"Most people are of average or lesser intelligence."
Sorry to burst your bubble but a statistically impossible statement like that would surely put you in category B: people of lesser intelligence. Unless of course you are drunk which in that case it's entirely forgivable.
Be thankful you have someone like me with an IQ of 50 gazillion to correct you and lift the general populations average IQ above single digits.
The real issue is that if this suit succeeds then it will effectively make it illegal for any company that produces a product with a computer chip to sell it with an in-built operating system. A nightmare situation. It would mean that you couldn't buy a mobile phone with an operating system in-built, at least without formally being given a choice of operating systems that would run it. Most consumers would just go "huh?" Washing machines, TV's, cars - you name it, ANY product that has an onboard computer would need to allow 3rd party operating systems and the consumer would have to be given the right to choose. That just aint gonna happen so this suit will not succeed if the judge has any sense.
hmmmm. I thought there was something fishy about Poster "I'm Don Giovannis" post. Seemed to me that he was being a bit too much of a Microsoft fanboy for it to be credible. I just checked out his Slashdot user page and what do you know, nearly all of his posts are Microsoft related and in defence of the company. Look at his user details. I've copied the titles of the articles he's commented on below.
Based on his comments he seems to be quite technically savvy too so perhaps not just a PR flake but someone with more of a stake in the company... What are we dealing with here Don? What sort of a kickback are you getting to warrant you spending so much time and effort defending MS?
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Mars doesn't orbit the Earth. Let's just make it that anything in orbit around the Earth "belongs" to the Earth and we can start making rules based on that and everyone will be happy.
I am in agreement with the GP, any spy satelites over my country had better look out.
I have an uncanny knack for fixing most things through simple sheer luck, trial and error and plenty of physical encouragement. (Seemingly far more than most people).
I think my biggest triumph was fixing a friends phone line when it had been kicked out of the wall socket. The 7 or so wires had been ripped from their connections. I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder and randomly attached the connections while listening for a dial tone. Much to my own surprise, I got a dial tone after about 15 minutes of stuffing around with it with only 4 of the 7 wires attached. I got my mobile and called the landline number, it rang, and it actually worked - I could hear myself and talk through both the mobile and landline. I then called my mobile from the landline just to make sure and that worked too. That was the really surprising part because unbeknownst to me at the time the landline had a block on outgoing calls. I can only assume some of the wires that weren't attached were responsible for the call blocking feature ( I wouldn't know, I know nothing about the tech behind phone systems!)
Being a University pad, everyone used the newly "unblocked" phone to make an enormous amount of phone calls, international calls included - expecting that they wouldn't be charged. Apparently they didn't get charged, but there was a rumor that they did. I never did find out because I had a falling out with my friend not long after.
If you want to try this then be careful when stripping the wires from the wall socket with your teeth (the line had an extension from the wall). I was unfortunate to have a wire poke up my nostril while another was in my mouth and received quite an unexpected jolt to my face! Who knew there was enough power running through a phone line to give you a shock...
I've often wondered what the business model for browsers is. Since they are given away for free then I gather the primary way to make money off them, in IE's case for instance, is to set millions of peoples home pages to the page of Microsofts choice and make money off the advertising. I can only assume that the amount of money they make from this advertising exceeds the cost of maintaining the browers tech etc or there is an expectation of a large future return.
I figure that MS must be losing out cash wise in the short term. I can't see advertising revenues from their home page being too much in excess of their development costs and I would figure that advertisers would be very weary of taking their site stats for granted. Just because they have millions visiting one of their sites doesn't mean the visitors actually pay any attention to what's on there as I imagine most arrive there because they simply don't know how to set their home page and immediately move on to another site.
Having the number 1 browser has also hit their brand extremely hard, all of the security holes associated with IE taint their brand image across the board. Sure, windows would still be known for its security issues if IE had never been around but I feel that IE's security problems has seriously compounded the bad image factor. Unless Microsoft is making serious money from IE, or knows they will in the future, I reckon they'd be better of dumping it and leaving the job to Firefox and Opera etc. Is it really that valuable to them that when a computer gets a virus/hacked the finger is often pointed at IE and Microsoft on the whole?
I'm not sure how I manage it but I have an older lap top running XP on a P3 746 MHz with 128 Meg Ram, 32 Meg ATI graphics card. I run all office 2000 applications without a problem. Photoshop, Macromedia MX applications, Illustrator etc work well most of the time though they get a bit laggy on bigger projects. I even manage to get away with doing some video editing in Premiere.
