No shit, when people ask me if I can help them with their 3 year old printer that has stopped working my first question is does it need new ink soon? The answer is always yes. Okay, for about $100 or less, you can go to the store and buy some new fancy ink that comes shipped with a brand new printer - viola! your problems are solved. It probably has better and more features than your old printer too.
God, if they had any sort of soul, they would give XP away once it was discontinued. Hell, give Windows 2000 away! There is a thought: IF they had a soul? I should think that Redmond would be surrounded by Tom wannabes trying to save them. Laughable, but interesting thought.
You have just named one of the very most important reasons for monitoring your credit report on all three credit agencies. The reports will show an enquiry on your credit and then the opening of a new account.
It gets better. Take an honest look at advertising, look at what they are selling and how they are selling it. Chances are better than 90% of the products you either don't need, can live without, or just plain can't use. Any product that is worth its weight simply doesn't need to be advertised.
While you are looking at marketing campaigns, see who spends the most money. I believe that the value of a product is inversely related to advertising dollars spent. With the exception of products that are new. VoIP is one of those (even though I can't for the life of me figure out what the Vonage marketers were thinking) exceptions where the product is so new that advertising is as much about education as it is selling. Sleeping aids and medicines for ailments your parents never heard of is no better than little blue pill junk mail. There are times that I think that such advertisements should be blockable and covered under the can-spam act.
Anyway, advertising sells. Without it consumers won't even know there is a product. Despite the buzz about desktop linux there actually are people in North America that do NOT know what Linux is, never mind if they want to use it. Security products and practices are the same. I haven't counted, but I know I don't have enough fingers for counting the number of times I've heard a VP spouting verbatim from some magazine article as if he learned it in college or something.
This effect is what keeps MS products so prominent, people don't actually know or understand that there are other competing products. People know about Mcafee and Norton. They don't know about ClamAV, and are not sure what Symantec does.
The open market, in this respect, is just a popularity contest.
I had hopes that sites like Consumer reports et al would change that, but no, consumers really are mostly sheep.
I too run several databases as warehouses, and consequently I don't have a crushing need for blinding speed or speed increases due to stored procedures. Consequently all our database can be dropped off a cliff, hardware replaced and warehouse rebuilt to usability in less than a week, with NO data loss as a result of the architecture. Stored procedures would make that much more difficult, unless for some reason I completely don't understand anything about data warehousing... it could happen
some cable station actually created a news and info channel that performed as well as my use of the Internet for news? Seriously, a couple of hosts out front and a couple dozen web searchers, a few people coordinating the display of data... 30 minutes of the news Internet style without typing or clicking... hmmmmmm
No, I don't mean something stupid, but for every story I read about, I can quickly verify with a second or third source. When a new word or entity pops up I can hit Google or Wikipedia or other sites for reference quickly....
Well, not sure how it would work, but I wish news stations would take a clue from how the Internet is used.
Let's hear the Slashdot crowd claim, once again, how software piracy is not really theft, and how it does not deprive the software-maker of anything of value.
And, of course, how the software-maker's steps to prevent the piracy are unethical, while the piracy itself is not.
I think you have that backwards! When a consumer is forced to purchase Vista with their new PC, it is the purchaser who is deprived of value. I'm willing to bet that even in China not too many people are even pirating Vista, never mind buying it...
Unfortunately, I expect patents are a major barrier to the community developing its own standards independently of those with an interest in restricting technologies. Perhaps the best hope is the public sector, e.g. the BBC's Dirac codec. (emphasis mine)
Now that was an insight. Doesn't seem that many caught that. Why would anyone really want the latest DRM scheme in Linux?? I don't think that MS can force this down the collective throats of the entire Internet population. What becomes popular will be what can be used successfully. If pr0n content providers find that they don't have many users that use this latest from MS, it won't become very popular and will die out. If it only works in Vista it's already off to a bad start.
