How the fuck does email get "lost"? How could that happen? Even a server crash should not cause that.
Don't worry. I'm sure that if you ask nicely, the NSA/Homeland Security will give you a copy of your email.
Provided of course, you file a Freedom of Information Act request, your fingerprints, DNA stool urine & blood samples, and the request is judged not to be affecting National Security in any way...
Let's face it, any real innovation by Microsoft in the last 15+ years has been strangled by their own Marketting department. Anything 'new' they came up with is either a return to the past (for instance, Vista separating the video routines from the kernel was the Way It Was Done in NT 3.5 & 4.0!), or something they stole or bought from somebody else. That's the problem with marketting-driven companies. It's all about the product. The marketting geeks made the programmers take out WinFS and a whole bunch of other stuff that would have actually helped Vista in favor of Yet Another GUI Facelift, things the techies had been planning on implementing for YEARS.
Word is, Microsoft has dumped over 7 billion into this turkey. Wonder how much of it was for writing stuff Marketting wouldn't let them use and code monkeying to plug up the gaping wounds when they were forced to tear out the new code...
The right of private firearm ownership is not, in my opinion, not directly covered by the Second Amendment, which I believe is about the right of communities to arm themselves. Most quotations from the founders that are used to support private firearm ownership are more accurately read in that light.
So the question becomes where the line of self-defense is drawn. I think we can both agree that the average citizen shouldn't have the right to own a bazooka or a nuclear warhead for example. Those implements could be used for self-defense, but it's just going too far. Therefore, we can both agree that there is a limit to the types of arms we can bear. The issue then becomes a question of what is permissible. There are many people, myself included, that claim that we should not have handguns for the same reason we should not be allowed to have bazookas.
OK, so you're advocating expanding police forces by an order of magnitude to 'protect' everybody? Mind if I ask how you intend to pay for it?
I don't believe in limiting availability of weaponry. Show me you know how to care for and properly use a bazooka, and I have no problems with you owning one. I'll trust you not to blow up my house.
As far as police go, first off, the old adage of 'there's never a cop around when you need one' is rather true for the most part. I don't count on them to 'protect' me. And yes, I live in a state with an 'open carry' law. Tends to make for a politer society, IMNSFBHO.
And besides, police aren't there to 'prevent crime' or any other such nonsense, they're there to clean up the mess. Last time I looked, the cops weren't busting down doors because somebody might commit a crime, or had the capacity and ability to commit a crime, they bust down doors to get to the people who committed a crime.
In short, why, yes, I do believe in the 2nd Amendment. I think gun safety should be manditory in schools to teach these kids what they're getting into when they play with guns. Learning gun safety is important. I grew up around guns, as did many of my neighbors, and we all learned about them at an early age what they can and cannot do. Nobody within 30 miles of me died of an 'accidental gun discharge'. This leads me to think that maybe the 'answer' to 'gun violence' is education. Problem with that is, it doesn't 'control' citizenry like a gun ban does. And it'll cost a bit of money instead of making Yet Another Criminal Class like a ban would. And besides, all a gun ban really does is drive up the street price of a gun. Think 'Prohibition.' Now that really did wonders for crime, didn't it?
Word. It's a _lot_ harder to kill someone without a handgun.
Quantity one baseball bat.
Quantity one steak knife.
Quantity one SUV.
So when we gonna outlaw baseball bats, steak knives, & SUVs? When we gonna outlaw plastic bottles & gasoline (used in making crude incindiary devices, according to a couple of ALF nutballs)?
If all black people ( and their white neighbors ) obey the laws, it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately there is a small criminal minority who will retain their guns for the purpose of using them to commit crimes. And their law-abiding victims will be defenseless, unless they happen to be lucky enough to have a cop nearby at just the right moment.
The problem is, in banning all guns, you instantly turn people who hang onto their guns into criminals. Just what we need, more criminals. As if our prisons here in the US aren't crowded enough, let's throw MORE people in them. It's a good source of dirt-cheap labor for corporations who run factories inside the prisons...
And does the old phrase 'when they pry my cold dead fingers from it' ring a bell?
