Thanks for the article. So u see, it's pricing that's the issue here. It will probably appeal to deep pocketed consumers who are sold on the looks and interface-but that's about it.
Personally I feel they could have done much better by selling the phone off the shelf instead of bundling it with a service provider, but that's just me.
Oh no, you're wrong there- there are official Apple stores where you can get iPods and iMacs. But Apple has essentially priced itself as a super premium offering, and lack of after sales service also hinders growth.
Nokia is Finnish btw, not Asian. I wouldn't go as far as to say user interfaces 'suck'.
People buy phones for various reasons. Not everyone who buys high end phones here buy them for the features; they do so in order to show off. Nokia's communicator series of business phones (models starting with 9) are one of the most expensive phones available-with full functions for business-checking email etc. Yet you'll find petty businessmen and traders who don't know dick about the phone they have; they got it just to tell people that they spend around 45,000 rupees on a phone. (This was a few years ago).
Nokia's phones infact are wildly popular here because of a consistent and easy interface across all their phones; they're the most user friendly compared to other manufacturers. This is because all their phones run either Series 60 or Series 40 OS (their own), and users have an easy upgrade path.
Current models of Nokia have a mini presentation that runs when you start the phone for the first time; it walks you through the important features. Similarly, there's a configuration wizard that sets up your internet settings; all you have to do is choose your country and operator.
In India, they've launched models with support for multiple Indian languages, including the text dictionary.
And in addition to the usual instruction manual which nobody reads, they also enclose a 2 page cheat sheet indicating how to operate the main features-eg, the camera, FM radio, and basic calling and SMS.
So you cannot just say that these phones suck.
Think of Windows XP vs OS X. While XP isn't as great as OS X in terms of usability, you cannot outright dismiss it as being complete sucky, either.
It all boils down to price, and how much are people really willing to pay for a nice UI in exchange for being locked into one operator and one plan. I can speak for the Indian market- 25,000 rupees is a lot of money, and people with that kind of budget usually are rich non-geeks who look at a phone as a status symbol.
In the end-this will play out for Apple the same way it has for computers. Macs are far easier and friendlier to use than Windows-but again priced way beyond the reach of most people (again I refer to the Indian market).
Coming out on top in the American market may be a pushover given the extremely limited range of phones there(and also the existing Apple fanbase), but it will be harder to tap the Asian market because of inevitable comparisons with what's already on offer.
Another example-iPods are few and far between because of being relatively expensive. People either use cheap Taiwanese MP3 players, or go for music enabled smartphones. Sony Ericsson's excellent Walkman phones, and Nokia's Xpressmusic/Music Edition phones do pretty well with the college going crowd.
Have you been in a cave that has prevented you from knowing that European and Asian launches are coming in 2008 if not sooner? Sure, Apple has plans for the European/Asian markets. Unfortunately, people here don't follow the stupid logic that a phone must only come from the provider. In India for example, they've announced plans to launch the iPhone-but in partnership with Airtel, India's largest mobile operator. People using other operators having to force to switch to Airtel to use the iPhone? India does not have number portability as yet-so switching operators means your phone number will change. How many people are really going to put up with that? Remember, ours is a far more evolved mobile market, dominated by Nokia and Sony Ericson. Here, features like FM radio and MMS are available in the most basic phones (priced around Rs. 2000, at Rs. 40 to the dollar currently, you do the math). The initial price announced for the iPhone is around Rs. 25,000-plus having to switch operators or plans. You can get a fully unlocked off the shelf high end Nokia Nseries phone for around the same price (The N95 currently retails for around Rs. 28,000-off the shelf, IMO it blows the iPhone out of the water)
As for offering the phone SIM-less thats not Apple's style. Exactly. Apple has always maintained the 'we know what's good for you,don't argue about it' attitude. Which is perfectly fine for the non tech savvy masses, I suppose.
