I've never understood people's desire to use VOIP over WiFi on their cell phones. What is wrong with just using your phone?
My wife and I share a family plan and we get plenty of minutes, and they roll over which is a big help because we don't have to have a plan that allows for that one month when we have higher than normal usage.
I guess some people are on the phone constantly and have to buy a prohibitively expensive plan? But are we talking 5000 minutes or what? Business folk who are on the phone that much every month probably need some mobility- i.e. you'd like to be able to leave your hotspot while on an important phone call.
Thats a pretty sweet idea. I suppose it is unlikely that bots would start downloading all the referenced content from a given HTML page. Someone else put it well- it is all about low hanging fruit. If you implement your own unique scheme, it is doubtful that anybody will mess with you.
Even still, it is annoying to have to resort to these tactics.
No, spammers are. The root problem of this "solution" is the spammers, who do not care our personal feelings of privacy. They don't care that their messages cause everyone else's costs to rise. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am getting annoyed at everyone complaining about CAPTCHAs. I don't like them either but if anybody complaining has EVER tried to run any type of online service, they'd realize how friggin bot-infested, spam-infested and disease-laden the Internet has become. Something simple like runing a small phpBB system is now a full time job because of all the bots infesting it. You're always trying to stay one step ahead of the spammers, and at best you still spend a few hours a week manually cleaning up bogus accounts and postings, or slugging away at an inbox of accounts to approve where 1000 are spam and 25 are legit.
CPATCHAs have gotten so difficult that I fail most on the first attempt. I'm sure the bots have no problem though. Or, they scrape and farm the CAPTCHAs out to porn sites to get real people (horny men) to solve them. If you're mad- be mad at the spammers! They've done this to us.
How is this any different than, say, Ford discontinuing its Aerostar minivan line? Sure, it is exactly the same. Assuming, of course, that your minivan can only run when authorized. The authorization dongle is connected to your PC, and your PC has a license that you won't be able to transfer to a new PC when your PC dies.
MSFT has a lot of power, and they can't use it properly. Sure they have incorrect philosophies, but they should at least be able to EXECUTE them... but they can't.
That is a pretty good point, actually. I guess it proves that being successful is something you have to work every minute of every day at. Just because something good happened to you yesterday and now you have a lot of $$$ in the bank doesn't make it any easier to be successful at something else tomorrow.
In Microsoft's case, they obviously did something right to get most of the PC's in the world running their OS. But they've had some pretty big flops over the last few years. Proof that pumping money into something isn't enough.
I've actually got a XP CD (retail) and I would still prefer to install just Vista. First, it is time consuming to install two OS's when you start from scratch, as opposed to one. Second, will the upgrade installer let you repartition the drive and truly start from scratch if you're doing an upgrade? Can't remember whether I had the option or not.
Of course, if you mess with your hardware a lot, you'll also be calling M$ quite a bit to reset your license. Overall, I find it to be a nasty process.
Why should this be a law? All this does is make cars more expensive which has the effect of making cars less affordable for lower income folks. Personally, I find the system annoying. My wife's new CRV has has the light come on twice now and get stuck and both times I've checked the tire pressure and it has been fine. The dealer can't seem to fix it.
What will the next new law be? Heated leather seats are mandatory? So much for this freedom thing I hear so much about.
This is one of the most refreshing things about a Mac- you don't have to reload the OS as soon as you buy the machine. I would NEVER use a preload version of XP or Vista. Never, ever, ever.
I haven't seen what Ubuntu preloads look like from the likes of Dell. Hopefully, it is nice and clean and about what I would do if I installed it myself and got all the drivers working.
The thing that really got us when we deployed our Java app on an AS/400 was EBCDIC. Our XML parser was good enough to handle ASCII files, but all the other stuff we did that used text files was all shot to hell because our code that read them wasn't set up to handle non-native encodings.
Think again! you are running the same image on two different machines. One real and one virtual with totally different hardware to the OS's point of view.
It is a thin line here, because one could say that with certain docking stations, you are running with totally different hardware, yet this is apparently allowed by Microsoft. I look at it this way- can I run both images at the same time? If not, they're not truly separate. Obviously, this isn't the litmus test that Microsoft uses, but maybe they should. In my case there is but one piece of physical hardware, and all the bytes on disk that make up the proprietary operating system only exist once. I only installed Windows once, and I didn't copy that install anywhere.