And people wonder why one of my fave t-shirts back in the day was one that had the barrel of a handgun pointed at the reader with the words "Come back to Detroit / We missed you the first time" on it.
Yes, but you usians have the option to shoot the lawyers when they come to serve you the subpoena.
NOT recommended. If the l*wy*r survived, they'd sue yer ass through bankruptcy.
And besides, process servers deliver subpoenas, not l*wy*rs.
Re:laptops, clitmouse, touchpad, andmouse
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
The "clitmouse" refers to a laptop mousing device that is basically composed of a pressure sensitive rubber bud, nestled in the keyboard, usually between the F, G, and T keys. They work almost like a mini joystick, and to some, resemble a certain part of the female anatomy...of course most of us on Slashdot wouldn't know what/where that is..
Ok, I never heard them called that. Though I don't recall what was generally used, I have heard "nipple" used, I used "stick".
We always called them 'nudgers'. My Thinkpad T22 has one. Personally, I like a touchpad, but as the woman said as she kissed the cow's ass, 'It's all just a matter of taste'...
Apple wants to have an image, for example they've never released a low-end machine.
You might want to be careful throwing that word "never" around.
The Apple//e computer was not a particularly high end machine, even in its own day.
Um, yeah, it was. At the time, the original IB PCs were shipping with a 4 MHz processor choked down to an 8 bit bus, and 64 kilobytes of RAM installed. IBM didn't think anybody needed more than 64k of RAM.
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Err...well, yes Macs are more expensive because Apple ships them with an OS. That's because Apple has to recover the cost of developing that OS through sales of Mac hardware. Note that I'm not comparing the cost of Macs and PCs here, I'm talking about the cost of a Mac as an absolute. A Mac would be cheaper if Apple didn't have to develop OS X. Whether it would be worthwhile for them to do that I leave as a (rather obvious) exercise for the reader.
Let's talk economies of scale.
Assume you spend 20 million bucks to create an operating system. Remember, this is a thought experiment, the 'real world' costs might be higher. Or lower. But in any case, me & thee will never know. Assume the marketting wanks are lying when they say 'This operating system cost $DOLLARAMOUNT to produce'. Odds are, they are lying.
Your brand spanking new computer is the only computer in the universe that can run this operating system. Thus, its price is 20 million dollars plus the hardware costs.
Assume now that you sell 20 million copies of that computer. Your amortised cost of developing that operating system is now down to 1 dollar per computer. Sell 100 million of those computers and the cost is now down to 5 cents a computer. And the more you sell, the cheaper the operating system becomes. The unit price of the computer stays the same, say 800 dollars retail, Parts would run you maybe 150 in quantity. (Hell, I can build my own machine for under $300) You get half the retail price of the computer from the wholesaler, who jacks up the price to 600 dollars and sells it to the retail outlet who adds 200 dollars to bring it up to the full $800 retail price.
You, as the manufacturer, make $400 for every computer you sell to the wholesaler. If you sell 20 million computers to the wholesaler, your profit margin is $249/machine. You've paid for the $150/machine & amortised the 20 million for the OS. Your total profit on that 20 million unit 'run' is $4,980,000,000. That's right, almost 5 billion dollars. Starting to see why vendor lockin is such a big deal to Microsoft and Apple?
The questions you now need to ask yourself are, 1) How much did Apple spend to develop their OSes? 2) How many units did they actually manufacture and sell? 3) How much did Microsoft spend to develop Vista? 4) How many copies of Vista are going to be shoved down everybody's throat?
It costs me about 50 cents to get a DVD I can write to. How much is Microsoft going to spend per DVD for several MILLION copies of Vista? I'm guessing pennies. And that's just for the home market. OEMs will put Vista on the hard drive with a reinstall partition that's hidden away from Joe Sixpack.
Re:Integration has always been Apple's differentia
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
``As time went on, MS forced it's OS onto every machines, and created the monopoly.''
I don't think that's how it went. Rather, IBM licensed DOS from Microsoft for shipping with the PC, and the clones did the same (although a few might have used MS-DOS clones). However, PCs with DOS weren't the only game in town: Apple sold Macintoshes with Mac OS, Commodore sold Amigas with AmigaOS, Atari the ST with GEM and GEMDOS, and, of course, there were the home computers like the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, and Unix workstations, and, later on, the BeBox and the NeXTcube.
