Same old story:
Procter and Gamble involved in sleazy phone searches, questionable favors from law enforcement, journalist strongarming, laws broken, etc.
Even if you get caught, its a simple business transaction weighing dollars gained against a little bad press and reputation. Purely consumer companies know that people have short memories, right?
Existing businesses benefit any time they hold back the expansion of their competitors.
New businesses can have prohibitively high costs of entry which Google doesn't have.
Small businesses are stifled w.r.t. emerging markets; they can be wiped out on a whim.
Huge businesses can profit with different methods than places with 25-99 employees.
With Vista going for $300 and PC hardware for half that, I'm waiting for a 1/2 price, $225 'Microsoft PC'.
It must run Vista, and they could "just" sell it at Wal-Mart while wiping out the small whitebox industry.
If Redmond has a bootsector patent it'll give new meaning to the increasingly frequent Windows Update:
"Once you have installed this item it cannot be removed"
Whatever Microsoft is calling their various versions now... they better differentiate between pushing marketing crap on consumers, and forcing non-productivity bloat on the business world who have purchased more expensive product.
With the cottage industry that has sprung up around offering pay solutions to after-the-fact Windows vulnerabilities, all 16000 variants of trojan/spyware/malware/adware/crapware/virus have been trademarked.
StopBadWare.com , StopBadWare.net and StopBadWare.us were probably taken, so they had to settle for StopBadWare.org
It's come out that that liquid attack was almost total crap
So was the iPod. But would Apple allow us to call it an iPod if it is no longer white? And would it have been an acceptable lavatory item had the passenger accidentally swallowed the device a few hours earlier, and then deposited the excess cargo through conventional methods?
Invent a camera that takes a high enough resolution picture of a mounted CD. It only needs to have proper lighting, and pick up pits while ignoring everything else.
Analog storage of 24-36 disks at a time in a small space!
It seems the minimum nowadays is 45+ unless you want to be seen as a slacker.
Tell your boss that you'll give the company 12 hours a day by leaving home for work at 7am, getting home at 7pm, and being available by phone during the commute.
Point out to him that this is 48 hours a week, that he gets you most days of the week (four), and that on these days you spend 75% of your waking hours on this job.
Throw in something about how you do your best thinking while driving to and from work, and remind him he doesn't get you to do this routine on a five days a week basis.
If you've got an 8-5 job in an urban area where you allow an extra 20 minutes to get to work, and stay an hour late... you are already doing the five-by-12 grind.
Either get yourself the extra day off, or get the boss to compromise that he doesn't get to make you work the four-day-plan hours. Go home by noon at least once a week.
Sounds like they are application design problems, not platform problems
Sounds like Microsoft could take a cue from their O/S design. Seeing there is one day per month to fix major platform problems, maybe they could devote one day per year to releasing patches for this stuff -- maybe the 4th Tuesday in every third month containing 30 days.
The future for Microsoft is dual processors (to run the always-mentioned background Windows antivirus scanning) and there should have been a 7th Vista version just for multiple CPUs.
They should have gotten together with chipset manufacturers to support a new coprocessor socket solely for running mandatory realtime spyware/malware background tasks.
I really don't want to purchase additional CPUs that don't benefit my primary applications!
--
Background processes will expand to usurp the allotted space.
there's no such thing as a ITIL compliant software package. ITIL is not a standard it's a collection of best practices.
The burning question -- when I reach some call center in India that cannot resolve my issue in 10 minutes, am I going to be able to tell that they subscribe to the ITIL philosophy? Am I really going to care whether they do, and is the company outsourcing to this call center really going to care about those internal practices either?
It's still about price. Small businesses don't have trouble justifying upgrading when $150 gets you a motherboard and processor as good as what was $450 two years earlier.
Up until early 2002 that was not difficult -- and both Intel and AMD stock still doubled during those previous 4 years, even after the big hits of the Dotcom bust and 9/11.
Slashdot Mirror
Until you've watched OJ processing out in the fields, you'd think the biggest decision is whether you want pulp or no pulp in your juice.
--
Time flies
Even if you get caught, its a simple business transaction weighing dollars gained against a little bad press and reputation. Purely consumer companies know that people have short memories, right?
Trying to recoup lost bits floating inside a 300bps acoustic coupler modem is something those new CSI guys don't want to mess with.