When you purchase the iPhone, you take it home, connect it to your computer and iTunes pops up to take you thru the activation process. Its EXTREMELY simple. Now imagine had it been sold SIM less. Each person would have to get the appropriate SIM for the carrier they wanted to go with. Thats just far too messy for Apple's tastes. It's about choice. What exactly is so difficult about opening the phone and replacing the card? The mobile store people will even help you put it in if you can't/won't do it yourself.
Here, if I find a better deal with another operator, all I do is purchase a SIM card (they're sold everywhere, even on small roadside shops) and it takes about 3 hours for them to activate the number. (By year end, we should have number portability-that makes things even better!)Same way-my phone (Nokia N73) can easily connect as a USB drive, and I can copy anything I want to/from it. I'm not forced to use iTunes. It even syncs with Windows Media Player,Winamp and plays WMA (ok, for whoever would want to use that format!)
Same goes for everything else-I can customize it with themes, make my own ringtones out of MP3s or midis and upload them, or choose from hundreds of 3rd party applications and games that make it even cooler to use. Nokia does not dictate to me how I can or cannot use the phone!!
To sum up-the iPhone may do well in the US because that's the primary market it's intended for. And Steve Jobs is just taking advantage of the restrictive market you guys have. The GP was right-he could have blown the US market wide open by offering it SIM free. People would flock to buy it in any case-it's not like he's going to lose out.
Basically, people in the US are waxing orgasmic over the iPhone only because of the pathetic alternatives you're stuck with there.
And well- Nokia S60(based on Symbian) is also an easy to use phone OS, even if it doesn't have all the touchscreen fanciness.
In India, we've had this since 1999 or 2000. Initially the service was using SMS ('text messages' to u americans) codes sent to a predefined number.You can query account balance, summary of transactions, stop payments, cheque book requests and so on-for eg send 'BAL' to get your account balance. For security, you have to register your mobile number with the bank first-via a signed paper form.
A few banks have even launched WAP portals ever since more users began to use GPRS/EDGE services.
And the latest innovation from ICICI Bank is a J2ME application that sends the control SMSes on your behalf (so you don't have to remember them each time).
Oh, and not just banking- SMS services are very common. TV channels frequently ask users to vote on various issues by sending an SMS.
You can book movie tickets, airline/railway tickets, check booking status and departure schedules, choose to be alerted via SMS of any delays.
The flip side-SMS spam offering credit cards, loans and insurance in addition to regular operator spam for content downloads.
I am SO happy that the operator subsidized model of mobile phone business did not take off in India. Here we use both GSM and CDMA (GSM dominates) and mobile operators just sell phone connections (GSM SIM cards). So no 'locking the phone down' bullshit. That said, I was surprised to note my provider Hutch was blocking access to a couple of free ringtone websites that offered download via WAP. This proves no problem to me, as I can anyway transfer anything between my phone and PC with the data cable. The downside is that high end mobile phones are expensive, and they depreciate in value rather fast as newer models are introduced. Oh, and both incoming calls and SMSes have been free since 2001, by order of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. In fact, the mobile phone market in India really took off only after this move.
..Here in India, all the mobile phones are belong to us, as in us the users. You want a phone, you go purchase it like any other device, and then buy a connection from the provider of your choice. If you don't like their service- flip em a birdie, and replace their SIM card with another providers. This has another advantage- people who travel frequently between cities can carry 2 SIM cards-one for each local city connection- to save on roaming charges,and having to carry 2 phones. In the end- the phone you have is not linked with your provider in any way, and you're free to attach a cable and copy photos. (I read that some US providers block this ability to force you to send images via mail/MMS)
Rates are extremely competitive too..it being a volume driven market. I pay the equivalent of 2 cents a minute for all local and national calls, as well as SMSes ^^ Oh, and incoming calls are free.
