We cannot afford to let Microsoft monopolize this market.
They already have a monopoly. NHL.com, unfortunately, only uses MS Win Media Player. Do I like it, hell no. Broadcast.com used to provide both formats before the NHL took it inhouse. (though I think it streams from msnbc or one of the other ms sites). I'm willing to bet that MS is not charging the NHL very much just to lock it in, since that's how they work. At this point, marketshare is more important than money.
Basically, companies will not switch unless given a good reason. If MS can practically give service away, there will never be a reason to use a free alternative.
Interesting that NPR is described as balanced. In general, I find it to be whiny and overly liberal with mediocre humor/human interest stories (specifically the drive time shows).
Balanced is a bit more like the O'Reilly Factor where he'll criticize anyone doing something screwy, but he does tend to come off a bit too capitalistic for my tastes.
They all have agendas and interests they are trying to convince you to support.
Slightly off topic, but check out Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. It describes how american HS history textbooks (not unique to america, however) distort the true history, in effect portraying america's gov't as a moral bunch do-gooders. What it comes down to is that if your only knowledge of US history is from HS, you might as well not know any of it.
Funny, one person says trivial and another says hard...
Once you start doing complex tables, be it for data or for laying out images, you cannot make it adjust to the browser width easily and retain the intended look of the page. Some people still run at 800x600. What if they do not run full screen? Fullscreen apps are so frustrating because you reduce your free desktop space to zero, but then I'm a unix guy who is used to interfacing with multiple applications at once.
alt-tab doesn't cut it. Besides, if everything auto-fit to the browser's width I would not be able to block out the right side msn crap on espn.com.
That said, every page I design for myself, or have some control over, will autofit to the browser width. If it is a data table, make your browser bigger. In fact, I bitch at my co-workers who make their tables fixed width.
RE: nav on the right side, maybe I've been using computers too long, but I read left->right and when I want to do something, I start looking on the left side. In fact, I never look on the right side for anything. If I read a magazine or newspaper, I look on the left column first as that is where the index tends to be and where articles start. If I'm taking notes, I label the date on the side that is easiest to browse (left on the left page, right on the right page).
Granted the look is a little stale, but exactly what usability problems are there with slashdot? Everything is pretty straightforward. It may not be perfect, but who defines perfect? Certainly not Jakob. He's probably off the mark 50% of the time. Especially with his "put the side nav bar on the right side". Guess what happens when people design sites that are too wide for a vaguely normal browser size? You can't navigate without side scrolling! 75% of the web is navigating to your information, so that has to be easy.
The only thing i find vaguely annoying is the search form all the way at the bottom, but that might be done to discourage its use (I'm sure full text searches in MySQL on a site this busy is a bad thing...) Anyway, it would explain the number of repeat stories we see so often.
They get around not charging you for splitting by requiring a separate device for every split by:
1) Switching to Digital Cable
2) Scrambling signals
3) compression (I've heard this, but it always turns out to be scrambling. If it was compressed, I wouldn't be able to sort of see the images, and why would they scramble and compress?)
So now they force you to buy another tuner/descrambler/etc...
There was a time when I could split the cable signal to my tv and vcr. I could then record and watch different programs. Then the cable company started scrambling channels so I can only record a lot of crap plus a few real cable channels.
Basically, they F*K you because no one can stop them. In most cases, people can't switch providers. Sure there are dish type providers but there are problems here as well (I can't see the south sky).
Americans need their TV so the cable companies bilk you as much as possible and the gov't helps them. The general consensus before the cable act of (9x?) went into effect is that it would raise prices, and it did. I now pay almost twice what I used to, and half the channels I never watch. Now maybe the increase is all due to taxes or something, but either way my only voice is to disconnect and how do I benefit from this? I just suffer less.
This is why capitalism doesn't work on a large scale. Even if 1% of the people rebel, the company in question won't care. You would probably need 25% or more for them to start doing something about it. Of course, most Americans are sheep (myself included) and won't do anything but complain about the cost/use/reliablity/etc...
