck, just keeping a laptop synced with a home desktop is a royal pain. I guess I don't know what the point I'm trying to make is, just ranting I suppose. The really sad thing is there has been zero progress on this - I mean what has Windows given us, the Briefcase?
Re:Not a big intro
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's a fair point, its not really a "must have" feature on a music player. My thinking on it though, is that everything about the player involves decisions MS actively made to exclude or restrict features, where one would think they would want to give the consumer as many features and content as possible. Ultimately it is a portable hard drive, that also happens to have the ability to play music and videos. The act of taking away its ability to store any file you want is a conscious act of exclusion to the detriment of the consumer. It doesn't cost anything to allow open storage, if anything it costs more to exclude the function. For every feature it has, there's a little footnote about how that feature is restricted. Its got wifi, thats great, they trumped the iPod, how innovative of MS...but wait, it doesn't actually do anything any consumer would actually want wifi for.
Re:Not a big intro
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ran across a Zune endcap display at a local Target. Backlight was set to immediately turn off making it impossible to use until I switched it to stay on permanently. After playing with it a while, found the UI acceptable if a bit unintuitive. Like others have noted, I was shocked at the bulk of the thing. No prices listed, I guess because it wasn't actually available for sale yet, which also seemed a bit odd. The feature list, which presumably is meant to entice buyers, read more like a Top 10 Lift of reasons not to buy. A 30 GB portable hard drive that you can't use as a portable hard drive...WTF?! I've never seen such a disaster waiting to happen.
I was just at my local (Lansing, MI) CompUSA and overheard the Mac rep making similar claims as his pitch to a potential customer. His exact word were "unlike with a PC, with a Mac you don't even have to think about viruses or spyware..." I was mildly shocked to hear it from an official rep like that.
These cameras rocked! I had one and it worked very well, very easy to operate for kids as intended. Took decent video too as I recall. Sadly mine died a painful death after I somehow got the strange idea to try to film underwater, and wrapped the camera in plastic. It worked nicely at first, but eventually sprung a leak - you can guess what happened next. Thus ended my directing career.
Just curious, anyone have any success returning some of the more recent non-standard CDs which clearly state on the back that it is in fact a non-standard disk that may not work in all players? I ran across one of these on a recent, though extremely rare, trip to the music store.
The Cringley article is pretty good, although he treats revenue recognition as earnings management as some new accounting trick when actually its one of the oldest tricks in the book.
I find the Gaudette quote odd, especially considering he's a CFO.
He explained that Microsoft carried on its books no value at all for its software. Assets like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, which might be given some book value and depreciated over time were carried on the books as valueless. This contrasted at the time with IBM, which valued its software assets at billions of dollars.
"Watch for any changes in our accounting," said Gaudette. "If I need to I can start, depreciating the software and maintain earnings growth for years on flat revenue. Watch for the accounting changes, wait for the next uptick in the stock price, and then sell.
This makes no sense at all. He states they carry software with no book value (in other words expense all costs immediately and capitalize nothing), but you can't suddenly start depreciating an asset that isn't there!? Not to mention, I'd be very interested if someone can explain to me how depreciation (an expense) can create revenue. I think I know what he's talking about in a general sense, you can decrease your depreciation each year against flat revenue and create the illusion of rising income - but again, depreciating what assets exactly?
Such statements would indicate a fundamental lack of understanding of basic accounting principles. I seriously doubt Microsoft's CFO doesn't know what he's talking about. Therefore it could mean Cringley misunderstood him, misquoted him, or just made it up.
I hate to do a me too post, but I noticed the same exact thing. I live in a well developed part of town, but for some reason every other map I use has failed to show the subdivision level detail of the area I live in, but this does!
And yes, the UI rules.
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole article was bullshit, likely thrown together by a lazy editor who happened to catch CNBC's 2-hour documentary The Age of Wal-Mart this week. This pop tart tid-bit was one of the more interesting bits of trivia in the show, I suspect this fluff piece was written in reaction to it.
American politicians on the stump are fond of citing Canada's socialized health care system as a superior alternative to the mixture of public and private health spending in the United States. Such rhetoric may attract votes, but we Canadians, trapped in a broken and deteriorating system, have reasons to disagree.
In 1967, when Canada adopted the British socialist model, our country was near the top of international rankings for the effectiveness of our medical spending. The U.N.'s World Health Organization now places Canada about 30th on that list.
Sorry canadians, 'universal' healthcare is not the answer. An average wait time of 17.7 weeks is not my idea of a superior system.