I've been working in software for some time now. For the last two years, I was working for the Indian arm of a small US tech company. I had a good time there, working closely with American colleagues and everyone there was highly competent and proficient in various technologies (by everyone I mean both the US and the Indian staff). This was partly due to stringent recruiting policies on either end. Now I've changed jobs, moved to Bangalore to join one of the big outsourcing firms, to get into the security domain. The difference in atmosphere could not be more stark. People are hired like crazy with no regard to quality control-half the candidates have no knowledge of rudimentary programming concepts. In the US (personal belief) most people in the tech sector are there because they like computers, or started programming as kids. No such situation here-99% of the people are in it solely for the money. This further translates into an attitude of 'learn the barest minimum to get things going.' No one is interested to learn anything further. A guy may have worked on say, J2EE technology for 4 years, but he won't know anything about troubleshooting his internet connection by pinging or checking DNS. Hell, he won't know ANYTHING about networking. After all, that's the network guy's problem isn't it? People here are rushed through so called training programs, and then sent onsite to the US or other countries to work. I haven't been sent out yet, but looking at some of them I seriously wonder what impression they give once they're there. How many of you in the US have had to work with such people- zero communication skills, absolutely poor and flimsy knowledge of the required technology and shoddy work?
Others here have theorized that India may have to start reverse outsourcing due to the shortage of skilled people. That will be quite ironic- but probably good news for those of you in the US who've been losing jobs to outsourcing.
No, he's implying that all humans who do that would be americans. 'Calling a lawyer' is not a kneejerk reaction everywhere in the world, the way it appears to be portrayed here.
For those who didn't get it-the parent is refering to the theme of the FPS Red Faction-one of whose hyped features was the ability to blow your way through any part of any level.
This becomes easy for Indian audiences.
I throw an open challenge to anyone who can decipher the name of the latest Bollywood flick, or some phrase from any Indian language translated into english. Indian films have long names, more like phrases-and there's no rule on how to spell them written in english, so they can be spelt in any way.
Same goes for anything else-swear words, phrases, proverbs...you won't even need to write it down!
Let me answer that..as another Indian. As noted by the AC who posted before this thread-automating common tasks like processing property deeds, taxes, enquiring about prices of foodgrains and agricultural products from other places, become easier if they can be computerized. Currently villagers have to deal with corrupt officials and middlemen, not to mention the redtape and bureaucracy with govt. departments. Some small projects of this kind are already underway-the Indian tobacco major ITC has a similar project in the eastern part of the country that allows farmers to compare prices of their cash crops with prevailing market rates across the world, and thus get a better deal (among other things).
In all these cases-computers are not owned by each and every villager. Usualy some sort of community owned infrastructure is set up, and one computer with broadband connection suffices for the needs of the whole village. So, in this case, even if you deploy just one computer per village, it works out to be hugely beneficial.
As for the point about the tech boom benefiting the middle class-it's explained like this-in earlier times, before India opened its economy for foreign investment, the people looked to the govt. as the provider of jobs. Public sector companies recruited people through an examination system. Now that the tech boom is on, the current generation has simply switched tracks; it's not as though there never was a middle class in India earlier.
I figured that half the trouble people have with XP SP2 would be because they already have a zillion applications loaded-and simply putting SP2 over this might just break something. It also helps if you have WHQL signed drivers for all your hardware-prevent screwups later on. I went to this excellent site that carries an article on slipstreaming SP2 along with other applications. Created a fresh slipstreamed CD(Nero 6, Media Player Classic, Winamp, Kazaa Lite all installed by default!), cleaned out my existing installation (uninstalled everything, no format) and did a clean install (replace as opposed to upgrade). No trouble since then. All applications working perfect. I replaced the builtin firewall with Kerio personal firewall. Norton AV 2004 was instaled, LiveUpdate fetched some updates for it, and now it as well as Kerio are detected by the Windows Security Center.
I never have to worry about spyware/ads/popups since getting Ad Muncher, so it makes no difference whether I use barebones IE, Firefox with Adblock, or the SP@ IE with its pop up and activex blocking doodads. None of these things even get a chance to work, since AdMuncher blows everything out of the way before it can even reach these apps! (divs, spans,tables, iframes, scripts-u name it-can be blocked)
Upshot is-if you want to play safe-don't blindly install it over your existing system, go for a clean new install and it should work without hassles.