My friend uses the capitalism argument to defend the RIAA. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Guess what? If others still spend billions, my voice isn't heard and the only person who suffers is me depriving myself of something I want because the cost/value ratio isn't fair IMO. Not much useful martydom there...
What is really scary is that I just heard an old commercial from an abbott and costello WWII radio show on NPR for Camel. They were donating 800,000 packs of cigs to the troops every week.
This post is so late I'm sure it won't be read, but I met Mark Jacobs, President of Mythic Entertainment, in EB while preregistering for Dark Age of Camelot. He talked to me for probably half an hour and even politely answered some silly requests I made.
This is how an executive should act with anyone who is interested in their company (as long as they are polite, of course!).
All www.msn.com does is forward you to other sites. All (extrapolation from a small sample size) of these sites (msnbc, expedia, etc...) work just fine with any browser.
Most of the links are go.msn.com that just logs and redirects.
My guess is that MSN is just having fun at your (our) expense.
Have you seen IBM's stock price? It is one of the few that haven't dropped in the toilet. Even MS's stock dropped, so IBM must be doing something right...
I'm replying to this comment mainly because it makes the issue a race to see which happens first: MS fixes the problem or the script kiddies attack.
I belong to the main (afaik) security list, NtBugTraq, and from what I can tell, almost all exploits are revealed to MS well in advance of the
While there are a few MS people on the list (who seem very helpful), a number of people generally seem to get the cold shoulder or dismissed by MS.
The exploits are released after a certain amount of time to encourage MS to actually fix the bugs, but sometimes MS twiddles it's thumbs for many months.
What news source have you been watching? I think every major (US) station reported that the buildings collapsed because of the intense heat generated by the jet fuel fire. Since the structural integrity of steel starts to disappear around 7k F (though I heard 3 or 4 different temps tossed around), the towers collapsed under the weight of the above floors.
Because each floor could only support maybe 2 floors of weight (w/o additional support, i.e. floor A supports B, B supports C, but if B doesn't support C, then A has to directly support B and C), the building collapsed. This is how they intentionally collapse buildings so they fall straight down.
If you take out the base, they fall over as if you were cutting down a tree. The base is so reinforced that you need a really big problem down there to knock it over, which is why the WTC bombing failed.
Source: ABCNews and some architect/structural engineer giving a statement about an hour after the WTC collapsed.
If it's a time of miltary rule, why are they so friggin non-military? Maybe it is just Scott Bakula having no spine and horrible line delivery, but with that rub down scene it seems more like Love Boat meets soft pr0n than Star Trek or SciFi. Ayn Rand says "Show, don't Tell". Regardless of what you think of her books or ideologies, just saying "it's a time of military rule" doesn't cut it. You have to show it for the audience to feel it.
That said, I accidently saw the pilot and it wasn't too bad, but it was typical ST schlock. You would think geeks would be smart enough and get tired of recycled plot lines, but they don't (or they did long enough to get Voyager off the air).
Every episode of Farscape impresses me more than any other show I've ever seen. I put off watching Farscape because of the puppets and the usual SciFi lineup was horrible, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. Pilot still looks like a puppet but is rarely shown, but Rigel, unless I focus on him, blends in pretty well.
Well, Farscape is kind of dicky about bundling a pair of episodes and selling it for $25 (20 on amazon).
You can get all of Buffy Season I for $50. (ok, it won't be released until Jan 15, but there are other examples...) I'm hoping they wise up and release each season bundled for a reasonable (to me) price.
Still my favorite show. Someone said this is the last season for Lexx, I hope not.
Bucknell is in the middle of nowhere, you *have* to have an intimate community because the avg education level off campus is middle school.
The main difference between a public and private uni is the total number of parties thrown on a given night (public) and research money (private). Though schools like dartmouth get picked for party school of the year and UCB probably gets more research money than most private institutions.
In general, your education is determined by what classes you choose and how well you apply yourself.
It's common knowledge that hardware isn't free and that Sun/HP are bastard expensive. Get a clue before you post.
In addition to the hardware, the real cost is all the stupid consultants that are hired at 100-200/hr to manage the damn things. (Don't say this doesn't happen, I've consulted (100/hr) at places that did this. OF course they are out of business now because money isn't water and you can't find it on trees...)
