Maybe all the stadiums are empty because all the spectators were turned away for wearing Polo(TM) shirts?
I mean, really. As a more-or-less private entity, the IOC cand do whatever it wants in terms of allowing people into venues, etc. But they have turned the whole spectacle into little more than a giant advertising venue, and that has made me lose interest in the whole deal. I saw it really start to go wrong back with the flap over whether some of the original US Dream Team could wear Reebok clothes (who sponsored those athletes) or would be forced to wear Nike jumpsuits (who sponsored the Olympics). The more the IOC does this, the fewer people will be willing to turn out and attend.
I had typing in the 8th grade, and it was the single most practical class I ever had in school, period.
You can type so much faster when you learn properly. There's a closer connection between your thoughts and getting them down in the computer.
If anything, the prevalence of computers is making typing skills MORE crucial, not less. Before e-mail and word processors, bosses had clerical staff to type. Now the boss himself has to be able to type, too. So everybody needs basic keyboarding skills.
Having a huge variety of "skins" available does absolutely nothing to help make a UI user-friendly. It's only eye-candy, nothing more. I can have as many cool looks to WinAmp as I want, but none of them let me fundamentally change how I use the program, make the buttons bigger, alter how I select music to play, etc.
You make a very calm and rational explanation for why professional wedding photographers refuse to relinquish CDs or negatives to their customers. From the customer's standpoint, though, I intend to patronize photographers who are willing to sell me such, at a reasonable price. The key for me is that you as the photographer have no real interest in the photos after you make the initial sales. The odds of someone coming and finding you 2 or 3 years after the wedding to order reprints are very small.
I, on the other hand, have a great deal of interest in providing copies of those photos to my family as it grows over the years. As an example, if I wind up having 7 children, it would be nice if each of them could wind up with a photo from their parents' wedding. This is particularly important as Walmart and other photo chains become more and more agents of professional photographers enforcing copyright laws. I can easily imagine a Walmart clerk prohibiting me from copying a 10 year old photo from a wedding. The odds of me being able to find you and order more copies 10 years from now are slim to none.
Fortunately, this is a free market, so customers who want copies of the CDs can choose to patronize photographers willing to provide them, and you can refuse to work for customers who insist on this.
In most states in the U.S., there are only very few types of cases where the courts allow the prevailing party to recover attorney's fees from the losing party... which is assuming that Microsoft would prevails in every case, and would never have to eat a whole lot of attorney's fees in a losing case. Also, MS would not be able to recover the costs it incurred sending executives to depositions, having its executives keep track of the case, etc.
Moreover, it is not going to be able to recoup its customer support costs and loss of good will (yes, MS does in fact have some with the general public) from customers who forgot that the site they needed to go to was windowsupdate.MICROSOFT.com instead of just windowsupdate.com, and then got screwed. Those costs alone far execeed the amount of money it would take to reserve 10,000 domain names.
It would "cost quite a bit"? Do you understand how much money Microsoft has? Do you understand how expensive their lawyers are? They could register 10,000 domain names with a fraction of the interest they make on their money in an hour. I really don't think the expense is why they didn't do it.
Pretty neat technology, but what does a new display technology (which is all this ultimately is) have to do with PHBs invading their employees' privacy? I'm all for paranoia, but maybe you could keep it within the realm of halfway relevant technology innovations? Your privacy is invaded whether PHB watches you on his wall or on his CRT, LCD, or OLED computer monitor or TV set.
Umpteen morons have posted so far claiming, without benefit of evidence, that RFID has only recently begun to be widely implemented because the patent expired. Baloney!
Even the briefist of Google searches will show you that RFID implementation has been bogged down by 2 factors: sufficiently cheap manufacturing techniques and industry-wide standards for implementation / data encoding / frequency usage. It took bar codes decades to become ubiquitous, in part because of the same need for standard data dsecriptions that allow every product by every manufacturer to be given a unique bar code.
Diebold software is not paid for by the U.S. government. Voting machines are purchased by state and/or local governments. The federal government doesn't pay for or control them. And the copyright limitations put on the U.S. government by the law cited don't apply to state and local governments.
It's a number which, if transmitted in the proper format, will allow access to your credit. Thus, it is a credit card number for all intents and purposes. That it's a different number than the one printed on your old fashioned card doesn't matter.
But with a card, you can usually tell whether or not somebody has physical access to it. Sure, the waiter could copy the number, but at least you know you gave it to him. With an RFID device, a reader could conceivably grab your number while you were just walking down the street.
