As stated above, this is most likely due to the upcoming Leopard release. Frugal shoppers know the (relatively) highly anticipated release will cost them $120ish dollars more now than in two months. Add to that the fierce rumors of a MacBook upgrade (Apple's star product under the iPod) and you got yourself a real reason to wait!
More interestingly; I'll bet by September nearly all Mac users will have upgraded to Leopard. Historically, Apple customers tend to upgrade fairly quickly (both consumer and business), whereas Vista is at what... 2% in twice as many months? I just think these/. articles about nothing are a waste of time.
A lot of managers don't think of "if we spend this we'll save twice that" they think "if we spend this we immediately reduce the bottom line by the same amount, fuck that!"
Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking.
Um that is a problem with humanity, not capitalism. I am entirely confident that greed affects other economic forms as well. For example, before taking greed (and a general desire to have more than others) into account, socialism seems like the nirvana of economic systems.
I think the real problem there is greed caused by flaws in the management structure of these companies. Being out of touch with your employees and lacking the foresight to understand how to increase productivity are marks of POOR MANAGEMENT. This is why Google and the like are nice places to work. They're just as greedy and corporate as anybody else, but having lots of engineers sprinkled through the management hierarchy leads to an enjoyable work place. Including dual big-ass wide screen monitors for all, a choice of operating systems, and tons of "distractions" like pianos, games and what not... Just get your work done and you can play all you want!!
The requirement for a degree in any CS profession is artificial. My degree is in Chemistry, and yet I work as a software engineer. My job isn't especially hard, and certainly two trained monkeys could do it. And I'm sure that if I practiced enough and studied enough text books, I could work as a crappy chemist too. What's your point? A CS degree requirement is not artificial. There is a good deal of non-trivial theory that a degree holder is expected to have a good handle on. Sure, its possible to script and write moderately complex programs without take Theory of Computation, Algorithms, OO Design, Programming languages, etc. Perhaps you don't need a grasp of graph theory or an understanding of why P=NP is important. However, when you get into anything sufficiently complicated, I believe a well-trained CS major will have a very strong advantage over you. But then again you're admittedly doing work that "a monkey" could do (boring), so it isn't anything a respected programmer would want to touch.
In all the jobs I have had, I learned new skills, languages and methodologies. That is one of the benefits of working in a leading-edge field. Of course its possible to jump right in learn "how to program", but I contest that doing so will result in a shaky foundation, at best. My education continues at work, it didn't start there. If you find the *right employer*, most of your work will be challenging, and occasionally rewarding. I'm sorry that you chose the wrong major for yourself.
That's still extremely expensive for such a small amount of in. You're looking at 40 cents per millilitre. Gas is only $1.00 per liter, and that's way more complex a substance than ink. They act like they are doing you a favour, but in reality are still ripping you off.
Are you joking?? You can't compare gasoline to printer ink! Why not compare ink to liquid gold? Fool.
Normal ink carts are about the same price for about 25% of the 50ml of ink these new carts have. For example, a random Red HP ink cartridge is $25 for only 17ml http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/C9393AN%2523140
Please explain what calculator you used to determine that $25/17ml is a better deal than $30/50ml... That random HP ink is $1.4 per ml of ink while the Memjet claim is $0.60 per ml all in USD. RTFA
Your response is pretty narrow minded. Aside from the disputed large energy savings from keeping people awake during sunlight hours, DST has other potential pros. By adjusting time forward, the US department of transportation contests that it reduces accident fatalities significantly, on a national level, because people are doing less nighttime driving.
Economies of scale really does not apply to royalties. The internet radio community can grow 100 fold next year and will still have to pay the same amount. This is really just an example of big corporate interests and evil lobbying.
The terrestrial radio world has sucked for a long time, and now they're seeing market share get eroded away on all fronts. In cars, some people are turning to satellite solutions. At home/work and work, internet radio is a great solution since it provides better playlists and higher quality sound for free. In the gym, ipods have almost completely replaced the personal portable radio.
When you take all that into consideration, it become quite clear what is happening here. With the new fees in place, internet radio as we know it will be destroyed. My prediction is that most stations would shut down almost immediately, as donations and revenue from online stores, t-shirts, cd's etc cant generate enough revenue to remain profitable. So long to high-quality internet radio. So long to playlists that comprise of hundreds of artists. So long to commercial free/few stations. After the smoke clears there will probably only be a selection of corporate internet radio stations with shitty playlists, constant commercials, and annoying hosts. Fucking bastards... i'll have to steal more music to compensate.
