Personally I don't think it's a big enough issue for him to care that much about it, but I doubt he'd discourage such action.
The biggest "Doh!" is that the photographer who took the pic of Kerry is a "professor of journalism ethics" at UC Berkeley, and I doubt he's too pleased that his photo was stolen and used in a forgery.
You could go one step further and make some assumptions - that a UC Berkley professor who photographed an anti-war rally might possibly be slightly leftward leaning and have a political motive in pursing this... =)
In any case, I'd say the whole Jane Fonda connection isn't that much of an issue for liberals - it's more of a conservative fixation. As such, it struck me as an (amateurish) attempt to damage his image on a national scale given his standing as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
Rove is dirty and ruthless, but I don't think he's that stupid. Suspicions point to the right, but yeah, it could have been anyone - I was just trying to be funny...
Parody and "pranksters" is one thing - no one lost any sleep over this one or the pic of Dubya wearing the One Ring - but this is different. This was passed off as a legitimate AP photo to news organizations complete with fabricated story.
And if you RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot) it's Corbis going after them for copyright violations, not Kerry.
This is the sort of double-standard that always kills MS - they can't win no matter what they do.
Apple bundles a browser with their OS, a media player, mail filtering, pop-up blocking etc. and everyone applauds them - MS tries to do so and people scream anti-trust.
Remember when MS put an MSN icon on the desktop of Windows 95 and people screamed bloody murder? I like how OS X tries to stuff.MAC services down your throat when you set up a system... =)
I guess the message is market leaders can't improve their product (i.e. engage in anti-competetive behavior) but everyone else can...
More often than not when MS adds stuff like this to their OS they provide very basic capabilities which can be improved upon by third parties. And it's often licensed from an established vendor. ZIP capabilities are licensed from Nico, but WinZip is still much better. CD burning in XP is licensed from Roxio, but it's very basic, and if you want more capabilities you can buy a commercial package. When they added backup to NT is was a slimmed down verion of the old BackupExec. NT defragmentation was a licensed version of Disk Keeper, and so on...
MS has done some messed up stuff, and I hardly consider myself a fanboy, but cut them some slack already... =)
Who else remembers the scratch-n-sniff card included with the Leather Goddesses of Phobos video game? It was an old Infocom text-based game from back in the early/mid-80s for those of you too young to remember, back when scratch-n-sniff stickers were all the rage.
When you reached a certain point in the game, it would mention a smell, and you had to scratch the appropriate number on the card to see what it was... =)
I think Amelio will always have a bad rap, but he performed the essential role he was hired for - hatchet man.
See, you hire someone, have them cut lots of fat out of the company, fire lots of folks, and consequently everyone hates them. Then you get rid of them and in swoops the savior to take control of a leaner, restructured company without any of the ill will because you just fired everyone's friends.
While I understand your sentiment, the entire PC "revolution" is based on giving too much power to the user.
I'm sure 20-30 years ago the world was filled with technical brahmins who thought computing power belonged under the care of the knowledgable few with access to the the company or university mainframe.
God forbid users actually have any sort of data processing capabilities on their desk, or much less their homes, they'll just mess things up! Not that those are REAL computers anyway...
How many people here taught themselves most of what they know about computers by screwing around on their own and breaking stuff?
I remember running Rhapsody DR2 on Intel - but that was back when they were working on slapping the OS9 UI onto NextStep. It never went any further than that.
Darwin can run on x86, but, uh... =)
In any case, it's never going to happen - Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. The make their money selling Macs, not the OS, the same way iTunes fuels iPod sales...
I think part of this is Palm's move to (in general) marginalize their own Palm Desktop application. On the Windows side they've already begun making the Palm work better with Outlook - the latest Palms can HotSync with Outlook without any third party software.
On the OS X side Apple already has the same framework in place with iSync, iCal and their Address Book.
At some point they obviously made the decision to let Apple and/or a third party worry about how to make it work and forego the cost of development themselves. And MarkSpace is already fairly well established - the Sony Clie has never synced with OS X and needs the Missing Sync software to work.
