Since this would have a keyboard you could type on with more than your thumbs, you could get rid of your old laptop, your PDA, and your Blackberry. This would be what I am looking for in a laptop; e.g. it is thin enough to fit into a briefcase yet has good battery life and storage. With this I could take notes, write, work on spreadsheets anywhere in an unobtrusive manner. This product should be re-targeted at business customers.
The summary is a little misleading(surprise, surprise). According to the article, "The sinkhole may be connected to even deeper caverns. At the bottom of the slope, was an area DEPTHX's could not probe. This could be simply a depression or the entrance to further caves. The researchers hope to send the probe back later this week to find out, and to explore any connected passages." The opening paragraph states that "A robotic submarine yesterday mapped the bottom of the world's deepest water-filled sinkhole in Mexico for the first time." Notice that it doesn't say "completely mapped."
I'm not trying to play down the achievement here. These explorers have done a great job and demonstrating the usefulness of ROV technology for exploring places where it is dangerous for people to go is very important. This should remind us that there are plenty of unexplored areas here on and in the Earth; that sense of mystery is a nice thing. There's been a lot of hoo-ha about how there are supposedly no places left to explore on Earth; this story should put a nail in the coffin of that idea. The subterranean parts of Earth and the open ocean depths remain largely unexplored.
I've tried the bicycle commute some too. I lived in Portland, OR for a few years which is well known for encouraging bike commutes, and I discovered some issues that make bicycle commuting problematic. For one, when it rains, even if you have a nice rainsuit, when you get to the office there's the inevitable problem of where to clean up and stash your wet rain gear. Most companies are not set up to handle bicycle commuters. You'd need someplace other than the restroom, really, to change and a place to hang your gear.
You're generally going to be sweaty, as well, so a shower would be a good thing before heading to your cube/office. This is another area where it's the workplace that would need to adapt rather than the traffic infrastructure.
I think bicycle commutes work well when your commute is a relatively short distance, say five miles. Beyond that I'd say you'd have to be a pretty hardcore cyclist to persevere.
Thanks a lot, pal. Now I'm going to get in trouble at the office for playing Space Invaders all day:0 I agree, it's a pretty impressive demo. It took a total of about 30 seconds to get the demo up and running....
Which would explain why so many open source projects fail to get any traction with end users. I am no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation(in the form of the help menus) their Office line of products in my mind is excellent. I have found that many of the Office how-to books found on the shelves of Barnes and Noble are little more than rehashes of Microsoft's help files. You can't just throw code out and expect anyone but hardcore tech people to spend the time to figure out what a product does and how best to use it without producing some decent documentation.
On the other hand, a lot of closed-source, for profit software companies are guilty of this as well. The concept of the "Missing Manual" book series, is mind boggling. You buy a powerful piece of software, you should get a detailed manual explaining how to best use its functionality as part of the package.
Well, why would Fred Anderson and Nancy Heinen be charged for hiding options grants that benefited Steve Jobs, and Jobs himself not be charged at some point? The Seattle Post Intelligencer has this quote:
"Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's Office was still investigating. A spokeswoman for the office declined to comment Tuesday on the status of the case.
Legal experts say the combination of Anderson's new accusations and the pending investigations leaves Jobs' culpability in question.
"That statement and the disposition of the SEC does leave Steve Jobs in legal limbo," said Ralph Ferrara, a former general counsel for the SEC who now works at the New York-based firm of LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP."
Further from the Seattle PI:
The grants in question were a February 2001 grant of 4.8 million options to Apple's executive team and a December 2001 grant of 7.5 million options to Jobs.
The SEC alleged Heinen modified documents to backdate the grant to Jobs, to reflect that it had been approved during a meeting in October 2001 that never occurred. The SEC said the executive team's grant was also fraudulently accounted for and that Anderson should have noticed Heinen's efforts to backdate it. The CFO did not take steps to ensure that Apple's financial statements were correct, the SEC said.
Anderson's attorney said "Anderson was reassured by Jobs that the board of directors had given the necessary approvals, and that Anderson concluded that the grant was being properly handled." Well, apparently since the board meeting in question never occurred, Jobs lied to his CFO to cover up the backdating.
This does come close to the camel's-back-breaker, though. For every PC that customers buy new now with XP, that pushes off the purchase of one copy of Vista four to five years into the future. That worsens the return on the cash M$ invested in producing Vista by a certain amount. I have a hunch that in three years if one had access to M$'s financial data on Vista that an analysis would show it to be a financial loss on a discounted cash flow basis.