What is so difficult about using a credit card?
on
Casio's Credit Card Watch
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I mean, how hard is it to just swipe a card? Are they that insecure about their appearance that they don't want to wear security ID badges around their necks?
Using RFID for security badges and charge cards seems to me like a solution in search of a problem...
Not on political, pro-Linux grounds, but because the company is starting to look a little desparate.
First was this article where MS announced they were significantly lengthening support periods for older software versions. This was a dramatic reversal of its previous practice of using strong-arm tactics to force corporate customers into frequent and regular upgrades.
Then there was this article, discussing how Microsoft has begun making changes to its previously onerous licensing terms in favor of its customers.
Now we've seen two patents in recent weeks which seem to be the overly-broad type normally associated with companies who are desparate to produce licensing revenue, and not real products.
Combine this with the fact they have been forced to delay much new product development because they must finally start focusing on security, and it all adds up to clear indications of bad times coming for them. (Of course, they have plenty of cash to tide them over for quite a long period.)
Why is it that genetic manipulation to make more and better food is bad, but genetic manipulation (with intentional release into the wild) to protest something is good? Why is it that when Monsanto says they've tested the GM crops to be safe, they are disbelieved on general principles, but when some art professors say THEIR GM bacteria are safe, they must know absolutely what they are talking about?
Is there any sort of RAID 5 available in the range of between $1000 and $2000? I have a small law firm, and would love to be able to have the redundancy capability offered by RAID 5. I would think there is a market for a stand alone Firewire box that I could pick up. The box could either come with 3, 4, or 5 harddrives, or allow me to pick up my choice of harddrives separately and just plug them in.
20 years ago, the competition was between Microsoft, Wordperfect, and Lotus for office and e-mail applications. Being the early, carefree days of mass computing, the competitive focus was on offering more and more new features. Microsoft won that battle (unfairly, I think, but it did win). While that war was going on, nobody paid much attention to security and stability.
Then for the next 10 years, Microsoft was largely in competition with itself (for desktop personal and business purposes), making money from upgrades and the sale of new computers. Here's where I think Microsoft got soft. They branched out into new and ultimately unproductive product types. They focused exclusively on new features that would give the average user a reason to shell out for an upgrade. They continued to use predatory pricing to insure that computer buyers had to pay for their OS (and maybe even their office software) whether they wanted it or not.
Now, even free software can have a very advanced feature set. The competitive factors are security and reliability, not new features. Microsoft is suffering because it did not see this coming in time to really start competing in this arena. Their existing code base is so huge that even though Gates said a couple of years ago they were freezing everything to focus on security, they still haven't managed to track down all possible sources even of "buffer overflow" errors, much less all the other security holes.
Linux doesn't have to make a huge hit on the desktop to cost Microsoft a lot of money. All it has to do is get enough users to make it economically worthwhile to the computer vendors to tell Microsoft that they will NOT sign the licensing agreement requiring them to bundle Windows and Office with every single computer they sell. Once that happens, then the competition will really start to open up again.
People are not starving because there is not enough food in the world, but because in too many places the distribution system is not very efficient, or is actively perverted by armies, dictators, and other autocrats. If we can find a way to use inexpensive, renewable plant matter to generate energy, it will ultimately improve the lives of people all over the world, especially in those places too poor to buy oil right noww.
This press release doesn't really have much new information in it. OLEDs have been around for several years now.
And the article talks about printing the monitor on the same glass as a current LCD monitor. One of the real potential benefits of OLED is the ability to print them on a flexible plastic film. Check out this Scientific American article from back in February.
Microsoft has been using short product support times (along with many other techniques) to force regular software product upgrades onto their corporate users. They did not wake up one morning and say: "oh, let's suddenly be nicer to our customers and help them stay with the old product longer instead of buying a new product from us."
It seems clear to me that enough corporate customers balked at the relentless upgrade cycle Microsoft was trying to impose that they had to back down. Good news for consumers, bad news for Microsoft's bottom line.
As a lawyer, I can't agree with your new analogy. Take the Ford Pinto. There was an easy way to avoid being blowing all to hell and back, just avoid being rear-ended! All the warning labels or waivers of liability in the world wouldn't have saved them from Ralph Nader.
I'm not a big fan of class-action suits, but it is clear that Microsoft (and everybody in the computer industry) is being held to different standards than other manufacturers.
