From my understanding, IBM's PC unit was always supposed to be a less seasonal cash-cow that would keep their mainframe business consistently in the black. Basically, mainframes take a long time to build and the number of orders is comparatively quite small. Servers are similarly much lower volume than desktops and laptops.
But diversification only does you some good if the things you do actually earn money, or at the very least, function as a loss-leader. Since the PC unit was doing neither, it made more sense to cut losses and pull out. As far as I know, they're relying on software sales and partnerships to prop up the big stuff in the off-seasons. Seems to be working quite well actually.
Actually, no this is not bogus, mod parent down.
A couple of days ago, before this story hit, I happened to notice this feature when I did a google search for "loneliness" since I couldn't remember how to spell it. Got three images up at the top of the page, exactly like what the article showed. Subsequent attempts to get those results met with failure.
So this is just a case of Google rolling things out to specific subnets. Not a hoax guys.
Exactly. It took me nearly a month to find a single empty band in the Rochester, NY area. I'll eventually go the route you did, but in the meantime, I'd rather be able to happily listen to my iTrip instead of all this ClearChannel crap.
Absolutely. But my current car has only an AM/FM radio, but I intend to get rid of my current car at my earliest convenience, and any investment in sound related stuff would be counter productive. And besides, the FM transmitter is nice when riding in friends' cars.
Speaking of which... I wish the FCC would clear off a set of standard channels for this sole purpose. Most FM transmitters have about a 15-20 foot range. Having a set of, oh, 2-3 consistently clear channels would be amazingly nice. I hate crossing the city and having to set the transmitter to a different channel halfway through the trip. You think cell phone users are dangerous while driving? You should see someone trying to change the channel on an iTrip while driving.
If that wasn't scary enough, I know of someone (friend of a friend, the story is probably true) who bought a French shoulder-launched missle launcher and one live anti-tank missle off eBay for $200. I guess eBay noticed the auction soon after it ended and wasn't too happy about it, but he received the goods from the seller and has been since asking all his friends to donate a junk car they don't care about to a good cause.
But imagine what would happen if he were malicious and decided to blast an airplane with it while it was loading passengers on the ground or even just taxing around on the runway? I'm sure there are even worse things one could think of to do with it if one only applied oneself.
If that's not bad enough, I know of an ammo dump of sorts in Rochester, NY, where I live, that is relatively easily accessible if you're creative. Friends of mine stumbled upon it while exploring a set of old abandoned warehouses. They found numerous 500lb bombs that appeared to be practice bombs (I think they said most, maybe all, were painted blue) but also quite a few hand grenades, old ammo, and various random military paraphenalia. All WW2 era stuff, but some of which could be quite lethal in the wrong hands. None of it looks like anyone had even looked at it in 20 years.
I'm not exactly sure how that guy managed to get away with not having the FBI come knocking on his door really, since eBay should have probably reported that, but I am sure that I have zero faith in the various US intelligence agencies.
It's really a case of an impossible job, trying to beat the odds, and relying on terrorists overcomplicating plans and introducing little mistakes. Basically, they just hope the terrorists don't get lucky very often. From the perspective of trying to prevent terrorists bent on your destruction from accomplishing their goals, it's really an impossible task, no matter how good the intellegence agencies are. There's just too much of a luck element.
Honestly, I think that minimizing the desire for these people to kill us is the only thing that will substantially drop the terrorist threat. Draconic measures to reduce the incidence of laser pointer mischief is likely to just tick wrongly-accused people off and accomplish nothing. Or worse, give terrorists ideas they hadn't thought of. (Well, crap, now all the terrorists are gonna be buying foreign military equipment off eBay.)
If we move to a more unregulated system, what about all the little guys with iPods and small FM transmitters? Won't we have trouble finding a free channel?
Religion is more than a search for truth.
There are plenty of people who consider themselves to be religious or spiritual who appreciate the truth of science. However, even the atheists do not worship science or any element of it. Religion goes beyond mere questions of existance and purpose. It is the search for love as well as the search for truth.
Another interesting thing to note is that many people would suggest that Genesis 6:3 indicates that God reduced the lifespan of mankind to 120 years around the time of the Flood.
The NIV reads:
Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
However, the NET (geekiest translation of the Bible ever) reads:
So the Lord said, "My spirit will not remain in mankind indefinitely since they are mortal. They will remain for one hundred and twenty more years."
And supplies the following translator note:
Heb "his days will be one hundred and twenty years." Some interpret this to mean that the age expectancy of people from this point on would be one hundred twenty, but neither the subsequent narrative nor reality favors this. It is more likely that this refers to the time remaining between this announcement of judgment and the coming of the flood.
