For that price, you can send a standard letter anywhere in the US (including the non-continental US) usually arriving in less than 5 days with a loss rate of virtually zero.
Too lazy to look it up, but a few years ago there was a much publicised scandal in Chicago in which postal workers were caught routinely dumping large volumes of mail in garbage dumpsters.
Why were they dumping mail instead of delivering it? Seems they couldn't cope with the backlog.
If you can convince 4 out of 10 of your customers to pay for an unnecessary update that nets them no benefit, I'd say that yes, your marketing department certainly did something right.
LOL. That worked when they marketed Windows ME to home consumers and Windows 2000 to every one else, but I doubt it'll work for Windows 7. Then again, the need for effective marketing can be used an excuse.
From an article that showed hit Google News today:
The closer you are to Windows 7, the more you like it. That's what supporters of the new operating system say. To them, reports that 60 percent of IT admins aren't planning to deploy Microsoft's newest simply don't make sense.
[lots of breathless comments from end users]
The generally positive response from real Windows 7 users apparently isn't reaching the mass of potential customers. This has to happen if Windows 7 is to avoid becoming Vista 2.
The conclusion? Microsoft isn't trying hard enough to educate all those IT guys who think otherwise.
It's not the OS that's the problem, it's the marketing!
And XP is 5.1. It's just a number to deal with crappy program version number compatibility.
LOL. You don't get it, do you?
Windows 9x (DOS)... Windows ME (DOS) Windows NT (NT3.1)... Windows NT (NT3.5) Windows NT (NT4.0) Windows 2000 (NT5.0)... XP (NT5.1) Windows Vista (NT6.0)... Windows 7 (NT6.1)
If you can't recognise the incremental changes in the DOS line, or the similarly incremental changes in the different NT lines, than I'd suggest looking a bit more closely. By incremental, I'm referring to both version numbers and the OS itself.
I love that optimism man, I guess you one of the guys that still vote for politicians on the basis of the promises they give!
Excellent analogy, but for a slightly different reason.
By the time we recognise that the current elected official sucks, there's an election right around the corner. That election not only offer promises of the new, but also allows us to forget the failures of the past.
The trouble with Microsoft is that we end up electing the same guy every time.
So if their mewling is comparable to a baby's cry I shudder to think what kind of dad I'd make;).
I wouldn't worry. Most all women who have had more than one or two children know how and when to ignore a crying baby.
I've had just about any animal you could think of as a pet, but I've learned over the years that barring any individual's fascination with cats (and the requisite personality traits required for membership in a cult or a successful career as a waiter), dogs make far better pets. Hell, even for the mythical coder case (where someone expects a low-maintenance pet), there a countless breeds of dogs that will happily sleep at your feet or otherwise leave you undisturbed for hours at a time. The difference, of course, having a dog might inspire you to venture outside for a walk after an over-long session.
A purring cat is like a crying baby? You could say the same of any animal that we eat for food, or is otherwise a pest. Baby rats, for example, make cute high pitched noises and are no less pink. Few would have any problem killing them or their entire family.
Right now 90% of Google runs on top of Windows. It's like renting a lemonade stand inside a supermarket.
A fair analogy.
But have you considered that what happens at the proverbial lemonade stand may influence what happens in the supermarket and ultimately change how it operates? Lots of real world examples to draw on there.
LOL. Speaking of consistency (or the lack thereof), consider the following Powershell commands and their respective aliases (I'm going by memory here so someone correct me if I'm incomplete):
Get Child-Item (aliased to 'ls')
Set-Location (aliased to 'cd' and 'chdir')
New-Item c:\foo -type directory (no alias) New-Item c:\foo\file.txt -type file (no alias)
Remove-Item (aliased to 'rmdir')
The default aliases seem to include both DOS and *nix commands, and DOS (or some stench of it), seems to be alive and well despite being officially killed off when Win2000 was released.
So, in the Microsoft world, we've gone from using 'directory' in DOS, to 'folder' in Windows, to 'Items', 'Locations' and '-type Directory' in PowerShell. No wonder everyone's confused.;-)
The only platform I've seen tackle this in anything approaching a consistent way is OS X
And the BSDs.
where you know that there's a directory where the applications live, and you can easily predict where the configuration will be... Simply getting a consistent standard for this on Linux distros would be a big win.