1 - I didn't mod the comment up 2 - I'm not a tool 3 - I didn't bash MS, I simply said I don't roll that way. I figure if someone can't put their content out in at least two formats they didn't really want anyone to see it anyway. You see, HTML and your web browsing experience is protected by a general compliance with standards. With video content there are too many standards. I think that MPEG is a good standard, consequently I ignore those pesky.wmv and most of the.mov files too. Its nice that people can make up their own formats for stuff, but I'm also happy to not view it if I have to load their special player... oh well.
There! Feel better? I didn't even mention Mi^H^H those people from Redmond.
Now, if you want a bit more thought, do you get this angry when someone says they don't like Bridgestone tires?
There are lies, the normal kind, and there are lies of omission. Leaving something out is often not the fault of the user. When tech support asks what happened, they might often not actually know. Like (here comes the car analogy) taking your car to the mechanic. The mechanic asks what's wrong with it. You tell him you don't know, its making a funny noise.
Software doesn't do a lot generally to track down what is happening when a failure happens. The bug reports help, but that is only on some software. Dr Watson was an attempt. Generally things are better, but throw out one non-standard error that causes a crash and the normal user is just lost and doesn't know. To most users a car is less complex than a computer and software. They don't know what they are supposed to know when they call tech support, only that they should call.
I've had tech support people do some fscking stupid things on the few times I've had to call them. So I don't think its just the user. If tech support asks the wrong questions they will get the wrong answers and before its over the user will be blamed.
The network group where I work started blocking all IPs that are not from North America. You guessed it, they got calls because the Internet didn't work. They could have avoided that by redirecting such http requests to a notice page, but no, they didn't. How is an average user to deal with that?
I think its about half and half regarding culpability wrt stupidity or lies.
but if the entire Digg-like patent system moderation were only people like jcr, it would stand a better chance. Something like the electoral college (not that it doesn't have problems) in that the discussion could be public and you or I could write to any of the college members, but discussion on the board would only be by college members.
If the college members were respected industry people, I believe that it would moderate out any fanboyism, and their opposites.
The NTP patents are at best very marginal and shouldn't have been granted just based on unobvious clause. If there were an opportunity to comment, I'm sure that others would be disallowed for the unobvious clause as well. Without a more general input it is difficult to say what is unobvious to the general public.
My friend, don't be fooled. One step closer to understanding how the universe works is one step closer to proving that irreducible complexity is as mythical as the flat earth, the perfect sun, or that the earth is the center of the universe.
Not all religions think that technology is evil/pointless, but the ones that are most dangerous do. This doesn't disprove the existence of god, or prove it. It disproves irreducible complexity, and thus the theory of intelligent design. ID is that theory that would not explore or experiment because it cannot be understood, things just are because god created them that way. Evolution didn't happen, the big bang didn't happen... all that claptrap. god may well exist, and may well have caused the big bang, or the chain of evolution to begin... who knows. The point is that understanding how things work is important to us as a species. Those that would oppose such investigations and the evidence they produce are dangerous to all of us. Scientists are heroes. Not even 1000 years ago men were killed or imprisoned for knowing less than we take for granted as common knowledge today.
with regard to this. This isn't someone claiming ID causes the universe to act as it does, this is FSCKING Einstein. That he is proved correct is more about man understanding the universe, and relying less on the theory that it is too complicated to understand and must have been created by an imaginary being. This *IS* news, and should be heralded appropriately.
While some might think me a troll, think about it, Einstein was right. That means that we are that much closer to understanding how the universe works. Even 100 years ago such progression could only be imagined, not proven. In the time that we live in, science books have to be revised every year not because of a need to spend government money, but to actually keep them up to date!
So much change and investigation. People have become numb to the actual changes.
This is just a kneejerk reaction to the rumor about Internet radio stations moving to Canada since the CRB decided to price them out of business.
If I were Canadian, I wouldn't worry so much about DMCA as I would the US pushing hard enough that the Canadian government rolls over on measures that protect their own music and film industries. Hollywood has been losing business to Canadian industry for years now.