The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'" Definitely true, and they clearly still feel this way. I never had any stability issues with Office X or problems with partially implemented features. It feels like a really solid product.
Ironically, Office X is years ahead of the latest Windows Office in terms of user interface and usability. My Windows friends are always amazed at the sleeker, semi-transparent, foldable-menu UI on the Mac version that i've been using for years now! Additionally the presentation mode of PP is top notch, really. Much better than the way its done on Windows. Worth noting that I only really use Word for text processing and PP for presentations on occasion.
Now, when my friend use to tell me that they couldnt get a Mac because they need Windows for the applications, they would always note Office as the most important one. When I showed them how much cooler it looks running on a Mac, they shut up pretty quick and walked away mumbling. Now, you can't walk through the halls without noticing that half of the laptops are Macbooks. I rarely hear this argument anymore, especially with boot camp.
Except that with the Fox, half of the people looking for and finding bugs are doing so in order to help get them fixed.
(insert devil's advocate)
But for how much longer? the more positive attention fox draws from the unwashed masses, the more negative attention will turn in that direction from malware developers.
If you go from 5% marketshare to 25% marketshare - your percentage of people looking for and finding bugs for good would drop through the floor.
Think of it like this - Maybe one out of every ten of my FFX using friends actually do any app-dev work. Is that accurate? Maybe 10% of all users? If more 'regular people' started using FFX, ditching IE, you think you're still going to have 10%?
Safari and FFx are safe for now, because they're not being targeted by hundreds/thousands/millions. I would contend that 10% is a wildly inaccurate estimate. There are millions of FF users, including my parents, sister and all of my friends/professors here at the University. There might be one person among that group who has contributed code... I doubt 10% of the FF user base has the knowledge or technical ability to patch/hack Mozilla source. Perhaps 10% contribute if you include QA/Bug reports/Documentation etc, but not "App-Dev" work.
Two years ago Firefox Downloads passed 25,000,000. To illustrate my point, lets say FF has 5,000,000 active users world wide (probably an order of magnitude more in reality). Now if 10% of those people hacked out the source and contributed code on a regular basis, Mozilla would have 500,000 patches to deal with. That's just too much to handle as each patch needs to be analyzed, merged and tested independently! If just 1% of the user base contribute code to this project, it will remain a wild success. I don't know of any project that needs over 50,000 developers working on it except maybe the overall Linux initiative. IE surely doesn't have more than a couple of dozen, maybe hundred, developers. What's your point again?
I wonder how Balmer thinks that they are going to sue something that no one owns, that no one made.
Is he going to sue anyone who uses this? Is he going to sue those who host the code? Doubtful and maybe. This shows us once again that Microsoft is truly fearful that Linux will be eating away at MS market share. With more governments and big business (IBM, et al) starting to pass law and policy to lessen their dependence on Microsoft products, Microsoft needs to act. Following the [Microsoft-sponsored] highly-public SCO debacle, MS is counting on the business world understanding the repercussions of IP in Linux. So, Microsoft can indeed sue businesses that use community software, and therefore their patents, illegally. Especially PC makers that are very valuable to Microsoft (like Dell) who would love to offer a free linux alternative to Windows.
With the current state of things the worst that could happen is that companies stop using Linux in the US, I don't see how they want to sue anyone based in Europe? Would the US government then start supporting Microsoft in trade wars? I believe you can sue (in the US) a foreign company that does business in the US. The US laws have no bearing on a foreign entity, however you could probably get a ban the product, thereby preventing foreign companies from doing any business in the US. A bad situation...
This whole software patent thing is beyond my understanding, I wonder if anyone out there really get the idea behind this? The lobbyists do.
More likely: "We buy millions of dollars worth of drives each year, and our buying decisions are driven in part by the reliability data that we collect. If we told everyone what kind of drives work best, more people would buy those drives, driving up the price that we pay." You tard. Demand and price in a free market are reversely proprotional. Go back to high school economics! Not only would that, but the great drive company mentioned would probably get more press and money leading to more R&D and even better drives.
I wish Google released the data they found because it would force the crappy drive companies to improve their products.