The above isn't relevant to the article as Shuttlesworth was talking about the "every-day user experience" relative to the "Where is my stuff?" question. Feature-filled desktop environments is what most people concentrate on, but unless you're using a terminal (or prefer to think of the computer as an appliance), it's still the case that the file manager presents the most useful interface to the computer.
That said, I'd agree that the consistency you're referring to would be a big improvement for Linux distros. Consistency is the chief reason why I use FreeBSD wherever possible (and why others who do consider Linux a bit of a mess). That, and the completeness of the documentation. Consistency, documentation and... ruthless efficiency. I'll come in again.
Seriously, if files and folders confuses you, you might want to reevaluate your need to use a computer.
A bit harsh, but I'd agree otherwise. I think the problem is that for those that do understand the concepts of files and directories, they balk at the idea of having to use them.
Granted it's possible that the average person in daily life has an aversion to organisation, but what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) should do their work for them and magically organise everything behind the scenes.
I consider that kind of thinking sheer laziness. And given that everyone is a system administrator (whether they like it or not), I'd suggest it's also shortsighted.
What employers want to see is the ability to write a C# program to automatically issue requests via HTTP to Bing to query the WWW and to retrieve the search results.
I've seen those job postings. The problem is most employers require at least 5 years of Bing experience.
it's much worse now - before they just kicked you off the internet - now some clueless judge will rubber stamp prison time.
What part of "can... choose to ban the user from the Internet, fine him or her 300,000 (according to the AFP), or hand over a two-year prison sentence." didn't you get?
First, I count 3 distinct options, not one mandatory "rubber stamp" option.
Second, technical issues aren't typically relevant during sentencing, so I fail to see how "clueless judge" is anything more than inflammatory rhetoric. The best person to have deciding sentencing issues is someone who does that on a regular basis (i.e. a judge). Granted, technical issues may present difficulties from someone not as knowledgable as yourself, but that can be true in any court case regardless of the subject.
Third, judges have in the past been known to impose restrictions on internet access here in the US. Kevin Mitnick's case comes to mind, as do the numerous cases of those guilty of possessing child porn. You'd be hard pressed to argue how the judgments in such cases are clueless, unfair, inappopriate or have the quality of a "rubber stamp".
I inhale cheeseburgers, I guess it would only be right to exhale them too.
One of the fundamental principles of the fast food industry is that the "food" shouldn't require any chewing. Obvious, but only after some careful thought, but wildly successful.
The generic cheeseburger you inhale is constructed from greasy patties of frozen ground meat, a bun that lightly resembles bread, a thick viscous layer of an edible oil product colored to resemble cheese, and copious amounts of additional vegetable oil mixtures (using various combinations of egg products, corn syrup, and flavourings, colour, and gum) that keeps everything soft and wet.
Substitute one or more of the ingredients with the real or fresh versions, and I suspect you won't be able to inhale. Whether chewing is a feature, I'll leave to you to decide.
Now, I'm a little skeptical that they didn't mean ISP instead of IP
When you read news of any kind, it's required that you be skeptical, read between the lines, compare with other sources, etc. However, when you read tech related news, you first have to stop and wonder if the reporter knows WTF they're writing.
When this story first hit the airwaves, Katie Couric (anchorwoman for ABC News) described the DDoS as security breaches of government websites. IP, ISP -- it's all just "arcane technical jargon"[1], right?
For now, we should all assume that it's 86 IP addresses. The submitter probably picked this story from a number of possible sources and selected the best one. If he/she was lax, I'm sure the editors would have caught the error.;-)
---------------- 1. Actual quote from a Slashdot post that was modded +5 Informative.
They're not spending $18M to redesign the website (presumably), but presumably on a total overhaul of the thing.
It's probably even more complicated than that.
To use a car analogy, you can hire unemployed Mexican labourers in California to pave a mile of road for a few thousand dollars. But if you want a freeway, expect the cost to be tens of millions for each and every mile.
This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US
More correctly, it's another example of how a mostly privately financed election system requires and encourages campaigns to raise obscene amounts of money to reach their voters who, regrettably, rely on expensive TV ads as their primary source of information. The horse is already out of the barn when you get to campaign finance laws.