That's also ignoring that Garnet (support was only dropped from Cobalt) upon which it sounds like most consumer level handhelds will be based, continues PalmOS 5.X and will presumably continue to work with existing Palm Desktop software...?
Not really, it depends a lot on the situation. My company got hit with this the very first day - new virus, not even named yet, got past the antivirus stuff on the mail server, which was Sendmail, not Exchange. Of course there's no defs for it, so user's antivirus software didn't pick it up.
Those of us in IT laughed at it and go, "Pfft, obviously a trojan or virus" and just deleted it. But in a company of thousands, there's going to be people that run this stuff - not necessarily idiots, but computers are still specialized knowledge to a lot of folks. If you work for a technology company or live on Slashdot your world view is slightly warped. =)
So the admins quickly move to block ZIP files at the mail server until they can filter it out, we wait for updated virus defs for users, figure out what is does and how to get rid of it, go through the server logs to get the addresses of all the 100+ internal infected systems, track them down, and then support folks have to get at them to clean them, etc.
A lot of times there's very little you can do about these things other than wait for them to happen and hope they hit someone else first so you know how to protect yourself. But when you're first... =|
I mean, though honestly it sucks, I can understand companies offshoring programming work - programming transcends the language barrier, and it's obviously cheaper. Arguments that it's "better" are specious, no one is stupid enough to believe it's about anything but the bottom line.
What I really don't understand is companies offshoring technical support. Just yesterday I had to help a user with a Palm problem that he wasn't able to resolve because he couldn't understand the tech support rep's thick Indian accent. Tech support is difficult enough when dealing with a non-technical user, but throw in the language barrier and it becomes a joke. The only explanation I can think of is that the companies simply don't give a shit if their support sucks, which probably wouldn't be too surprising a statement...
The ultimate in backlash and overhype. I was as disappointed as everyone else, especially with the third, but you would have thought there might be a token nod for visual effects, especially since only three movies are nominated there, and most categories have five nominations? Ouch...
I mean, they have a neat idea, but what can they do with it? Users aren't going to pay for it. Advertising? Even with VC funding last fall performance has gotten progressively worse over the past year so that it's largely unusable most of the time - and over which time I can't think of any change I can recall. It's still beta, still has the same UI...
It seemed like an ideal candidate to be swallowed up by Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL - as a service to offer to bring in users or whatever.
I mean, I think at least Google could have thrown the hardware and bandwidth at it it so desperately needs?
I have a Mac Classic (SE30) down in the garage that's been running the old After Dark fishtank screensaver for years now. Every month or so I actually go into the garage and marvel that it's still running - I think it's around 12 years old now. =)
I did my stretch of unemployment as well, and I'd never bothered to get any certifications at all. I worked with people that knew me and knew what I could do and that was enough (at the time).
Plus during the boom I'd interviewed my share of paper IT people that signed up for crash courses to get their certs but knew jack shit about IT, so I had a fairly cynical opinion of them.
That said, with most companies you need to get past HR first, and HR are for the most part clueless about IT, so... they think the certs mean something.
So the certs aren't bad, and may get you past HR and get you an interview, but unless you've got the smarts or experience to back them up you're not going to get much farther.
Offhand I'd say it sounds like the movies actually making it to the internet come further down the chain from him. The article doesn't mention him encoding movies (DIVX, SVCD, whatever) just copying them. He makes five or six copies for friends, maybe they make copies, and eventually one winds up in the hands of group that encodes it and posts it. Would explain why there's lots of different groups releasing encodes, even of the same screener.
I stand corrected then, but it is a convoluted mess, hehe, and I confused a few points...
Caldera as a company was split shortly before filing suit - it was split into (at least) Caldera and Caldera Systems. Caldera Systems was the Linux part, Caldera was a holding company that existed solely to sue Microsoft. In fact, they filed suit against Microsoft the very day they purchased DR-DOS from Novell...