It's worth the trouble, since several flaws and even a few new exploits have been fixed by it. (Of course, newer holes will popup sure as the sun shines, but thats' another story:) )
Rules like: As long as you don't click on it, it can do no harm.
That seems to be a valid rule even on Windows! I've told people the golden rule-if you don't understand what something does-read it again.If you still don't understand-take down the message you see before pestering someone more knowledgeable for help-nobody's clairvoyant; they need to know what the message was before being able to help you.
And if you still don't understand-hit 'cancel'.
The danger comes when people blindly click 'OK' to popups without caring what they do-and then whining about spyware.
But let me also add-this is all a case of user initiated security breaches. There are sufficient ones for Windows that don't require user intervention.
revolution among non copyrighted works?
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
As someone else pointed out-in the case of artistes (musicians)-anyone who chooses not to play by the rules of the recording companies remains at the fringes and cannot hope to become as popular as say, an Aerosmith or a Britney Spears (!).
Drawing a parallel with the OSS movement-today open source is strong enough to provide an alternative to closed source solutions-to the extent that biggies like IBM and Oracle too are taking linux etc seriously.
A similar revolution of sorts is needed among the music (and possibly amateur movie) community. Suppose there were bands that made it big on their own, and actually acquired cult status (like the Grateful Dead once did)-and also refused all offers from big labels to sign up-then we would have some contenders for open music.
The same way-(although this is harder)-with the advent of technology-it may be possible for amateur movie makers to come up with good alternatives to commercial cinema (just an idea, though). I recall an article once earlier about how people are using the Halo level editor to create short animated movies.
Only if there is an open alternative to copyrighted works, the way we have open vs closed source-can we finally be free of the RIAA MPAA and their draconian rulings, and cock a snook at them.
Back in '95, I was in high school, and our school computer room just had MSDOS 3.2, and only a couple of '1337' 386es that ran win 3.1-the rest were already ancient for the day-8086es.
We were being taught Turbo Pascal 5.5-and geek that i was, I managed to snitch a second hand manual for it, to try out low level functions. I didn't have a PC at home, so this was where I experimented.
One day, during lunch time, I write a memory resident program that sets the keyboard interrupt vector to null after the user presses 'enter' 20 times-and displays a message like 'eBOLa sTRiKeZ!!'
Feeling evil, I compiled the code, ran it, verified that it was resident, and started tapping away at enter..nothing.
I walk out of the computer room pissed, since I had to go attend a class-and an hour later, when I return-the teacher is screaming blue murder about a new virus. Seems my nasty little program chose to kick in when she was filing away the exam schedule in Wordstar...
It was all I could to retain a straight face.
Okay, so mass is the amount of matter in something and weight is the net force exerted on it due to gravity.
Just a thought experiment-if you're up in the ISS, holding a shotput and a baseball (which i think are of a similar size, though one is much heavier)
Since the shotput has much higher mass compared to the baseball, it should be harder to juggle ?
I'm having trouble contrasting this with the standard image of zero gravity-where everything floats around nice and easy. If I was to throw either of them to a colleague-would I need to exert more force to do it? High school physics says it is so-but 'imagining' how it would be is another matter...is it just as tough to throw a shotput up in space as it would be here on earth?
"For several years I've had to trim all kinds of stuff out of my email archives due to the claustrophobic 4- and 6-meg limit on Yahoo mail. Then suddenly I log in and there's 100 meg available. Well that sucks, I've deleted maybe half that in stuff I'd rather have kept over the years. "
For starters-Yahoo offered POP access till April 2002, for free. You could have downloaded all your mails at any time.
Even after POP went paid, YahooPOPs will let you download all your yahoo mails to your POP client.
I've been using this combination for over 5 years now-where's the problem? They can continue with 6 MB, goto 1 GB, hell, 1 TB-I get all my mail into my POP client when I want to. I have mails archived all the way from 1999 on my PC.
For ads-use AdMuncher
Again-where's the problem? I haven't EVER been subjected to a single ad, popup, driveby activex or anything in the last five years.