The post was clearly craftd very carefully to spur head-on-head mud slinging... Why must we place blame for something so menial? There are so many more problems with Visa and third-party software that this is just pathetic to speak of. It just means you should charge your iPod via the included wall adapter for a little while. Or an even better strategy is to either dual boot vista+xp or JUST WAIT ON VISTA.
Why don't we talk more about how Nvidia promised us Vista support and largely failed. Note that Apple never promised us that... If you can't even install Vista on your computer, why worry about syncing your iPod with it. I personally just got vista on my high-end Nforce4 machine yesterday. I had to use these workaround drivers from a community website to get Vista to even install on my integrated nvidia RAID setup. Now with all the WHCL signed drivers and the machine all set up, it will periodically just crash. Works great other than that, except for using 515 MB of RAM just to boot.
Pick your battles fools. BTW, iTunes works perfectly for playing music on Vista.
Has anybody else noticed on the top of the Yahoo! search results page, there is some text in red that reads "Search with Yahoo! from your browser"? When you hover over that text, a box pops up advertising the Yahoo! search bar, EXCEPT that the little image is a Google icon...
This type of problem is not at all uncommon in the corporate big bussiness world. Ideally all proper channels are in place to guarantee that everything various deparment and policies align with the common company goals. BUT, the world is not ideal, and large companies are not exception.
Lesson
Unless somebody has proven themselves trustworthy and competant, always assume that they are not. Assume that everybody you meet will screw you over by accident. Finally, ALWAYS get everything in writing and rubber stamped! If they refuse to provide that, its a red flag... screw 'em.
Google has done an excellent job of making high resolution aerial photography readily available. Obviously they recognized the need for discretion over sensitive areas. The article does mention the "pixel-out" effect that can be used. For example, until a year or so ago, the roof of the white house was precisely erased and replaced with a solid white overlay. I assume this was done for national security, and has been deemed no longer needed. The same for Area 51, which use to be a very very grainy low resolution image overlaid at the location (not so any more). Clearly there are mechanisms in place to allow for obfuscation of small areas. I would think it was the job of the military to tell Google what areas it thinks are sensitive. Such areas could be replaced by out of date, but still interesting images of how the bases use to look.
The second issue in play is far more serious. Consider that Google has not launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit as of yet. The image data it has is gathered from many third-party providers including state GIS services, and the NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas companies. Those companies sell the data in question as their business. Even if Google dismantled its Earth/Maps services, the data would still be available to moderately funded terrorist groups. Ultra-high res image data, infrastructure maps and 3D building data on almost every square foot of Massachusetts is available for free here: MassGIS. The military should be aware of this by now and should be taking action to minimize the threat. Google Maps is far less accurate than flying a spy plane over a base because the images are likely months out of date. Flying spy plane has been possible for decades. It would be much more difficult to determine where the lavatories are located and where the light armor is parked if those areas had some light tent's or shrouds around them. The cost to do that in a base is probably less than the cost of one of the heavy tanks it would protect.
The argument is really strange in my opinion. Now, being experienced consumers of the products from capitalist corporations, we all KNOW that every single one of the MP3 player companies that complains about Apple's system lock-in would not have hesitated to do it themselves if given the chance. The easiest example is Sony... a company that absolutely loves to lock consumers to their devices. The Mini Disc fad, for example was the same thing. Sony player, Sony PC software, Sony format only. Even worse, until MD started losing customers, it required all music be in the Sony-only ATRAC3 format. The iPod on the other hand could always play MP3s just fine. Nobody really complained all that loudly that Sony was trying to lock customers into their product line because the situation worked itself out. MD became undesirable when the micro hard drive and high capacity flash era arrived. Nobody wanted to carry around 50 small CD-like plastic data squares.
Along comes Apple with an MP3 player that was high capacity like the market leading Creative product, but much much smaller, lighter and easier to use. Coupled with tightly integrated iTunes software and cheap/flexible Apple music store, it killed all the competition. Now a problem comes along because Apple did its job too well! Their easy-to-use system becomes so popular that the competing devices and music services can't compete. The Apple systems *grows* not because of lock-in, but because of customers choosing the most appealing device. So they all flounder and compete for small slices of the remaining 30ish% of the digital music player market.