Actually, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and several of the other news organizations ran commericial free for several *days*, and are looking at losses in profit because of that. Rather than pander to commericialism, they actually decided that the point of the TV news was to report the news, and did so at a loss their bottom lines.
Actually, they ran commercial free because they wanted to get ratings (ok, they probably also wanted to report the news). If any of those networks ran a commercial, people would have immediately changed to another channel's coverage.
People probably changed channels anyway, but that was due to the stations' coverages getting pretty stale after an hour or so.
1) MHz is an invalid benchmark. This is proven by lower MHz Athlons beating higher MHz P3s/P4s.
2) Gas octane rating is (I'm pretty sure) gov't regulated, whereas MHz is not.
Marketing is all about defining an image. Right now, MHz is part of the defining image of a chip. A paragraph description of why AMD beats Intel would not stick in the mind of consumer, hence they play the MHz game. Maybe they could replace this with Quake FPS instead...
Granted, AMD will confuse people and will probably suffer sales because of the confusion (why buy something if you aren't quite sure what it represents). Only enthusiasts will go to sites like tomshardware to check the test results.
Traffic? If you are driving 70 mph, there is an absence of traffic:)
Anyway, half the traffic problems in the DC (and other) area are due to people driving 70-80 in a 55 zone. Something about pushing a large volume through a smaller volume...
Nothing is more distracting than trying to figure out how to write the lisp code to get your.emacs file setup to do what you want.
I used to use XEmacs religiously until my workstation switched from solaris to windows (work change in 96). Since then, XEmacs has been released for the Win32 platform but it doesn't really interoperate well there, and my fingers have forgotten most of the command sequences.:(
Slashdot Mirror
We cannot afford to let Microsoft monopolize this market.
They already have a monopoly. NHL.com, unfortunately, only uses MS Win Media Player. Do I like it, hell no. Broadcast.com used to provide both formats before the NHL took it inhouse. (though I think it streams from msnbc or one of the other ms sites). I'm willing to bet that MS is not charging the NHL very much just to lock it in, since that's how they work. At this point, marketshare is more important than money.
Basically, companies will not switch unless given a good reason. If MS can practically give service away, there will never be a reason to use a free alternative.
Interesting that NPR is described as balanced. In general, I find it to be whiny and overly liberal with mediocre humor/human interest stories (specifically the drive time shows).
Balanced is a bit more like the O'Reilly Factor where he'll criticize anyone doing something screwy, but he does tend to come off a bit too capitalistic for my tastes.
They all have agendas and interests they are trying to convince you to support.
Slightly off topic, but check out Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. It describes how american HS history textbooks (not unique to america, however) distort the true history, in effect portraying america's gov't as a moral bunch do-gooders. What it comes down to is that if your only knowledge of US history is from HS, you might as well not know any of it.
Well, it could mean that they already bought the DOJ... Republicans tend to support big business when it comes right down to it.
I am in like flint
Bad movie, stole the real quote.
In like Flynn
How would that impact non-US open source developers?
Just don't vist the US and you *might* be OK.
Funny, one person says trivial and another says hard...
Once you start doing complex tables, be it for data or for laying out images, you cannot make it adjust to the browser width easily and retain the intended look of the page. Some people still run at 800x600. What if they do not run full screen? Fullscreen apps are so frustrating because you reduce your free desktop space to zero, but then I'm a unix guy who is used to interfacing with multiple applications at once.
alt-tab doesn't cut it. Besides, if everything auto-fit to the browser's width I would not be able to block out the right side msn crap on espn.com.
That said, every page I design for myself, or have some control over, will autofit to the browser width. If it is a data table, make your browser bigger. In fact, I bitch at my co-workers who make their tables fixed width.
RE: nav on the right side, maybe I've been using computers too long, but I read left->right and when I want to do something, I start looking on the left side. In fact, I never look on the right side for anything. If I read a magazine or newspaper, I look on the left column first as that is where the index tends to be and where articles start. If I'm taking notes, I label the date on the side that is easiest to browse (left on the left page, right on the right page).