The biggest problems occur when I want to run several applications at once, usually Dreamweaver, Photoshop and a web browser with a few tabs open.
I'm buying a new computer next week and have been tossing up whether to get a dual core or not. After reading about the supposed advantages of dual cores (and the advantages don't seem to be so obvious), I've realised that I'm currently getting away with so much on such crap specs that I'll probably just go for a regular chip.
Company A CEO: "Thank god we spent all that time and money putting in place those safe guards for the bird flu pandemic when company B did absolutely nothing! Now let's use the advantage and sell lots of stuff!"
Company A COO: "Err... All of our staff and customers are dead. I'm afraid it's just you and me left in this $5 billion state of the art clean room.... Want to see me naked?"
Sure, life as we know it can exist in what we consider to be particularly hostile conditions. I think an extremely important factor that most neglect to take into account is that the environment that kick started life on this planet was likely a relative paradise compared to the conditions that certain forms of life have evolved to withstand.
The life forms we have found living in what we consider extreme conditions such as volcanos and extreme cold aren't exactly world beaters on the complexity/intelligence scale - their mollecular machinery is pretty much equipped for the bare minimum for survival.
As an analogy, take nuclear fission/fussion. The laws of physics allow it, and it's a truly amazing force of nature, but the conditions for which it can occur need to be absolutely perfect to make it happen in the first place. In the same way, "life" needs similarly ideal conditions to be kick started and then it can evolve to barely survive in extreme conditions such as we have witnessed on earth. It just aint gonna happen on a barren cold rock of a planet just like it isn't going to happen in the 99% of the universe that is, funnily enough, a vacuous lifeless void.
Quoting - "No resource, no matter who it's written by, is absolutely definitive. Any thorough research will require going to many different sources to arrive at the best approximation of the "truth."
Very true. But that's where Wikipedia beats encyclopedias hands down. Most entries in encyclopedias are ultimately written by no more than a handful of people. Wikipedia articles on the other hand are ultimately written and edited by tens if not hundreds of people and the resulting article becomes the amalgamation of common truth - or as close as you are going to get to it. I'm not saying don't use other resources, but comparatively the contribution of many more authors to Wikepedia will ultimately make the information available far more definitive than other sources. At least that's its potential and I for one support that potential wholehartedly - early stage hiccups aside.
"What? The history of the Internet's [extraordinary] growth was based on private-sector investment?"
Yes. I think if you looked at a graph of the internets growth you would find that "extraordinary growth" did in fact occur when the private sector injected billions of dollars into companies the likes of Yahoo, AOL etc in the mid to late 90's. This coincided with the internationalisation of the net with other countries getting on board and their private companies in turn investing in.com ventures and ISP's. Prior to that the nets growth pales in comparison.
If instantaneous travel is actually physically possible, then I find it tantalising to think that we could stumble across it very soon or could have done so at some stage in the past century. The principles of most inventions incur the "but of course!" or "why didn't I think of that!" statement with many educated/intelligent people.
Supposing instantaneous travel is in fact possible, then it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that Mr Big Brain might have formulated a theory for accomplishing the feat which in turn could lead to the manufacture of a device capable of doing so. A dedicated effort to put cash and manpower into developing the technology may see (or have seen) it's manufacture in very little time.
So. Mr Big Brain formulates the idea and the device is ready to use by say, 1950. Humans are then able to travel to any point in the galaxy near instantaneously packing guns, bombs, nukes, bad hairdos and a superior attitude. We stumble across a "paradise" world where the rivers run with chocolate and there's aphrodite-esque chicks running around and they like our bombs...
My point is that if ftl is possible then perhaps we are just waiting to discover how to make it possible. And when and if we finally do discover how, we might just say "but of course!" and realise we had the technology to do so decades before. Thus making it not such a huge stretch of the imagination to think that those with limited technological capacity might be our first peaceful/hostile visitors.
Google is entering, threatening and in many cases on the verge of dominating so many markets that it is both exciting and very scary. It seems that you can't go a whole week without hearing of a new venture or rumour of a new venture. The markets they are entering are mostly very well targeted with the potential for massive payoffs. Even if half fail the few that succeed seem capable of making up for those lossess 50 fold. Their brand name (which is still synonymous with success, and good - just) coupled with their fiscal might and innovative and flexible business model, makes for one hell of a formiddable company.
I give it 5 years or less before the term "Googleopoly" or similar is a commonly used business lexicon and dictionary term.
I imagine that the main point (and only point) is that the phone call is free.