From what I gather I would have similar issues if I were a chronic machine rebuilder. I used to be one of those guys but I'm glad I'm not anymore. A weekend spent swapping out hard drives, video card, and other components will almost certainly lock down Vista from what I gather. I guess I just don't get it.... supposedly piracy is this huge problem yet the people willing to shell out the money are the ones who lose out. I can guess that there is a pirated version of Vista floating around somewhere that has none of the issues that the version I paid for has. This is similar to the DRM restrictions for those who decide to legally buy their digital music (although thankfully this is changing.)
I run Vista in a bootcamp partition and also use that partition as a virtual machine in parallels. Well, I "TRY" to do this....
What happened was, the hardware looks so different between the two that Microsoft deactivated both of them, I believe. I'm a little fuzzy on what happened really because I wasn't aware that it "would" happen, since Parallels advertises this feature pretty heavily. I thought they could treat it like a laptop, with a docked and undocked mode.
Anyway, it took about an hour or more to fix the boot camp side, and the parallels side doesn't work, it is still inactivated. For the record, I legitimately own a Vista license. I had to first muck around with some crappy UI trying to reestablish a network connection in some rubbish single user mode (using a wired mouse since my mighty mouse bluetooth no longer had the drivers loaded.) I finally got it reconnected and then it said that it couldn't activate me online. So I had to call someone at what I suppose to be an offshore call center. I had to read this guy like 40 characters off my screen, and he read back a bunch of characters that I had to key in. This part was tedious and it was way more characters that what would seem necessary.
In the end I felt like a total criminal. After buying Vista Ultimate, I felt like a criminal. I can install Ubuntu for free and not feel like a criminal, and I can donate $20 to Ubuntu or another distro and really feel good about myself. I don't believe the Bootcamp/VM setup violates the EULA for Ultimate because they are just different ways of launching the same image. If this is a violation, certainly a docked and undocked laptop violates it.
ANYWAY, now that I'm done ranting (sorry), my question. Does RC1 fix all this?
We've grown up a generation that thinks if it can be sent over a wire, it should be free. If I can find a way to download it, I took it for free. Therefore, I'm a winner and the people paying are suckers and losers.
This is a very valid point. Also, look at how most people use the Internet and how much those things cost the people the run the services. Most of it has no revenue model other than advertising. Trying to get people to pay to use a service over the net is difficult. I think that most people think that they can fire up Google Maps for free because they pay $50 for a broadband connection. I am soooo skeptical of Google- IMHO they may be considerably overvalued. They give just about everything away for free and I don't feel that an advertising company (lets face it- that is all they are) can really be worth as much as companies like Coca Cola that have such a stronghold in their marketplace. It isn't likely a new soda will come along that will cause Coca Cola to go crashing to the floor. I'm not sure Google has the same strangle-hold in their market space however. Maybe they do, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe 20 years from now the whole world will be nothing but Google.
I know that is a small tangent from digital content but I think the two are tied at the hip. By the same token, many people think their $50 broadband bill is what entitles them to fill their hard drives with copyrighted content. Either way I think you are right- this whole thing is going to crash.
These stories are getting old. We've been hearing about stuff like this for years now. At some point there has to be a truce. I would like to think that most people want to enjoy music while respecting the rights of people who make the music to make a living. I'm not sure what the answer is, but perhaps it is time for the entire middle tier (the record labels) to get ripped out of the equation and for the RIAA to be dissolved. The Amazon store shows progress- at least we are free from DRM hell.
I'd like to see a model where when you pay for music you actually receive a license of some sort for the given song or album. This would be good for a lifetime, and when a new media format comes out, you could get the album or single reissued to you just pay for the price of the media and handling charges. As it stands I had some albums on cassette that I subsequently bought on CD and eventually lost the CDs and ended up buying the digital DRM version. I'll also have to buy the non-DRM version now if I want it. This is total B.S. and seems to be in direct contradiction to the argument that you aren't "buying music", you're "licensing" it.
All these lawsuits are just an outdated industry with an outdated business model trying to stay alive. They want to keep the margins as high as they were when vinyl was being pressed. They're not adapting, they're just kicking and screaming theirselves out of business.
That is really the entire problem in a nutshell. The funny part is, this is almost 2008. The time for the recording industry to be pioneers was back in 1995! Thirteen years ago! They could have become a major player in the digital age been a guiding force. Almost every other industry in this country adapted themselves in some form or another to do business in this new age.