As you say, the only rationale for Vista has been that M$ needed a new version to maintain cash flow from its operating system division. They still get the cash from XP so they aren't hurt too badly from a pure cash flow point of view.
If Bill Gates didn't have a controlling amount of shares in the company, Microsoft would have been taken over and undergone major restructuring by now. They take the cash from the Office franchise and to an extent the OS franchise and hose it away on acquisitions of businesses they know nothing about(like ERP) or building businesses that they'll never recover their investment in(XBox series).
I think that is correct; however the other side of the coin is there is still opportunity for Linux on the business desktop. Businesses won't want their employees watching YouTube on company time; the lack of video codecs on Linux may prove to be a selling point. It would be interesting to know what the proportion of PC sales is between sales to the home user and sales to businesses.
I agree that genres aren't significant. However, literary critics tend to dismiss works of science fiction and fantasy. The New York Times Review of Books archives contains relatively few positive reviews of science fiction or fantasy novels. Tolkien's novels were dismissed by the critics of his day because the novels did not fit the literary fashion of the time. I should have revised my statement to read "Typically science fiction is not considered by critics to be great literature." The people I'm referring to are the thought leaders in the literary world. Check the NYTimes "Sunday Book Review"'s "100 Notable Books of the Year" posted in December. Out of fifty works of fiction listed, I count two that might be considered science fiction or fantasy. One is a Stephen King novel.
A big part of my appreciation for Vonnegut lies in the fact that his work has been accepted as literature by the literary elites while including elements of science fiction. Typically science fiction is not considered to be literature.
-"A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past. They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer"...so there does appear to be a correlation between the sunspot number and Earth's climate...
-"Sunspots have been monitored on the Sun since 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope. They provide the longest-running direct measurement of our star's activity. The variation in sunspot numbers has revealed the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity as well as other, longer-term changes. In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive"...everything that I have read about sunpot cycles whether in scientific publications, or writing for a general audience basically agree that the Maunder Minimum to some degree was a cause of the Little Ice Age...
-"Dr Solanki is presenting a paper on the reconstruction of past solar activity at Cool Stars, Stellar Systems And The Sun, a conference in Hamburg, Germany. He says that the reconstruction shows the Maunder Minimum and the other minima that are known in the past thousand years. But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years. Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer. Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase."...the effect of the last twenty years of sunspot activity versus the complete change in activity over 1,150 years will be relatively minimal...it is likely that given a trend of warming on Earth due to an increase in sunspot activity over 1,150 years warming would not suddenly stop due to a 20 year plateau in the sunspot number..
-"This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels."...Dr. Solanki probably had to put this in the paper to get his research accepted by the conference...
-the conclusion by the BBC writer is complete garbage..."This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth"...okay, the Sun has considerable direct effect on the Earth's climate, as evidenced the fact that we have seasons every year as the earth orbits the Sun...the statement that "mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth" is lame as the verb "attempt" implies a will-full action, and the proposition that mankind is amplifying the warming of the Earth overall is an open question, in spite of elements of the environmentalist community and grant-seeking scientists' efforts to squash debate on the issue.
With all due respect, the settlers of Greenland had no way to forecast how climate might change in that area. All they knew is that they found some farmable territory and took advantage of it. The change in the local climate that led to their demise was tragic for them, but in no way predictable for them.
Well, Chirac is a right-wing leader in France, which means that on the political spectrum he is toward the left compared to say, a right-wing leader in the US. We also have to remember that the French elites think they're smarter than everyone else in the world, and hence when Chirac says he wants a world government, he wants one that the French are in charge of.
I think it would be interesting to know about applications where the source code has been lost. To me, it would seem that running an app where no one has the source code implies zero vendor support. Is anyone willing to give examples of apps they know of where the source has disappeared and the running binary is a mission-critical app (particularly at any Fortune 500 companies)?
To me, the biggest source of resistance from the music industry lies in two areas. One is that their investment in CD-production facilities have been fully amortized and so the marginal cost of producing CD's is trivial. Protecting those CD profit margins is at the top of their list. I would venture that the CD-duplication plants are essentially worth scrap value at this point, except for marginal revenue from CD production. The second source is the traditional system where A & R people would spend tons of money on throwing promotional parties, expense account meals, payola and so forth. These people don't want to see their gravy train derailed. I talk about this more at Music CD sales shrinking constantly.