Requiring the major networks using public airwaves to set aside free air time to candidates, combined with a shorter election cycle, would a long way to removing the problems that campaign finance laws try (and inevitably fail) to correct.
Impossible? Perhaps. Other countries have no problem, and you'd be hard pressed to argue they're any less democratic or functional than we are. I'd suggest that the obstacles to real reform aren't unlike those found in the current health care debate. The major difference with health care is that a good portion of the voting public has finally got round to recognising that the current system is dysfunctional, uncessarily expensive, and that other countries may indeed have a better way of doing things.
It is more worthy in the eyes of God if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.
I'm not entirely certain you've succeeded in changing my opinion of hydrogen, but you've definitely made a change in my thinking.
A license plate, street address and phone number are both unique and tied to a specific person until the person chooses to end that connection.
That's a fair summary, and far better than uncessarily mixing in technical terms like "network endpoint" which is domain-specific.
An IP address should more correctly be identified as a lease, or more generically, an assignment. Hardly a legal term, but it'll do for most discussions.
A house address can, therefore, be viewed as an assignment of a given plot of land to a mortgage holder, an apartment address is an assignment to a renter, and a license plate is an assignment to a person owning a given car.
Any or all of those "can" be considered personally identifiable. But without taking into account the terms of the assignment (date and time, duration, terms, and ultimately, usage), those assigments can be meaningless. A room assignment in a Las Vegas hotel room may be proof of blackjack and hookers, or it could be proof of nothing at all.
Why that's obvious in certain contexts (LEA officials using a given "last known address"), but not judges in RIAA cases, is anyone's guess.
And SSNs are generally only assigned at 2 times: birth, or the first time someone gets a job and has to pay taxes (usually in high school).
Or when becoming a naturalised citizen.
I received my SS card 15 years before my green card was (finally) approved. Translated, that means I was able to pay taxes, but lacked the legal right to work.
Renting something that only can be used 2-3 times means you end up paying a LOT to rent it. If the company who rents it is to make a profit, they have to charge a significant fraction of the price of the item to rent it.
Reading the above reminds of a story I saw covered on TV not too long ago.
I don't recall the exact details or the name of the company (maybe someone can chime in), but some enterprising individual decided to set up a Craigslist type of service where individuals who owned "stuff" could rent that stuff to others. The basic premise (or inspiration) was that most people who buy things like expensive powertools or sports equipment, for example, typically use them just a few times. So instead of having that shiny new drill sitting unused in its battery charger in the garage, the drill owner could rent it out for the day or week to folks who need one, don't want to shell out the money for a purchase.
Granted, such an approach doesn't apply to textbooks, but the concept is interesting enough. The folks doing the renting find it very profitable, and those doing the renting are no less happy with their savings.
Reports that build on one another, creating the false impression of growing momentum and consensus, with some invisible hand guiding everything and everyone... where have I heard that, before?
Assuming that punitive damages were awarded agains Exxon and that Exxon argued that those damages were excessive and therefore unconstitutional, perhaps Thomas could make a similar argument.
Actually, the case involved both punitive and compensatory damages. The Supreme Court decided that a 1:1 ratio was the fair upper limit for punitive damages, and reduced it.
As for the OP, my take is that he's simply way off in left field suggesting that a what happened in a given maritime case has any relevance to this copyright infringement case. The "bad anology" comment was correct. Hell, what's next -- someone suggesting that just because a "being a nice guy" defense works in traffic court, it should work similarly in federal court?
Although homosexual acts were decriminalized in some parts of the Western world, such as Poland in 1932, Denmark in 1933, Sweden in 1944, and the United Kingdom in 1967, it was not until the mid-1970s that the gay community first began to achieve limited civil rights in some developed countries. On July 2, 2009, homosexuality was decriminalized in India by a High Court ruling.
So yes, assuming you live in a liberal Western country, you probably can find gay porn at your local video store, but I'd wager most of the sodomy laws are still on the books. In fact, there was a couple (male/female) a few years back who were charged by an overzealous prosecutor in one of the Southern states.
A curious irony is that most law enforcement officials tend to be heterosexual males, so the shitload of "obscene" or otherwise illegal gay porn continues to remain available. Anyone who has seen something like the Goatse images knows that even a 3 second viewing is 3 seconds too much.
