What's interesting to me is the bottom part of TFA titled "Legal Mumbo Jumbo". I haven't been following this, but it sure sounds like the case has been awfully contentious.
Most important though, the complaint is (1) that Toshiba wasn't licensed and (2) that there is a breech of the agreement with Canon over "excluded products" (among a bunch of other stuff). That might mean that - Toshiba or not - Canon's not going to be free of the lawsuit, and not going to be releasing SED products either. Curiously, Nano's site doesn't mention any other licensees of their technology. So...one has to wonder if Toshiba and Canon together can't get these things to market and make them competitive, then who are they hoping to find that can do it?
Seems to me the best move would've been to let Canon/Toshiba take them to market and then go after all the competitors (Sony, Phillips, Hitachi, etc) for a license when they try to enter the market. But I guess that's why I don't own a multi-billion dollar electronics company.
> Sony will still send 85 more units to the store from > the initial order. The stores did not order more units, > they simply received what they had ordered during > the hype period.
From the manufacturer's point of view those units were already sold with the original order of 100, it just hadn't been fulfilled yet. Follow your example through...now the store certainly won't order any more PS3's until it has sold some of the 90 it has on its shelves.
Point is if Sony continues to ship them then someone is buying them. There's no great conspiracy here about misrepresenting shipments as sales.
> When will companies start saying how many units were sold, > instead of shipped? We are not really interested in their > plants manufacturing capability.
Well they kind of go hand-in-hand because they don't just ship them into a black hole, and they obviously don't build units that they don't intend to sell. If the stores are willing to accept them it's because they have "shelf space"...and that's because they've sold their last shipment already. From the manufacturer's perspective these units are sold.
Now in the past there have been companies who have shipped a bunch of product just before the end of a fiscal period to hit a decent number, only to have all the retailers ship it back because they were already holding a bunch of inventory. That's just a numbers game though.
I tell you what...for all the hype around these things just a few weeks ago, I've had three chances to buy one (a PS3) in the last few days. One was a friend who bought two of them for Ebay and couldn't sell them at all. The other two times were regular retail stores while I was Christmas shopping. I passed all three times. Not sure why but the price of those things sure made me think twice.
I can certainly see buyer's remorse sneaking in after people play it for a few days and realize that maybe it isn't $500 cooler than their old PS2.
What, am I the only one reading this crap on Christmas Eve?
Think about how tedious a computer scene would be if the user had to navigate Windows, KDE, or even Mac OS X. While the herione was trying to find her husband's company's secret documents she'd log in... click on My Computer... then My Network Places... then log in again... then private -> secret -> projects -> 2006 -> world domination... and then wait for Office to load.
The way it works in the movies is the way it should work. Log in, type "find Kyoto meeting minutes", a bunch of matrix-ish characters scroll across the screen, and there it is.
Actually, this is the first public release of the beta but various earlier releases have been out for a couple months now. I've been working with it with both Ubuntu and Gentoo guests and have been pretty impressed (though I can't say I've ever opened a new release of a VMWare product and not been impressed). These guys do good work. It's surprisingly Mac-like for a company that hasn't had previous releases on the Mac platform. In daily use so far I haven't had any real problems to speak of and won't be surprised to see it released fairly soon. It's missing a few of the features I rely on in the Workstation product but it's still an easy choice over Parallels, Q, or anything else I've seen.
Ignoring for a moment how patently absurd this feature is (pun intended), I can't see how a patent like this would have any value to the holder.
This seems like one of those features that if it didn't get adopted completely (yahoo, gmail, aol, etc, etc) then it would just be ignored by users. If I were crafting e-mails with emotiflags (and were a 13 year old girl), I'd probably just give up on picking the pretty little icons since all my friends who aren't using Outlook can't see them anyway.
And this certainly isn't one of those must-have features where companies are going to rush to get a license from MS for fear of having an "incomplete" product. This type of thing is clearly aimed at younger users who, in my experience, are almost all using free e-mail services...most of which aren't by MS. Well that's if they're using e-mail at all anymore with IM and MySpace.
Maybe I just don't understand, but it doesn't seem worth the effort for them. On the bright side, at least this is one MS patent that I don't fear will infringe on anything I am or will be working on.
Apple is on Intel chips because of supply problems with IBM and lack of a good mobile processor. Nothing to do with "the competition in the PC world" or Microsoft.
Supposedly the card is optimized for UDP traffic, which is what most games use, rather than TCP. Not saying it works...and certainly not worth $279 to me...
