"Without the force of a ban, those people will still continue to buy the cheaper incandescents."
Gosh, I can almost hear you sizzling in geek rage. THOSE PEOPLE and their WRONGNESS!
Shouldn't homeowners decide for themselves which technology is most effective on their property? The assertion that people are too dumb to understand the difference between incandescents and CFLs is simple elitism.
Even efficiency targets don't make a lot of sense to me -- I may want a bulb that gives off more heat, for example to keep my lizard alive or provide a little extra warmth in a cold room. If I choose to pay for the kilowatt hours, why is that anybody else's business? Would it be OK for the government to set efficiency requirements for your processor and graphics card too? You don't really need those ecologically questionable frames per second, and the government will make that choice for you. In fact, if you'll just fill out this electricity use survey, form 84 stroke Z, and please keep in mind that you are under oath, we'll make sure that your use of electricity is consistent with our homeland security goals.
Seriously, isn't this the kind of unbiased, behavior-based surveillance that we should be encouraging? The alternatives are (1) no surveillance in crowded, high profile events or (2) surveillance by humans with their weird biases about race, dress, headgear, etc.
No surveillance carries risk, human surveillance carries risk, and computerized surveillance carries risk. It just depends on which risks you are comfortable with.
Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but the "Top Selling" list is nothing more than an advertising mechanism. I've seen stuff on those lists that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot clown pole. They are clearly paying for placement, or being placed there because Amazon can't get rid of them.
Aside from that, any measure of iPod sales that *doesn't include the Apple store* is a waste of time.
The right against self-incrimination refers to your testimony as a witness against yourself:
... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself
It's not carte blanche to destroy evidence on your government-owned computer at your government job. Lawyers, and particularly lawyers in the Office of the Special Counsel, should know that inviting a third-party to come into the building to destroy government documents is going to raise a huge red flag.
Honestly, that seems like a rather silly legal distinction. There's a clear difference between "copyright enforced and copying not allowed" versus "copyright not enforced and/or copying allowed". I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the copying involved material that they were allowed to copy. Doing that on company time may still be against the rules, sure, but it's not the same class as software piracy or duping movie DVDs.
That's why you're not seeing crashes in Windows XP. Try using it as your primary, and you'll find that when you've got half a dozen big apps up all the time, and you're constantly testing the limits (that 4MB JPEG file decompresses into 700MB of RAM!), XP Pro SP2 will have plenty of problems.
It's certainly possible that the apps are at fault. But it doesn't really matter from a user perception standpoint. I use Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac just as intensely, and crashes are much less frequent.
Ask anybody in the support business; prophylactic restarts are simply the norm in Windows XP. They're not the norm in MacOS 10.4 or the Unices. I have reasonable confidence that they won't be the norm in 10.5, once Apple gets a couple of system revisions in. I can wait on the 10.5 upgrade a few months to make sure it's stable.
I was ready to dismiss this diatribe, but I have to admit, there is some insight here. The same rule has always applied: install somebody's software, and you potentially give them anything on your computer. We all know that. The only reason anybody noticed WoW is that there is a cadre of hackers (or, is that crackers? or cheaters?) with a vested interest in observing and modifying the server/client data streams.
Ultimately, using anybody else's software on a networked computer has always been a web of trust with very little hard data to verify that trust. To paraphrase David Hume, does the estimated likelihood of true privacy violation outweigh the utility of the product?
Half-Life 2: Test bed for Internet licensing techniques
...
There are many reports on the Steam user forums that legitimate game owners are being banned for using cheats or hacks that modify the behavior of the game (even the single-player game!), and a Valve staffer says explicitly that the Steam system will be used to enforce violations of the Steam/HL2 license...
Regrettably, the original Steam forum posting has been removed. No surprise there. But Valve was enforcing hacking restrictions *on the single player game* in 2004. Mod your non-multiplayer game, and it's taken away from you.
However, software licenses *add up* over the enterprise. You've got some domain controllers, some file servers, some print servers, some web servers, database servers. All with their own server OS licenses. Some of this stuff has to be redundant (more licenses) and some has to be replicated in remote offices (more licenses), etc. etc. You want to simplify by running some things as virtual servers, but that doesn't help the licensing situation. And most of these licenses involve yearly maintenance if you want vendor support.
