>"Apple keeps out-marketing us, but let's keep plugging away anyways."
Replace Apple with Sony and now youre talking about the original xbox. 5 years later Sony's PS3 is a market nightmare and the xbox360 (which has also been decried as a failrure on slashdot) is the must-have gaming machine.
The zune is still new to the market and now its looking to slide into the #2 mp3 player, which is pretty impressive with all the competition.
>The smart companies figured out long ago that there were much better, technically legal, ways to bribe their politicians.
Youer so cool and cynical. You must get all the girls/boys.
At least Lobbying is transparent. We can see who is giving to whom. Bribery is completely invisible. They two are alike but far, far from the same. One is a legitimate process and the other isnt. Thats how the world works. Moneid interests influence politics. Better out in the open than behind closed doors.
>"I'm going to ask you to do something stupid in 10 seconds" countdown when you click on an install link for an XPI file?
The best is when I try to download an XPI for thunderbird and firefox tries to install it. And get this: there's no save as! The solution, ironically, is to load up IE7 and do a save as. I really hope they fired some of those overpaid google UI people and got back to basics with FF 3.0. IE7 and Safari have really caught up and its time for Mozilla to stop with all the UI tinkering and limitations (only x amount of tabs show now) and do some real work.
What? Youre saying a science fiction author who has never worked with large scale networking has invalid opinions about network security and his proposed fix-all is questionable musings? Say it aint so!
>All technology aside, replacing the entire look'n'feel for our user base (office 2007 + Vista) would be a huge productivity killer for months, with no benefit whatsoever.
Yeah! Lets go back to the Win 3.11 GUI or perhaps to the days of DOS. Change is bad!
>Truth is, while holding off Vista might be an idea, what guarantee is there that Windows 7 will be any better.
You dont get guarantees in life.
Well, the idea is that companies learn from mistakes. I can imagine you a few years ago saying "What guarnatee is there that Microsoft wont learn from ME?" Then XP was released shortly after and now everyone seems to be in love with it. Personally I prefered the simplicity of 2000.
Then no terabit connection for you. I dont care how fast the backbone is. Where I live the last-mile technology is DSL which for my location maxes out at 1.5mbps.
I think the "OMG LOOK HOW FAST TIS IS" kiddie-mentality of movies-per-second ignores the whole issue of last-mile distribution. And PC buses. And practility. And economics.
Youd think slashdot would have better things to post than PR releases.
>"tough titty. our customers won't want it, it's an expensive product that doesn't work and only benefits you." what are they going to do?
Sue them. This is an industry that sues its own custoemrs. Done be naive. I think the MS-hate here is so huge that people cant think straight when it comes to the RIAA.
>Abandon the billion desktops?
Yes. Absolutely. Theyve abandoned web distribution of music until Steve Jobs gave in to all their DRM requirements and even then have completely half-assed the job so they can pretend they can go back to selling CDs.
The battery doesnt work because your users dont need laptops. Batteries that dont get used tend to fail. So if Jane Officeworker cow-worker makes a hissy fit and has her department buy her a laptop as a status thing and it never leaves her desk then the few times she actually unplugs it from the AC might be a bit of a surprise.
Why are you blaming ms about this? Do you really think Ballmer came up with this limitation? Even MS cant muscle the music industry. Hell, Im surprised they can even do this as-is knowing the tactics and history of the RIAA. Now if some sympathetic engineer would release a patch that broke this little limitation, well, that would be pretty nice.
Then again I bought a refurbished zune from woot for 80 dollars. THe 200 or so dollars I saved over buying the over-priced and just-as locked down ipod makes me feel good about dealing with some limitations.
Its pretty much a dead feature anyway. Heck, the RIAA is being overly paranoid about sharing songs wirelessly when I can just torrent full discographies without ever trying to find a zune user who happens to like the same kind of music I like.
The really nice part is that now I have the 2.1 firmware on a Zune 1.0 so I can sync my library wirelessly. That's the real advantage of the zune. Amazing what 80 dollars gets you nowadays.
On further examination no emails from Meredith Fuchs are getting past the spam filter. A court order to force her to change her last name to Smithe has been issued by the 9th district court of appeals. It has also been suggested that President Bush seriously think about changing his name to Jones as the email that is missing has the subject line "Meredith Fuchs Bush." That message alone has crashed all the White House spam assassin filters three times today.
The task monitor in wm just shows you what apps are running. Theres no image names or cpu meters. Its actually pretty handy.
