I really do get tired of companies that think consumers are there for them to screw over, instead of understanding that to be successful they need to be selling what consumers want.
I think you should ask your CEO when he last matched googles numbers..... But that is a bad comparision. The point is that IBM makes billions supporting Linux.
Operating in such a commodity business Apple would have to grab nearly 40% of the market just to break even with the hardware sales losses they would endure. So they would have to sell more than 8 times as much software as they sell hardware with software today just to break even? Apple is 5% of the market selling hardware. I don't think they net $800 off of every sell. In fact my mac mini was loaded and only cost $799.
I think it should be illegal to put copy protection on digital works that are more than what could be applied to a video tape or a book (a physical ink on paper book).
Its important that rich billionares make donations. The public or privateness isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. If I were in their shoes I make them public in hopes of inspiring other wealthy people to do the same.
Not having billions, I would love to make my donations anonymously to keep from being on the fund raising mailing list of thousands of organizations. I figure if you are a billionare, you are on the list anyway, and you can pay someone to through out all the damn return address labels!!:-)
If it is all based on google, then its a bubble. Not every start up will succeed like google, or even be purchased by google.
On the other hand the job market is about to boom, or so it seems. I had a developer freind get laid off (by suprise) the first week of Dec., he found and started a new job before New years eve. That is impresive to me, to get a job over Christmas season.
Yes some co-workers and mysefl (all IT folks) were discussing Family Guy over lunch. But does it have a big enough geek following for this to be "News for Nerds"?
I have always thought partisan politics showed an inability to think for one's self. I guess this supports that theory.
While there is no legal (or even moral basis) for it, I have long thought that "voting straight ticket" should mean your vote isn't counted. Perhaps if I worked for DieBold I could make that a reality!!:-)
"have any films actually been leaked by the ratings board?" Will you ever know for sure? Not until someone is caught. But the perfect digital copies of movies that come out before the film hits the theaters often come from advance DVD's sent to ratings boards and professional movie reviewers.
Yes I think the film maker is looking to stir something up, but that doesn't matter. The MPAA broke the same law they spend millions trying to enforce.
I could imagine a lawyer taking the case for the publicity also. Maybe we will be that lucky!
As others have pointed out it is not an issue of "usb drives." Before high capacity flash drives there were USB harddrives, ipods, DVD burners, CD-Burners, http file upload, e-mail, ftp, and does anyone remember floppies. Sure a floppy only holds 1.4MB, but have you tried zipping your oracle database? Those compress REALLY well.
If companies try to crack down on this too much it will cause problems with performing backups of data on PC's. Most companies have no, or bad plans for backing up data on PC's and laptops. If they spend too much time trying to keep information from walking out the door, they might find themselves the victim of data loss from harddrive failures.
I am not the original poster. But I'd like to ask the question a little differently. Can anyone recommend cheap (or free) software where I can learn chess a little faster than my child so I can keep playing chess against my preschool daughter without feeling like Homer Simpson?
Normally people say "upto" 4 times faster etc. Because it really does depend on the software mix and application. This is going to especially be true of dual core or dual CPU systems.
I think this is where an overhaul to the patent system could come in handy. The original patent system was supposed to encourage the sharing of information. However it has been twisted and twisted until it discourages the sharing of information.
I assume to be legal these days a Mix Artist needs a Microsoft sized legal team. I mean this is what it would be like for a painter if all the colors were copyrighted by different companies. Imagine trying to secure the rights to display a Renoir!!
Or a musician who uses samples. Would it be legal today for the Art of Noise to produce their music? IANAL
The Simpsons are the most relevant thing on TV. I have to control the desire to firebomb Fox when they replace the Simpsons with some useless sporting event or even worse some starwars movie. The only things that should disrupt a Simpsons episode is a currently occuring natural disaster in the immediate viewing area, or perhaps the actuall declaration of war by congress. Anything less than that is not an excuse for interupting the normal Sunday night ritual of watching the Simpsons.
Things that are not more important than the Simpsons: 1. Presidential address. 2. Military action this is not accompanied by a declaration of war. (The Gulfwar, Gulfwar II, Vietnam, etc. fall into this category. US entry into WW II would not.) 3. Terrorist Attacks (I can wait 30 minutes to hear about that!) 4. The SuperBowl. 5. The olympics... 6. Birdflu outbreak. 7. Alien Invation
These things can wait until the Simpsons are over....
I have to say I hate the anti-compeditive methods MS is using the wage the NG DVD format war, but I do support their goal of a less restrictive DRM system.