This reminds me of a product I thought was cool in a geeky sort of way, a TV Remote Control Watch like this Quemex. It lets you control volume and channel. I don't know if it's as universal as the device listed in TFA, but someone could easily devise one. It's sold to the super lazy couch potato who's doens't even want to reach to the coffee table for the remote, but I always thought it would be pretty cool to have on those rare occassions when you're stuck in a waiting room or something with a TV stuck on QVC or something.
I surprised at the posters getting all upset about this type of device. Yes it would be rude to mess with people in a crowded place like a bar or whatever if its obvious they're watching it. But how is an open IR receiver any different from say an open WAP? It's their fault if they didn't think about the possibility of someone using it in a way they didn't envision.
I can recommend these after carrying one for school for 2 years. I got mine for like $40 on sale at CompUSA. It is functional for regular backpack use due to the large capacity of the non-computer pockets. It was tough and comfortable, I wore it trudging across our large campus many times. As I said, I liked it for its large (largest I could find) non-computer storage pockets - one utility compartment for cables, and one larger pocket for books, quite a few of them.
It comes with a ludicrous 'rack system' basically a plastic shelf inside the pocket that just gets in the way. You can pull it out and throw it away. It also has one of the largest padded computer sleeves I could find, big enough for my tank-like Thinkpad A31. Otherwise it has tons of utility compartments for all your knick-knacks.
When dod the police catch on a planned murder (or other crime) before it is actually comitted? -- very very rarely. So should we disband the police? Or should we consider that even if they are too late to prevent a crime punishing the criminal provides justice and prevention to other criminals.
There were already laws in place against fraud, and enforcement agents to punish them when caught, the SEC does not contribute to this at all. The SEC's action are the equivalent of the police requiring every person in the country to file a quarterly report with them about their recent activities, as if they would be dumb enough disclose information necessary to tell if a crime was happening.
Again, another frequent response:
So what is the alternative? That investors become spies and actually go to the company's offices and check on things? Well if you believe that, then 99.999% of current stock owners will not be able to invest properly, which means that the market will crash, capital will become 10x more expensive and our economy will disappear. I would rather have the SEC.
Your faith in the power of the government is astonishing. Believe it or not, the stock market operated just fine, as did our economy, long before the invention of the SEC. We still had accountants and auditors, but they actually did their jobs back then, didn't mix their interests, and traded largely on their reputation for integrity. But today we have the aura of government sanction on every public company. Investors were better informed about the firms they purchased, because they had to be. Today we have millions of idiots with Ameritrade accounts who don't even know what a 10-K is investing in total billions of dollars in companies they don't understand, and probably just heard about from the guy at work or maybe CNBC. Then they go crying to their mommies when the 200x PE stock they bought on a whim drops to pennies overnight.
Stock market crashes are brought about by government intervention, not saved by it. People seem to have this idea that the big crash caused the depression, but it's the other way around. It was a symptom, brought on by a meddling fed reserve, protectionist trade, and extensive socialist central planning put in place by the administration. And anyway, the SEC was never intended to stop depressions, it was to regulate stocks. Yet there have been a number of drops since then of similar magnatude to 'the big one'.
Actually, the devestation to Andersen wasn't all that bad. True they went under and the partners lost their stakes, but it's not like all their other clients just went away. Basically all the partners picked up their tents and ran to the other remaining firms who were only too happy to take on their new clients and all the scrambling little auditors with them. Plus with the passage of the reporting heavy Sarbanes-Oxley, there has only been more work for CPAs since the implosion. Trust me, the Andersen guys are doing fine, its the Enron employees that are hurting.
And those Andersen people got off easy. CPAs are held to a higher standard, their charter is very specific about ethical requirements. They didn't just make a bad decision, they made a horribly incmpetent and deceitful decision. Every single auditor on that job had a duty to make that knowledge public, and every single one of them deserves to have his charter revoked, but did they?
Ask yourself the following question - "When is the last time the SEC or a Certified Public Accountant identified a case of major corporate fraud before the scam was so far gone it sent the company to court and probably bankruptcy?" The answer is not recently, almost never. This was the fairly radical theory of one of my better former finance professors. His exact words were "The SEC is a farce." In the very best case scenario, the SEC which claims to protect investors, is a colossal failure, costing billions of dollars to accomplish nothing, offering no such protection - and therefore should be disbanded simply to stop wasting money. The SEC was established in the 1920s, yet there have been numerous major stock market crashes and other scams at regular intervals since, and just as many high profile corporate bankruptcies. In the worst case, the existence of institutions like the SEC and AICPA provides a false sense of security to investors, who do not scrutinize firms in the detail they should, presuming that the so called auditors have done that job for them. But they are badly mistaken, the protection offered is nothing but a rubber stamp on an audit report.