Dunno, everyone here is so in love with the iphone it makes me wonder if they have ever used wm before. I have a treo700wx that is a like the mcgyver of phones. evdo, nice browser, plays youtube videos, does skype for internation calling over EVDO, etc. The last two wouldnt exist if MS took the the "lock it down" Apple approach. I bought this 700wx used for 200 dollars ftw.
Oh well, while the peanut gallery writhes in more MS bashing and are saving up their pennies for an overpriced completely closed anti-DIY phone, Ive got my treo.
I cant speak about this thing from t-mobile, but a good wm implementation is a nice thing. Then again this is slashdot. DIE BILL GATES SPAWN.. There that should count for a +1 informative.
I AM BILLIONAIRE AMERICAN BILLY GATES III CEO. I OFFER TO YOU A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY YOU ARE INTERESTED IN. CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE CONTACT ME ASAP IF YOU CAN HELP ME MOVE 10,000 WINDOWS INTO YOUR COUNTRY. BECAUSE OF INTERNATIONAL REGULATION I NEED YOUR HELP IN THIS IMPORTANT MATTER. FOR YOUR HELP IN THIS TRANSACTION YOU WILL RECEIVE 400,000 AMERICAN DOLLARS. GOD BLESS.
My treo 700wx does this, no problem. Im sure the iphone screen is swankier, but its not like this is new technology.
As far as the directions go, well, I'd rather have gmaps or some other service show me the map and directions than talk to some guy for 2 minutes who may not know crap about the area Im coming from. Heck, ever even try calling a restuarant during their busy hours? You'll be lucky to get anyone for more than 15 seconds.
On top of it, I'm on the web to find the phone number anyway so I might as well do a copy and paste of the address into gmaps or mapquest. Im not rich enough to call 411 all the time like Mr Dvorak. I'm sure Mr. Dvorak has some rants about crappy Cavier too.
To be fair, its easier to call 444-film than visit yahoo movies or rottentomatoes, but thats only because the 444-film people do an amazing job with movie listings. There's no equivalent of 444-film for other services.
Exactly. Nor are they free from politics. Imagine contacting the Soviet Union equivalant on another planet. These space soviets then publicize the fact and scare the space Americans with their tall tales of aliens who have found us and have befriended the soviet side. The Americans then get into gear and launch an interstellar manhattan project and blow up parts of our earth. Makes perfect sense from a survivalist first-strike POV (think vietnam or cuba).
Any contact will of course be a political act for the sender and the receiver. The idea that all aliens are in some humanist federation and just want to help is like believing somewhere in the woods there are hobbits and wizards.
That's interesting. I'm in the same boat with the 90%. Heck, I'm not even willing to buy a HDTV until the format war ends. If more people are like me then this isnt just hurting next-gen dvds but the entire HD industry. Oh well, the faster Sony loses the better.
Another "bring back my old exploits and unbalanced classes/weapons/spells" fans. You know that that kind of environment is only "fun" for the first few nerds who find out about it. Then everyone knows that the spear of pokey-in-the-eyey is overpowered when weilded by a talking half-dog warrior. Then everyone plays that, then the old players whine when that class is brought back to normal standards by the developers.
Fine, you liked it before, but Im certainly not going to the play the sheep for your wolf. Screw it. Whats fun for the kids 'in the know' is a pain in the ass for the rest of us still discovering the game and who are looking for fun, not just griefing or ganking people from behind with the over-powered dagger of stupid-mythical-reference.
Developer and game companies know this, thus they fix these bugs and put in balance. Dont like it? Go roll your own little MUD, but dont whine when no one shows up.
Im so sick of this bully mentality. People who get off on offing newbies or outright cheating. Youd think nerds would understand the downside of bullying better than most, but I guess not.
Well, the telesale industry has been in decline for a long time, its usually scammy, and doesnt provide any real employment. It pisses people off and they dont really have a powerful lobby. The lobby of pissed of constitieunts eventually beat them. Considering that scammy sales have migrated to the web/email, I dont think anyone is taking a real loss. Its just more cost effective for these scammers to move to spam anyway.
There's not much detail in this article but did it occur to your or anyone that getting the police involved in this matter only escalted the situation to an unreasonable point. Perhaps only leading the misguided kid to get even more aggressive. I couldnt imagine my parents ever calling the police on me. Sounds like Mom and Dad want the state to raise their children. I think this combination of hands-off parenting and 'call the police' is just about the worst way to deal with kids. The kid may or may not be the bad guy here, but the parents certainly are.
>I think the congressional Democrat's numbers are low because they have completely failed to rein in the Bush administration, which is what the Democrats were put in power to do.