Apparently Caldera Systems as a compnay didn't profit from the MS settlement at all (only Caldera stockholders did, MS nemesis and Novell co-founder Noorda chief amongst them), but their IPO was on the exact same day Caldera announced the MS settlement, hehe...
The parallels are eerie though...
1. Buy "dead" technology from Novell...
2. Sue
3. Profit!
Caldera as a company was founded with the sole purpose of suing Microsoft over DR-DOS, which they had acquired. Litigation is nothing new, it's been their business model from day one.
...and the first sponsored link that shows up for me is "The Official LEGO Shop" - shop.lego.com. =)
Can't say I've used them in 20 years or so, but damn I loved legos as a kid. I used to have a giant plastic bin into which I tossed all the pieces from all the kits and would just make stuff.
Though I remember this one kid I used to play with sometimes, he'd get the kits and make what was on the cover of the box, and then that was it. He'd usually put them on a shelf and never take them apart. One time I tried to and he got mad at me and accused me of "breaking" his legos. LOL!
I'll agree I found RealOne to be a terribly bloated and invasive product that I went out of my way NOT to use - and having just installed v10 it, uh, doesn't look any different.
But I was thinking, you know, given the market, what is Real supposed to do? How can they compete with Apple and Microsoft who subsidize the cost of their media players with hardware and software sales?
People on the internet will just not buy certain kinds of software. Look at Netscape.
So how do they stay alive? A music store? Apple has already said that at $.99 the music store doesn't make any money - it just pays for itself and helps sell iPods.
Even if RealPlayer was an efficient and elegant program would anyone pay for it?
Outside of suing Microsoft for $1 billion how else can they make money other than spamming you, acting like spyware and stuffing advertising in your face?
Not saying it's right, but, what are their options?
It's not necessarily a case of someone waiting around until a technology becomes popular, though I don't know Optima's story. There are cases where companies are acquired specifically for their patent portfolios, or leadership may have changed in the company. And in these hard times I'm sure it's not too unusual for a company to hire some lawyers to look through their patents to try and find an "alternative revenue model" as it were.
Not defending them, just saying... =)
I think people ignore the fact that innovation had to die (in a sense) for the web to gain broader acceptance. I mean, the basics haven't really changed since the days of Mosaic - Home, Back, Forward, Bookmarks. It's clean, simple, and makes sense to your Grandmother.
The back-end stuff like CSS, PHP, etc. is all transparent to your average end-user, and innovation hasn't really died there I don't think.
When you start reinventing the wheel because you can, or innovating for innovation's sake, or adding in lots of "neat" features you just end up with a confused and bloated product.
Think of Word, where something like 95% of the people use 5% of the features. I just made up those statistics of course, but you know what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest "Doh!" is that the photographer who took the pic of Kerry is a "professor of journalism ethics" at UC Berkeley, and I doubt he's too pleased that his photo was stolen and used in a forgery.
You could go one step further and make some assumptions - that a UC Berkley professor who photographed an anti-war rally might possibly be slightly leftward leaning and have a political motive in pursing this... =)
Original Article
So much for the conservative sense of humor... =P
In any case, I'd say the whole Jane Fonda connection isn't that much of an issue for liberals - it's more of a conservative fixation. As such, it struck me as an (amateurish) attempt to damage his image on a national scale given his standing as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
Rove is dirty and ruthless, but I don't think he's that stupid. Suspicions point to the right, but yeah, it could have been anyone - I was just trying to be funny...
1. Grab stick
2. Remove from ass
^_^
And if you RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot) it's Corbis going after them for copyright violations, not Kerry.
...some Karl Rove lackey is reformatting his hard drive right now? =)
This is the sort of double-standard that always kills MS - they can't win no matter what they do.
.MAC services down your throat when you set up a system... =)
Apple bundles a browser with their OS, a media player, mail filtering, pop-up blocking etc. and everyone applauds them - MS tries to do so and people scream anti-trust.
Remember when MS put an MSN icon on the desktop of Windows 95 and people screamed bloody murder? I like how OS X tries to stuff
I guess the message is market leaders can't improve their product (i.e. engage in anti-competetive behavior) but everyone else can...