My other thought on this issue is that since buyers can now purchase their music by the song, they are not bothering to purchase the "filler" songs that in the past made up the bulk of the content on albums/CDs. There's no doubt in my mind that just about every adult American has bought a CD after hearing a song they liked and then were disappointed with the rest of the songs included. I personally have had the misfortune of purchasing several CD's due to a popular song only to find out that the style of the hit song was nothing like the artist's core style or any other songs on the CD. That means you, Goo Goo Dolls! The conclusion I draw is that the incumbent music industry infrastructure will inevitably shrink to the point where the fixed costs can be supported by what consumers are willing to pay for music.
While I agree in general with your comments, I have to disagree about testing hardware in real world conditions. I believe that any "top" manufacturer would have a decent-sized test lab where the device in question could be hooked up to the lab network and be put through its paces. I figure such a lab could have a secure link to the Web to suck down traffic to run through the lab network. This kind of setup would allow for fairly thorough testing that would closely approximate the kind of setups that customers would have.
I recall visiting Novell's test lab many years ago in Provo, UT where they had a warehouse sized room of PC's on racks(just aluminum frame racks, not the current rackmount type). I was told that they ran their products on this test network heavily before releasing their products. Granted, that was an internal network, but as I recall in its day Netware and its associated products were known for their reliability in production environments.
To sum up: I think that major manufacturers can test their products under real world conditions. If they don't, we should stop buying their products. To go back to my Novell case, apparently one of the factors in that company's decline was that their marketing people failed to realize that flashing a few slides in front of non-IT suits would get more sales than explaining their product to the IT people who would actually use it. So a big part of the problem is C-level execs making purchasing decisions without really paying attention to IT's concerns.
According to Wikipedia,a patent filer gets 20 years before the patent expires, typically. Clearly there are many companies/organizations that are currently running software that has been in production use for more than 20 years. Couldn't a company using software that has lost patent protection take that software, make a few changes and call it their own new product and then cancel any licensing/maintenance contracts with the vendor?
I agree with you. The article in ArsTechnica pointed out that at the time of the memo, Microsoft's position in the market was radically different than it is today. MS was a relatively small company compared to the big boys in the enterprise world like IBM and Sun and Novell. The way software was distributed was totally different as well. Given that the Internet was primarily an academic and military system at the time, companies were still sending you boxes of floppies. I recall from graduate school at that time seeing a business plan that contemplating distributing software through vending machines! It seems absurd now, but at the time it wasn't that far out of the ball park. In any case, based on reading the excerpt from the memo, Gates was trying to figure out how best to make money from the business of writing software. Today, the open source community is in the same boat. We want non-restrictive licenses (like MIT's), but also want to put food on the table.
I don't excuse MS's anti-competitive business practices, and a lot of their frankly dumb decisions over the years. But I can see where Gates has something of a point. To me, since software costs practically nothing to copy, the primary way to make a profit at software is in support. Most general-use software is rather simple to produce these days (see how many different text editors there are). So I don't think most types of software should be patentable.
I am not a CA resident, but I believe that at least some of the poor performance can be attributed to the fact that there are many foreign-born kids(whether illegal or not) in the state's K-12 schools. You can't take a third grade kid from Oaxaca and plop him down in any elementary school days, weeks, or months after crossing the border and expect him to meet the averages for the third grade. His performance at that point is going to be based on the quality of the Mexican school system, which I would guess really stinks. Plus he likely doesn't speak English at all. So this kid was getting poor to zero education in his native language, and now you expect him to learn in a new language that is notorious for being difficult to learn. Can't blame the teachers for these problems.
Just on a side note, here in Utah we have some of the lowest per capita spending on K-12 and yet somehow Utah schools consistently rank at the top in every measure of educational achievement. I wonder why that could be? How about a belief in the value of education and hard work. Granted, teacher pay needs to be adjusted upwards somewhat here and the legislature has addressed that this year, but we're still not jacking up the per capita $ just for the sake of the rankings.
PC World's posted yesterday iSuppli's market share report for the fourth quarter of 2006; the headline is "HP Beats Dell in PC Sales". It looks to me like HP is responding to what customers are asking for, while Dell is clinging to Microsoft's subsidies. The top 5 vendors look like this: 1. HP - 17.4% 2. Dell - 14.5% 3. Lenovo - 7.1% 4. Acer - 6.6% 5. Toshiba - 3.7%
is that a lot of those songs that you thought got played a lot because they were popular among your peers were just played because somebody slipped the DJ a couple of fifties. To me, the point isn't that "indie" music didn't get airtime; it is that the Top 40 wasn't based on what kids liked to listen to but what product the record labels had under contract that they needed to make their money back on. There have been a lot of crap songs on the Billboard 200 over the last 30 years; payola is at least a partial explanation.