The DMCA would just be one measure to strong arm the entire continent into a position of propping up the **AA at any cost to the consumer.
I don't know why exactly, but I think that is funny as hell. If only enough people use it, this new technology might one day decide that most Intarweb users are latent school teachers and like pink ponies and colorfully planted flowerbeds when they are not trying to raise money to supply more bricks for the addition to their local church.
Setting aside the default "screw M$" spinal chord reaction, can't we concede that they do have a point here? The fact that they are guilty of being monopolists themselves doesn't mean they have nothing that's worth saying. Google's latest acquisitions have definitely set them on a monopolistic path as they expand ownership over content providers and now methods of advertising through those providers. I think everyone forgets that MS bought Gator. Yep, that was some serious Internet business savvy. MS might well have something to say, but its real difficult for it to not sound like sour grapes. As for AT&T, hell, they are having enough trouble trying to kill Vonage and Skype. Killing off Google is a bit out of their league right now.
Sure, Google conspiracy theories may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think few people would disagree that an internet largely dominated by Google and Google-backed products, generating more Google revenue (positive feedback, anyone?) would entail the typical monopoly shortcomings (less innovation once the market is consolidated, arbitrariness, a bigger buffer zone for failed services, etc.). Right now I can't help but feel that Google is almost administering a utility, like water or electricity. Half of what I do online is powered (or directly coded) by Google -- ensuring a major share of the advertising revenue wouldn't be so different to ensuring they get most of their rightful toll/tax money for providing those basic services. Sure, there's nothing wrong with these services so far, but do we really want one guy centralizing all the cool net stuff? I for one, have to hand this one to our traditional Microsoft overlords. There is one simple reason that Google is becoming dominant: They build good products. They apparently are so good, you use them all the time. Google took the incredible risk of buying YouTube when some people said that you would have to be a moron to do so. Google has consistently taken what they have and created good solid products and services that PEOPLE WANT TO USE and this has built their business.
So some people here want the government to regulate online advertising business? How can that be good? What MS and AT&T want is for the government to stop people (Google) from taking money from them. I don't like monopolies anymore than anyone else, but I can't see the huge danger here. That doesn't mean there is no danger, only that I don't see it. Google has not tried to kill off any of the other 100 or so search engines, they give away much of their products, and even if MS or AT&T bought doubleclick, chances are it would die on the vine in the face of competing with Google. That would still leave the same problems.
Sheesh, " Nanotech and Wireless Guard Against Earthquakes" makes it sound like they have something that works on actual earthquakes. Technically these technologies do not guard, the attempt to limit damage done to structures during an earthquake. This is a far cry from guarding against something.
An automotive airbag does not "guard against" accidents!
We all know about how much damage an airbag deployment causes, I wonder how much actual damage these technologies can prevent. Getting everyone out alive is important, but if the remaining structure is left distorted and unrepairable, the cost will probably be more than most want to spend. Safety is one thing, going broke just in case is another.
I don't think it should be normal, but it can stop network downtime so that all is well until the vendor figures out what the crash dump means.
In fact, I spent over 8 months tracking a bug that caused this type of scenario. In the end it was a cross linked index that only caused an error when a particular device was addressed. The behavior of handling the cross linked index entry for that subscriber was the bug, but finding it took a LOOOONNNGGGG time. In the mean time, the crash/reset saved us unknown hours of complete system downtime. Trying to maintain Six Sigma type uptime on a communications network is important to customers, and this crash/reset behavior helped us keep at least the appearance of such while we were trying to find the bug.
I agree with you but would like to point out that there are times and circumstances where a crash/reset is a better option. In RT comms systems, down time is far more expensive than a crash/reset could be. If a critical system or process is thrown into an unrecoverable circumstance such as corrupt table index etc. it is much preferable to crash/reset and start anew than to wait and stop processing traffic for 2 hours until the technician arrives to push the reset button. The recovery process associated with startup fixes some things.