IBM licensed PC-DOS from Microsoft for every PC that hit the street. The clone makers licensed MS-DOS because it was compatible with IBM, but not bound to IBM by copyright. Microsoft 'conquered' the desktop because no business would buy anything but IBM because 'nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM'. The clone market took off because now people could buy a cheaper computer for home and take their work home at night.
The killer app for the PC was Lotus. Everybody had it. You could put in your floppy, turn the computer on, it'd come up, you could work all day, save off your work at 5 & just redswitch it. Lotus was an industry standard.
Apple, SGI, and Commodore ended up fighting it out in the graphics arena. When it was all said and done, Apple pretty much killed them all; graphics was the Mac's killer app.
The reason Microsoft came to be in such a dominant position is that people chose the PC over competing systems. By the time DOS began to see serious competition on the PC, Microsoft was already firmly established. Even now, with a multitude of operating systems available for running on PC hardware, people continue to choose Microsoft. That's what makes Microsoft so strong. Microsoft isn't forcing their OS onto anyone, but people largely refuse to buy computers that don't come with Microsoft Windows.
People chose the PC for business reasons, not because it was so much better than anything else. Back in The Day, IBM meant business. And no clone maker would put anything other than DOS on their machines so they'd be compatible with what you used every day at the office.
The thought of a law like this scares me. That being said, if a country were to enact such a law, my guess would be that Australia would be the country to do it. Take a look at their Sedition Law.
If a nation does not even guarantee its citizens freedom of speech, asking its legal system to enact just intellectual property laws is definitely a tall order.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. After glancing at the Wikipedia article, I'd say the Australian government was seriously in violation of Section 24 of the Sedition Law. From what I can see, this new law is going to cause those effects...
Course, they'll prolly pull a Bush and blanket pardon themselves before the fact. Just goes to show that modern governments are all about 'Do as I say, not as I do'...
between foregoing security updates or switching to that bloated thunderbird GUI monstrosity...
Or, for the adventurous, there's http://www.netego.de/pronto/ a cool database backend, gui front end, with support for even Postgres for the snobs amungst us...
Somebody who wrote a large number of VBA macros for themself would. If they have gotten used to using those macros, they might not switch to OOo if it doesn't support them, as this would mean they would need to write all of their code again.
But will those macros work on the next version of MS Office? I wouldn't make book on it. And once they're forced to upgrade to the next version of Office by being forced to upgrade to Vista, they will. What I'd like to know is, who really needs a 64 bit word processor?
hat was a copyright issue, not a patent issue. Weak troll.
No, it was a comment on how Microsoft does business. They sued Stacker to the point where they could no longer survive as a company, then snapped it and its technology up for pennies on the dollar, only to come out with 'this brand new piece of technology we call Doublespace. Aren't we innovative?' Amazing how stuff other people come up with ends up in Windows, doesn't it? Drivespace, the disc defragger that looks an AWFUL lot like the Norton one, the whole TCP/IP stack...
I trust that in five years (or less!) when MS changes the terms for renewing the deal, you'll still be able to switch to a decent OS.
Of this I have no doubt. Of course, the 'decent OS' will likely be MS.
I'm sure that if you've been running SUSE it's quite convenient to continue running it. It just isn't very smart.
What, running SuSE isn't smart? Up to the time they decided to throw in with the Dark Side, I was rather indifferent to them. Now, OTOT, things are different.
If there's one thing that Microsoft does well, it's business. Their technical skills may be poorly managed, but they do killer business. How else do you think they kept their position if their software is so bad?
By embracing, extending, extinguishing all the competition, no matter how small. Remember Stacker?
# Microsoft is not going to sue customers of Linux because it doesn't make sense. It would be analogous to a person who has been a victim of car theft prosecuting the unwitting buyer of the stolen car instead of the known car theif who stole it. If they did go after anybody, it would be the distributors of Linux.
Except that it is possible to sue the owner of a stolen car on the grounds that they had control of the use of the car and did not properly secure it against theft.