Not particularly a money saver if you are only making a single call every so often but it would probably save you a bit if you wanted to "let your fingers do the walking" so to speak and call a bunch of companies for a quote.
Having said that, I don't see it lasting too long with the prevelance of ISP's rolling out free VOIP services.
I agree, but that was in the days when the porn industry was just getting on its feet. Porn used to be relegated to dingy peep show haunts on the strip but then this amazing new technology came along (cheap video cassettes) and allowed people to easily distribute the porn and even make it at home. As you quite rightly pointed out, Betamax won because it was preferred by the pornographers.
With the veritable mass of new media formats available today, it is unlikely that the porn industry will have such an influence on the dominant new formats. More likely it will be whichever company can drum up the most 3rd party support and the generic hardware manufacturers will be a major target. In line with your Betamax v VHS argument, history has proven that it won't necessarily be the best technology that wins.
I just had a thought that anywhere there is censorship on the net (country-wide inparticular, i.e. China) then that censorship might create a knock on effect and skew search results for others outside the affected area. I say this because for instance if, hypothetically, China censored most pages about democracy but let most pages concerning communism throught then it would be far more likely that Chinese sites would link to the sites concerning communism (mainly because they would never have seen the other pages anyway).
In this scenario Googles Page Rank system would give more weight to the pro communist pages rather than the pages on pro democracy due to the number of links created as a result of Chinas firewall. If more countries were to censor data in this way then there may be an even greater scewing of page ranks and therefore an overall knock-on effect that could perhaps see a kind of censorship or propoganda effect where some types of information are buried in favour of others.
I've never heard of this being raised as a concern before. Is it possible?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to burst your bubble but a statistically impossible statement like that would surely put you in category B: people of lesser intelligence. Unless of course you are drunk which in that case it's entirely forgivable.
Be thankful you have someone like me with an IQ of 50 gazillion to correct you and lift the general populations average IQ above single digits.
That is a fascinating idea. I think you should contact the authors of the simulation theory about it.
--
Permission based video advertising system
So the idea of using humans as batteries isn't the _worst_ sci_ fi_ plot_ evar after all?
hmmmm. I thought there was something fishy about Poster "I'm Don Giovannis" post. Seemed to me that he was being a bit too much of a Microsoft fanboy for it to be credible. I just checked out his Slashdot user page and what do you know, nearly all of his posts are Microsoft related and in defence of the company. Look at his user details. I've copied the titles of the articles he's commented on below.
Based on his comments he seems to be quite technically savvy too so perhaps not just a PR flake but someone with more of a stake in the company... What are we dealing with here Don? What sort of a kickback are you getting to warrant you spending so much time and effort defending MS?
attached to A Hands-On Zune Review
attached to Acrobat-killer Submitted to Standards Body
attached to Microsoft Agrees to Changes in Vista Security
attached to Vista DRM Prevents Kernel Tampering
attached to Microsoft Plugs a Record 26 Security Holes
attached to Windows XP SP1 Support Ends Tuesday
attached to Big Challenges for Vista Bug Hunters
attached to IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
attached to Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales
attached to Windows Vista RC2 Available
attached to Google in Talks to Buy YouTube
attached to IE Used To Launch Yahoo IM Clickfraud
attached to Zune's Wireless Almost Totally Worthless
attached to Hackers claim zero-day flaw in Firefox
attached to Why Microsoft's Zune Scares Apple to the Core
Mars doesn't orbit the Earth. Let's just make it that anything in orbit around the Earth "belongs" to the Earth and we can start making rules based on that and everyone will be happy.
I am in agreement with the GP, any spy satelites over my country had better look out.
I have an uncanny knack for fixing most things through simple sheer luck, trial and error and plenty of physical encouragement. (Seemingly far more than most people). I think my biggest triumph was fixing a friends phone line when it had been kicked out of the wall socket. The 7 or so wires had been ripped from their connections. I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder and randomly attached the connections while listening for a dial tone. Much to my own surprise, I got a dial tone after about 15 minutes of stuffing around with it with only 4 of the 7 wires attached. I got my mobile and called the landline number, it rang, and it actually worked - I could hear myself and talk through both the mobile and landline. I then called my mobile from the landline just to make sure and that worked too. That was the really surprising part because unbeknownst to me at the time the landline had a block on outgoing calls. I can only assume some of the wires that weren't attached were responsible for the call blocking feature ( I wouldn't know, I know nothing about the tech behind phone systems!) Being a University pad, everyone used the newly "unblocked" phone to make an enormous amount of phone calls, international calls included - expecting that they wouldn't be charged. Apparently they didn't get charged, but there was a rumor that they did. I never did find out because I had a falling out with my friend not long after. If you want to try this then be careful when stripping the wires from the wall socket with your teeth (the line had an extension from the wall). I was unfortunate to have a wire poke up my nostril while another was in my mouth and received quite an unexpected jolt to my face! Who knew there was enough power running through a phone line to give you a shock...