Granted the look is a little stale, but exactly what usability problems are there with slashdot? Everything is pretty straightforward. It may not be perfect, but who defines perfect? Certainly not Jakob. He's probably off the mark 50% of the time. Especially with his "put the side nav bar on the right side". Guess what happens when people design sites that are too wide for a vaguely normal browser size? You can't navigate without side scrolling! 75% of the web is navigating to your information, so that has to be easy.
The only thing i find vaguely annoying is the search form all the way at the bottom, but that might be done to discourage its use (I'm sure full text searches in MySQL on a site this busy is a bad thing...) Anyway, it would explain the number of repeat stories we see so often.
They get around not charging you for splitting by requiring a separate device for every split by:
1) Switching to Digital Cable
2) Scrambling signals
3) compression (I've heard this, but it always turns out to be scrambling. If it was compressed, I wouldn't be able to sort of see the images, and why would they scramble and compress?)
So now they force you to buy another tuner/descrambler/etc...
There was a time when I could split the cable signal to my tv and vcr. I could then record and watch different programs. Then the cable company started scrambling channels so I can only record a lot of crap plus a few real cable channels.
Basically, they F*K you because no one can stop them. In most cases, people can't switch providers. Sure there are dish type providers but there are problems here as well (I can't see the south sky).
Americans need their TV so the cable companies bilk you as much as possible and the gov't helps them. The general consensus before the cable act of (9x?) went into effect is that it would raise prices, and it did. I now pay almost twice what I used to, and half the channels I never watch. Now maybe the increase is all due to taxes or something, but either way my only voice is to disconnect and how do I benefit from this? I just suffer less.
This is why capitalism doesn't work on a large scale. Even if 1% of the people rebel, the company in question won't care. You would probably need 25% or more for them to start doing something about it. Of course, most Americans are sheep (myself included) and won't do anything but complain about the cost/use/reliablity/etc...
My friend uses the capitalism argument to defend the RIAA. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Guess what? If others still spend billions, my voice isn't heard and the only person who suffers is me depriving myself of something I want because the cost/value ratio isn't fair IMO. Not much useful martydom there...
What is really scary is that I just heard an old commercial from an abbott and costello WWII radio show on NPR for Camel. They were donating 800,000 packs of cigs to the troops every week.
Talk about doing their part...
This post is so late I'm sure it won't be read, but I met Mark Jacobs, President of Mythic Entertainment, in EB while preregistering for Dark Age of Camelot. He talked to me for probably half an hour and even politely answered some silly requests I made.
This is how an executive should act with anyone who is interested in their company (as long as they are polite, of course!).
All www.msn.com does is forward you to other sites. All (extrapolation from a small sample size) of these sites (msnbc, expedia, etc...) work just fine with any browser.
Most of the links are go.msn.com that just logs and redirects.
My guess is that MSN is just having fun at your (our) expense.
Have you seen IBM's stock price? It is one of the few that haven't dropped in the toilet. Even MS's stock dropped, so IBM must be doing something right...
I'm replying to this comment mainly because it makes the issue a race to see which happens first: MS fixes the problem or the script kiddies attack.
I belong to the main (afaik) security list, NtBugTraq, and from what I can tell, almost all exploits are revealed to MS well in advance of the
While there are a few MS people on the list (who seem very helpful), a number of people generally seem to get the cold shoulder or dismissed by MS.
The exploits are released after a certain amount of time to encourage MS to actually fix the bugs, but sometimes MS twiddles it's thumbs for many months.
What news source have you been watching? I think every major (US) station reported that the buildings collapsed because of the intense heat generated by the jet fuel fire. Since the structural integrity of steel starts to disappear around 7k F (though I heard 3 or 4 different temps tossed around), the towers collapsed under the weight of the above floors.
Because each floor could only support maybe 2 floors of weight (w/o additional support, i.e. floor A supports B, B supports C, but if B doesn't support C, then A has to directly support B and C), the building collapsed. This is how they intentionally collapse buildings so they fall straight down.
If you take out the base, they fall over as if you were cutting down a tree. The base is so reinforced that you need a really big problem down there to knock it over, which is why the WTC bombing failed.