With podcasting and MP3's and so forth the only excuse you have for not finding independent music to listen to is your own laziness.
Re:Cut him some slack already...
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Since this would have a keyboard you could type on with more than your thumbs, you could get rid of your old laptop, your PDA, and your Blackberry. This would be what I am looking for in a laptop; e.g. it is thin enough to fit into a briefcase yet has good battery life and storage. With this I could take notes, write, work on spreadsheets anywhere in an unobtrusive manner. This product should be re-targeted at business customers.
The summary is a little misleading(surprise, surprise). According to the article, "The sinkhole may be connected to even deeper caverns. At the bottom of the slope, was an area DEPTHX's could not probe. This could be simply a depression or the entrance to further caves. The researchers hope to send the probe back later this week to find out, and to explore any connected passages." The opening paragraph states that "A robotic submarine yesterday mapped the bottom of the world's deepest water-filled sinkhole in Mexico for the first time." Notice that it doesn't say "completely mapped."
I'm not trying to play down the achievement here. These explorers have done a great job and demonstrating the usefulness of ROV technology for exploring places where it is dangerous for people to go is very important. This should remind us that there are plenty of unexplored areas here on and in the Earth; that sense of mystery is a nice thing. There's been a lot of hoo-ha about how there are supposedly no places left to explore on Earth; this story should put a nail in the coffin of that idea. The subterranean parts of Earth and the open ocean depths remain largely unexplored.
I've tried the bicycle commute some too. I lived in Portland, OR for a few years which is well known for encouraging bike commutes, and I discovered some issues that make bicycle commuting problematic. For one, when it rains, even if you have a nice rainsuit, when you get to the office there's the inevitable problem of where to clean up and stash your wet rain gear. Most companies are not set up to handle bicycle commuters. You'd need someplace other than the restroom, really, to change and a place to hang your gear.
You're generally going to be sweaty, as well, so a shower would be a good thing before heading to your cube/office. This is another area where it's the workplace that would need to adapt rather than the traffic infrastructure.
I think bicycle commutes work well when your commute is a relatively short distance, say five miles. Beyond that I'd say you'd have to be a pretty hardcore cyclist to persevere.
Mod ++ Funny!!!
Thanks a lot, pal. Now I'm going to get in trouble at the office for playing Space Invaders all day:0 I agree, it's a pretty impressive demo. It took a total of about 30 seconds to get the demo up and running....
Which would explain why so many open source projects fail to get any traction with end users. I am no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation(in the form of the help menus) their Office line of products in my mind is excellent. I have found that many of the Office how-to books found on the shelves of Barnes and Noble are little more than rehashes of Microsoft's help files. You can't just throw code out and expect anyone but hardcore tech people to spend the time to figure out what a product does and how best to use it without producing some decent documentation.
On the other hand, a lot of closed-source, for profit software companies are guilty of this as well. The concept of the "Missing Manual" book series, is mind boggling. You buy a powerful piece of software, you should get a detailed manual explaining how to best use its functionality as part of the package.
No excuse, but the linked article's title is also misleading: "Beer maker, scientists to create energy"...
Further from the Seattle PI:
Anderson's attorney said "Anderson was reassured by Jobs that the board of directors had given the necessary approvals, and that Anderson concluded that the grant was being properly handled." Well, apparently since the board meeting in question never occurred, Jobs lied to his CFO to cover up the backdating.
This does come close to the camel's-back-breaker, though. For every PC that customers buy new now with XP, that pushes off the purchase of one copy of Vista four to five years into the future. That worsens the return on the cash M$ invested in producing Vista by a certain amount. I have a hunch that in three years if one had access to M$'s financial data on Vista that an analysis would show it to be a financial loss on a discounted cash flow basis.
As you say, the only rationale for Vista has been that M$ needed a new version to maintain cash flow from its operating system division. They still get the cash from XP so they aren't hurt too badly from a pure cash flow point of view.
If Bill Gates didn't have a controlling amount of shares in the company, Microsoft would have been taken over and undergone major restructuring by now. They take the cash from the Office franchise and to an extent the OS franchise and hose it away on acquisitions of businesses they know nothing about(like ERP) or building businesses that they'll never recover their investment in(XBox series).