And you can't hardly find an old timer to clean the crud that accumulates in those rubber earcups after a questionable BBS session.
Existing businesses benefit any time they hold back the expansion of their competitors.
New businesses can have prohibitively high costs of entry which Google doesn't have.
Small businesses are stifled w.r.t. emerging markets; they can be wiped out on a whim.
Huge businesses can profit with different methods than places with 25-99 employees.
With Vista going for $300 and PC hardware for half that, I'm waiting for a 1/2 price, $225 'Microsoft PC'.
It must run Vista, and they could "just" sell it at Wal-Mart while wiping out the small whitebox industry.
If Redmond has a bootsector patent it'll give new meaning to the increasingly frequent Windows Update:
"Once you have installed this item it cannot be removed"
I hope he licenses it for $0.01 per play.
I'd call it Lindows if that hadn't already been tried. FreeDows?
1) Buy new inkjet
2) Remove cartridges
3) Donate brand new printer to charity
4) Take full tax deduction
5) Repeat next month
The state-of-the-art has benefited from Microsoft's 333 pages of Internet Standards and Protocols as well as their upcoming, 400+ page Guide to Defect Prevention
StopBadWare.com , StopBadWare.net and StopBadWare.us were probably taken, so they had to settle for StopBadWare.org
So was the iPod. But would Apple allow us to call it an iPod if it is no longer white? And would it have been an acceptable lavatory item had the passenger accidentally swallowed the device a few hours earlier, and then deposited the excess cargo through conventional methods?
Analog storage of 24-36 disks at a time in a small space!
Tell your boss that you'll give the company 12 hours a day by leaving home for work at 7am, getting home at 7pm, and being available by phone during the commute.
Point out to him that this is 48 hours a week, that he gets you most days of the week (four), and that on these days you spend 75% of your waking hours on this job.
Throw in something about how you do your best thinking while driving to and from work, and remind him he doesn't get you to do this routine on a five days a week basis.
If you've got an 8-5 job in an urban area where you allow an extra 20 minutes to get to work, and stay an hour late ... you are already doing the five-by-12 grind.
Either get yourself the extra day off, or get the boss to compromise that he doesn't get to make you work the four-day-plan hours. Go home by noon at least once a week.
Sounds like Microsoft could take a cue from their O/S design. Seeing there is one day per month to fix major platform problems, maybe they could devote one day per year to releasing patches for this stuff -- maybe the 4th Tuesday in every third month containing 30 days.
and SP1 installations of XP that are running keys that cannot be upgraded with the two year old "latest" (and last) XP service pack.
Or the first 18 months of XP releases that cannot be upgraded at the WindowsUpdate website because they aren't SP1 versions.
They should have gotten together with chipset manufacturers to support a new coprocessor socket solely for running mandatory realtime spyware/malware background tasks.
I really don't want to purchase additional CPUs that don't benefit my primary applications!
--
Background processes will expand to usurp the allotted space.
Archimedes revealed? He had already done his best science work naked.
Yeah, right. You and what Army ?
The burning question -- when I reach some call center in India that cannot resolve my issue in 10 minutes, am I going to be able to tell that they subscribe to the ITIL philosophy? Am I really going to care whether they do, and is the company outsourcing to this call center really going to care about those internal practices either?
I, for one, welcome our new Backslash Overloads!
However, there are 18,200 results for "don't trust Microsoft".
To put it in perspective, there are over 2 million Google hits for the misspelled 'occurence' used in the parent quote.
The failure modes of a H-Hg battery is what Monty Python called the 'Holy Hand Grenade' , or what everyone else* calls, the H-Hg.
* Fallout2, Worms3D, BardsTale, Buffy, DukeNukem:TTK, et. al
You are right. All they have to do is let their marketing see your numbers:
"$9.99 online or just $0.99 on CD or 8-track tape, plus $11.00 S&H"
(and lose the part about waiting 4-6 weeks for them to process your order)
It's still about price. Small businesses don't have trouble justifying upgrading when $150 gets you a motherboard and processor as good as what was $450 two years earlier.
Up until early 2002 that was not difficult -- and both Intel and AMD stock still doubled during those previous 4 years, even after the big hits of the Dotcom bust and 9/11.