I think this whole issue is ridiculous. Apple has shown us that a company with a great idea can corner a market really quickly. This is not because they locked people in... how many iTunes songs have you actually purchased?? I have purchased maybe 6 in 5+ years... big deal. The reason I am on my 3rd iPod is because when it comes time to get a new portable music player, I examine the competition, and decide that the iPod is right for me. Whether or not SanDisk or Creative can play my iTMS songs makes no difference to me, and I suspect the vast majority of people. It only makes a difference to angry MP3/online music companies who want to find a reason... nay, who want to find something to blame their lack of success on.
Forcing Apple to make their DRM licensable would not in itself solve anything. Apple could just set the price per device license at $400. Who could compete with a pre-manufacture cost of $400? So we have to force Apple to make it licensable, and affordable! It is like saying "Hey Apple, Great job!! Your product is so good that we need to require that you let the competition share the profits from what you have built without their help."
The iPod will lose its top seat when something better comes along. It'd be nice if all MP3 players played nice together, but even then I would still but iPod's until something more elegant, functional, affordable and appealing came along...
Oh man, I was totally with them up until the prices. I was preparing to pull out my credit card and spend an extra few months in debt. But... $500 for a 4gig and $600 for an 8gig? My MP3 collection is 13gigs. I'd have to shell out $500 and I'd *still* have to carry around my iPod. Oh, and also, I'd probably also have to switch from T-Mobile to Cingular.
Me too. The prices are about $100 higher than the max I would have thought. 2-year contract is acceptable, but a downer. My collection is 20gb, but an 8gb phone would be fine. Just put your favorite few hundred songs on there! The real problem is that programs will probably take most of the space:(
I'm talking about the San Jose/Santa Cruz/Cupertino area. It's quite a distance from San Francisco.
True it is a whole 40 minute drive from SF proper. I would consider all those places to be in the "Greater San Francisco" area. Here in eastern MA, people say "Boston" when they mean any far east MA town...
I wouldn't be surprised if the act of reading the license constitutes acceptance. In other words, it is impossible to boot the machine far enough to be able to install alternative OS without violating some portion of the license.
The license is a contract consisting of specific terms. You can't have a term in a contract that forces you to accept the contract because you don't accept the terms unless you accept the contract... make sense?
Realize that whatever license texts appear on screen, you don't practically accept the license until you activate windows. Before activation you could easily just format the hard drive a few times and wipe all proof of ever reading the license at all.
I think that really won't be a problem and Google might not even need to include race/sex/etc information. If they're looking for self-motivated, intelligent, and approachable super geeks with good programming skills, why should the bias information matter? In fact, the ideal system could actually (forcebly) remove some of biases that might be imposed by manual recruitment. Just ignore sensitive but useless data points like gender.
On another note, the official Google employment application does not ask for race or gender information (though a name can usually reveal those) and starts with the ubiquitous statement: "Google is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Qualified applicants are considered without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability or any other status protected by applicable law." So it really comes down to interviewer bias, in which this system has NO bearing at all.
From what I understand, it isnt always as easy as just saying 'fire them'. Many countries make firing employees extremely difficult to do. I hear that France is the worst (2 jobs ago, we had a sales team in Paris), but it can be difficult in the U.S. as well.
If a manager is constantly singling out one person, it may appear that they have some personal grudge. I think that is the real reason why they would send a whole team to training instead of one or two person. If you are in a management position and considering firing somebody, you need to have some data to back up your choice. Namely, be able to show that the employee in question was given all the same chances to correct themselves as you would give somebody else.
Job security is very important to people like me (software engineers), even though the market is really good right now. We like to feel valuable... part of that is feeling comes from knowing that we can screw up on rare occasion and get a fair chance to make it right, so to speak. Additionally there are things like severence that can complicate firing people without having a solid, legally valid reason. If there is a contract involved, it is pretty easy to imagine cases where it would be cheaper to keep a bad employee on staff while you make a good case for firing them.
All this pertains to small tech firms or 50-100 employees, since that is where I have been employed. Things are probably very different at the warehouse...
It makes me wonder who actually administers these involuntary tests, surely not a card carrying member of the APA.
They probably carry a Polygraph Examiners of America card. YOU too can be a member for as little as $95/year and a "sample report"!! If you recruit two of your friends, you can be a "Senior" member too!
linux code - freely available. Number of linux exploits - minimal. windows code - closed source. Number of windows exploits - incredible.
Well yeah, but it is misleading that you suggest Windows is less secure just because it is closed source. To disqualify that statement you just need to consider that if Linux became closed source tomorrow it would be no less secure than it is today.