I think that is correct; however the other side of the coin is there is still opportunity for Linux on the business desktop. Businesses won't want their employees watching YouTube on company time; the lack of video codecs on Linux may prove to be a selling point. It would be interesting to know what the proportion of PC sales is between sales to the home user and sales to businesses.
I agree that genres aren't significant. However, literary critics tend to dismiss works of science fiction and fantasy. The New York Times Review of Books archives contains relatively few positive reviews of science fiction or fantasy novels. Tolkien's novels were dismissed by the critics of his day because the novels did not fit the literary fashion of the time. I should have revised my statement to read "Typically science fiction is not considered by critics to be great literature." The people I'm referring to are the thought leaders in the literary world. Check the NYTimes "Sunday Book Review"'s "100 Notable Books of the Year" posted in December. Out of fifty works of fiction listed, I count two that might be considered science fiction or fantasy. One is a Stephen King novel.
A big part of my appreciation for Vonnegut lies in the fact that his work has been accepted as literature by the literary elites while including elements of science fiction. Typically science fiction is not considered to be literature.
Just to clarify from the BBC article:
-"A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer"...so there does appear to be a correlation between the sunspot number and Earth's climate...
-"Sunspots have been monitored on the Sun since 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope. They provide the longest-running direct measurement of our star's activity. The variation in sunspot numbers has revealed the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity as well as other, longer-term changes. In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface. This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it.
It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive"...everything that I have read about sunpot cycles whether in scientific publications, or writing for a general audience basically agree that the Maunder Minimum to some degree was a cause of the Little Ice Age...
-"Dr Solanki is presenting a paper on the reconstruction of past solar activity at Cool Stars, Stellar Systems And The Sun, a conference in Hamburg, Germany. He says that the reconstruction shows the Maunder Minimum and the other minima that are known in the past thousand years. But the most striking feature, he says, is that looking at the past 1,150 years the Sun has never been as active as it has been during the past 60 years. Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer. Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase."...the effect of the last twenty years of sunspot activity versus the complete change in activity over 1,150 years will be relatively minimal...it is likely that given a trend of warming on Earth due to an increase in sunspot activity over 1,150 years warming would not suddenly stop due to a 20 year plateau in the sunspot number..
-"This is put down to a human-produced greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels."...Dr. Solanki probably had to put this in the paper to get his research accepted by the conference...
-the conclusion by the BBC writer is complete garbage..."This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth"...okay, the Sun has considerable direct effect on the Earth's climate, as evidenced the fact that we have seasons every year as the earth orbits the Sun...the statement that "mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth" is lame as the verb "attempt" implies a will-full action, and the proposition that mankind is amplifying the warming of the Earth overall is an open question, in spite of elements of the environmentalist community and grant-seeking scientists' efforts to squash debate on the issue.
With all due respect, the settlers of Greenland had no way to forecast how climate might change in that area. All they knew is that they found some farmable territory and took advantage of it. The change in the local climate that led to their demise was tragic for them, but in no way predictable for them.
Well, Chirac is a right-wing leader in France, which means that on the political spectrum he is toward the left compared to say, a right-wing leader in the US. We also have to remember that the French elites think they're smarter than everyone else in the world, and hence when Chirac says he wants a world government, he wants one that the French are in charge of.
I think it would be interesting to know about applications where the source code has been lost. To me, it would seem that running an app where no one has the source code implies zero vendor support. Is anyone willing to give examples of apps they know of where the source has disappeared and the running binary is a mission-critical app (particularly at any Fortune 500 companies)?
To me, the biggest source of resistance from the music industry lies in two areas. One is that their investment in CD-production facilities have been fully amortized and so the marginal cost of producing CD's is trivial. Protecting those CD profit margins is at the top of their list. I would venture that the CD-duplication plants are essentially worth scrap value at this point, except for marginal revenue from CD production. The second source is the traditional system where A & R people would spend tons of money on throwing promotional parties, expense account meals, payola and so forth. These people don't want to see their gravy train derailed. I talk about this more at Music CD sales shrinking constantly.
My other thought on this issue is that since buyers can now purchase their music by the song, they are not bothering to purchase the "filler" songs that in the past made up the bulk of the content on albums/CDs. There's no doubt in my mind that just about every adult American has bought a CD after hearing a song they liked and then were disappointed with the rest of the songs included. I personally have had the misfortune of purchasing several CD's due to a popular song only to find out that the style of the hit song was nothing like the artist's core style or any other songs on the CD. That means you, Goo Goo Dolls! The conclusion I draw is that the incumbent music industry infrastructure will inevitably shrink to the point where the fixed costs can be supported by what consumers are willing to pay for music.