Long story short, when you add it all up, Linux licenses + support could be much cheaper than Windows licenses + support in some enterprises.
But the transition can be survived, and even result in eventual success. Consider Maxis, which went through a dark time after their EA acquisition in the 90s. It turned out OK when EA finally decided to let Will Wright develop that house architecture simulator he had been piddling with in his office.
That game was The Sims.
The jury is still out on the Microsoft/Bungie merger -- the Halos are successful, but it remains to be seen whether Bungie will get through the Halo franchise and come out the other side.
Ultimately, it may not turn out so bad, as long as the individual companies keep to their own creative agendas. EA will push, it's up to Bioware to push back.
Gmail's authenticated SMTP server appears to have something like this built-in. I used to run a script that looked for updates to job web sites and send me a summary of the changes it found. It was not unusual for it to generate 30-50 e-mails on each run.
If I ran it against smtp.gmail.com, it would hit a threshold at about 10 messages where Gmail would stop accepting the messages for awhile. When I dropped a delay loop that would put a minimum of 30-90 seconds between messages, the problem went away.
No, it does not. Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate are the very first versions of Windows to include DVD playback capability -- all other versions of Windows (including other Vista versions) do not have the ability to play DVD videos.
If your computer play DVDs out of the box, it means that the system integrator installed DVD player software and codecs for you. You paid for it, separate from Windows.
Simple question, really. You can choose to agree with speech, and you can choose not to agree with speech. I'll even stretch the concept and say that speech which wanders into explicit sexuality might be considered "obscene" under a traditional judicial concept of pornographic obscenity.
But what makes the Facebook site obscene? The use of the F-word alone?
Simple timestamping -- by notary or digital means -- is no guarantee that your IP will be protected, for example see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould. Patent application (and eventual granting of same) is really your only option.
Agreed, and it makes me wonder if The Consumerist read the article carefully. They're pretty aggressive about bad behaviorby companies. So it's OK if a consumer steals for personal gain?
Call him what you will, but any scientist is taking a risk when they take money from private investors. There is always a potential for bias toward the investors' point of view. For example,
The peer review process for grants puts an important layer of fact-checking on top of every grant, and puts needed philosophical distance between the goals of the granting organization and the grantee. This is particularly important for university faculty, whose careers are built on research integrity.
Some may legitimately complain that the grants approval process has a stultifying effect on innovation, and it probably does. But it has a much greater effect on fraud & bad science, IMO.
In fact, your best realistic choice is to exercise your rights and use the option of not agreeing to the EULA, and shipping the machine back at their expense. RTFA. He called Gateway immediately to complain, and they shut him out and refused to take the system back.
In the Hill case (which Gateway won), they argued that the complaints were issued after the 30-day EULA acceptance period. Now, Gateway is claiming that he accepted the EULA when he unpacked the computer from the box and turned it on. It's not the same case at all.
They should want to lose. By winning, they (1) put the case in the national headlines and (2) send the clear, unmistakable message, "Our tech support sucks and we won't replace a computer that arrives utterly broken and non-usable."
Their disparagement of the complaintant's character is even more ridiculous. He's a high school dropout, so we should be allowed to take his money and send him a non-working computer? Guess what, even the non-dropouts are going to avoid you like a bad rash now.
I favor Adam Osborne's policy: if a complaint gets so far up the chain that the head of the company hears about it, it's time to write a check and get on with your life.
If he can write The Hex Coda, he can win this contest. But I'll give The Rose of Eternity series due credit for its awesome use of cutscenes and music.
What surprises me about this PR analysis is that none of it -- not one word -- is dedicated to selling the journalist on the quality of Microsoft's products. Not their web products, not their development environments, nothing. At a minimum, they could have said something like "Channel 9 will help us show developers how we make the best development products."
If you're going to make a video blog for developers, I'd think you would focus on the quality of your development products.
Instead, it's all a bunch of internal politicking about transparency and alleviating fear. Is that how Microsoft makes money these days? Selling transparency?Alleviating fear?