At this point, Eclipse is a mature, stable and feature-rich IDE with a healthy plugin community to boot.
For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.
I should qualify this by saying that I'm perfectly able to swap if a new job required it. And if I were doing HelloWorld, single project type stuff it wouldn't matter in the slightest. But once you get a dozen or so interdependent projects in your workspace and you get everything running like a well oiled machine and don't go around thinking "I really wish this piece of junk could do X, Y and Z".... well, its a tough sell.
I think it is import to distinguish between what we just don't like and what is actually illegal- i.e. unconstitutional.
For example, I just posted something on Apple's support forums about distaste for the fact that they chose not to include Java 6 in Leopard. They deleted the entire thread. I don't like it and I think ti sucks. BUT- it isn't illegal. They own the support forum! They can delete whatever the hell they want. This has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amedement doesn't grant you the right to speak freely in someone else's property. It doesn't even grant you the right to enter their property.
I believe content blocking/filtering/etc is the same type thing. Some ISP will pop up who uses this as marketing material. They'll market themselves as the ones who "don't block anything."
This idea is far from new. I interviewed with a small company back in 99 called e-medsoft.com that was trying to put medical records online. The idea has a lot of merit when you look at all the paper that moves from place to place in the health care industry. The company I interviewed with went belly up, because it was too hard to get people to adopt the technology. It needs to be nearly ubiquitous to add the most value. Plus, there are a lot of regulations and privacy laws in place which make it a little more difficult to effectively do business in this space.
You're talking about the Power Support one? I almost bought it but resisted because I didn't know anything about it. Good to hear a first hand review- thanks!
Agreed. My only major hang up with my iPhone that can't be easily fixed is that the friggin screen is ALWAYS getting smeared up. I live in a warm weather climate and I have oily skin to boot. I'd really have to try the technology to see whether I could get used to it or not. The nice thing about a traditional touch screen that is is the most natural of instincts. See something you want to interact with and touch it.
I can understand the company having policies, but this is a case where a manager clearly should have used his authority for a one-time override. Next time I guess you'll be taking your business elsewhere, I bet? So, they are the ones who goofed up.
I agree. I can't believe there are people who are actually upset that Apple is doing this. They'd rather have us get nothing. That is just a crappy attitude IMHO.
Well, if was absolutely going to buy Leopard no matter what, even before this happened, and now I apply the $100 to that purchase, Apple is actually out the $100 in terms of opportunity cost.
The case you presented is valid however for people who decide to buy something they wouldn't have ordinarily bought.
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I've never understood people's desire to use VOIP over WiFi on their cell phones. What is wrong with just using your phone?
My wife and I share a family plan and we get plenty of minutes, and they roll over which is a big help because we don't have to have a plan that allows for that one month when we have higher than normal usage.
I guess some people are on the phone constantly and have to buy a prohibitively expensive plan? But are we talking 5000 minutes or what? Business folk who are on the phone that much every month probably need some mobility- i.e. you'd like to be able to leave your hotspot while on an important phone call.
Thats a pretty sweet idea. I suppose it is unlikely that bots would start downloading all the referenced content from a given HTML page. Someone else put it well- it is all about low hanging fruit. If you implement your own unique scheme, it is doubtful that anybody will mess with you.
Even still, it is annoying to have to resort to these tactics.
CPATCHAs have gotten so difficult that I fail most on the first attempt. I'm sure the bots have no problem though. Or, they scrape and farm the CAPTCHAs out to porn sites to get real people (horny men) to solve them. If you're mad- be mad at the spammers! They've done this to us.
MSFT has a lot of power, and they can't use it properly. Sure they have incorrect philosophies, but they should at least be able to EXECUTE them... but they can't.
That is a pretty good point, actually. I guess it proves that being successful is something you have to work every minute of every day at. Just because something good happened to you yesterday and now you have a lot of $$$ in the bank doesn't make it any easier to be successful at something else tomorrow.
In Microsoft's case, they obviously did something right to get most of the PC's in the world running their OS. But they've had some pretty big flops over the last few years. Proof that pumping money into something isn't enough.
I've actually got a XP CD (retail) and I would still prefer to install just Vista. First, it is time consuming to install two OS's when you start from scratch, as opposed to one. Second, will the upgrade installer let you repartition the drive and truly start from scratch if you're doing an upgrade? Can't remember whether I had the option or not. Of course, if you mess with your hardware a lot, you'll also be calling M$ quite a bit to reset your license. Overall, I find it to be a nasty process.