However, I don't really buy that a gross mistranslation of the magnitude you suggest could have occurred, especially since Genesis was originally written in Hebrew and stayed in the original Hebrew (supposedly by Moses) for a very, very long time. Long enough to produce a substantial manuscript record that tends to indicate very few transcription errors. If you want to argue that there were inaccuracies to the tune of a few months or so due to using a lunar calendar, OK, I'll bite. But a discrepancy of just under 900 years is almost laughable. This kind of error would have been noticed and documented long ago if it existed. The Bible has plenty enough opponents scouring it to spy something like this.
Sure, but Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft employees who got rich early on and decided to make games. Which is good because if they'd continued at Microsoft, we might have seen a sequel to Microsoft Bob.
So it's really not all that surprising that there's not a whole lot of direct support for Linux from Valve.
Incidentally though, if Microsoft were to break the Google Toolbar's ability to function inside IE as part of their hypothetical declaration of war on Google, it might end up being the nail in IE's coffin. Without the Google Toolbar, there is no way I'd be using IE willingly.
Please note that the registrar is http://www.markmonitor.com whose raison d'etre is protection of intellectual property. It could be as simple as Google trying to prevent anyone else from registering gbrowser.com and using it to make a quick buck. Or that plus a good way to keep their future options open. I'm not sure Google needs Microsoft declaring all-out war on them so soon after their IPO.
Two words: Voting Power.
Investors are already worried enough as it is about the difference in voting power between the two types of Google stocks. To reduce the price to a more reasonable level while still earning the same amount of money total in the IPO, they'd have to hand out more common stock, thus reducing the comparitive voting power that the owners have. Changing the voting power ratio from 10 to 1 to something like 20 to 1 would just make potential investors more worried.
Well, for starters, I'm going to just assume this is flame-bait and mostly ignore the bits regarding my "mission".
The issue of whether Windows is any easier to use than your example of Gnome is quite moot. It's not a question of what is easiest. If it were, we'd probably be considering much more expensive Macs as an option.
The issue is, that for a computer illiterate person, learning new things on a computer is simply much harder. If they already have learned how to use Windows and Microsoft Word, it's much easier to train users how to run a piece of software that looks and behaves like Microsoft Word.
It may, in fact, be easier to use Gnome, but that doesn't matter because Gnome is *not* what these users already know (i use this in the loosest sense of the word possible) how to use.
As for me knowing about linux, you couldn't be further from the truth. I have a second box running debian right next to me as I type this. The email servers at work are all unix machines, and the machines I have to use at college are all Solaris boxes.
As for the silly VB jab, actually, it's one of the few major languages I don't know. I know C/C++, Java, C#, Scheme/LISP, Smalltalk, COBOL, x86+68k Assembly, Python, Perl, and I'm learning Ruby at the moment.
My guess is that since you didn't flame the parent message, you're really just flaming this one because I work for a missions organization. Funny that. Last I heard, some people were planning on plugging our open source unicode rendering engine (Graphite) into linux. Won't that be funny. Now fliplap will have to abandon linux since it is partially the work of missionaries.
Seriously, I suggest you don't jump to conclusions so quickly next time.
It's a darn shame, but (bad or good) parenting makes a pretty lousy scape-goat too. Someone pretty close to me that I know decided at one point to go off on a rampage. Fortunately, his parents got wind of it and put a stop to it. But that's not my point. My point is, he had good parents who WERE instilling good moral values. Or at least, they were trying as best they knew how. He had been listening to Eminem a lot, but I don't think that has much to do with it either. While that might have provided fuel for his fantasy of running out and killing his family and schoolmates, that hardly was what put that desire into his head.
Oh wait... you wanted me to tell you what I think is the cause? Hmmm.... funny you should ask since I'm quite sure the answer is quite obvious to all of us if we'd just admit it.
We all get angry at some point in our lives. If you think otherwise, you're deluding yourself. Some people just decide, for one reason or another, to let it stew instead of letting it go. If you sit in your room, refusing to stop being angry about something, and you just stay there.... while most people eventually have the thought cross their heads that if I stop being angry about this, I'll feel better, other people come to the conclusion that if I act upon my anger, I'll feel better. And sometimes, acting on your anger ends up being on a larger scale than simply punching your brother.
There is quite simply, no causality to be had. Unless you count "The human race is inexorably flawed and will continue to make stupid decisions based on irrational notions" as causality.