I agree that this is unacceptable behavior for a word processing app, but still, some times in some circumstances, the crash and reset process if curative and beneficial.
Slashdot Mirror
No shit, when people ask me if I can help them with their 3 year old printer that has stopped working my first question is does it need new ink soon? The answer is always yes. Okay, for about $100 or less, you can go to the store and buy some new fancy ink that comes shipped with a brand new printer - viola! your problems are solved. It probably has better and more features than your old printer too.
You have just named one of the very most important reasons for monitoring your credit report on all three credit agencies. The reports will show an enquiry on your credit and then the opening of a new account.
It gets better. Take an honest look at advertising, look at what they are selling and how they are selling it. Chances are better than 90% of the products you either don't need, can live without, or just plain can't use. Any product that is worth its weight simply doesn't need to be advertised.
While you are looking at marketing campaigns, see who spends the most money. I believe that the value of a product is inversely related to advertising dollars spent. With the exception of products that are new. VoIP is one of those (even though I can't for the life of me figure out what the Vonage marketers were thinking) exceptions where the product is so new that advertising is as much about education as it is selling. Sleeping aids and medicines for ailments your parents never heard of is no better than little blue pill junk mail. There are times that I think that such advertisements should be blockable and covered under the can-spam act.
Anyway, advertising sells. Without it consumers won't even know there is a product. Despite the buzz about desktop linux there actually are people in North America that do NOT know what Linux is, never mind if they want to use it. Security products and practices are the same. I haven't counted, but I know I don't have enough fingers for counting the number of times I've heard a VP spouting verbatim from some magazine article as if he learned it in college or something.
This effect is what keeps MS products so prominent, people don't actually know or understand that there are other competing products. People know about Mcafee and Norton. They don't know about ClamAV, and are not sure what Symantec does.
The open market, in this respect, is just a popularity contest.
I had hopes that sites like Consumer reports et al would change that, but no, consumers really are mostly sheep.
I too run several databases as warehouses, and consequently I don't have a crushing need for blinding speed or speed increases due to stored procedures. Consequently all our database can be dropped off a cliff, hardware replaced and warehouse rebuilt to usability in less than a week, with NO data loss as a result of the architecture. Stored procedures would make that much more difficult, unless for some reason I completely don't understand anything about data warehousing... it could happen
some cable station actually created a news and info channel that performed as well as my use of the Internet for news? Seriously, a couple of hosts out front and a couple dozen web searchers, a few people coordinating the display of data... 30 minutes of the news Internet style without typing or clicking... hmmmmmm
No, I don't mean something stupid, but for every story I read about, I can quickly verify with a second or third source. When a new word or entity pops up I can hit Google or Wikipedia or other sites for reference quickly....
Well, not sure how it would work, but I wish news stations would take a clue from how the Internet is used.
Let's hear the Slashdot crowd claim, once again, how software piracy is not really theft, and how it does not deprive the software-maker of anything of value.
And, of course, how the software-maker's steps to prevent the piracy are unethical, while the piracy itself is not.
I think you have that backwards! When a consumer is forced to purchase Vista with their new PC, it is the purchaser who is deprived of value. I'm willing to bet that even in China not too many people are even pirating Vista, never mind buying it...Now that was an insight. Doesn't seem that many caught that. Why would anyone really want the latest DRM scheme in Linux?? I don't think that MS can force this down the collective throats of the entire Internet population. What becomes popular will be what can be used successfully. If pr0n content providers find that they don't have many users that use this latest from MS, it won't become very popular and will die out. If it only works in Vista it's already off to a bad start.
I'll give it a go
.wmv and most of the .mov files too. Its nice that people can make up their own formats for stuff, but I'm also happy to not view it if I have to load their special player... oh well.
1 - I didn't mod the comment up
2 - I'm not a tool
3 - I didn't bash MS, I simply said I don't roll that way. I figure if someone can't put their content out in at least two formats they didn't really want anyone to see it anyway. You see, HTML and your web browsing experience is protected by a general compliance with standards. With video content there are too many standards. I think that MPEG is a good standard, consequently I ignore those pesky
There! Feel better? I didn't even mention Mi^H^H those people from Redmond.