Slashdot Mirror
For that price, you can send a standard letter anywhere in the US (including the non-continental US) usually arriving in less than 5 days with a loss rate of virtually zero.
Too lazy to look it up, but a few years ago there was a much publicised scandal in Chicago in which postal workers were caught routinely dumping large volumes of mail in garbage dumpsters.
Why were they dumping mail instead of delivering it? Seems they couldn't cope with the backlog.
If you can convince 4 out of 10 of your customers to pay for an unnecessary update that nets them no benefit, I'd say that yes, your marketing department certainly did something right.
LOL. That worked when they marketed Windows ME to home consumers and Windows 2000 to every one else, but I doubt it'll work for Windows 7. Then again, the need for effective marketing can be used an excuse.
From an article that showed hit Google News today:
The conclusion? Microsoft isn't trying hard enough to educate all those IT guys who think otherwise.
It's not the OS that's the problem, it's the marketing!
And XP is 5.1. It's just a number to deal with crappy program version number compatibility.
LOL. You don't get it, do you?
Windows 9x (DOS) ... Windows ME (DOS) ... Windows NT (NT3.5) ... XP (NT5.1) ... Windows 7 (NT6.1)
Windows NT (NT3.1)
Windows NT (NT4.0)
Windows 2000 (NT5.0)
Windows Vista (NT6.0)
If you can't recognise the incremental changes in the DOS line, or the similarly incremental changes in the different NT lines, than I'd suggest looking a bit more closely. By incremental, I'm referring to both version numbers and the OS itself.
I love that optimism man, I guess you one of the guys that still vote for politicians on the basis of the promises they give!
Excellent analogy, but for a slightly different reason.
By the time we recognise that the current elected official sucks, there's an election right around the corner. That election not only offer promises of the new, but also allows us to forget the failures of the past.
The trouble with Microsoft is that we end up electing the same guy every time.
So if their mewling is comparable to a baby's cry I shudder to think what kind of dad I'd make ;).
I wouldn't worry. Most all women who have had more than one or two children know how and when to ignore a crying baby.
I've had just about any animal you could think of as a pet, but I've learned over the years that barring any individual's fascination with cats (and the requisite personality traits required for membership in a cult or a successful career as a waiter), dogs make far better pets. Hell, even for the mythical coder case (where someone expects a low-maintenance pet), there a countless breeds of dogs that will happily sleep at your feet or otherwise leave you undisturbed for hours at a time. The difference, of course, having a dog might inspire you to venture outside for a walk after an over-long session.
A purring cat is like a crying baby? You could say the same of any animal that we eat for food, or is otherwise a pest. Baby rats, for example, make cute high pitched noises and are no less pink. Few would have any problem killing them or their entire family.
Right now 90% of Google runs on top of Windows. It's like renting a lemonade stand inside a supermarket.
A fair analogy.
But have you considered that what happens at the proverbial lemonade stand may influence what happens in the supermarket and ultimately change how it operates? Lots of real world examples to draw on there.
Amigas kept everything in 'drawers'. This is clearly the best system for storing hot grits.
And even better if you're a 15yo girl in the US who already keeps her Ibuprophen there.
MS-DOS has DIR command
LOL. Speaking of consistency (or the lack thereof), consider the following Powershell commands and their respective aliases (I'm going by memory here so someone correct me if I'm incomplete):
The default aliases seem to include both DOS and *nix commands, and DOS (or some stench of it), seems to be alive and well despite being officially killed off when Win2000 was released.
So, in the Microsoft world, we've gone from using 'directory' in DOS, to 'folder' in Windows, to 'Items', 'Locations' and '-type Directory' in PowerShell. No wonder everyone's confused. ;-)
The only platform I've seen tackle this in anything approaching a consistent way is OS X
And the BSDs.
where you know that there's a directory where the applications live, and you can easily predict where the configuration will be ... Simply getting a consistent standard for this on Linux distros would be a big win.
The above isn't relevant to the article as Shuttlesworth was talking about the "every-day user experience" relative to the "Where is my stuff?" question. Feature-filled desktop environments is what most people concentrate on, but unless you're using a terminal (or prefer to think of the computer as an appliance), it's still the case that the file manager presents the most useful interface to the computer.