I hoped that Novell/MS deal was really something meaningful, not yet another PR/Marketing stunt from Microsoft. Putting all that "protection racket" bullshit aside, which I can buy a little bit, this Balmer speech asks for more serious investigation, because it just roars "antitrust".
Given Microsoft's track record, was there ever any doubt? This whole Novell/MS thing was the basis of the 'itsatrap' tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Just click on the dancing hoof for more wild bovine action.
Why should they? Novell is doing rather nicely enough on its own...
Provided of course, you file a Freedom of Information Act request, your fingerprints, DNA stool urine & blood samples, and the request is judged not to be affecting National Security in any way...
Word is, Microsoft has dumped over 7 billion into this turkey. Wonder how much of it was for writing stuff Marketting wouldn't let them use and code monkeying to plug up the gaping wounds when they were forced to tear out the new code...
You've got more reading to do.
OK, so you're advocating expanding police forces by an order of magnitude to 'protect' everybody? Mind if I ask how you intend to pay for it?
I don't believe in limiting availability of weaponry. Show me you know how to care for and properly use a bazooka, and I have no problems with you owning one. I'll trust you not to blow up my house.
As far as police go, first off, the old adage of 'there's never a cop around when you need one' is rather true for the most part. I don't count on them to 'protect' me. And yes, I live in a state with an 'open carry' law. Tends to make for a politer society, IMNSFBHO.
And besides, police aren't there to 'prevent crime' or any other such nonsense, they're there to clean up the mess. Last time I looked, the cops weren't busting down doors because somebody might commit a crime, or had the capacity and ability to commit a crime, they bust down doors to get to the people who committed a crime.
In short, why, yes, I do believe in the 2nd Amendment. I think gun safety should be manditory in schools to teach these kids what they're getting into when they play with guns. Learning gun safety is important. I grew up around guns, as did many of my neighbors, and we all learned about them at an early age what they can and cannot do. Nobody within 30 miles of me died of an 'accidental gun discharge'. This leads me to think that maybe the 'answer' to 'gun violence' is education. Problem with that is, it doesn't 'control' citizenry like a gun ban does. And it'll cost a bit of money instead of making Yet Another Criminal Class like a ban would. And besides, all a gun ban really does is drive up the street price of a gun. Think 'Prohibition.' Now that really did wonders for crime, didn't it?
Quantity one baseball bat.
Quantity one steak knife.
Quantity one SUV.
So when we gonna outlaw baseball bats, steak knives, & SUVs? When we gonna outlaw plastic bottles & gasoline (used in making crude incindiary devices, according to a couple of ALF nutballs)?
3. Making government bureaucrats think things over before engaging in absolute stupidity, priceless.
The problem is, in banning all guns, you instantly turn people who hang onto their guns into criminals. Just what we need, more criminals. As if our prisons here in the US aren't crowded enough, let's throw MORE people in them. It's a good source of dirt-cheap labor for corporations who run factories inside the prisons...
And does the old phrase 'when they pry my cold dead fingers from it' ring a bell?
Wish I knew where that one ran off to...
Probably not more than a handful. The Apollo team was in its 30s and 40s at the time, which would make them 70+ if they still survive.
Change the law to disallow jury nullification. Change the Constitution to allow double jeopardy. Then try him til you get a conviction.
NOT recommended. If the l*wy*r survived, they'd sue yer ass through bankruptcy.
And besides, process servers deliver subpoenas, not l*wy*rs.
Um, yeah, it was. At the time, the original IB PCs were shipping with a 4 MHz processor choked down to an 8 bit bus, and 64 kilobytes of RAM installed. IBM didn't think anybody needed more than 64k of RAM.
Let's talk economies of scale.
Assume you spend 20 million bucks to create an operating system. Remember, this is a thought experiment, the 'real world' costs might be higher. Or lower. But in any case, me & thee will never know. Assume the marketting wanks are lying when they say 'This operating system cost $DOLLARAMOUNT to produce'. Odds are, they are lying.
Your brand spanking new computer is the only computer in the universe that can run this operating system. Thus, its price is 20 million dollars plus the hardware costs.