Source: ABCNews and some architect/structural engineer giving a statement about an hour after the WTC collapsed.
If it's a time of miltary rule, why are they so friggin non-military? Maybe it is just Scott Bakula having no spine and horrible line delivery, but with that rub down scene it seems more like Love Boat meets soft pr0n than Star Trek or SciFi. Ayn Rand says "Show, don't Tell". Regardless of what you think of her books or ideologies, just saying "it's a time of military rule" doesn't cut it. You have to show it for the audience to feel it.
That said, I accidently saw the pilot and it wasn't too bad, but it was typical ST schlock. You would think geeks would be smart enough and get tired of recycled plot lines, but they don't (or they did long enough to get Voyager off the air).
Every episode of Farscape impresses me more than any other show I've ever seen. I put off watching Farscape because of the puppets and the usual SciFi lineup was horrible, but I'm glad I gave it a chance. Pilot still looks like a puppet but is rarely shown, but Rigel, unless I focus on him, blends in pretty well.
Well, Farscape is kind of dicky about bundling a pair of episodes and selling it for $25 (20 on amazon).
You can get all of Buffy Season I for $50. (ok, it won't be released until Jan 15, but there are other examples...) I'm hoping they wise up and release each season bundled for a reasonable (to me) price.
Still my favorite show. Someone said this is the last season for Lexx, I hope not.
Bucknell is in the middle of nowhere, you *have* to have an intimate community because the avg education level off campus is middle school.
The main difference between a public and private uni is the total number of parties thrown on a given night (public) and research money (private). Though schools like dartmouth get picked for party school of the year and UCB probably gets more research money than most private institutions.
In general, your education is determined by what classes you choose and how well you apply yourself.
It's common knowledge that hardware isn't free and that Sun/HP are bastard expensive. Get a clue before you post.
In addition to the hardware, the real cost is all the stupid consultants that are hired at 100-200/hr to manage the damn things. (Don't say this doesn't happen, I've consulted (100/hr) at places that did this. OF course they are out of business now because money isn't water and you can't find it on trees...)
These are jobs, not lives. The people laid off are probably in the top 1% intellectually and will get new jobs fairly easily at very nice salaries.
Now, I like HPUX more than solaris, but both of those dogs are too expensive when compared with linux or NT.
Business decisions suck. Whether this decision is smart is to be seen.
Actually, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and several of the other news organizations ran commericial free for several *days*, and are looking at losses in profit because of that. Rather than pander to commericialism, they actually decided that the point of the TV news was to report the news, and did so at a loss their bottom lines.
Actually, they ran commercial free because they wanted to get ratings (ok, they probably also wanted to report the news). If any of those networks ran a commercial, people would have immediately changed to another channel's coverage.
People probably changed channels anyway, but that was due to the stations' coverages getting pretty stale after an hour or so.
1) MHz is an invalid benchmark. This is proven by lower MHz Athlons beating higher MHz P3s/P4s.
2) Gas octane rating is (I'm pretty sure) gov't regulated, whereas MHz is not.
Marketing is all about defining an image. Right now, MHz is part of the defining image of a chip. A paragraph description of why AMD beats Intel would not stick in the mind of consumer, hence they play the MHz game. Maybe they could replace this with Quake FPS instead...
Granted, AMD will confuse people and will probably suffer sales because of the confusion (why buy something if you aren't quite sure what it represents). Only enthusiasts will go to sites like tomshardware to check the test results.
The prom stuff (OpenBoot) was originally written by Mitch Bradley.
Traffic? If you are driving 70 mph, there is an absence of traffic :)
Anyway, half the traffic problems in the DC (and other) area are due to people driving 70-80 in a 55 zone. Something about pushing a large volume through a smaller volume...
Nothing is more distracting than trying to figure out how to write the lisp code to get your .emacs file setup to do what you want.
:(
I used to use XEmacs religiously until my workstation switched from solaris to windows (work change in 96). Since then, XEmacs has been released for the Win32 platform but it doesn't really interoperate well there, and my fingers have forgotten most of the command sequences.
George Tirebiters around the US