Use Admuncher-and you won't have to care about seeing any ad ever again. Yahoo's pages are absolutely clean and ad free for me-they've always been.
I don't see whats so great about being able to store all your emails ever received on some company's servers. What happens if, years later, Google gets taken over, or closes down? Would you rather have all your mails sitting pretty there? Recall when Google took over Dejanews and made it Google Groups-many people were upset that all the dumb posts,profanities and flames they'd made years earlier would now go public. Do you still trust someone else to store every single mail you've ever sent?
Then again-that's me.
Now that we've addressed two major issues-mailbox size and type of ads-what's left?
Oh, yeah, 'I trust google but not $COMPANY'-a view expressed by many people here.
Just what's so great about them? Any company is in business for one thing and one thing only-PROFIT.
Google is not a charity. There's NO telling how their current user friendly stance may change after the IPO. Look at Apple-people held out Steve Jobs as some great evangelist who's come to save the world from evil Microsoft and IBM-he's another bird of the same feather. Recall the Playfair vs iTunes controversy a couple of months back (should be somewhere here on/.)
In the end-Google is a great company no doubt-but they're not infallible. They've provided excellent service till now, there's no reason however to expect that they won't serve up something unpleasant in the future.
This technology claims to propel projectiles upto extremely high speeds, right, so what happens to the old Newtonian concept of action-reaction?
Shouldn't the recoil be brutal on these kinds of weapons?
The guys behind this are the ones who *invented* Kazaa and the FastTrack protocol-they later sold it to Sharman Networks, who are the ones who added the spyware. There's no spyware in this-their website boldly displays this fact, instead of burying it under legalese.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the article. So u see, it's pricing that's the issue here. It will probably appeal to deep pocketed consumers who are sold on the looks and interface-but that's about it. Personally I feel they could have done much better by selling the phone off the shelf instead of bundling it with a service provider, but that's just me.
Oh no, you're wrong there- there are official Apple stores where you can get iPods and iMacs. But Apple has essentially priced itself as a super premium offering, and lack of after sales service also hinders growth. Nokia is Finnish btw, not Asian. I wouldn't go as far as to say user interfaces 'suck'. People buy phones for various reasons. Not everyone who buys high end phones here buy them for the features; they do so in order to show off. Nokia's communicator series of business phones (models starting with 9) are one of the most expensive phones available-with full functions for business-checking email etc. Yet you'll find petty businessmen and traders who don't know dick about the phone they have; they got it just to tell people that they spend around 45,000 rupees on a phone. (This was a few years ago). Nokia's phones infact are wildly popular here because of a consistent and easy interface across all their phones; they're the most user friendly compared to other manufacturers. This is because all their phones run either Series 60 or Series 40 OS (their own), and users have an easy upgrade path. Current models of Nokia have a mini presentation that runs when you start the phone for the first time; it walks you through the important features. Similarly, there's a configuration wizard that sets up your internet settings; all you have to do is choose your country and operator. In India, they've launched models with support for multiple Indian languages, including the text dictionary. And in addition to the usual instruction manual which nobody reads, they also enclose a 2 page cheat sheet indicating how to operate the main features-eg, the camera, FM radio, and basic calling and SMS. So you cannot just say that these phones suck. Think of Windows XP vs OS X. While XP isn't as great as OS X in terms of usability, you cannot outright dismiss it as being complete sucky, either.
It all boils down to price, and how much are people really willing to pay for a nice UI in exchange for being locked into one operator and one plan. I can speak for the Indian market- 25,000 rupees is a lot of money, and people with that kind of budget usually are rich non-geeks who look at a phone as a status symbol. In the end-this will play out for Apple the same way it has for computers. Macs are far easier and friendlier to use than Windows-but again priced way beyond the reach of most people (again I refer to the Indian market). Coming out on top in the American market may be a pushover given the extremely limited range of phones there(and also the existing Apple fanbase), but it will be harder to tap the Asian market because of inevitable comparisons with what's already on offer. Another example-iPods are few and far between because of being relatively expensive. People either use cheap Taiwanese MP3 players, or go for music enabled smartphones. Sony Ericsson's excellent Walkman phones, and Nokia's Xpressmusic/Music Edition phones do pretty well with the college going crowd.