No, the problem with Windows is that M$ made some bad design choices in the early days (90's) and opted to endlessly patch problems rather than rearchitect the kernel/OS (what Vista is supposed to be). The community around linux on the other hand represents "oversight" and helps force speedy correction of underlying flaws. So basically I am saying that with Linux-like oversight on its closed source code, Windows would be really good. To bad that is not feasable.
I think it was only a matter of time until this was officially stated. It isnt very suprising at all, and actually pretty logical if you stop to think about why this is so.
Non-technical reasons: Downloading content, espectially movies is downright easy. At this point, with the popular and mainstream bit torrent programs, getting most pirated content takes little more than a single-click. Then just sit back and wait a short while. There are so many GOOD and FREE piracy search engines out there that you can pretty much find recently released pirated material nearly as fast as you could find it on Amazon. Legally, pirates are breaking the law and the penatlies can be extremely severe.... but the is virtually no risk! My friends pirates ridiculous amounts of material on an almost daily basis (almost only movies and TV shows). None of them has ever gotten caught, or even fears getting caught.
Technical reasons: The bussiness model is almost perfect. Bit torrent in particular enables the ENTIRE burden and cost of distribution to be shifted to the end-users. Most end-users don't really care or understand that they are actually powering the piracy network with their own purchased bandwidth. And why should they? They've paid the ISP for the traffic. Mass disctribution via a central server on the other hand is just so damn expensive that DVD downloads can't yet be offered for less than you can purchase a DVD for.. not that it matters as anything is more expensive than free.
Pirated content is DRM-free. Enough said.
Pirated content is generally higher quality. I'm referrring to DVD rips or HDTV show rips. Since the pirates are not paying for the distribution costs, they have no problem using high-quality compression. Movie download service right now don't offer anything comparable in quality for a low price.
Pirated content is highly accessable. The torrent search engines run on ad revenue, and basically just index the contents of various torrent trackers.
This turned into a rant, so I am ending it here. Eventually (soon) somebody will come up with a solution that that will address all these issues and manage to design a VIABLE CHEAP, POSSIBLY FREE legal alternative to piracy that *works*. It will happen, always does. It won't eliminate piracy (which has always existed in some form), but the creators will probably become billionaires in a short time. Just my prediction.
Why do you say that Hong Kong is a separate government than mainland China?
Poor wording on my part. It's part of China proper, but has its own government and political structure officially known as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. (see: Honk Kong) It reminds me of D.C., which while not at all the same, is not a city on to itself, but rather a entirely seperate federal entity coupled with the city of Washington, Maryland.
Yahoo HK was just abiding by the law.
According to the article posted, it was not legally required to cooperate with mainland police. From wikipedia: "In contrast to mainland China's civil law system, Hong Kong continues to follow the common law tradition established by British colonial rule." That includes a seperate British-esq court system...
And how is "local customs" different from US companies who turned data over to the US govt after 9/11 even though there was no valid legal compulsion?
It isnt. Not all companies complied with requests like that, and the ones that did probably got a few law suits. I imagine it was not hard to get a court order for anything in the weeks following 9/11 anyway.
If you're going to be "law-abiding", you're probably going to screw people over at the behest of whatever local regime.
Agreed. There are certain things you just have to do to stay in bussiness, and compliance with law is one of them. You should recognize the massive difference between abiding by the law and following customs. Laws are written, voted on, and known to all citizens of a government. Customs are unwritten and subject to extreme variations in interpetation. Basically an excuse that can be applied to anything.
Slashdot Mirror
As stated above, this is most likely due to the upcoming Leopard release. Frugal shoppers know the (relatively) highly anticipated release will cost them $120ish dollars more now than in two months. Add to that the fierce rumors of a MacBook upgrade (Apple's star product under the iPod) and you got yourself a real reason to wait!
/. articles about nothing are a waste of time.
More interestingly; I'll bet by September nearly all Mac users will have upgraded to Leopard. Historically, Apple customers tend to upgrade fairly quickly (both consumer and business), whereas Vista is at what... 2% in twice as many months? I just think these
Um that is a problem with humanity, not capitalism. I am entirely confident that greed affects other economic forms as well. For example, before taking greed (and a general desire to have more than others) into account, socialism seems like the nirvana of economic systems.Well, that's the bad thing about capitalism today - it's been replaced by blind greed and short-term thinking.