More often than not when MS adds stuff like this to their OS they provide very basic capabilities which can be improved upon by third parties. And it's often licensed from an established vendor. ZIP capabilities are licensed from Nico, but WinZip is still much better. CD burning in XP is licensed from Roxio, but it's very basic, and if you want more capabilities you can buy a commercial package. When they added backup to NT is was a slimmed down verion of the old BackupExec. NT defragmentation was a licensed version of Disk Keeper, and so on...
MS has done some messed up stuff, and I hardly consider myself a fanboy, but cut them some slack already... =)
When you reached a certain point in the game, it would mention a smell, and you had to scratch the appropriate number on the card to see what it was... =)
http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/leather/leath er.html
I think Amelio will always have a bad rap, but he performed the essential role he was hired for - hatchet man.
See, you hire someone, have them cut lots of fat out of the company, fire lots of folks, and consequently everyone hates them. Then you get rid of them and in swoops the savior to take control of a leaner, restructured company without any of the ill will because you just fired everyone's friends.
And someone, somewhere, owes you a sense of humor. =)
While I understand your sentiment, the entire PC "revolution" is based on giving too much power to the user.
I'm sure 20-30 years ago the world was filled with technical brahmins who thought computing power belonged under the care of the knowledgable few with access to the the company or university mainframe.
God forbid users actually have any sort of data processing capabilities on their desk, or much less their homes, they'll just mess things up! Not that those are REAL computers anyway...
How many people here taught themselves most of what they know about computers by screwing around on their own and breaking stuff?
I remember running Rhapsody DR2 on Intel - but that was back when they were working on slapping the OS9 UI onto NextStep. It never went any further than that.
Darwin can run on x86, but, uh... =)
In any case, it's never going to happen - Apple is first and foremost a hardware company. The make their money selling Macs, not the OS, the same way iTunes fuels iPod sales...
I think part of this is Palm's move to (in general) marginalize their own Palm Desktop application. On the Windows side they've already begun making the Palm work better with Outlook - the latest Palms can HotSync with Outlook without any third party software.
On the OS X side Apple already has the same framework in place with iSync, iCal and their Address Book.
At some point they obviously made the decision to let Apple and/or a third party worry about how to make it work and forego the cost of development themselves. And MarkSpace is already fairly well established - the Sony Clie has never synced with OS X and needs the Missing Sync software to work.
That's also ignoring that Garnet (support was only dropped from Cobalt) upon which it sounds like most consumer level handhelds will be based, continues PalmOS 5.X and will presumably continue to work with existing Palm Desktop software...?
Those of us in IT laughed at it and go, "Pfft, obviously a trojan or virus" and just deleted it. But in a company of thousands, there's going to be people that run this stuff - not necessarily idiots, but computers are still specialized knowledge to a lot of folks. If you work for a technology company or live on Slashdot your world view is slightly warped. =)
So the admins quickly move to block ZIP files at the mail server until they can filter it out, we wait for updated virus defs for users, figure out what is does and how to get rid of it, go through the server logs to get the addresses of all the 100+ internal infected systems, track them down, and then support folks have to get at them to clean them, etc.
A lot of times there's very little you can do about these things other than wait for them to happen and hope they hit someone else first so you know how to protect yourself. But when you're first... =|
What I really don't understand is companies offshoring technical support. Just yesterday I had to help a user with a Palm problem that he wasn't able to resolve because he couldn't understand the tech support rep's thick Indian accent. Tech support is difficult enough when dealing with a non-technical user, but throw in the language barrier and it becomes a joke. The only explanation I can think of is that the companies simply don't give a shit if their support sucks, which probably wouldn't be too surprising a statement...
The ultimate in backlash and overhype. I was as disappointed as everyone else, especially with the third, but you would have thought there might be a token nod for visual effects, especially since only three movies are nominated there, and most categories have five nominations? Ouch...
It seemed like an ideal candidate to be swallowed up by Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL - as a service to offer to bring in users or whatever.