In India, we've had this since 1999 or 2000. Initially the service was using SMS ('text messages' to u americans) codes sent to a predefined number.You can query account balance, summary of transactions, stop payments, cheque book requests and so on-for eg send 'BAL' to get your account balance. For security, you have to register your mobile number with the bank first-via a signed paper form. A few banks have even launched WAP portals ever since more users began to use GPRS/EDGE services. And the latest innovation from ICICI Bank is a J2ME application that sends the control SMSes on your behalf (so you don't have to remember them each time). Oh, and not just banking- SMS services are very common. TV channels frequently ask users to vote on various issues by sending an SMS. You can book movie tickets, airline/railway tickets, check booking status and departure schedules, choose to be alerted via SMS of any delays. The flip side-SMS spam offering credit cards, loans and insurance in addition to regular operator spam for content downloads.
I am SO happy that the operator subsidized model of mobile phone business did not take off in India. Here we use both GSM and CDMA (GSM dominates) and mobile operators just sell phone connections (GSM SIM cards). So no 'locking the phone down' bullshit.
That said, I was surprised to note my provider Hutch was blocking access to a couple of free ringtone websites that offered download via WAP.
This proves no problem to me, as I can anyway transfer anything between my phone and PC with the data cable.
The downside is that high end mobile phones are expensive, and they depreciate in value rather fast as newer models are introduced.
Oh, and both incoming calls and SMSes have been free since 2001, by order of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. In fact, the mobile phone market in India really took off only after this move.
..Here in India, all the mobile phones are belong to us, as in us the users. You want a phone, you go purchase it like any other device, and then buy a connection from the provider of your choice. If you don't like their service- flip em a birdie, and replace their SIM card with another providers.
This has another advantage- people who travel frequently between cities can carry 2 SIM cards-one for each local city connection- to save on roaming charges,and having to carry 2 phones.
In the end- the phone you have is not linked with your provider in any way, and you're free to attach a cable and copy photos. (I read that some US providers block this ability to force you to send images via mail/MMS)
Rates are extremely competitive too..it being a volume driven market. I pay the equivalent of 2 cents a minute for all local and national calls, as well as SMSes ^^
Oh, and incoming calls are free.
I've been working in software for some time now. For the last two years, I was working for the Indian arm of a small US tech company. I had a good time there, working closely with American colleagues and everyone there was highly competent and proficient in various technologies (by everyone I mean both the US and the Indian staff). This was partly due to stringent recruiting policies on either end.
Now I've changed jobs, moved to Bangalore to join one of the big outsourcing firms, to get into the security domain. The difference in atmosphere could not be more stark. People are hired like crazy with no regard to quality control-half the candidates have no knowledge of rudimentary programming concepts.
In the US (personal belief) most people in the tech sector are there because they like computers, or started programming as kids. No such situation here-99% of the people are in it solely for the money.
This further translates into an attitude of 'learn the barest minimum to get things going.' No one is interested to learn anything further. A guy may have worked on say, J2EE technology for 4 years, but he won't know anything about troubleshooting his internet connection by pinging or checking DNS. Hell, he won't know ANYTHING about networking. After all, that's the network guy's problem isn't it?
People here are rushed through so called training programs, and then sent onsite to the US or other countries to work.
I haven't been sent out yet, but looking at some of them I seriously wonder what impression they give once they're there.
How many of you in the US have had to work with such people- zero communication skills,
absolutely poor and flimsy knowledge of the required technology and shoddy work?
Others here have theorized that India may have to start reverse outsourcing due to the shortage of skilled people. That will be quite ironic- but probably good news for those of you in the US who've been losing jobs to outsourcing.
Naans and rotis differ in the way they're prepared, but both are eaten as an accompaniment with a vegetable or meat side dish.