The parent is modded funny and rightfully so. But it still needs to be recognized that there are deep structural market distortions at play in these cases. Should investors demand more and dig deeper into the financials? Of course! Chalking it all up to the free market is way off base.
Something along these lines, I'm certainly no expert, but everything I learned about DOS attacks I picked up on Steve Gibson's site. He believed Windows 2000 and XP would lead to even larger and more dangerous zombie fleets because of the inclusion of direct access to raw sockets which better enables IP spoofing.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
To me, this whole discussion leads to the more general problem of the lack of built in and easy to use general data synchronization capabilities in applications and/or operating systems. It would make more sense for this to be an OS level function so it would be truly universal. Of course its nice having web access our email, and the benefits of also storing it on your own hardware are there - the problem is keeping them in sync. I'm not aware of any existing software/service that does this presently short of running your own Exchange server at home, and again, we get back to the ISP/server issue. But it doesn't just go for email, I want this capability for everything on my PC: music, video, documents. Heck, just keeping a laptop synced with a home desktop is a royal pain. I guess I don't know what the point I'm trying to make is, just ranting I suppose. The really sad thing is there has been zero progress on this - I mean what has Windows given us, the Briefcase?
That's a fair point, its not really a "must have" feature on a music player. My thinking on it though, is that everything about the player involves decisions MS actively made to exclude or restrict features, where one would think they would want to give the consumer as many features and content as possible. Ultimately it is a portable hard drive, that also happens to have the ability to play music and videos. The act of taking away its ability to store any file you want is a conscious act of exclusion to the detriment of the consumer. It doesn't cost anything to allow open storage, if anything it costs more to exclude the function. For every feature it has, there's a little footnote about how that feature is restricted. Its got wifi, thats great, they trumped the iPod, how innovative of MS...but wait, it doesn't actually do anything any consumer would actually want wifi for.
Ran across a Zune endcap display at a local Target. Backlight was set to immediately turn off making it impossible to use until I switched it to stay on permanently. After playing with it a while, found the UI acceptable if a bit unintuitive. Like others have noted, I was shocked at the bulk of the thing. No prices listed, I guess because it wasn't actually available for sale yet, which also seemed a bit odd. The feature list, which presumably is meant to entice buyers, read more like a Top 10 Lift of reasons not to buy. A 30 GB portable hard drive that you can't use as a portable hard drive...WTF?! I've never seen such a disaster waiting to happen.
I was just at my local (Lansing, MI) CompUSA and overheard the Mac rep making similar claims as his pitch to a potential customer. His exact word were "unlike with a PC, with a Mac you don't even have to think about viruses or spyware..." I was mildly shocked to hear it from an official rep like that.
These cameras rocked! I had one and it worked very well, very easy to operate for kids as intended. Took decent video too as I recall. Sadly mine died a painful death after I somehow got the strange idea to try to film underwater, and wrapped the camera in plastic. It worked nicely at first, but eventually sprung a leak - you can guess what happened next. Thus ended my directing career.
Just curious, anyone have any success returning some of the more recent non-standard CDs which clearly state on the back that it is in fact a non-standard disk that may not work in all players? I ran across one of these on a recent, though extremely rare, trip to the music store.
Must be going by the old rule, when in doubt, apostrophe.
I find the Gaudette quote odd, especially considering he's a CFO.
This makes no sense at all. He states they carry software with no book value (in other words expense all costs immediately and capitalize nothing), but you can't suddenly start depreciating an asset that isn't there!? Not to mention, I'd be very interested if someone can explain to me how depreciation (an expense) can create revenue. I think I know what he's talking about in a general sense, you can decrease your depreciation each year against flat revenue and create the illusion of rising income - but again, depreciating what assets exactly?Such statements would indicate a fundamental lack of understanding of basic accounting principles. I seriously doubt Microsoft's CFO doesn't know what he's talking about. Therefore it could mean Cringley misunderstood him, misquoted him, or just made it up.
I hate to do a me too post, but I noticed the same exact thing. I live in a well developed part of town, but for some reason every other map I use has failed to show the subdivision level detail of the area I live in, but this does! And yes, the UI rules.
Workers told 'no smoking,' even if it's at home.
I still like Composer as a quick and dirty WYSIWYG HTML editor.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/10/jeopardy_winn er_wage.html
Actually, I think the better reference is to Max Headroom. If this goes through, it will finally pave the way for making 'off' buttons illegal!