SpaceX? Spacesex? Of course they won. Nothing like getting the pron industry involved to get a market pumping.
I've often wondered what the business model for browsers is. Since they are given away for free then I gather the primary way to make money off them, in IE's case for instance, is to set millions of peoples home pages to the page of Microsofts choice and make money off the advertising. I can only assume that the amount of money they make from this advertising exceeds the cost of maintaining the browers tech etc or there is an expectation of a large future return.
I figure that MS must be losing out cash wise in the short term. I can't see advertising revenues from their home page being too much in excess of their development costs and I would figure that advertisers would be very weary of taking their site stats for granted. Just because they have millions visiting one of their sites doesn't mean the visitors actually pay any attention to what's on there as I imagine most arrive there because they simply don't know how to set their home page and immediately move on to another site.
Having the number 1 browser has also hit their brand extremely hard, all of the security holes associated with IE taint their brand image across the board. Sure, windows would still be known for its security issues if IE had never been around but I feel that IE's security problems has seriously compounded the bad image factor. Unless Microsoft is making serious money from IE, or knows they will in the future, I reckon they'd be better of dumping it and leaving the job to Firefox and Opera etc. Is it really that valuable to them that when a computer gets a virus/hacked the finger is often pointed at IE and Microsoft on the whole?
I'm not sure how I manage it but I have an older lap top running XP on a P3 746 MHz with 128 Meg Ram, 32 Meg ATI graphics card. I run all office 2000 applications without a problem. Photoshop, Macromedia MX applications, Illustrator etc work well most of the time though they get a bit laggy on bigger projects. I even manage to get away with doing some video editing in Premiere.
:)
The biggest problems occur when I want to run several applications at once, usually Dreamweaver, Photoshop and a web browser with a few tabs open.
I'm buying a new computer next week and have been tossing up whether to get a dual core or not. After reading about the supposed advantages of dual cores (and the advantages don't seem to be so obvious), I've realised that I'm currently getting away with so much on such crap specs that I'll probably just go for a regular chip.
I'll let you all know how I go
Company A CEO: "Thank god we spent all that time and money putting in place those safe guards for the bird flu pandemic when company B did absolutely nothing! Now let's use the advantage and sell lots of stuff!"
Company A COO: "Err... All of our staff and customers are dead. I'm afraid it's just you and me left in this $5 billion state of the art clean room.... Want to see me naked?"
Sure, life as we know it can exist in what we consider to be particularly hostile conditions. I think an extremely important factor that most neglect to take into account is that the environment that kick started life on this planet was likely a relative paradise compared to the conditions that certain forms of life have evolved to withstand.
The life forms we have found living in what we consider extreme conditions such as volcanos and extreme cold aren't exactly world beaters on the complexity/intelligence scale - their mollecular machinery is pretty much equipped for the bare minimum for survival.
As an analogy, take nuclear fission/fussion. The laws of physics allow it, and it's a truly amazing force of nature, but the conditions for which it can occur need to be absolutely perfect to make it happen in the first place. In the same way, "life" needs similarly ideal conditions to be kick started and then it can evolve to barely survive in extreme conditions such as we have witnessed on earth. It just aint gonna happen on a barren cold rock of a planet just like it isn't going to happen in the 99% of the universe that is, funnily enough, a vacuous lifeless void.
Quoting - "No resource, no matter who it's written by, is absolutely definitive. Any thorough research will require going to many different sources to arrive at the best approximation of the "truth."
Very true. But that's where Wikipedia beats encyclopedias hands down. Most entries in encyclopedias are ultimately written by no more than a handful of people. Wikipedia articles on the other hand are ultimately written and edited by tens if not hundreds of people and the resulting article becomes the amalgamation of common truth - or as close as you are going to get to it. I'm not saying don't use other resources, but comparatively the contribution of many more authors to Wikepedia will ultimately make the information available far more definitive than other sources. At least that's its potential and I for one support that potential wholehartedly - early stage hiccups aside.
"What? The history of the Internet's [extraordinary] growth was based on private-sector investment?"