No, he's implying that all humans who do that would be americans. 'Calling a lawyer' is not a kneejerk reaction everywhere in the world, the way it appears to be portrayed here.
For those who didn't get it-the parent is refering to the theme of the FPS Red Faction-one of whose hyped features was the ability to blow your way through any part of any level.
This becomes easy for Indian audiences. I throw an open challenge to anyone who can decipher the name of the latest Bollywood flick, or some phrase from any Indian language translated into english. Indian films have long names, more like phrases-and there's no rule on how to spell them written in english, so they can be spelt in any way. Same goes for anything else-swear words, phrases, proverbs...you won't even need to write it down!
Or did anyone else also read it as 'MS releases malicious, software removal tool?' Hey Pop, come look at the amount of free space we got suddenly!
Anytime! As for corruption..haha..we are probably only a step behind Nigeria.
Let me answer that..as another Indian. As noted by the AC who posted before this thread-automating common tasks like processing property deeds, taxes, enquiring about prices of foodgrains and agricultural products from other places, become easier if they can be computerized. Currently villagers have to deal with corrupt officials and middlemen, not to mention the redtape and bureaucracy with govt. departments. Some small projects of this kind are already underway-the Indian tobacco major ITC has a similar project in the eastern part of the country that allows farmers to compare prices of their cash crops with prevailing market rates across the world, and thus get a better deal (among other things). In all these cases-computers are not owned by each and every villager. Usualy some sort of community owned infrastructure is set up, and one computer with broadband connection suffices for the needs of the whole village. So, in this case, even if you deploy just one computer per village, it works out to be hugely beneficial. As for the point about the tech boom benefiting the middle class-it's explained like this-in earlier times, before India opened its economy for foreign investment, the people looked to the govt. as the provider of jobs. Public sector companies recruited people through an examination system. Now that the tech boom is on, the current generation has simply switched tracks; it's not as though there never was a middle class in India earlier.
No trouble since then. All applications working perfect. I replaced the builtin firewall with Kerio personal firewall. Norton AV 2004 was instaled, LiveUpdate fetched some updates for it, and now it as well as Kerio are detected by the Windows Security Center.
I never have to worry about spyware/ads/popups since getting Ad Muncher, so it makes no difference whether I use barebones IE, Firefox with Adblock, or the SP@ IE with its pop up and activex blocking doodads. None of these things even get a chance to work, since AdMuncher blows everything out of the way before it can even reach these apps! (divs, spans,tables, iframes, scripts-u name it-can be blocked) :) )
Upshot is-if you want to play safe-don't blindly install it over your existing system, go for a clean new install and it should work without hassles. It's worth the trouble, since several flaws and even a few new exploits have been fixed by it. (Of course, newer holes will popup sure as the sun shines, but thats' another story
Rules like: As long as you don't click on it, it can do no harm. That seems to be a valid rule even on Windows! I've told people the golden rule-if you don't understand what something does-read it again.If you still don't understand-take down the message you see before pestering someone more knowledgeable for help-nobody's clairvoyant; they need to know what the message was before being able to help you. And if you still don't understand-hit 'cancel'. The danger comes when people blindly click 'OK' to popups without caring what they do-and then whining about spyware. But let me also add-this is all a case of user initiated security breaches. There are sufficient ones for Windows that don't require user intervention.
As someone else pointed out-in the case of artistes (musicians)-anyone who chooses not to play by the rules of the recording companies remains at the fringes and cannot hope to become as popular as say, an Aerosmith or a Britney Spears (!). Drawing a parallel with the OSS movement-today open source is strong enough to provide an alternative to closed source solutions-to the extent that biggies like IBM and Oracle too are taking linux etc seriously. A similar revolution of sorts is needed among the music (and possibly amateur movie) community. Suppose there were bands that made it big on their own, and actually acquired cult status (like the Grateful Dead once did)-and also refused all offers from big labels to sign up-then we would have some contenders for open music. The same way-(although this is harder)-with the advent of technology-it may be possible for amateur movie makers to come up with good alternatives to commercial cinema (just an idea, though). I recall an article once earlier about how people are using the Halo level editor to create short animated movies. Only if there is an open alternative to copyrighted works, the way we have open vs closed source-can we finally be free of the RIAA MPAA and their draconian rulings, and cock a snook at them.