Bullshit. America voted Bush in AGAIN in 2004. After everything, after the war. There's no big anti-bush mandate. America is a conservative country with conservative voters following a conservative agenda. Just because the moderate party has a slim majority doesnt mean its time to clean house. Americans dont want that and the democrats certainly do not have the power to do so.
Im so sick of hearing whiners say stuff like 'what has the congress done to kick out bush' after theyve voted him in twice and supported his wars. If you dont want a Bush in office then stop voting republican, this includes ron paul supporters too.
As long as the republican party holds all this power in america you will have all these problems. Poor conservatives have no idea whats going on they just vote on hot button issues like abortion and "id like to have a beer with him."
Sorry, theres no mandate. No big revolution. Just a moderate party with a little control. They have to work with the republicans to get -anything- done, thus no impeachments or big traditionally democratic bills in play.
Why blame Gehry? Its no uglier than his other buildings and anytime you deal with creative architecture you're going to have some unique issues. How about blaming the administrators and politicians who take your hard earned tax money and throw it to a vanity architect? Gehry is an easy target, but he's the wrong target.
Inherent self-preservation instinct of any successful race will dictate that no one will begin transmitting like crazy to suspect systems. Its too much of a risk. Only idealists with a lot of faith in both humanity and alienity would be willing to take such a risk. The problem here is idealists are usually poor and can't afford to the equipment and energy to do what you propose. Not to mention, I imagine that the people who would even attempt such a thing are pretty credulous to begin with and would just conclude that aliens are here already and point to fuzzy videotapes and tall-tales of area 51 as proof.
"Our" ipods? Not everyone is silly enough to spent 350 dollars on a music player. Hell, you're even comparing apples and oranges. An ipod that can do wifi is useless where there isnt any wifi. Hell, it doesnt even run any apps not approved by apple.
No it isnt. It takes only a coulpe hours for a non-technical person to learn how to operate a modern OS becuase of all the GUI-ness, wizards, etc. Modern applications dont even ship with manuals.
Now put them in front of a box running DOS 6.22 and well, you can figure it out.
OSs do a lot more. A lot. Maybe not for the "im too kewl for school" elitist like yourself, but for the common person they've brought computing to the home.
Slashdot Mirror
>"Apple keeps out-marketing us, but let's keep plugging away anyways."
Replace Apple with Sony and now youre talking about the original xbox. 5 years later Sony's PS3 is a market nightmare and the xbox360 (which has also been decried as a failrure on slashdot) is the must-have gaming machine.
The zune is still new to the market and now its looking to slide into the #2 mp3 player, which is pretty impressive with all the competition.
>The smart companies figured out long ago that there were much better, technically legal, ways to bribe their politicians.
Youer so cool and cynical. You must get all the girls/boys.
At least Lobbying is transparent. We can see who is giving to whom. Bribery is completely invisible. They two are alike but far, far from the same. One is a legitimate process and the other isnt. Thats how the world works. Moneid interests influence politics. Better out in the open than behind closed doors.
>"I'm going to ask you to do something stupid in 10 seconds" countdown when you click on an install link for an XPI file?
The best is when I try to download an XPI for thunderbird and firefox tries to install it. And get this: there's no save as! The solution, ironically, is to load up IE7 and do a save as. I really hope they fired some of those overpaid google UI people and got back to basics with FF 3.0. IE7 and Safari have really caught up and its time for Mozilla to stop with all the UI tinkering and limitations (only x amount of tabs show now) and do some real work.
>It's kind of a dumb rant
What? Youre saying a science fiction author who has never worked with large scale networking has invalid opinions about network security and his proposed fix-all is questionable musings? Say it aint so!
>All technology aside, replacing the entire look'n'feel for our user base (office 2007 + Vista) would be a huge productivity killer for months, with no benefit whatsoever.
Yeah! Lets go back to the Win 3.11 GUI or perhaps to the days of DOS. Change is bad!
>Truth is, while holding off Vista might be an idea, what guarantee is there that Windows 7 will be any better.
You dont get guarantees in life.
Well, the idea is that companies learn from mistakes. I can imagine you a few years ago saying "What guarnatee is there that Microsoft wont learn from ME?" Then XP was released shortly after and now everyone seems to be in love with it. Personally I prefered the simplicity of 2000.
This might be an ME-like release for MS.
>No "PC"s on "backbones" I think.
Then no terabit connection for you. I dont care how fast the backbone is. Where I live the last-mile technology is DSL which for my location maxes out at 1.5mbps.
I think the "OMG LOOK HOW FAST TIS IS" kiddie-mentality of movies-per-second ignores the whole issue of last-mile distribution. And PC buses. And practility. And economics.
Youd think slashdot would have better things to post than PR releases.