I wouldn't be surprised if this whole article was bullshit, likely thrown together by a lazy editor who happened to catch CNBC's 2-hour documentary The Age of Wal-Mart this week. This pop tart tid-bit was one of the more interesting bits of trivia in the show, I suspect this fluff piece was written in reaction to it.
What? This isn't a game demo? The visual FX are so awful I was sure it had to be.
I surprised at the posters getting all upset about this type of device. Yes it would be rude to mess with people in a crowded place like a bar or whatever if its obvious they're watching it. But how is an open IR receiver any different from say an open WAP? It's their fault if they didn't think about the possibility of someone using it in a way they didn't envision.
I can recommend these after carrying one for school for 2 years. I got mine for like $40 on sale at CompUSA. It is functional for regular backpack use due to the large capacity of the non-computer pockets. It was tough and comfortable, I wore it trudging across our large campus many times. As I said, I liked it for its large (largest I could find) non-computer storage pockets - one utility compartment for cables, and one larger pocket for books, quite a few of them.
It comes with a ludicrous 'rack system' basically a plastic shelf inside the pocket that just gets in the way. You can pull it out and throw it away. It also has one of the largest padded computer sleeves I could find, big enough for my tank-like Thinkpad A31. Otherwise it has tons of utility compartments for all your knick-knacks.
Again, another frequent response:
Your faith in the power of the government is astonishing. Believe it or not, the stock market operated just fine, as did our economy, long before the invention of the SEC. We still had accountants and auditors, but they actually did their jobs back then, didn't mix their interests, and traded largely on their reputation for integrity. But today we have the aura of government sanction on every public company. Investors were better informed about the firms they purchased, because they had to be. Today we have millions of idiots with Ameritrade accounts who don't even know what a 10-K is investing in total billions of dollars in companies they don't understand, and probably just heard about from the guy at work or maybe CNBC. Then they go crying to their mommies when the 200x PE stock they bought on a whim drops to pennies overnight.Stock market crashes are brought about by government intervention, not saved by it. People seem to have this idea that the big crash caused the depression, but it's the other way around. It was a symptom, brought on by a meddling fed reserve, protectionist trade, and extensive socialist central planning put in place by the administration. And anyway, the SEC was never intended to stop depressions, it was to regulate stocks. Yet there have been a number of drops since then of similar magnatude to 'the big one'.
Actually, the devestation to Andersen wasn't all that bad. True they went under and the partners lost their stakes, but it's not like all their other clients just went away. Basically all the partners picked up their tents and ran to the other remaining firms who were only too happy to take on their new clients and all the scrambling little auditors with them. Plus with the passage of the reporting heavy Sarbanes-Oxley, there has only been more work for CPAs since the implosion. Trust me, the Andersen guys are doing fine, its the Enron employees that are hurting. And those Andersen people got off easy. CPAs are held to a higher standard, their charter is very specific about ethical requirements. They didn't just make a bad decision, they made a horribly incmpetent and deceitful decision. Every single auditor on that job had a duty to make that knowledge public, and every single one of them deserves to have his charter revoked, but did they?
Ask yourself the following question - "When is the last time the SEC or a Certified Public Accountant identified a case of major corporate fraud before the scam was so far gone it sent the company to court and probably bankruptcy?" The answer is not recently, almost never. This was the fairly radical theory of one of my better former finance professors. His exact words were "The SEC is a farce." In the very best case scenario, the SEC which claims to protect investors, is a colossal failure, costing billions of dollars to accomplish nothing, offering no such protection - and therefore should be disbanded simply to stop wasting money. The SEC was established in the 1920s, yet there have been numerous major stock market crashes and other scams at regular intervals since, and just as many high profile corporate bankruptcies. In the worst case, the existence of institutions like the SEC and AICPA provides a false sense of security to investors, who do not scrutinize firms in the detail they should, presuming that the so called auditors have done that job for them. But they are badly mistaken, the protection offered is nothing but a rubber stamp on an audit report.
The parent is modded funny and rightfully so. But it still needs to be recognized that there are deep structural market distortions at play in these cases. Should investors demand more and dig deeper into the financials? Of course! Chalking it all up to the free market is way off base.
Something along these lines, I'm certainly no expert, but everything I learned about DOS attacks I picked up on Steve Gibson's site. He believed Windows 2000 and XP would lead to even larger and more dangerous zombie fleets because of the inclusion of direct access to raw sockets which better enables IP spoofing.
Totally. What kind of prick would do something like that.