Now, if you want a bit more thought, do you get this angry when someone says they don't like Bridgestone tires?
I've got some servers that your management might be interested in, they're very expensive, but worth every penny, I promise!
I simply say NO to .wmv files... meh, no big loss so far as I can tell.
Who will Verizon go after next? Skypeout?
... Verizon sucks and I won't be using their services.
Now millions of people will have to turn to the existing vampiric phone services
I've been very happy with Vonage, does anyone know a good alternative?
There are lies, the normal kind, and there are lies of omission. Leaving something out is often not the fault of the user. When tech support asks what happened, they might often not actually know. Like (here comes the car analogy) taking your car to the mechanic. The mechanic asks what's wrong with it. You tell him you don't know, its making a funny noise.
Software doesn't do a lot generally to track down what is happening when a failure happens. The bug reports help, but that is only on some software. Dr Watson was an attempt. Generally things are better, but throw out one non-standard error that causes a crash and the normal user is just lost and doesn't know. To most users a car is less complex than a computer and software. They don't know what they are supposed to know when they call tech support, only that they should call.
I've had tech support people do some fscking stupid things on the few times I've had to call them. So I don't think its just the user. If tech support asks the wrong questions they will get the wrong answers and before its over the user will be blamed.
The network group where I work started blocking all IPs that are not from North America. You guessed it, they got calls because the Internet didn't work. They could have avoided that by redirecting such http requests to a notice page, but no, they didn't. How is an average user to deal with that?
I think its about half and half regarding culpability wrt stupidity or lies.
but if the entire Digg-like patent system moderation were only people like jcr, it would stand a better chance. Something like the electoral college (not that it doesn't have problems) in that the discussion could be public and you or I could write to any of the college members, but discussion on the board would only be by college members.
If the college members were respected industry people, I believe that it would moderate out any fanboyism, and their opposites.
The NTP patents are at best very marginal and shouldn't have been granted just based on unobvious clause. If there were an opportunity to comment, I'm sure that others would be disallowed for the unobvious clause as well. Without a more general input it is difficult to say what is unobvious to the general public.
My friend, don't be fooled. One step closer to understanding how the universe works is one step closer to proving that irreducible complexity is as mythical as the flat earth, the perfect sun, or that the earth is the center of the universe.
Not all religions think that technology is evil/pointless, but the ones that are most dangerous do. This doesn't disprove the existence of god, or prove it. It disproves irreducible complexity, and thus the theory of intelligent design. ID is that theory that would not explore or experiment because it cannot be understood, things just are because god created them that way. Evolution didn't happen, the big bang didn't happen... all that claptrap. god may well exist, and may well have caused the big bang, or the chain of evolution to begin... who knows. The point is that understanding how things work is important to us as a species. Those that would oppose such investigations and the evidence they produce are dangerous to all of us. Scientists are heroes. Not even 1000 years ago men were killed or imprisoned for knowing less than we take for granted as common knowledge today.
with regard to this. This isn't someone claiming ID causes the universe to act as it does, this is FSCKING Einstein. That he is proved correct is more about man understanding the universe, and relying less on the theory that it is too complicated to understand and must have been created by an imaginary being. This *IS* news, and should be heralded appropriately.
While some might think me a troll, think about it, Einstein was right. That means that we are that much closer to understanding how the universe works. Even 100 years ago such progression could only be imagined, not proven. In the time that we live in, science books have to be revised every year not because of a need to spend government money, but to actually keep them up to date!
So much change and investigation. People have become numb to the actual changes.
This is just a kneejerk reaction to the rumor about Internet radio stations moving to Canada since the CRB decided to price them out of business.
If I were Canadian, I wouldn't worry so much about DMCA as I would the US pushing hard enough that the Canadian government rolls over on measures that protect their own music and film industries. Hollywood has been losing business to Canadian industry for years now.