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Maybe all the stadiums are empty because all the spectators were turned away for wearing Polo(TM) shirts?
I mean, really. As a more-or-less private entity, the IOC cand do whatever it wants in terms of allowing people into venues, etc. But they have turned the whole spectacle into little more than a giant advertising venue, and that has made me lose interest in the whole deal. I saw it really start to go wrong back with the flap over whether some of the original US Dream Team could wear Reebok clothes (who sponsored those athletes) or would be forced to wear Nike jumpsuits (who sponsored the Olympics). The more the IOC does this, the fewer people will be willing to turn out and attend.
I had typing in the 8th grade, and it was the single most practical class I ever had in school, period. You can type so much faster when you learn properly. There's a closer connection between your thoughts and getting them down in the computer. If anything, the prevalence of computers is making typing skills MORE crucial, not less. Before e-mail and word processors, bosses had clerical staff to type. Now the boss himself has to be able to type, too. So everybody needs basic keyboarding skills.
Having a huge variety of "skins" available does absolutely nothing to help make a UI user-friendly. It's only eye-candy, nothing more. I can have as many cool looks to WinAmp as I want, but none of them let me fundamentally change how I use the program, make the buttons bigger, alter how I select music to play, etc.
You make a very calm and rational explanation for why professional wedding photographers refuse to relinquish CDs or negatives to their customers. From the customer's standpoint, though, I intend to patronize photographers who are willing to sell me such, at a reasonable price. The key for me is that you as the photographer have no real interest in the photos after you make the initial sales. The odds of someone coming and finding you 2 or 3 years after the wedding to order reprints are very small.
I, on the other hand, have a great deal of interest in providing copies of those photos to my family as it grows over the years. As an example, if I wind up having 7 children, it would be nice if each of them could wind up with a photo from their parents' wedding. This is particularly important as Walmart and other photo chains become more and more agents of professional photographers enforcing copyright laws. I can easily imagine a Walmart clerk prohibiting me from copying a 10 year old photo from a wedding. The odds of me being able to find you and order more copies 10 years from now are slim to none.
Fortunately, this is a free market, so customers who want copies of the CDs can choose to patronize photographers willing to provide them, and you can refuse to work for customers who insist on this.
In most states in the U.S., there are only very few types of cases where the courts allow the prevailing party to recover attorney's fees from the losing party... which is assuming that Microsoft would prevails in every case, and would never have to eat a whole lot of attorney's fees in a losing case. Also, MS would not be able to recover the costs it incurred sending executives to depositions, having its executives keep track of the case, etc. Moreover, it is not going to be able to recoup its customer support costs and loss of good will (yes, MS does in fact have some with the general public) from customers who forgot that the site they needed to go to was windowsupdate.MICROSOFT.com instead of just windowsupdate.com, and then got screwed. Those costs alone far execeed the amount of money it would take to reserve 10,000 domain names.
It would "cost quite a bit"? Do you understand how much money Microsoft has? Do you understand how expensive their lawyers are? They could register 10,000 domain names with a fraction of the interest they make on their money in an hour. I really don't think the expense is why they didn't do it.
Pretty neat technology, but what does a new display technology (which is all this ultimately is) have to do with PHBs invading their employees' privacy? I'm all for paranoia, but maybe you could keep it within the realm of halfway relevant technology innovations? Your privacy is invaded whether PHB watches you on his wall or on his CRT, LCD, or OLED computer monitor or TV set.
Umpteen morons have posted so far claiming, without benefit of evidence, that RFID has only recently begun to be widely implemented because the patent expired. Baloney!
Even the briefist of Google searches will show you that RFID implementation has been bogged down by 2 factors: sufficiently cheap manufacturing techniques and industry-wide standards for implementation / data encoding / frequency usage. It took bar codes decades to become ubiquitous, in part because of the same need for standard data dsecriptions that allow every product by every manufacturer to be given a unique bar code.
See Frontline, and CSEMag.com, just to pick 2.
The fact that this was patented had nothing to do with its lack of widespread use. Get a grip, people!
Diebold software is not paid for by the U.S. government. Voting machines are purchased by state and/or local governments. The federal government doesn't pay for or control them. And the copyright limitations put on the U.S. government by the law cited don't apply to state and local governments.
It's a number which, if transmitted in the proper format, will allow access to your credit. Thus, it is a credit card number for all intents and purposes. That it's a different number than the one printed on your old fashioned card doesn't matter.