>"tough titty. our customers won't want it, it's an expensive product that doesn't work and only benefits you." what are they going to do?
Sue them. This is an industry that sues its own custoemrs. Done be naive. I think the MS-hate here is so huge that people cant think straight when it comes to the RIAA.
>Abandon the billion desktops?
Yes. Absolutely. Theyve abandoned web distribution of music until Steve Jobs gave in to all their DRM requirements and even then have completely half-assed the job so they can pretend they can go back to selling CDs.
The battery doesnt work because your users dont need laptops. Batteries that dont get used tend to fail. So if Jane Officeworker cow-worker makes a hissy fit and has her department buy her a laptop as a status thing and it never leaves her desk then the few times she actually unplugs it from the AC might be a bit of a surprise.
Why are you blaming ms about this? Do you really think Ballmer came up with this limitation? Even MS cant muscle the music industry. Hell, Im surprised they can even do this as-is knowing the tactics and history of the RIAA. Now if some sympathetic engineer would release a patch that broke this little limitation, well, that would be pretty nice.
Then again I bought a refurbished zune from woot for 80 dollars. THe 200 or so dollars I saved over buying the over-priced and just-as locked down ipod makes me feel good about dealing with some limitations.
Its pretty much a dead feature anyway. Heck, the RIAA is being overly paranoid about sharing songs wirelessly when I can just torrent full discographies without ever trying to find a zune user who happens to like the same kind of music I like.
The really nice part is that now I have the 2.1 firmware on a Zune 1.0 so I can sync my library wirelessly. That's the real advantage of the zune. Amazing what 80 dollars gets you nowadays.
On further examination no emails from Meredith Fuchs are getting past the spam filter. A court order to force her to change her last name to Smithe has been issued by the 9th district court of appeals. It has also been suggested that President Bush seriously think about changing his name to Jones as the email that is missing has the subject line "Meredith Fuchs Bush." That message alone has crashed all the White House spam assassin filters three times today.
The task monitor in wm just shows you what apps are running. Theres no image names or cpu meters. Its actually pretty handy.
Dunno, everyone here is so in love with the iphone it makes me wonder if they have ever used wm before. I have a treo700wx that is a like the mcgyver of phones. evdo, nice browser, plays youtube videos, does skype for internation calling over EVDO, etc. The last two wouldnt exist if MS took the the "lock it down" Apple approach. I bought this 700wx used for 200 dollars ftw.
Oh well, while the peanut gallery writhes in more MS bashing and are saving up their pennies for an overpriced completely closed anti-DIY phone, Ive got my treo.
I cant speak about this thing from t-mobile, but a good wm implementation is a nice thing. Then again this is slashdot. DIE BILL GATES SPAWN.. There that should count for a +1 informative.
DEAR MADAMES;m,
I AM BILLIONAIRE AMERICAN BILLY GATES III CEO. I OFFER TO YOU A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY YOU ARE INTERESTED IN. CONFIDENTIAL. PLEASE CONTACT ME ASAP IF YOU CAN HELP ME MOVE 10,000 WINDOWS INTO YOUR COUNTRY. BECAUSE OF INTERNATIONAL REGULATION I NEED YOUR HELP IN THIS IMPORTANT MATTER. FOR YOUR HELP IN THIS TRANSACTION YOU WILL RECEIVE 400,000 AMERICAN DOLLARS. GOD BLESS.
BILLY GATES III CEO
My treo 700wx does this, no problem. Im sure the iphone screen is swankier, but its not like this is new technology.
As far as the directions go, well, I'd rather have gmaps or some other service show me the map and directions than talk to some guy for 2 minutes who may not know crap about the area Im coming from. Heck, ever even try calling a restuarant during their busy hours? You'll be lucky to get anyone for more than 15 seconds.
On top of it, I'm on the web to find the phone number anyway so I might as well do a copy and paste of the address into gmaps or mapquest. Im not rich enough to call 411 all the time like Mr Dvorak. I'm sure Mr. Dvorak has some rants about crappy Cavier too.
To be fair, its easier to call 444-film than visit yahoo movies or rottentomatoes, but thats only because the 444-film people do an amazing job with movie listings. There's no equivalent of 444-film for other services.
Exactly. Nor are they free from politics. Imagine contacting the Soviet Union equivalant on another planet. These space soviets then publicize the fact and scare the space Americans with their tall tales of aliens who have found us and have befriended the soviet side. The Americans then get into gear and launch an interstellar manhattan project and blow up parts of our earth. Makes perfect sense from a survivalist first-strike POV (think vietnam or cuba).