I think I've got some synergy and some new paradigms for sale too, guaranteed to be content-free.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh, I can almost hear you sizzling in geek rage. THOSE PEOPLE and their WRONGNESS!
Shouldn't homeowners decide for themselves which technology is most effective on their property? The assertion that people are too dumb to understand the difference between incandescents and CFLs is simple elitism.
Even efficiency targets don't make a lot of sense to me -- I may want a bulb that gives off more heat, for example to keep my lizard alive or provide a little extra warmth in a cold room. If I choose to pay for the kilowatt hours, why is that anybody else's business? Would it be OK for the government to set efficiency requirements for your processor and graphics card too? You don't really need those ecologically questionable frames per second, and the government will make that choice for you. In fact, if you'll just fill out this electricity use survey, form 84 stroke Z, and please keep in mind that you are under oath, we'll make sure that your use of electricity is consistent with our homeland security goals.
Seriously, isn't this the kind of unbiased, behavior-based surveillance that we should be encouraging? The alternatives are (1) no surveillance in crowded, high profile events or (2) surveillance by humans with their weird biases about race, dress, headgear, etc.
No surveillance carries risk, human surveillance carries risk, and computerized surveillance carries risk. It just depends on which risks you are comfortable with.
RR
Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but the "Top Selling" list is nothing more than an advertising mechanism. I've seen stuff on those lists that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot clown pole. They are clearly paying for placement, or being placed there because Amazon can't get rid of them.
Aside from that, any measure of iPod sales that *doesn't include the Apple store* is a waste of time.
The right against self-incrimination refers to your testimony as a witness against yourself:
... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himselfIt's not carte blanche to destroy evidence on your government-owned computer at your government job. Lawyers, and particularly lawyers in the Office of the Special Counsel, should know that inviting a third-party to come into the building to destroy government documents is going to raise a huge red flag.
Honestly, that seems like a rather silly legal distinction. There's a clear difference between "copyright enforced and copying not allowed" versus "copyright not enforced and/or copying allowed". I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the copying involved material that they were allowed to copy. Doing that on company time may still be against the rules, sure, but it's not the same class as software piracy or duping movie DVDs.
That's why you're not seeing crashes in Windows XP. Try using it as your primary, and you'll find that when you've got half a dozen big apps up all the time, and you're constantly testing the limits (that 4MB JPEG file decompresses into 700MB of RAM!), XP Pro SP2 will have plenty of problems.
It's certainly possible that the apps are at fault. But it doesn't really matter from a user perception standpoint. I use Linux (Ubuntu) and Mac just as intensely, and crashes are much less frequent.
Ask anybody in the support business; prophylactic restarts are simply the norm in Windows XP. They're not the norm in MacOS 10.4 or the Unices. I have reasonable confidence that they won't be the norm in 10.5, once Apple gets a couple of system revisions in. I can wait on the 10.5 upgrade a few months to make sure it's stable.
RR
I was ready to dismiss this diatribe, but I have to admit, there is some insight here. The same rule has always applied: install somebody's software, and you potentially give them anything on your computer. We all know that. The only reason anybody noticed WoW is that there is a cadre of hackers (or, is that crackers? or cheaters?) with a vested interest in observing and modifying the server/client data streams.
Ultimately, using anybody else's software on a networked computer has always been a web of trust with very little hard data to verify that trust. To paraphrase David Hume, does the estimated likelihood of true privacy violation outweigh the utility of the product?
Activate TIME TRAVEL...
http://www.politechbot.com/2005/01/06/test-bed-for/
Regrettably, the original Steam forum posting has been removed. No surprise there. But Valve was enforcing hacking restrictions *on the single player game* in 2004. Mod your non-multiplayer game, and it's taken away from you.
Region-locking is pretty tame by comparison.
Rick R.
However, software licenses *add up* over the enterprise. You've got some domain controllers, some file servers, some print servers, some web servers, database servers. All with their own server OS licenses. Some of this stuff has to be redundant (more licenses) and some has to be replicated in remote offices (more licenses), etc. etc. You want to simplify by running some things as virtual servers, but that doesn't help the licensing situation. And most of these licenses involve yearly maintenance if you want vendor support.