That said, I'd agree that the consistency you're referring to would be a big improvement for Linux distros. Consistency is the chief reason why I use FreeBSD wherever possible (and why others who do consider Linux a bit of a mess). That, and the completeness of the documentation. Consistency, documentation and ... ruthless efficiency. I'll come in again.
Seriously, if files and folders confuses you, you might want to reevaluate your need to use a computer.
A bit harsh, but I'd agree otherwise. I think the problem is that for those that do understand the concepts of files and directories, they balk at the idea of having to use them.
Granted it's possible that the average person in daily life has an aversion to organisation, but what I see is a relatively recent and often shrill insistence that their computer (and, by extension, the applications they use) should do their work for them and magically organise everything behind the scenes.
I consider that kind of thinking sheer laziness. And given that everyone is a system administrator (whether they like it or not), I'd suggest it's also shortsighted.
What employers want to see is the ability to write a C# program to automatically issue requests via HTTP to Bing to query the WWW and to retrieve the search results.
I've seen those job postings. The problem is most employers require at least 5 years of Bing experience.
it's much worse now - before they just kicked you off the internet - now some clueless judge will rubber stamp prison time.
What part of "can ... choose to ban the user from the Internet, fine him or her 300,000 (according to the AFP), or hand over a two-year prison sentence." didn't you get?
First, I count 3 distinct options, not one mandatory "rubber stamp" option.
Second, technical issues aren't typically relevant during sentencing, so I fail to see how "clueless judge" is anything more than inflammatory rhetoric. The best person to have deciding sentencing issues is someone who does that on a regular basis (i.e. a judge). Granted, technical issues may present difficulties from someone not as knowledgable as yourself, but that can be true in any court case regardless of the subject.
Third, judges have in the past been known to impose restrictions on internet access here in the US. Kevin Mitnick's case comes to mind, as do the numerous cases of those guilty of possessing child porn. You'd be hard pressed to argue how the judgments in such cases are clueless, unfair, inappopriate or have the quality of a "rubber stamp".
I inhale cheeseburgers, I guess it would only be right to exhale them too.
One of the fundamental principles of the fast food industry is that the "food" shouldn't require any chewing. Obvious, but only after some careful thought, but wildly successful.
The generic cheeseburger you inhale is constructed from greasy patties of frozen ground meat, a bun that lightly resembles bread, a thick viscous layer of an edible oil product colored to resemble cheese, and copious amounts of additional vegetable oil mixtures (using various combinations of egg products, corn syrup, and flavourings, colour, and gum) that keeps everything soft and wet.
Substitute one or more of the ingredients with the real or fresh versions, and I suspect you won't be able to inhale. Whether chewing is a feature, I'll leave to you to decide.
Now, I'm a little skeptical that they didn't mean ISP instead of IP
When you read news of any kind, it's required that you be skeptical, read between the lines, compare with other sources, etc. However, when you read tech related news, you first have to stop and wonder if the reporter knows WTF they're writing.
When this story first hit the airwaves, Katie Couric (anchorwoman for ABC News) described the DDoS as security breaches of government websites. IP, ISP -- it's all just "arcane technical jargon"[1], right?
For now, we should all assume that it's 86 IP addresses. The submitter probably picked this story from a number of possible sources and selected the best one. If he/she was lax, I'm sure the editors would have caught the error. ;-)
----------------
1. Actual quote from a Slashdot post that was modded +5 Informative.
They're not spending $18M to redesign the website (presumably), but presumably on a total overhaul of the thing.
It's probably even more complicated than that.
To use a car analogy, you can hire unemployed Mexican labourers in California to pave a mile of road for a few thousand dollars. But if you want a freeway, expect the cost to be tens of millions for each and every mile.
This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US
More correctly, it's another example of how a mostly privately financed election system requires and encourages campaigns to raise obscene amounts of money to reach their voters who, regrettably, rely on expensive TV ads as their primary source of information. The horse is already out of the barn when you get to campaign finance laws.
Requiring the major networks using public airwaves to set aside free air time to candidates, combined with a shorter election cycle, would a long way to removing the problems that campaign finance laws try (and inevitably fail) to correct.