The DMCA would just be one measure to strong arm the entire continent into a position of propping up the **AA at any cost to the consumer.
I don't know why exactly, but I think that is funny as hell. If only enough people use it, this new technology might one day decide that most Intarweb users are latent school teachers and like pink ponies and colorfully planted flowerbeds when they are not trying to raise money to supply more bricks for the addition to their local church.
MS might well have something to say, but its real difficult for it to not sound like sour grapes. As for AT&T, hell, they are having enough trouble trying to kill Vonage and Skype. Killing off Google is a bit out of their league right now. Sure, Google conspiracy theories may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I think few people would disagree that an internet largely dominated by Google and Google-backed products, generating more Google revenue (positive feedback, anyone?) would entail the typical monopoly shortcomings (less innovation once the market is consolidated, arbitrariness, a bigger buffer zone for failed services, etc.). Right now I can't help but feel that Google is almost administering a utility, like water or electricity. Half of what I do online is powered (or directly coded) by Google -- ensuring a major share of the advertising revenue wouldn't be so different to ensuring they get most of their rightful toll/tax money for providing those basic services. Sure, there's nothing wrong with these services so far, but do we really want one guy centralizing all the cool net stuff? I for one, have to hand this one to our traditional Microsoft overlords. There is one simple reason that Google is becoming dominant: They build good products. They apparently are so good, you use them all the time. Google took the incredible risk of buying YouTube when some people said that you would have to be a moron to do so. Google has consistently taken what they have and created good solid products and services that PEOPLE WANT TO USE and this has built their business.
So some people here want the government to regulate online advertising business? How can that be good? What MS and AT&T want is for the government to stop people (Google) from taking money from them. I don't like monopolies anymore than anyone else, but I can't see the huge danger here. That doesn't mean there is no danger, only that I don't see it. Google has not tried to kill off any of the other 100 or so search engines, they give away much of their products, and even if MS or AT&T bought doubleclick, chances are it would die on the vine in the face of competing with Google. That would still leave the same problems.
Sheesh, " Nanotech and Wireless Guard Against Earthquakes" makes it sound like they have something that works on actual earthquakes. Technically these technologies do not guard, the attempt to limit damage done to structures during an earthquake. This is a far cry from guarding against something.
An automotive airbag does not "guard against" accidents!
We all know about how much damage an airbag deployment causes, I wonder how much actual damage these technologies can prevent. Getting everyone out alive is important, but if the remaining structure is left distorted and unrepairable, the cost will probably be more than most want to spend. Safety is one thing, going broke just in case is another.
I don't think it should be normal, but it can stop network downtime so that all is well until the vendor figures out what the crash dump means.
In fact, I spent over 8 months tracking a bug that caused this type of scenario. In the end it was a cross linked index that only caused an error when a particular device was addressed. The behavior of handling the cross linked index entry for that subscriber was the bug, but finding it took a LOOOONNNGGGG time. In the mean time, the crash/reset saved us unknown hours of complete system downtime. Trying to maintain Six Sigma type uptime on a communications network is important to customers, and this crash/reset behavior helped us keep at least the appearance of such while we were trying to find the bug.
I agree with you but would like to point out that there are times and circumstances where a crash/reset is a better option. In RT comms systems, down time is far more expensive than a crash/reset could be. If a critical system or process is thrown into an unrecoverable circumstance such as corrupt table index etc. it is much preferable to crash/reset and start anew than to wait and stop processing traffic for 2 hours until the technician arrives to push the reset button. The recovery process associated with startup fixes some things.
I agree that this is unacceptable behavior for a word processing app, but still, some times in some circumstances, the crash and reset process if curative and beneficial.
but you won't know about it, not after the men in black suits come to visit you this evening....
Uhm, not so sure about that. MS FrontPage seemed to do just that and worse... terribly difficult to parse through with a text editor.
But because I have a cell phone with IM, text messaging, and email on it, I should be able to opt-in to tertiary authentication using that model??