Assume now that you sell 20 million copies of that computer. Your amortised cost of developing that operating system is now down to 1 dollar per computer. Sell 100 million of those computers and the cost is now down to 5 cents a computer. And the more you sell, the cheaper the operating system becomes. The unit price of the computer stays the same, say 800 dollars retail, Parts would run you maybe 150 in quantity. (Hell, I can build my own machine for under $300) You get half the retail price of the computer from the wholesaler, who jacks up the price to 600 dollars and sells it to the retail outlet who adds 200 dollars to bring it up to the full $800 retail price.
You, as the manufacturer, make $400 for every computer you sell to the wholesaler. If you sell 20 million computers to the wholesaler, your profit margin is $249/machine. You've paid for the $150/machine & amortised the 20 million for the OS. Your total profit on that 20 million unit 'run' is $4,980,000,000. That's right, almost 5 billion dollars. Starting to see why vendor lockin is such a big deal to Microsoft and Apple?
The questions you now need to ask yourself are, 1) How much did Apple spend to develop their OSes? 2) How many units did they actually manufacture and sell? 3) How much did Microsoft spend to develop Vista? 4) How many copies of Vista are going to be shoved down everybody's throat?
It costs me about 50 cents to get a DVD I can write to. How much is Microsoft going to spend per DVD for several MILLION copies of Vista? I'm guessing pennies. And that's just for the home market. OEMs will put Vista on the hard drive with a reinstall partition that's hidden away from Joe Sixpack.
IBM licensed PC-DOS from Microsoft for every PC that hit the street. The clone makers licensed MS-DOS because it was compatible with IBM, but not bound to IBM by copyright. Microsoft 'conquered' the desktop because no business would buy anything but IBM because 'nobody ever got fired for specifying IBM'. The clone market took off because now people could buy a cheaper computer for home and take their work home at night.
The killer app for the PC was Lotus. Everybody had it. You could put in your floppy, turn the computer on, it'd come up, you could work all day, save off your work at 5 & just redswitch it. Lotus was an industry standard.
Apple, SGI, and Commodore ended up fighting it out in the graphics arena. When it was all said and done, Apple pretty much killed them all; graphics was the Mac's killer app.
People chose the PC for business reasons, not because it was so much better than anything else. Back in The Day, IBM meant business. And no clone maker would put anything other than DOS on their machines so they'd be compatible with what you used every day at the office.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. After glancing at the Wikipedia article, I'd say the Australian government was seriously in violation of Section 24 of the Sedition Law. From what I can see, this new law is going to cause those effects...
Course, they'll prolly pull a Bush and blanket pardon themselves before the fact. Just goes to show that modern governments are all about 'Do as I say, not as I do'...
Or, for the adventurous, there's http://www.netego.de/pronto/ a cool database backend, gui front end, with support for even Postgres for the snobs amungst us...
But will those macros work on the next version of MS Office? I wouldn't make book on it. And once they're forced to upgrade to the next version of Office by being forced to upgrade to Vista, they will. What I'd like to know is, who really needs a 64 bit word processor?
No, it was a comment on how Microsoft does business. They sued Stacker to the point where they could no longer survive as a company, then snapped it and its technology up for pennies on the dollar, only to come out with 'this brand new piece of technology we call Doublespace. Aren't we innovative?' Amazing how stuff other people come up with ends up in Windows, doesn't it? Drivespace, the disc defragger that looks an AWFUL lot like the Norton one, the whole TCP/IP stack...
Yeah, Microsoft really knows how to innovate...
Of this I have no doubt. Of course, the 'decent OS' will likely be MS.
What, running SuSE isn't smart? Up to the time they decided to throw in with the Dark Side, I was rather indifferent to them. Now, OTOT, things are different.
By embracing, extending, extinguishing all the competition, no matter how small. Remember Stacker?
Except that it is possible to sue the owner of a stolen car on the grounds that they had control of the use of the car and did not properly secure it against theft.
Given Microsoft's track record, was there ever any doubt? This whole Novell/MS thing was the basis of the 'itsatrap' tag.
This is just business as usual for Microsoft.