Why should this be a law? All this does is make cars more expensive which has the effect of making cars less affordable for lower income folks. Personally, I find the system annoying. My wife's new CRV has has the light come on twice now and get stuck and both times I've checked the tire pressure and it has been fine. The dealer can't seem to fix it.
What will the next new law be? Heated leather seats are mandatory? So much for this freedom thing I hear so much about.
This is one of the most refreshing things about a Mac- you don't have to reload the OS as soon as you buy the machine. I would NEVER use a preload version of XP or Vista. Never, ever, ever.
I haven't seen what Ubuntu preloads look like from the likes of Dell. Hopefully, it is nice and clean and about what I would do if I installed it myself and got all the drivers working.
The thing that really got us when we deployed our Java app on an AS/400 was EBCDIC. Our XML parser was good enough to handle ASCII files, but all the other stuff we did that used text files was all shot to hell because our code that read them wasn't set up to handle non-native encodings.
Think again! you are running the same image on two different machines. One real and one virtual with totally different hardware to the OS's point of view.
It is a thin line here, because one could say that with certain docking stations, you are running with totally different hardware, yet this is apparently allowed by Microsoft. I look at it this way- can I run both images at the same time? If not, they're not truly separate. Obviously, this isn't the litmus test that Microsoft uses, but maybe they should. In my case there is but one piece of physical hardware, and all the bytes on disk that make up the proprietary operating system only exist once. I only installed Windows once, and I didn't copy that install anywhere.
From what I gather I would have similar issues if I were a chronic machine rebuilder. I used to be one of those guys but I'm glad I'm not anymore. A weekend spent swapping out hard drives, video card, and other components will almost certainly lock down Vista from what I gather. I guess I just don't get it.... supposedly piracy is this huge problem yet the people willing to shell out the money are the ones who lose out. I can guess that there is a pirated version of Vista floating around somewhere that has none of the issues that the version I paid for has. This is similar to the DRM restrictions for those who decide to legally buy their digital music (although thankfully this is changing.)
I run Vista in a bootcamp partition and also use that partition as a virtual machine in parallels. Well, I "TRY" to do this.... What happened was, the hardware looks so different between the two that Microsoft deactivated both of them, I believe. I'm a little fuzzy on what happened really because I wasn't aware that it "would" happen, since Parallels advertises this feature pretty heavily. I thought they could treat it like a laptop, with a docked and undocked mode. Anyway, it took about an hour or more to fix the boot camp side, and the parallels side doesn't work, it is still inactivated. For the record, I legitimately own a Vista license. I had to first muck around with some crappy UI trying to reestablish a network connection in some rubbish single user mode (using a wired mouse since my mighty mouse bluetooth no longer had the drivers loaded.) I finally got it reconnected and then it said that it couldn't activate me online. So I had to call someone at what I suppose to be an offshore call center. I had to read this guy like 40 characters off my screen, and he read back a bunch of characters that I had to key in. This part was tedious and it was way more characters that what would seem necessary. In the end I felt like a total criminal. After buying Vista Ultimate, I felt like a criminal. I can install Ubuntu for free and not feel like a criminal, and I can donate $20 to Ubuntu or another distro and really feel good about myself. I don't believe the Bootcamp/VM setup violates the EULA for Ultimate because they are just different ways of launching the same image. If this is a violation, certainly a docked and undocked laptop violates it. ANYWAY, now that I'm done ranting (sorry), my question. Does RC1 fix all this?
We've grown up a generation that thinks if it can be sent over a wire, it should be free. If I can find a way to download it, I took it for free. Therefore, I'm a winner and the people paying are suckers and losers.
This is a very valid point. Also, look at how most people use the Internet and how much those things cost the people the run the services. Most of it has no revenue model other than advertising. Trying to get people to pay to use a service over the net is difficult. I think that most people think that they can fire up Google Maps for free because they pay $50 for a broadband connection. I am soooo skeptical of Google- IMHO they may be considerably overvalued. They give just about everything away for free and I don't feel that an advertising company (lets face it- that is all they are) can really be worth as much as companies like Coca Cola that have such a stronghold in their marketplace. It isn't likely a new soda will come along that will cause Coca Cola to go crashing to the floor. I'm not sure Google has the same strangle-hold in their market space however. Maybe they do, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe 20 years from now the whole world will be nothing but Google.