While I agree in general with your comments, I have to disagree about testing hardware in real world conditions. I believe that any "top" manufacturer would have a decent-sized test lab where the device in question could be hooked up to the lab network and be put through its paces. I figure such a lab could have a secure link to the Web to suck down traffic to run through the lab network. This kind of setup would allow for fairly thorough testing that would closely approximate the kind of setups that customers would have.
I recall visiting Novell's test lab many years ago in Provo, UT where they had a warehouse sized room of PC's on racks(just aluminum frame racks, not the current rackmount type). I was told that they ran their products on this test network heavily before releasing their products. Granted, that was an internal network, but as I recall in its day Netware and its associated products were known for their reliability in production environments.
To sum up: I think that major manufacturers can test their products under real world conditions. If they don't, we should stop buying their products. To go back to my Novell case, apparently one of the factors in that company's decline was that their marketing people failed to realize that flashing a few slides in front of non-IT suits would get more sales than explaining their product to the IT people who would actually use it. So a big part of the problem is C-level execs making purchasing decisions without really paying attention to IT's concerns.
According to Wikipedia,a patent filer gets 20 years before the patent expires, typically. Clearly there are many companies/organizations that are currently running software that has been in production use for more than 20 years. Couldn't a company using software that has lost patent protection take that software, make a few changes and call it their own new product and then cancel any licensing/maintenance contracts with the vendor?
I agree with you. The article in ArsTechnica pointed out that at the time of the memo, Microsoft's position in the market was radically different than it is today. MS was a relatively small company compared to the big boys in the enterprise world like IBM and Sun and Novell. The way software was distributed was totally different as well. Given that the Internet was primarily an academic and military system at the time, companies were still sending you boxes of floppies. I recall from graduate school at that time seeing a business plan that contemplating distributing software through vending machines! It seems absurd now, but at the time it wasn't that far out of the ball park. In any case, based on reading the excerpt from the memo, Gates was trying to figure out how best to make money from the business of writing software. Today, the open source community is in the same boat. We want non-restrictive licenses (like MIT's), but also want to put food on the table.
I don't excuse MS's anti-competitive business practices, and a lot of their frankly dumb decisions over the years. But I can see where Gates has something of a point. To me, since software costs practically nothing to copy, the primary way to make a profit at software is in support. Most general-use software is rather simple to produce these days (see how many different text editors there are). So I don't think most types of software should be patentable.
Personally, I would rephrase that as "flaming retard", but that's just me...
I am not a CA resident, but I believe that at least some of the poor performance can be attributed to the fact that there are many foreign-born kids(whether illegal or not) in the state's K-12 schools. You can't take a third grade kid from Oaxaca and plop him down in any elementary school days, weeks, or months after crossing the border and expect him to meet the averages for the third grade. His performance at that point is going to be based on the quality of the Mexican school system, which I would guess really stinks. Plus he likely doesn't speak English at all. So this kid was getting poor to zero education in his native language, and now you expect him to learn in a new language that is notorious for being difficult to learn. Can't blame the teachers for these problems.
Just on a side note, here in Utah we have some of the lowest per capita spending on K-12 and yet somehow Utah schools consistently rank at the top in every measure of educational achievement. I wonder why that could be? How about a belief in the value of education and hard work. Granted, teacher pay needs to be adjusted upwards somewhat here and the legislature has addressed that this year, but we're still not jacking up the per capita $ just for the sake of the rankings.
PC World's posted yesterday iSuppli's market share report for the fourth quarter of 2006; the headline is "HP Beats Dell in PC Sales". It looks to me like HP is responding to what customers are asking for, while Dell is clinging to Microsoft's subsidies. The top 5 vendors look like this:
1. HP - 17.4%
2. Dell - 14.5%
3. Lenovo - 7.1%
4. Acer - 6.6%
5. Toshiba - 3.7%
is that a lot of those songs that you thought got played a lot because they were popular among your peers were just played because somebody slipped the DJ a couple of fifties. To me, the point isn't that "indie" music didn't get airtime; it is that the Top 40 wasn't based on what kids liked to listen to but what product the record labels had under contract that they needed to make their money back on. There have been a lot of crap songs on the Billboard 200 over the last 30 years; payola is at least a partial explanation.
With podcasting and MP3's and so forth the only excuse you have for not finding independent music to listen to is your own laziness.
Amen; you are 100% on target...