Impossible? Perhaps. Other countries have no problem, and you'd be hard pressed to argue they're any less democratic or functional than we are. I'd suggest that the obstacles to real reform aren't unlike those found in the current health care debate. The major difference with health care is that a good portion of the voting public has finally got round to recognising that the current system is dysfunctional, uncessarily expensive, and that other countries may indeed have a better way of doing things.
Garrison Keillor once wrote
It is more worthy in the eyes of God if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.
I'm not entirely certain you've succeeded in changing my opinion of hydrogen, but you've definitely made a change in my thinking.
Now if I could only find my car keys ...
A license plate, street address and phone number are both unique and tied to a specific person until the person chooses to end that connection.
That's a fair summary, and far better than uncessarily mixing in technical terms like "network endpoint" which is domain-specific.
An IP address should more correctly be identified as a lease, or more generically, an assignment. Hardly a legal term, but it'll do for most discussions.
A house address can, therefore, be viewed as an assignment of a given plot of land to a mortgage holder, an apartment address is an assignment to a renter, and a license plate is an assignment to a person owning a given car.
Any or all of those "can" be considered personally identifiable. But without taking into account the terms of the assignment (date and time, duration, terms, and ultimately, usage), those assigments can be meaningless. A room assignment in a Las Vegas hotel room may be proof of blackjack and hookers, or it could be proof of nothing at all.
Why that's obvious in certain contexts (LEA officials using a given "last known address"), but not judges in RIAA cases, is anyone's guess.
The summary confused me, so I looked it up, and it is true. Veins bring blood towards the heart. Arteries bring blood away from the heart.
Your post confused me. The "bring blood away" construct is an oxymoron at best, or a dangerous medical condition at worst.
Carry on.
The US needs a BBC.
It would never work. No one would understand the foreign accents.
And SSNs are generally only assigned at 2 times: birth, or the first time someone gets a job and has to pay taxes (usually in high school).
Or when becoming a naturalised citizen.
I received my SS card 15 years before my green card was (finally) approved. Translated, that means I was able to pay taxes, but lacked the legal right to work.
Renting something that only can be used 2-3 times means you end up paying a LOT to rent it. If the company who rents it is to make a profit, they have to charge a significant fraction of the price of the item to rent it.
Reading the above reminds of a story I saw covered on TV not too long ago.
I don't recall the exact details or the name of the company (maybe someone can chime in), but some enterprising individual decided to set up a Craigslist type of service where individuals who owned "stuff" could rent that stuff to others. The basic premise (or inspiration) was that most people who buy things like expensive powertools or sports equipment, for example, typically use them just a few times. So instead of having that shiny new drill sitting unused in its battery charger in the garage, the drill owner could rent it out for the day or week to folks who need one, don't want to shell out the money for a purchase.
Granted, such an approach doesn't apply to textbooks, but the concept is interesting enough. The folks doing the renting find it very profitable, and those doing the renting are no less happy with their savings.
Reports that build on one another, creating the false impression of growing momentum and consensus, with some invisible hand guiding everything and everyone... where have I heard that, before?
Assuming that punitive damages were awarded agains Exxon and that Exxon argued that those damages were excessive and therefore unconstitutional, perhaps Thomas could make a similar argument.
Actually, the case involved both punitive and compensatory damages. The Supreme Court decided that a 1:1 ratio was the fair upper limit for punitive damages, and reduced it.
As for the OP, my take is that he's simply way off in left field suggesting that a what happened in a given maritime case has any relevance to this copyright infringement case. The "bad anology" comment was correct. Hell, what's next -- someone suggesting that just because a "being a nice guy" defense works in traffic court, it should work similarly in federal court?
We only begrudgingly accept homosexuality.
Hardly. From the Wiki article
So yes, assuming you live in a liberal Western country, you probably can find gay porn at your local video store, but I'd wager most of the sodomy laws are still on the books. In fact, there was a couple (male/female) a few years back who were charged by an overzealous prosecutor in one of the Southern states.
A curious irony is that most law enforcement officials tend to be heterosexual males, so the shitload of "obscene" or otherwise illegal gay porn continues to remain available. Anyone who has seen something like the Goatse images knows that even a 3 second viewing is 3 seconds too much.