The thing is I'm afraid they will also try to set up the DRM specificly to make sure OSS operating systems (perhaps even non-windows operating systems) can not play back or use HD-DVD's.
I would add to the list, cut down on the number of different versions of Vista. If they don't Windows will be more fractured than the number of distributions of *BSD and Linux on x86.
Ok so I exaggerate a little bit. There are hundreds of distributions, but I think there are less than 6 major distributions that have significant desktop share.
I can't stand the music that is hyped today in the US. Yes there is a lot of bad music out there. But thats where friends come in. When I was in college we did have CDs, but not MP3s, and I could afford a CD-ROM or enough hard drive space to store a ripped album. (40MB was about $200!)
But there was plenty of music swapping going on in the dorms. You go to someone's room and listen to a bunch of music. The stuff you really liked you would buy, the stuff you kind of liked would get put on a cassette tape (are you old enough to remember those?). I sorted through lots of music that way.
You expose yourself to new music, and then hunt for more by the people you liked in the past.
I really don't think this will go very far in Russia. The Russian's might play lip service to protecting US IP rights, as the Chinese did earlier this year, but the Russian's have too many real problems for this to be a priority.
The music industry is desperate, because the fat profits are drying up. And if that "problem" weren't enough they are being faced with disruptive technologies that almost make them obsolete. Face it, big music labels are only needed for marketing. With a few thousand dollars worth of equipment you can put together a good home studio, make your own CD, and sell your music online. And if you are good enough to get some grassroots buzz, you will probably make as much that way as signing with the big label. As someone said "last throws."
I once predicted that 1997 was the peak of Microsoft power, and that it would be a long (read slow) decline from that point. I still believe that. It will still be a long road down, but I believe that in 2017 Microsoft's position of power in the computer industry will be comparable to Sun Microsystems "power" today.
Right now I would say that Microsoft is still a de-facto monopoly on the desktop, especially the corporate desktop. But Microsoft has branched out into many areas where they are not a monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally liked the tone of this blog posting.
I really do get tired of companies that think consumers are there for them to screw over, instead of understanding that to be successful they need to be selling what consumers want.
I think you should ask your CEO when he last matched googles numbers..... But that is a bad comparision. The point is that IBM makes billions supporting Linux.
Operating in such a commodity business Apple would have to grab nearly 40% of the market just to break even with the hardware sales losses they would endure.
So they would have to sell more than 8 times as much software as they sell hardware with software today just to break even? Apple is 5% of the market selling hardware. I don't think they net $800 off of every sell. In fact my mac mini was loaded and only cost $799.
I think it should be illegal to put copy protection on digital works that are more than what could be applied to a video tape or a book (a physical ink on paper book).
The Chinese will want it fixed. This should be the "worst kept secret" not news. :-)
Its important that rich billionares make donations. The public or privateness isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. If I were in their shoes I make them public in hopes of inspiring other wealthy people to do the same.
:-)
Not having billions, I would love to make my donations anonymously to keep from being on the fund raising mailing list of thousands of organizations. I figure if you are a billionare, you are on the list anyway, and you can pay someone to through out all the damn return address labels!!
If it is all based on google, then its a bubble. Not every start up will succeed like google, or even be purchased by google.
On the other hand the job market is about to boom, or so it seems. I had a developer freind get laid off (by suprise) the first week of Dec., he found and started a new job before New years eve. That is impresive to me, to get a job over Christmas season.
Links to the site or mirrors?
What else is there to say?
Yes some co-workers and mysefl (all IT folks) were discussing Family Guy over lunch. But does it have a big enough geek following for this to be "News for Nerds"?
Or will slashdot post anything these days?
I have always thought partisan politics showed an inability to think for one's self. I guess this supports that theory.
:-)
While there is no legal (or even moral basis) for it, I have long thought that "voting straight ticket" should mean your vote isn't counted. Perhaps if I worked for DieBold I could make that a reality!!
"have any films actually been leaked by the ratings board?"
Will you ever know for sure? Not until someone is caught. But the perfect digital copies of movies that come out before the film hits the theaters often come from advance DVD's sent to ratings boards and professional movie reviewers.
Yes I think the film maker is looking to stir something up, but that doesn't matter. The MPAA broke the same law they spend millions trying to enforce.
I could imagine a lawyer taking the case for the publicity also. Maybe we will be that lucky!