I've been trying to make the case to folks at work that Vista *might* fail like Windows ME did a few years ago. Looking at my customers, I don't see how most of them could choose to upgrade to Vista corporate-wide. I don't see too many features that make it a compelling upgrade for a business...nevermind that those little pizza-box Compaqs probably don't have the graphic horsepower to run all the eye candy. Once you take the pretty wrapping off it there's not a whole lot left other than WinXP, which can be fitted with IE7 when the time is right anyway. So if businesses skip this version - as I expect - then it's going to have to be the OEMs and the retail sales that drive it. Unless I'm missing something (and I'm sure you good folks will point it out if I am), we saw how that worked out with WinME right?
> What other laughable claims have you heard attributed to encryption, and how were you able to properly lay them to rest?
Well, after all these years I'm still shocked at how often I hear someone refer to "XOR encryption". As for laying them to rest though, you really shouldn't have to. I can come up with thousands of ways to mangle data and claim it's encrypted...but the burden would be on me to prove that any of the methods were reasonable encryption. In my opinion you're probably best to just avoid conversations like this because you're certainly not going to make any headway with someone who knows so little about the field.
Did you notice the dateline on that Wired artice about "High-End Tech Company Perks"?
July 31, 1999.
Yeah, that sure was a fun time, wasn't it? See if you can dig up any of the articles between then and now that explain what happened to all the dot-com companies. I've never worked for the big guys mentioned in there, but I'll wager they don't offer all those perks now. They don't have to.
Companies aren't quite as anxious to overpay for decent talent anymore. All those things you mention end up in the budget right along side of "cost of employee salaries" and "cost of employee benefits". So I'll take whatever they're willing to pay me in cash instead of subsidized gym memberships, thank you very much. It's already hard enough to be faster and more accurate than the other guy (who is also decent, lives overseas, and is cheaper than I am)...I don't need the overall cost of American labor at our firm to be even higher because we're paying for rec rooms and company outings.
1. Build walking robot
2. Install Linux
3....
4. Profit???
Seriously, why so much interest in building a walknig robot though? Sure it's an interesting research project, but what's the real application of a robotic biped? IANARE (I Am Not A Robot Engineer), but it seems to me that there are a lot more efficient ways for a robot to move - wheels, treads, etc - than trying to master walking. By the time you're done adding motors, sensors and processing power to make it walk, I imagine there's precious little left to make it actually *do* anything useful.
Seriously, there are ports of many open source projects to Mac OS X now and most of them work great. If you ever get the chance to get your hands on a Mac, give it a try. You can pickup some of the Power-PC Macs pretty cheap lately...and all in all the platform makes for a fairly pleasant computing experience...
Anyone who's worked with offshore resources knows this is exaclty true. A couple of years ago I was contracted at a large 401k company when they brought in massive amounts of Indian labor. They were bright, spoke English well, and did passable work...but they didn't know a thing about retirement accounts or any other American financial practices. I was far, far more valuable working with them as a business analyst then I was as a coder. Yeah, those of us Americans who are left in IT in 2010 are going to have to know the businesses very well.
I saw this http://www.sforh.com/pointing/headmouse-extreme.ht ml demonstrated when I was at UVa just as it was about to go commercial. Probably better for severely diabled but very, very slick. They even had the test subject "typing" by looking at the keys on a virtual keyboard.
Maybe a litle pricey, but if I can just master sleeping with my eyes open I might have to pick one of these up for the office...
Yeah, I always thought this machine got a little hotter than it should. My serial# starts W8607...so that's well before the ones the article talks about. So, time to call apple I guess...
Not surprisingly, it doesn't sound like anyone here has actually used MS Virtual Server. MSVS doesn't (yet) offer even half of what VMWare does...and the gap is even wider if you compare it to the ESX platform and the related tools. The MS product might be nice for a small development team or QA staff (though we've even had limited sucess with that), but Virtual Server isn't a serious consideration for any large-scale virtualization.
...generally you had to re-install to get good performance again
I've actually had good luck with SysInternal's Page Defrag program for getting back that "fresh from the install" feeling. Defrags both the paging files and the registry files.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe we have a monopoly on it yet, but we're working on securing a patent.
What's interesting to me is the bottom part of TFA titled "Legal Mumbo Jumbo". I haven't been following this, but it sure sounds like the case has been awfully contentious.