I work for one of these non profit (missionary) organizations, and I think I can safely say that if Microsoft didn't do this for us, we wouldn't be able to do much of anything at all.
I'm writing code for a program that is targetted at computer illiterate users, often with machines that were donated to them and these machines are almost exclusively Windows machines.
The simple fact of the matter is, end users who lack technical know-how would be simply throwing their hands up in despair if they had to work on linux machines. And "tech support" is on the other side of the world and would require a satellite phone call.
In many cases, it is an issue of Microsoft donating software that never would have been bought otherwise. But it's not really driving the free software out. The free software was never there to drive out because it was too hard to set up and use.
Yes. Several times. With a nice galleon worth of pirates and some sneaky techniques involving land combat, it's very possible. (Use one army as bait and keep the others in the forest.) It's much harder to do coming in from the sea though.
There IS an IRC channel in #eve-test at irc.stratics.com; the people there are generally friendly and will gladly tell you what the latest patch is and give you a direct link so you can download it manually. Of course, you *could* just go to the download page for the eve beta website and find out yourself... you know, like everyone else.
If the problem is with the patch itself, just clean reinstall the original installation file and use one of the direct patches from the original to the latest version.
As for developer communication, commentary, and feedback, CCP has actually done a VERY good job. Dev chats are very very common compared to other games and their latest attempt at communication with the community (Council of Stellar Management, latest log is here.) is a very big step in the right direction.
Frankly, I don't think you're trying very hard.
Well, if you're having trouble with the navigation, there are several solutions.
For starters, the best way of navigating around is to select your destination from the tree list up in the upper left corner. Most people don't seem to even realize it's there.
But beyond that, if you hover your mouse over the icons, they will spread out and then you will be able to easily read them and select the one you want.
Also, there's a keyboard shortcut for freezing the labels in the current location. I think it's Ctrl-Shift-Alt but you should look it up. All the 500000 keyboard shortcuts are listed under the config tab in the ESC menu.
Personally, I consider EVE's navigation to be very power user friendly but a wee bit tough to get used to at first. Once you know what you're doing, it works quite smoothly.
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From my understanding, IBM's PC unit was always supposed to be a less seasonal cash-cow that would keep their mainframe business consistently in the black. Basically, mainframes take a long time to build and the number of orders is comparatively quite small. Servers are similarly much lower volume than desktops and laptops.
But diversification only does you some good if the things you do actually earn money, or at the very least, function as a loss-leader. Since the PC unit was doing neither, it made more sense to cut losses and pull out. As far as I know, they're relying on software sales and partnerships to prop up the big stuff in the off-seasons. Seems to be working quite well actually.
And now I'm curious whether people will mod that Funny or Insightful.
Just make them all write their code in Scheme/Lisp.
You forgot "Profit" in that list... gotta be there somewhere.
Actually, no this is not bogus, mod parent down. A couple of days ago, before this story hit, I happened to notice this feature when I did a google search for "loneliness" since I couldn't remember how to spell it. Got three images up at the top of the page, exactly like what the article showed. Subsequent attempts to get those results met with failure. So this is just a case of Google rolling things out to specific subnets. Not a hoax guys.
Exactly. It took me nearly a month to find a single empty band in the Rochester, NY area. I'll eventually go the route you did, but in the meantime, I'd rather be able to happily listen to my iTrip instead of all this ClearChannel crap.
And if you want to listen to the oldies station right after listening to some transmitted pod tunes?
Absolutely. But my current car has only an AM/FM radio, but I intend to get rid of my current car at my earliest convenience, and any investment in sound related stuff would be counter productive. And besides, the FM transmitter is nice when riding in friends' cars.
Speaking of which... I wish the FCC would clear off a set of standard channels for this sole purpose. Most FM transmitters have about a 15-20 foot range. Having a set of, oh, 2-3 consistently clear channels would be amazingly nice. I hate crossing the city and having to set the transmitter to a different channel halfway through the trip. You think cell phone users are dangerous while driving? You should see someone trying to change the channel on an iTrip while driving.
If that wasn't scary enough, I know of someone (friend of a friend, the story is probably true) who bought a French shoulder-launched missle launcher and one live anti-tank missle off eBay for $200. I guess eBay noticed the auction soon after it ended and wasn't too happy about it, but he received the goods from the seller and has been since asking all his friends to donate a junk car they don't care about to a good cause.
But imagine what would happen if he were malicious and decided to blast an airplane with it while it was loading passengers on the ground or even just taxing around on the runway? I'm sure there are even worse things one could think of to do with it if one only applied oneself.