I mean, I think at least Google could have thrown the hardware and bandwidth at it it so desperately needs?
I have a Mac Classic (SE30) down in the garage that's been running the old After Dark fishtank screensaver for years now. Every month or so I actually go into the garage and marvel that it's still running - I think it's around 12 years old now. =)
Plus during the boom I'd interviewed my share of paper IT people that signed up for crash courses to get their certs but knew jack shit about IT, so I had a fairly cynical opinion of them.
That said, with most companies you need to get past HR first, and HR are for the most part clueless about IT, so... they think the certs mean something.
So the certs aren't bad, and may get you past HR and get you an interview, but unless you've got the smarts or experience to back them up you're not going to get much farther.
Offhand I'd say it sounds like the movies actually making it to the internet come further down the chain from him. The article doesn't mention him encoding movies (DIVX, SVCD, whatever) just copying them. He makes five or six copies for friends, maybe they make copies, and eventually one winds up in the hands of group that encodes it and posts it. Would explain why there's lots of different groups releasing encodes, even of the same screener.
Caldera as a company was split shortly before filing suit - it was split into (at least) Caldera and Caldera Systems. Caldera Systems was the Linux part, Caldera was a holding company that existed solely to sue Microsoft. In fact, they filed suit against Microsoft the very day they purchased DR-DOS from Novell...
Apparently Caldera Systems as a compnay didn't profit from the MS settlement at all (only Caldera stockholders did, MS nemesis and Novell co-founder Noorda chief amongst them), but their IPO was on the exact same day Caldera announced the MS settlement, hehe...
The parallels are eerie though...
1. Buy "dead" technology from Novell...
2. Sue
3. Profit!
Caldera as a company was founded with the sole purpose of suing Microsoft over DR-DOS, which they had acquired. Litigation is nothing new, it's been their business model from day one.
Wow, I hope you got a good price for your soul. =)
Can't say I've used them in 20 years or so, but damn I loved legos as a kid. I used to have a giant plastic bin into which I tossed all the pieces from all the kits and would just make stuff.
Though I remember this one kid I used to play with sometimes, he'd get the kits and make what was on the cover of the box, and then that was it. He'd usually put them on a shelf and never take them apart. One time I tried to and he got mad at me and accused me of "breaking" his legos. LOL!
I'll agree I found RealOne to be a terribly bloated and invasive product that I went out of my way NOT to use - and having just installed v10 it, uh, doesn't look any different. But I was thinking, you know, given the market, what is Real supposed to do? How can they compete with Apple and Microsoft who subsidize the cost of their media players with hardware and software sales? People on the internet will just not buy certain kinds of software. Look at Netscape. So how do they stay alive? A music store? Apple has already said that at $.99 the music store doesn't make any money - it just pays for itself and helps sell iPods. Even if RealPlayer was an efficient and elegant program would anyone pay for it? Outside of suing Microsoft for $1 billion how else can they make money other than spamming you, acting like spyware and stuffing advertising in your face? Not saying it's right, but, what are their options?
It's not necessarily a case of someone waiting around until a technology becomes popular, though I don't know Optima's story. There are cases where companies are acquired specifically for their patent portfolios, or leadership may have changed in the company. And in these hard times I'm sure it's not too unusual for a company to hire some lawyers to look through their patents to try and find an "alternative revenue model" as it were. Not defending them, just saying... =)
I think people ignore the fact that innovation had to die (in a sense) for the web to gain broader acceptance. I mean, the basics haven't really changed since the days of Mosaic - Home, Back, Forward, Bookmarks. It's clean, simple, and makes sense to your Grandmother.
The back-end stuff like CSS, PHP, etc. is all transparent to your average end-user, and innovation hasn't really died there I don't think.
When you start reinventing the wheel because you can, or innovating for innovation's sake, or adding in lots of "neat" features you just end up with a confused and bloated product.
Think of Word, where something like 95% of the people use 5% of the features. I just made up those statistics of course, but you know what I mean.