Long story short, when you add it all up, Linux licenses + support could be much cheaper than Windows licenses + support in some enterprises.
But the transition can be survived, and even result in eventual success. Consider Maxis, which went through a dark time after their EA acquisition in the 90s. It turned out OK when EA finally decided to let Will Wright develop that house architecture simulator he had been piddling with in his office.
That game was The Sims.
The jury is still out on the Microsoft/Bungie merger -- the Halos are successful, but it remains to be seen whether Bungie will get through the Halo franchise and come out the other side.
Ultimately, it may not turn out so bad, as long as the individual companies keep to their own creative agendas. EA will push, it's up to Bioware to push back.
Nerd persistence + exacting medical knowledge == CRAZY INFORMATIVE
Already publishers & retailers of print products routinely try to put people out of business. For example, for buying your books from a discounter:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519564
Gmail's authenticated SMTP server appears to have something like this built-in. I used to run a script that looked for updates to job web sites and send me a summary of the changes it found. It was not unusual for it to generate 30-50 e-mails on each run.
If I ran it against smtp.gmail.com, it would hit a threshold at about 10 messages where Gmail would stop accepting the messages for awhile. When I dropped a delay loop that would put a minimum of 30-90 seconds between messages, the problem went away.
Rick R.
No, it does not. Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate are the very first versions of Windows to include DVD playback capability -- all other versions of Windows (including other Vista versions) do not have the ability to play DVD videos.
If your computer play DVDs out of the box, it means that the system integrator installed DVD player software and codecs for you. You paid for it, separate from Windows.
Simple question, really. You can choose to agree with speech, and you can choose not to agree with speech. I'll even stretch the concept and say that speech which wanders into explicit sexuality might be considered "obscene" under a traditional judicial concept of pornographic obscenity.
But what makes the Facebook site obscene? The use of the F-word alone?
Simple timestamping -- by notary or digital means -- is no guarantee that your IP will be protected, for example see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould. Patent application (and eventual granting of same) is really your only option.
I'll simply point out that others have noted that Microsoft products induce loyalty by making you work for it .
Agreed, and it makes me wonder if The Consumerist read the article carefully. They're pretty aggressive about bad behavior by companies. So it's OK if a consumer steals for personal gain?
Call him what you will, but any scientist is taking a risk when they take money from private investors. There is always a potential for bias toward the investors' point of view. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bockris
The peer review process for grants puts an important layer of fact-checking on top of every grant, and puts needed philosophical distance between the goals of the granting organization and the grantee. This is particularly important for university faculty, whose careers are built on research integrity.
Some may legitimately complain that the grants approval process has a stultifying effect on innovation, and it probably does. But it has a much greater effect on fraud & bad science, IMO.
Well, customer service wasn't Osborne's problem. Also, he's dead.
They should want to lose. By winning, they (1) put the case in the national headlines and (2) send the clear, unmistakable message, "Our tech support sucks and we won't replace a computer that arrives utterly broken and non-usable."
Their disparagement of the complaintant's character is even more ridiculous. He's a high school dropout, so we should be allowed to take his money and send him a non-working computer? Guess what, even the non-dropouts are going to avoid you like a bad rash now.
I favor Adam Osborne's policy: if a complaint gets so far up the chain that the head of the company hears about it, it's time to write a check and get on with your life.
If he can write The Hex Coda, he can win this contest. But I'll give The Rose of Eternity series due credit for its awesome use of cutscenes and music.
I've used Sakai heavily, and it's definitely adaptable to K-12 education. "comp101" could just as easily be "Mrs. Froodle's 2nd Grade".
What surprises me about this PR analysis is that none of it -- not one word -- is dedicated to selling the journalist on the quality of Microsoft's products. Not their web products, not their development environments, nothing. At a minimum, they could have said something like "Channel 9 will help us show developers how we make the best development products."
If you're going to make a video blog for developers, I'd think you would focus on the quality of your development products.
Instead, it's all a bunch of internal politicking about transparency and alleviating fear. Is that how Microsoft makes money these days? Selling transparency? Alleviating fear?
I think I've got some synergy and some new paradigms for sale too, guaranteed to be content-free.