If that's not bad enough, I know of an ammo dump of sorts in Rochester, NY, where I live, that is relatively easily accessible if you're creative. Friends of mine stumbled upon it while exploring a set of old abandoned warehouses. They found numerous 500lb bombs that appeared to be practice bombs (I think they said most, maybe all, were painted blue) but also quite a few hand grenades, old ammo, and various random military paraphenalia. All WW2 era stuff, but some of which could be quite lethal in the wrong hands. None of it looks like anyone had even looked at it in 20 years.
I'm not exactly sure how that guy managed to get away with not having the FBI come knocking on his door really, since eBay should have probably reported that, but I am sure that I have zero faith in the various US intelligence agencies.
It's really a case of an impossible job, trying to beat the odds, and relying on terrorists overcomplicating plans and introducing little mistakes. Basically, they just hope the terrorists don't get lucky very often. From the perspective of trying to prevent terrorists bent on your destruction from accomplishing their goals, it's really an impossible task, no matter how good the intellegence agencies are. There's just too much of a luck element.
Honestly, I think that minimizing the desire for these people to kill us is the only thing that will substantially drop the terrorist threat. Draconic measures to reduce the incidence of laser pointer mischief is likely to just tick wrongly-accused people off and accomplish nothing. Or worse, give terrorists ideas they hadn't thought of. (Well, crap, now all the terrorists are gonna be buying foreign military equipment off eBay.)
If we move to a more unregulated system, what about all the little guys with iPods and small FM transmitters? Won't we have trouble finding a free channel?
Religion is more than a search for truth. There are plenty of people who consider themselves to be religious or spiritual who appreciate the truth of science. However, even the atheists do not worship science or any element of it. Religion goes beyond mere questions of existance and purpose. It is the search for love as well as the search for truth.
Another interesting thing to note is that many people would suggest that Genesis 6:3 indicates that God reduced the lifespan of mankind to 120 years around the time of the Flood. The NIV reads: Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years." However, the NET (geekiest translation of the Bible ever) reads: So the Lord said, "My spirit will not remain in mankind indefinitely since they are mortal. They will remain for one hundred and twenty more years." And supplies the following translator note: Heb "his days will be one hundred and twenty years." Some interpret this to mean that the age expectancy of people from this point on would be one hundred twenty, but neither the subsequent narrative nor reality favors this. It is more likely that this refers to the time remaining between this announcement of judgment and the coming of the flood. However, I don't really buy that a gross mistranslation of the magnitude you suggest could have occurred, especially since Genesis was originally written in Hebrew and stayed in the original Hebrew (supposedly by Moses) for a very, very long time. Long enough to produce a substantial manuscript record that tends to indicate very few transcription errors. If you want to argue that there were inaccuracies to the tune of a few months or so due to using a lunar calendar, OK, I'll bite. But a discrepancy of just under 900 years is almost laughable. This kind of error would have been noticed and documented long ago if it existed. The Bible has plenty enough opponents scouring it to spy something like this.
Sure, but Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft employees who got rich early on and decided to make games. Which is good because if they'd continued at Microsoft, we might have seen a sequel to Microsoft Bob.
So it's really not all that surprising that there's not a whole lot of direct support for Linux from Valve.
Well aware of this. I have to use IE at work, but I frequently use FireFox at home.
Incidentally though, if Microsoft were to break the Google Toolbar's ability to function inside IE as part of their hypothetical declaration of war on Google, it might end up being the nail in IE's coffin. Without the Google Toolbar, there is no way I'd be using IE willingly.
Please note that the registrar is http://www.markmonitor.com whose raison d'etre is protection of intellectual property. It could be as simple as Google trying to prevent anyone else from registering gbrowser.com and using it to make a quick buck. Or that plus a good way to keep their future options open. I'm not sure Google needs Microsoft declaring all-out war on them so soon after their IPO.
Two words: Voting Power. Investors are already worried enough as it is about the difference in voting power between the two types of Google stocks. To reduce the price to a more reasonable level while still earning the same amount of money total in the IPO, they'd have to hand out more common stock, thus reducing the comparitive voting power that the owners have. Changing the voting power ratio from 10 to 1 to something like 20 to 1 would just make potential investors more worried.
Well, for starters, I'm going to just assume this is flame-bait and mostly ignore the bits regarding my "mission".
The issue of whether Windows is any easier to use than your example of Gnome is quite moot. It's not a question of what is easiest. If it were, we'd probably be considering much more expensive Macs as an option.