I know that is a small tangent from digital content but I think the two are tied at the hip. By the same token, many people think their $50 broadband bill is what entitles them to fill their hard drives with copyrighted content. Either way I think you are right- this whole thing is going to crash.
These stories are getting old. We've been hearing about stuff like this for years now. At some point there has to be a truce. I would like to think that most people want to enjoy music while respecting the rights of people who make the music to make a living. I'm not sure what the answer is, but perhaps it is time for the entire middle tier (the record labels) to get ripped out of the equation and for the RIAA to be dissolved. The Amazon store shows progress- at least we are free from DRM hell.
I'd like to see a model where when you pay for music you actually receive a license of some sort for the given song or album. This would be good for a lifetime, and when a new media format comes out, you could get the album or single reissued to you just pay for the price of the media and handling charges. As it stands I had some albums on cassette that I subsequently bought on CD and eventually lost the CDs and ended up buying the digital DRM version. I'll also have to buy the non-DRM version now if I want it. This is total B.S. and seems to be in direct contradiction to the argument that you aren't "buying music", you're "licensing" it.
All these lawsuits are just an outdated industry with an outdated business model trying to stay alive. They want to keep the margins as high as they were when vinyl was being pressed. They're not adapting, they're just kicking and screaming theirselves out of business.
That is really the entire problem in a nutshell. The funny part is, this is almost 2008. The time for the recording industry to be pioneers was back in 1995! Thirteen years ago! They could have become a major player in the digital age been a guiding force. Almost every other industry in this country adapted themselves in some form or another to do business in this new age.
At this point, Eclipse is a mature, stable and feature-rich IDE with a healthy plugin community to boot.
For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.
I should qualify this by saying that I'm perfectly able to swap if a new job required it. And if I were doing HelloWorld, single project type stuff it wouldn't matter in the slightest. But once you get a dozen or so interdependent projects in your workspace and you get everything running like a well oiled machine and don't go around thinking "I really wish this piece of junk could do X, Y and Z".... well, its a tough sell.
I think it is import to distinguish between what we just don't like and what is actually illegal- i.e. unconstitutional.
For example, I just posted something on Apple's support forums about distaste for the fact that they chose not to include Java 6 in Leopard. They deleted the entire thread. I don't like it and I think ti sucks. BUT- it isn't illegal. They own the support forum! They can delete whatever the hell they want. This has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amedement doesn't grant you the right to speak freely in someone else's property. It doesn't even grant you the right to enter their property.
I believe content blocking/filtering/etc is the same type thing. Some ISP will pop up who uses this as marketing material. They'll market themselves as the ones who "don't block anything."
OK.... are we SURE that these things weren't made in Japan?
Cause they're acting more like a Honda than a GM at this point.
This idea is far from new. I interviewed with a small company back in 99 called e-medsoft.com that was trying to put medical records online. The idea has a lot of merit when you look at all the paper that moves from place to place in the health care industry. The company I interviewed with went belly up, because it was too hard to get people to adopt the technology. It needs to be nearly ubiquitous to add the most value. Plus, there are a lot of regulations and privacy laws in place which make it a little more difficult to effectively do business in this space.
You're talking about the Power Support one? I almost bought it but resisted because I didn't know anything about it. Good to hear a first hand review- thanks!
Agreed. My only major hang up with my iPhone that can't be easily fixed is that the friggin screen is ALWAYS getting smeared up. I live in a warm weather climate and I have oily skin to boot. I'd really have to try the technology to see whether I could get used to it or not. The nice thing about a traditional touch screen that is is the most natural of instincts. See something you want to interact with and touch it.
We don't need to know which devices or the formats. Just tell us HOW MANY devices, and we'll bill you accordingly. Thanks...
I can understand the company having policies, but this is a case where a manager clearly should have used his authority for a one-time override. Next time I guess you'll be taking your business elsewhere, I bet? So, they are the ones who goofed up.
LOL... nice. I didn't RTFA but based on reading your quotes from it, this Carson guy really comes across sounding like an idiot. Hey, I'm convinced :)
I agree. I can't believe there are people who are actually upset that Apple is doing this. They'd rather have us get nothing. That is just a crappy attitude IMHO.
Well, if was absolutely going to buy Leopard no matter what, even before this happened, and now I apply the $100 to that purchase, Apple is actually out the $100 in terms of opportunity cost.
The case you presented is valid however for people who decide to buy something they wouldn't have ordinarily bought.