Any contact will of course be a political act for the sender and the receiver. The idea that all aliens are in some humanist federation and just want to help is like believing somewhere in the woods there are hobbits and wizards.
That's interesting. I'm in the same boat with the 90%. Heck, I'm not even willing to buy a HDTV until the format war ends. If more people are like me then this isnt just hurting next-gen dvds but the entire HD industry. Oh well, the faster Sony loses the better.
Another "bring back my old exploits and unbalanced classes/weapons/spells" fans. You know that that kind of environment is only "fun" for the first few nerds who find out about it. Then everyone knows that the spear of pokey-in-the-eyey is overpowered when weilded by a talking half-dog warrior. Then everyone plays that, then the old players whine when that class is brought back to normal standards by the developers.
Fine, you liked it before, but Im certainly not going to the play the sheep for your wolf. Screw it. Whats fun for the kids 'in the know' is a pain in the ass for the rest of us still discovering the game and who are looking for fun, not just griefing or ganking people from behind with the over-powered dagger of stupid-mythical-reference.
Developer and game companies know this, thus they fix these bugs and put in balance. Dont like it? Go roll your own little MUD, but dont whine when no one shows up.
Im so sick of this bully mentality. People who get off on offing newbies or outright cheating. Youd think nerds would understand the downside of bullying better than most, but I guess not.
Well, the telesale industry has been in decline for a long time, its usually scammy, and doesnt provide any real employment. It pisses people off and they dont really have a powerful lobby. The lobby of pissed of constitieunts eventually beat them. Considering that scammy sales have migrated to the web/email, I dont think anyone is taking a real loss. Its just more cost effective for these scammers to move to spam anyway.
There's not much detail in this article but did it occur to your or anyone that getting the police involved in this matter only escalted the situation to an unreasonable point. Perhaps only leading the misguided kid to get even more aggressive. I couldnt imagine my parents ever calling the police on me. Sounds like Mom and Dad want the state to raise their children. I think this combination of hands-off parenting and 'call the police' is just about the worst way to deal with kids. The kid may or may not be the bad guy here, but the parents certainly are.
>I think the congressional Democrat's numbers are low because they have completely failed to rein in the Bush administration, which is what the Democrats were put in power to do.
Bullshit. America voted Bush in AGAIN in 2004. After everything, after the war. There's no big anti-bush mandate. America is a conservative country with conservative voters following a conservative agenda. Just because the moderate party has a slim majority doesnt mean its time to clean house. Americans dont want that and the democrats certainly do not have the power to do so.
Im so sick of hearing whiners say stuff like 'what has the congress done to kick out bush' after theyve voted him in twice and supported his wars. If you dont want a Bush in office then stop voting republican, this includes ron paul supporters too.
As long as the republican party holds all this power in america you will have all these problems. Poor conservatives have no idea whats going on they just vote on hot button issues like abortion and "id like to have a beer with him."
Sorry, theres no mandate. No big revolution. Just a moderate party with a little control. They have to work with the republicans to get -anything- done, thus no impeachments or big traditionally democratic bills in play.
Why blame Gehry? Its no uglier than his other buildings and anytime you deal with creative architecture you're going to have some unique issues. How about blaming the administrators and politicians who take your hard earned tax money and throw it to a vanity architect? Gehry is an easy target, but he's the wrong target.
Inherent self-preservation instinct of any successful race will dictate that no one will begin transmitting like crazy to suspect systems. Its too much of a risk. Only idealists with a lot of faith in both humanity and alienity would be willing to take such a risk. The problem here is idealists are usually poor and can't afford to the equipment and energy to do what you propose. Not to mention, I imagine that the people who would even attempt such a thing are pretty credulous to begin with and would just conclude that aliens are here already and point to fuzzy videotapes and tall-tales of area 51 as proof.
>Like we already have in our iPods.
"Our" ipods? Not everyone is silly enough to spent 350 dollars on a music player. Hell, you're even comparing apples and oranges. An ipod that can do wifi is useless where there isnt any wifi. Hell, it doesnt even run any apps not approved by apple.
>Fascinating isn't it?
No it isnt. It takes only a coulpe hours for a non-technical person to learn how to operate a modern OS becuase of all the GUI-ness, wizards, etc. Modern applications dont even ship with manuals.
Now put them in front of a box running DOS 6.22 and well, you can figure it out.
OSs do a lot more. A lot. Maybe not for the "im too kewl for school" elitist like yourself, but for the common person they've brought computing to the home.
>but now at 65, the genius database that is going to let no small-time criminal get away has caught her.
Murder is small time? Yeah, youre an idiot.