Back in '95, I was in high school, and our school computer room just had MSDOS 3.2, and only a couple of '1337' 386es that ran win 3.1-the rest were already ancient for the day-8086es. We were being taught Turbo Pascal 5.5-and geek that i was, I managed to snitch a second hand manual for it, to try out low level functions. I didn't have a PC at home, so this was where I experimented. One day, during lunch time, I write a memory resident program that sets the keyboard interrupt vector to null after the user presses 'enter' 20 times-and displays a message like 'eBOLa sTRiKeZ!!' Feeling evil, I compiled the code, ran it, verified that it was resident, and started tapping away at enter..nothing. I walk out of the computer room pissed, since I had to go attend a class-and an hour later, when I return-the teacher is screaming blue murder about a new virus. Seems my nasty little program chose to kick in when she was filing away the exam schedule in Wordstar... It was all I could to retain a straight face.
Okay, so mass is the amount of matter in something and weight is the net force exerted on it due to gravity. Just a thought experiment-if you're up in the ISS, holding a shotput and a baseball (which i think are of a similar size, though one is much heavier) Since the shotput has much higher mass compared to the baseball, it should be harder to juggle ? I'm having trouble contrasting this with the standard image of zero gravity-where everything floats around nice and easy. If I was to throw either of them to a colleague-would I need to exert more force to do it? High school physics says it is so-but 'imagining' how it would be is another matter...is it just as tough to throw a shotput up in space as it would be here on earth?
I didn't get the joke-don't get Comedy Central here. Can you explain?
For starters-Yahoo offered POP access till April 2002, for free. You could have downloaded all your mails at any time. Even after POP went paid, YahooPOPs will let you download all your yahoo mails to your POP client. I've been using this combination for over 5 years now-where's the problem? They can continue with 6 MB, goto 1 GB, hell, 1 TB-I get all my mail into my POP client when I want to. I have mails archived all the way from 1999 on my PC. For ads-use AdMuncher Again-where's the problem? I haven't EVER been subjected to a single ad, popup, driveby activex or anything in the last five years. Use Admuncher-and you won't have to care about seeing any ad ever again. Yahoo's pages are absolutely clean and ad free for me-they've always been.
I don't see whats so great about being able to store all your emails ever received on some company's servers. What happens if, years later, Google gets taken over, or closes down? Would you rather have all your mails sitting pretty there? Recall when Google took over Dejanews and made it Google Groups-many people were upset that all the dumb posts,profanities and flames they'd made years earlier would now go public. Do you still trust someone else to store every single mail you've ever sent? /.)
In the end-Google is a great company no doubt-but they're not infallible. They've provided excellent service till now, there's no reason however to expect that they won't serve up something unpleasant in the future.
Then again-that's me.
Now that we've addressed two major issues-mailbox size and type of ads-what's left? Oh, yeah, 'I trust google but not $COMPANY'-a view expressed by many people here. Just what's so great about them? Any company is in business for one thing and one thing only-PROFIT. Google is not a charity. There's NO telling how their current user friendly stance may change after the IPO. Look at Apple-people held out Steve Jobs as some great evangelist who's come to save the world from evil Microsoft and IBM-he's another bird of the same feather. Recall the Playfair vs iTunes controversy a couple of months back (should be somewhere here on
Metal Gear Solid Rex has been released for public beta
This technology claims to propel projectiles upto extremely high speeds, right, so what happens to the old Newtonian concept of action-reaction? Shouldn't the recoil be brutal on these kinds of weapons?
The guys behind this are the ones who *invented* Kazaa and the FastTrack protocol-they later sold it to Sharman Networks, who are the ones who added the spyware. There's no spyware in this-their website boldly displays this fact, instead of burying it under legalese.