As others have pointed out it is not an issue of "usb drives." Before high capacity flash drives there were USB harddrives, ipods, DVD burners, CD-Burners, http file upload, e-mail, ftp, and does anyone remember floppies. Sure a floppy only holds 1.4MB, but have you tried zipping your oracle database? Those compress REALLY well.
If companies try to crack down on this too much it will cause problems with performing backups of data on PC's. Most companies have no, or bad plans for backing up data on PC's and laptops. If they spend too much time trying to keep information from walking out the door, they might find themselves the victim of data loss from harddrive failures.
I am not the original poster. But I'd like to ask the question a little differently. Can anyone recommend cheap (or free) software where I can learn chess a little faster than my child so I can keep playing chess against my preschool daughter without feeling like Homer Simpson?
Normally people say "upto" 4 times faster etc. Because it really does depend on the software mix and application. This is going to especially be true of dual core or dual CPU systems.
I for one see no great conspiracy here.
I think this is where an overhaul to the patent system could come in handy. The original patent system was supposed to encourage the sharing of information. However it has been twisted and twisted until it discourages the sharing of information.
Windows Media player for Mac was a joke anyway. Very buggy, playback would stop/hang randomly.
Oh so its just as good as MS software for windows. Cool.
I assume to be legal these days a Mix Artist needs a Microsoft sized legal team. I mean this is what it would be like for a painter if all the colors were copyrighted by different companies.
Imagine trying to secure the rights to display a Renoir!!
Or a musician who uses samples. Would it be legal today for the Art of Noise to produce their music? IANAL
The Simpsons are the most relevant thing on TV. I have to control the desire to firebomb Fox when they replace the Simpsons with some useless sporting event or even worse some starwars movie. The only things that should disrupt a Simpsons episode is a currently occuring natural disaster in the immediate viewing area, or perhaps the actuall declaration of war by congress. Anything less than that is not an excuse for interupting the normal Sunday night ritual of watching the Simpsons.
Things that are not more important than the Simpsons:
1. Presidential address.
2. Military action this is not accompanied by a declaration of war. (The Gulfwar, Gulfwar II, Vietnam, etc. fall into this category. US entry into WW II would not.)
3. Terrorist Attacks (I can wait 30 minutes to hear about that!)
4. The SuperBowl.
5. The olympics...
6. Birdflu outbreak.
7. Alien Invation
These things can wait until the Simpsons are over....
If this were for sale for real, I'd say it was asking for a lawsuit.
I have to say I hate the anti-compeditive methods MS is using the wage the NG DVD format war, but I do support their goal of a less restrictive DRM system.
The thing is I'm afraid they will also try to set up the DRM specificly to make sure OSS operating systems (perhaps even non-windows operating systems) can not play back or use HD-DVD's.
Talk about the lesser of two evils!!
I would add to the list, cut down on the number of different versions of Vista. If they don't Windows will be more fractured than the number of distributions of *BSD and Linux on x86.
Ok so I exaggerate a little bit. There are hundreds of distributions, but I think there are less than 6 major distributions that have significant desktop share.
I can't stand the music that is hyped today in the US. Yes there is a lot of bad music out there. But thats where friends come in. When I was in college we did have CDs, but not MP3s, and I could afford a CD-ROM or enough hard drive space to store a ripped album. (40MB was about $200!)
But there was plenty of music swapping going on in the dorms. You go to someone's room and listen to a bunch of music. The stuff you really liked you would buy, the stuff you kind of liked would get put on a cassette tape (are you old enough to remember those?). I sorted through lots of music that way.
You expose yourself to new music, and then hunt for more by the people you liked in the past.
I really don't think this will go very far in Russia. The Russian's might play lip service to protecting US IP rights, as the Chinese did earlier this year, but the Russian's have too many real problems for this to be a priority.
The music industry is desperate, because the fat profits are drying up. And if that "problem" weren't enough they are being faced with disruptive technologies that almost make them obsolete. Face it, big music labels are only needed for marketing. With a few thousand dollars worth of equipment you can put together a good home studio, make your own CD, and sell your music online. And if you are good enough to get some grassroots buzz, you will probably make as much that way as signing with the big label. As someone said "last throws."
I once predicted that 1997 was the peak of Microsoft power, and that it would be a long (read slow) decline from that point. I still believe that. It will still be a long road down, but I believe that in 2017 Microsoft's position of power in the computer industry will be comparable to Sun Microsystems "power" today.
Right now I would say that Microsoft is still a de-facto monopoly on the desktop, especially the corporate desktop. But Microsoft has branched out into many areas where they are not a monopoly.