Most important though, the complaint is (1) that Toshiba wasn't licensed and (2) that there is a breech of the agreement with Canon over "excluded products" (among a bunch of other stuff). That might mean that - Toshiba or not - Canon's not going to be free of the lawsuit, and not going to be releasing SED products either. Curiously, Nano's site doesn't mention any other licensees of their technology. So...one has to wonder if Toshiba and Canon together can't get these things to market and make them competitive, then who are they hoping to find that can do it?
Seems to me the best move would've been to let Canon/Toshiba take them to market and then go after all the competitors (Sony, Phillips, Hitachi, etc) for a license when they try to enter the market. But I guess that's why I don't own a multi-billion dollar electronics company.
> Sony will still send 85 more units to the store from
> the initial order. The stores did not order more units,
> they simply received what they had ordered during
> the hype period.
From the manufacturer's point of view those units were already sold with the original order of 100, it just hadn't been fulfilled yet. Follow your example through...now the store certainly won't order any more PS3's until it has sold some of the 90 it has on its shelves.
Point is if Sony continues to ship them then someone is buying them. There's no great conspiracy here about misrepresenting shipments as sales.
> When will companies start saying how many units were sold,
> instead of shipped? We are not really interested in their
> plants manufacturing capability.
Well they kind of go hand-in-hand because they don't just ship them into a black hole, and they obviously don't build units that they don't intend to sell. If the stores are willing to accept them it's because they have "shelf space"...and that's because they've sold their last shipment already. From the manufacturer's perspective these units are sold.
Now in the past there have been companies who have shipped a bunch of product just before the end of a fiscal period to hit a decent number, only to have all the retailers ship it back because they were already holding a bunch of inventory. That's just a numbers game though.
Wow, I just read that entire story and was sure the punch line would be about TMX Elmo. Guess not.
I tell you what...for all the hype around these things just a few weeks ago, I've had three chances to buy one (a PS3) in the last few days. One was a friend who bought two of them for Ebay and couldn't sell them at all. The other two times were regular retail stores while I was Christmas shopping. I passed all three times. Not sure why but the price of those things sure made me think twice.
I can certainly see buyer's remorse sneaking in after people play it for a few days and realize that maybe it isn't $500 cooler than their old PS2.
Yes, it's called an Optical Logic Gate.
What, am I the only one reading this crap on Christmas Eve?
... click on My Computer ... then My Network Places ... then log in again ... then private -> secret -> projects -> 2006 -> world domination ... and then wait for Office to load.
Think about how tedious a computer scene would be if the user had to navigate Windows, KDE, or even Mac OS X. While the herione was trying to find her husband's company's secret documents she'd log in
The way it works in the movies is the way it should work. Log in, type "find Kyoto meeting minutes", a bunch of matrix-ish characters scroll across the screen, and there it is.
Actually, this is the first public release of the beta but various earlier releases have been out for a couple months now. I've been working with it with both Ubuntu and Gentoo guests and have been pretty impressed (though I can't say I've ever opened a new release of a VMWare product and not been impressed). These guys do good work. It's surprisingly Mac-like for a company that hasn't had previous releases on the Mac platform. In daily use so far I haven't had any real problems to speak of and won't be surprised to see it released fairly soon. It's missing a few of the features I rely on in the Workstation product but it's still an easy choice over Parallels, Q, or anything else I've seen.
> WTF is SOAP?
Based on the slashdotters I know, you aren't likely to get an answer to this here.
Ignoring for a moment how patently absurd this feature is (pun intended), I can't see how a patent like this would have any value to the holder.
This seems like one of those features that if it didn't get adopted completely (yahoo, gmail, aol, etc, etc) then it would just be ignored by users. If I were crafting e-mails with emotiflags (and were a 13 year old girl), I'd probably just give up on picking the pretty little icons since all my friends who aren't using Outlook can't see them anyway.
And this certainly isn't one of those must-have features where companies are going to rush to get a license from MS for fear of having an "incomplete" product. This type of thing is clearly aimed at younger users who, in my experience, are almost all using free e-mail services...most of which aren't by MS. Well that's if they're using e-mail at all anymore with IM and MySpace.
Maybe I just don't understand, but it doesn't seem worth the effort for them. On the bright side, at least this is one MS patent that I don't fear will infringe on anything I am or will be working on.
Apple is on Intel chips because of supply problems with IBM and lack of a good mobile processor. Nothing to do with "the competition in the PC world" or Microsoft.
Supposedly the card is optimized for UDP traffic, which is what most games use, rather than TCP. Not saying it works...and certainly not worth $279 to me...