The issue is, that for a computer illiterate person, learning new things on a computer is simply much harder. If they already have learned how to use Windows and Microsoft Word, it's much easier to train users how to run a piece of software that looks and behaves like Microsoft Word.
It may, in fact, be easier to use Gnome, but that doesn't matter because Gnome is *not* what these users already know (i use this in the loosest sense of the word possible) how to use.
As for me knowing about linux, you couldn't be further from the truth. I have a second box running debian right next to me as I type this. The email servers at work are all unix machines, and the machines I have to use at college are all Solaris boxes.
As for the silly VB jab, actually, it's one of the few major languages I don't know. I know C/C++, Java, C#, Scheme/LISP, Smalltalk, COBOL, x86+68k Assembly, Python, Perl, and I'm learning Ruby at the moment. My guess is that since you didn't flame the parent message, you're really just flaming this one because I work for a missions organization. Funny that. Last I heard, some people were planning on plugging our open source unicode rendering engine (Graphite) into linux. Won't that be funny. Now fliplap will have to abandon linux since it is partially the work of missionaries. Seriously, I suggest you don't jump to conclusions so quickly next time.
It's a darn shame, but (bad or good) parenting makes a pretty lousy scape-goat too. Someone pretty close to me that I know decided at one point to go off on a rampage. Fortunately, his parents got wind of it and put a stop to it. But that's not my point. My point is, he had good parents who WERE instilling good moral values. Or at least, they were trying as best they knew how. He had been listening to Eminem a lot, but I don't think that has much to do with it either. While that might have provided fuel for his fantasy of running out and killing his family and schoolmates, that hardly was what put that desire into his head. Oh wait... you wanted me to tell you what I think is the cause? Hmmm.... funny you should ask since I'm quite sure the answer is quite obvious to all of us if we'd just admit it. We all get angry at some point in our lives. If you think otherwise, you're deluding yourself. Some people just decide, for one reason or another, to let it stew instead of letting it go. If you sit in your room, refusing to stop being angry about something, and you just stay there.... while most people eventually have the thought cross their heads that if I stop being angry about this, I'll feel better, other people come to the conclusion that if I act upon my anger, I'll feel better. And sometimes, acting on your anger ends up being on a larger scale than simply punching your brother. There is quite simply, no causality to be had. Unless you count "The human race is inexorably flawed and will continue to make stupid decisions based on irrational notions" as causality.
I work for one of these non profit (missionary) organizations, and I think I can safely say that if Microsoft didn't do this for us, we wouldn't be able to do much of anything at all.
I'm writing code for a program that is targetted at computer illiterate users, often with machines that were donated to them and these machines are almost exclusively Windows machines.
The simple fact of the matter is, end users who lack technical know-how would be simply throwing their hands up in despair if they had to work on linux machines. And "tech support" is on the other side of the world and would require a satellite phone call.
In many cases, it is an issue of Microsoft donating software that never would have been bought otherwise. But it's not really driving the free software out. The free software was never there to drive out because it was too hard to set up and use.
Yes. Several times. With a nice galleon worth of pirates and some sneaky techniques involving land combat, it's very possible. (Use one army as bait and keep the others in the forest.) It's much harder to do coming in from the sea though.
...paid product placement links in the text itself, as in the Truman Show, except, well... online.
There IS an IRC channel in #eve-test at irc.stratics.com; the people there are generally friendly and will gladly tell you what the latest patch is and give you a direct link so you can download it manually. Of course, you *could* just go to the download page for the eve beta website and find out yourself... you know, like everyone else. If the problem is with the patch itself, just clean reinstall the original installation file and use one of the direct patches from the original to the latest version. As for developer communication, commentary, and feedback, CCP has actually done a VERY good job. Dev chats are very very common compared to other games and their latest attempt at communication with the community (Council of Stellar Management, latest log is here.) is a very big step in the right direction. Frankly, I don't think you're trying very hard.
Well, if you're having trouble with the navigation, there are several solutions.
For starters, the best way of navigating around is to select your destination from the tree list up in the upper left corner. Most people don't seem to even realize it's there.
But beyond that, if you hover your mouse over the icons, they will spread out and then you will be able to easily read them and select the one you want.
Also, there's a keyboard shortcut for freezing the labels in the current location. I think it's Ctrl-Shift-Alt but you should look it up. All the 500000 keyboard shortcuts are listed under the config tab in the ESC menu.
Personally, I consider EVE's navigation to be very power user friendly but a wee bit tough to get used to at first. Once you know what you're doing, it works quite smoothly.