But with a card, you can usually tell whether or not somebody has physical access to it. Sure, the waiter could copy the number, but at least you know you gave it to him. With an RFID device, a reader could conceivably grab your number while you were just walking down the street.
I mean, how hard is it to just swipe a card? Are they that insecure about their appearance that they don't want to wear security ID badges around their necks? Using RFID for security badges and charge cards seems to me like a solution in search of a problem...
Not on political, pro-Linux grounds, but because the company is starting to look a little desparate. First was this article where MS announced they were significantly lengthening support periods for older software versions. This was a dramatic reversal of its previous practice of using strong-arm tactics to force corporate customers into frequent and regular upgrades.
Then there was this article, discussing how Microsoft has begun making changes to its previously onerous licensing terms in favor of its customers.
Now we've seen two patents in recent weeks which seem to be the overly-broad type normally associated with companies who are desparate to produce licensing revenue, and not real products.
Combine this with the fact they have been forced to delay much new product development because they must finally start focusing on security, and it all adds up to clear indications of bad times coming for them. (Of course, they have plenty of cash to tide them over for quite a long period.)
Why is it that genetic manipulation to make more and better food is bad, but genetic manipulation (with intentional release into the wild) to protest something is good? Why is it that when Monsanto says they've tested the GM crops to be safe, they are disbelieved on general principles, but when some art professors say THEIR GM bacteria are safe, they must know absolutely what they are talking about?
Is there any sort of RAID 5 available in the range of between $1000 and $2000? I have a small law firm, and would love to be able to have the redundancy capability offered by RAID 5. I would think there is a market for a stand alone Firewire box that I could pick up. The box could either come with 3, 4, or 5 harddrives, or allow me to pick up my choice of harddrives separately and just plug them in.
20 years ago, the competition was between Microsoft, Wordperfect, and Lotus for office and e-mail applications. Being the early, carefree days of mass computing, the competitive focus was on offering more and more new features. Microsoft won that battle (unfairly, I think, but it did win). While that war was going on, nobody paid much attention to security and stability. Then for the next 10 years, Microsoft was largely in competition with itself (for desktop personal and business purposes), making money from upgrades and the sale of new computers. Here's where I think Microsoft got soft. They branched out into new and ultimately unproductive product types. They focused exclusively on new features that would give the average user a reason to shell out for an upgrade. They continued to use predatory pricing to insure that computer buyers had to pay for their OS (and maybe even their office software) whether they wanted it or not. Now, even free software can have a very advanced feature set. The competitive factors are security and reliability, not new features. Microsoft is suffering because it did not see this coming in time to really start competing in this arena. Their existing code base is so huge that even though Gates said a couple of years ago they were freezing everything to focus on security, they still haven't managed to track down all possible sources even of "buffer overflow" errors, much less all the other security holes. Linux doesn't have to make a huge hit on the desktop to cost Microsoft a lot of money. All it has to do is get enough users to make it economically worthwhile to the computer vendors to tell Microsoft that they will NOT sign the licensing agreement requiring them to bundle Windows and Office with every single computer they sell. Once that happens, then the competition will really start to open up again.
People are not starving because there is not enough food in the world, but because in too many places the distribution system is not very efficient, or is actively perverted by armies, dictators, and other autocrats. If we can find a way to use inexpensive, renewable plant matter to generate energy, it will ultimately improve the lives of people all over the world, especially in those places too poor to buy oil right noww.
This press release doesn't really have much new information in it. OLEDs have been around for several years now. And the article talks about printing the monitor on the same glass as a current LCD monitor. One of the real potential benefits of OLED is the ability to print them on a flexible plastic film. Check out this Scientific American article from back in February.
Microsoft has been using short product support times (along with many other techniques) to force regular software product upgrades onto their corporate users. They did not wake up one morning and say: "oh, let's suddenly be nicer to our customers and help them stay with the old product longer instead of buying a new product from us." It seems clear to me that enough corporate customers balked at the relentless upgrade cycle Microsoft was trying to impose that they had to back down. Good news for consumers, bad news for Microsoft's bottom line.
As a lawyer, I can't agree with your new analogy. Take the Ford Pinto. There was an easy way to avoid being blowing all to hell and back, just avoid being rear-ended! All the warning labels or waivers of liability in the world wouldn't have saved them from Ralph Nader.
I'm not a big fan of class-action suits, but it is clear that Microsoft (and everybody in the computer industry) is being held to different standards than other manufacturers.