.com ventures and ISP's. Prior to that the nets growth pales in comparison.
Yes. I think if you looked at a graph of the internets growth you would find that "extraordinary growth" did in fact occur when the private sector injected billions of dollars into companies the likes of Yahoo, AOL etc in the mid to late 90's. This coincided with the internationalisation of the net with other countries getting on board and their private companies in turn investing in
Last time I tried to bounce a cannonball I was thrown off the team.
and I'm not about to start.
If instantaneous travel is actually physically possible, then I find it tantalising to think that we could stumble across it very soon or could have done so at some stage in the past century. The principles of most inventions incur the "but of course!" or "why didn't I think of that!" statement with many educated/intelligent people.
Supposing instantaneous travel is in fact possible, then it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that Mr Big Brain might have formulated a theory for accomplishing the feat which in turn could lead to the manufacture of a device capable of doing so. A dedicated effort to put cash and manpower into developing the technology may see (or have seen) it's manufacture in very little time.
So. Mr Big Brain formulates the idea and the device is ready to use by say, 1950. Humans are then able to travel to any point in the galaxy near instantaneously packing guns, bombs, nukes, bad hairdos and a superior attitude. We stumble across a "paradise" world where the rivers run with chocolate and there's aphrodite-esque chicks running around and they like our bombs...
My point is that if ftl is possible then perhaps we are just waiting to discover how to make it possible. And when and if we finally do discover how, we might just say "but of course!" and realise we had the technology to do so decades before. Thus making it not such a huge stretch of the imagination to think that those with limited technological capacity might be our first peaceful/hostile visitors.
Sooon maybe. I'm still tinkering...
OBeardedone.
Google is entering, threatening and in many cases on the verge of dominating so many markets that it is both exciting and very scary. It seems that you can't go a whole week without hearing of a new venture or rumour of a new venture. The markets they are entering are mostly very well targeted with the potential for massive payoffs. Even if half fail the few that succeed seem capable of making up for those lossess 50 fold. Their brand name (which is still synonymous with success, and good - just) coupled with their fiscal might and innovative and flexible business model, makes for one hell of a formiddable company.
I give it 5 years or less before the term "Googleopoly" or similar is a commonly used business lexicon and dictionary term.
to get out of the automated system and speak to a customer rep causes bigger problems in many cases. i.e.
.... 15 minute wait
robot: For account enquiries press...
User: Mash mash mash on keypad.
Robot: Ok, we'll just put you through to a customer support representative.
Customer rep: How can I help you?
User: Yeah hi, I need some technical support.
Customer rep: Oh ok, I'll just put you through to tech support, please hold.
Another 20 minute wait and a broken telephone.
I imagine that the main point (and only point) is that the phone call is free.
Not particularly a money saver if you are only making a single call every so often but it would probably save you a bit if you wanted to "let your fingers do the walking" so to speak and call a bunch of companies for a quote.
Having said that, I don't see it lasting too long with the prevelance of ISP's rolling out free VOIP services.
Close but no cigar...
All your base belong to Base!
Quick! Get rid of the hospitals, they are making us sick!
"Betamax won" Uh, I choose to disregard this reality and substitute my own.
I agree, but that was in the days when the porn industry was just getting on its feet. Porn used to be relegated to dingy peep show haunts on the strip but then this amazing new technology came along (cheap video cassettes) and allowed people to easily distribute the porn and even make it at home. As you quite rightly pointed out, Betamax won because it was preferred by the pornographers.
With the veritable mass of new media formats available today, it is unlikely that the porn industry will have such an influence on the dominant new formats. More likely it will be whichever company can drum up the most 3rd party support and the generic hardware manufacturers will be a major target. In line with your Betamax v VHS argument, history has proven that it won't necessarily be the best technology that wins.
I just had a thought that anywhere there is censorship on the net (country-wide inparticular, i.e. China) then that censorship might create a knock on effect and skew search results for others outside the affected area. I say this because for instance if, hypothetically, China censored most pages about democracy but let most pages concerning communism throught then it would be far more likely that Chinese sites would link to the sites concerning communism (mainly because they would never have seen the other pages anyway).
In this scenario Googles Page Rank system would give more weight to the pro communist pages rather than the pages on pro democracy due to the number of links created as a result of Chinas firewall. If more countries were to censor data in this way then there may be an even greater scewing of page ranks and therefore an overall knock-on effect that could perhaps see a kind of censorship or propoganda effect where some types of information are buried in favour of others.
I've never heard of this being raised as a concern before. Is it possible?