I've been trying to make the case to folks at work that Vista *might* fail like Windows ME did a few years ago. Looking at my customers, I don't see how most of them could choose to upgrade to Vista corporate-wide. I don't see too many features that make it a compelling upgrade for a business...nevermind that those little pizza-box Compaqs probably don't have the graphic horsepower to run all the eye candy. Once you take the pretty wrapping off it there's not a whole lot left other than WinXP, which can be fitted with IE7 when the time is right anyway. So if businesses skip this version - as I expect - then it's going to have to be the OEMs and the retail sales that drive it. Unless I'm missing something (and I'm sure you good folks will point it out if I am), we saw how that worked out with WinME right?
Here's a sample of a 'prior inventions' clause: http://www.rhs.com/web/blog/PowerOfTheSchwartz.nsf /d6plinks/RSCZ-6NY3U9
Like this guy says, I don't see how I could sign this, especially if I'm working with other customers at the time.
> What other laughable claims have you heard attributed to encryption, and how were you able to properly lay them to rest?
Well, after all these years I'm still shocked at how often I hear someone refer to "XOR encryption". As for laying them to rest though, you really shouldn't have to. I can come up with thousands of ways to mangle data and claim it's encrypted...but the burden would be on me to prove that any of the methods were reasonable encryption. In my opinion you're probably best to just avoid conversations like this because you're certainly not going to make any headway with someone who knows so little about the field.
Did you notice the dateline on that Wired artice about "High-End Tech Company Perks"?
July 31, 1999.
Yeah, that sure was a fun time, wasn't it? See if you can dig up any of the articles between then and now that explain what happened to all the dot-com companies. I've never worked for the big guys mentioned in there, but I'll wager they don't offer all those perks now. They don't have to.
Companies aren't quite as anxious to overpay for decent talent anymore. All those things you mention end up in the budget right along side of "cost of employee salaries" and "cost of employee benefits". So I'll take whatever they're willing to pay me in cash instead of subsidized gym memberships, thank you very much. It's already hard enough to be faster and more accurate than the other guy (who is also decent, lives overseas, and is cheaper than I am)...I don't need the overall cost of American labor at our firm to be even higher because we're paying for rec rooms and company outings.
1. Build walking robot ...
2. Install Linux
3.
4. Profit???
Seriously, why so much interest in building a walknig robot though? Sure it's an interesting research project, but what's the real application of a robotic biped? IANARE (I Am Not A Robot Engineer), but it seems to me that there are a lot more efficient ways for a robot to move - wheels, treads, etc - than trying to master walking. By the time you're done adding motors, sensors and processing power to make it walk, I imagine there's precious little left to make it actually *do* anything useful.
Seriously, there are ports of many open source projects to Mac OS X now and most of them work great. If you ever get the chance to get your hands on a Mac, give it a try. You can pickup some of the Power-PC Macs pretty cheap lately...and all in all the platform makes for a fairly pleasant computing experience...
http://darwinports.org/
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
http://www.kberg.ch/q/
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/
My advice is
1. Think first
2. Post to Slashdot
Wishful thinking, I know.
Anyone who's worked with offshore resources knows this is exaclty true. A couple of years ago I was contracted at a large 401k company when they brought in massive amounts of Indian labor. They were bright, spoke English well, and did passable work...but they didn't know a thing about retirement accounts or any other American financial practices. I was far, far more valuable working with them as a business analyst then I was as a coder. Yeah, those of us Americans who are left in IT in 2010 are going to have to know the businesses very well.
I saw this http://www.sforh.com/pointing/headmouse-extreme.ht ml demonstrated when I was at UVa just as it was about to go commercial. Probably better for severely diabled but very, very slick. They even had the test subject "typing" by looking at the keys on a virtual keyboard.
Maybe a litle pricey, but if I can just master sleeping with my eyes open I might have to pick one of these up for the office...
Yeah, I always thought this machine got a little hotter than it should. My serial# starts W8607...so that's well before the ones the article talks about. So, time to call apple I guess...
Not surprisingly, it doesn't sound like anyone here has actually used MS Virtual Server. MSVS doesn't (yet) offer even half of what VMWare does...and the gap is even wider if you compare it to the ESX platform and the related tools. The MS product might be nice for a small development team or QA staff (though we've even had limited sucess with that), but Virtual Server isn't a serious consideration for any large-scale virtualization.
...generally you had to re-install to get good performance again
I've actually had good luck with SysInternal's Page Defrag program for getting back that "fresh from the install" feeling. Defrags both the paging files and the registry files.