I think the real problem there is greed caused by flaws in the management structure of these companies. Being out of touch with your employees and lacking the foresight to understand how to increase productivity are marks of POOR MANAGEMENT. This is why Google and the like are nice places to work. They're just as greedy and corporate as anybody else, but having lots of engineers sprinkled through the management hierarchy leads to an enjoyable work place. Including dual big-ass wide screen monitors for all, a choice of operating systems, and tons of "distractions" like pianos, games and what not... Just get your work done and you can play all you want!!
My job isn't especially hard, and certainly two trained monkeys could do it. And I'm sure that if I practiced enough and studied enough text books, I could work as a crappy chemist too. What's your point? A CS degree requirement is not artificial. There is a good deal of non-trivial theory that a degree holder is expected to have a good handle on. Sure, its possible to script and write moderately complex programs without take Theory of Computation, Algorithms, OO Design, Programming languages, etc. Perhaps you don't need a grasp of graph theory or an understanding of why P=NP is important. However, when you get into anything sufficiently complicated, I believe a well-trained CS major will have a very strong advantage over you. But then again you're admittedly doing work that "a monkey" could do (boring), so it isn't anything a respected programmer would want to touch.
In all the jobs I have had, I learned new skills, languages and methodologies. That is one of the benefits of working in a leading-edge field. Of course its possible to jump right in learn "how to program", but I contest that doing so will result in a shaky foundation, at best. My education continues at work, it didn't start there. If you find the *right employer*, most of your work will be challenging, and occasionally rewarding. I'm sorry that you chose the wrong major for yourself.
Are you joking?? You can't compare gasoline to printer ink! Why not compare ink to liquid gold? Fool.
Normal ink carts are about the same price for about 25% of the 50ml of ink these new carts have. For example, a random Red HP ink cartridge is $25 for only 17ml http://www.shopping.hp.com/product/C9393AN%252314
Please explain what calculator you used to determine that $25/17ml is a better deal than $30/50ml... That random HP ink is $1.4 per ml of ink while the Memjet claim is $0.60 per ml all in USD. RTFA
Your response is pretty narrow minded. Aside from the disputed large energy savings from keeping people awake during sunlight hours, DST has other potential pros. By adjusting time forward, the US department of transportation contests that it reduces accident fatalities significantly, on a national level, because people are doing less nighttime driving.
Economies of scale really does not apply to royalties. The internet radio community can grow 100 fold next year and will still have to pay the same amount. This is really just an example of big corporate interests and evil lobbying.
The terrestrial radio world has sucked for a long time, and now they're seeing market share get eroded away on all fronts. In cars, some people are turning to satellite solutions. At home/work and work, internet radio is a great solution since it provides better playlists and higher quality sound for free. In the gym, ipods have almost completely replaced the personal portable radio.
When you take all that into consideration, it become quite clear what is happening here. With the new fees in place, internet radio as we know it will be destroyed. My prediction is that most stations would shut down almost immediately, as donations and revenue from online stores, t-shirts, cd's etc cant generate enough revenue to remain profitable. So long to high-quality internet radio. So long to playlists that comprise of hundreds of artists. So long to commercial free/few stations. After the smoke clears there will probably only be a selection of corporate internet radio stations with shitty playlists, constant commercials, and annoying hosts. Fucking bastards... i'll have to steal more music to compensate.
until a pilot triggers that system and then takes a nap? :)
Ironically, Office X is years ahead of the latest Windows Office in terms of user interface and usability. My Windows friends are always amazed at the sleeker, semi-transparent, foldable-menu UI on the Mac version that i've been using for years now! Additionally the presentation mode of PP is top notch, really. Much better than the way its done on Windows. Worth noting that I only really use Word for text processing and PP for presentations on occasion.
Now, when my friend use to tell me that they couldnt get a Mac because they need Windows for the applications, they would always note Office as the most important one. When I showed them how much cooler it looks running on a Mac, they shut up pretty quick and walked away mumbling. Now, you can't walk through the halls without noticing that half of the laptops are Macbooks. I rarely hear this argument anymore, especially with boot camp.
(insert devil's advocate)
But for how much longer? the more positive attention fox draws from the unwashed masses, the more negative attention will turn in that direction from malware developers.
If you go from 5% marketshare to 25% marketshare - your percentage of people looking for and finding bugs for good would drop through the floor.
Think of it like this - Maybe one out of every ten of my FFX using friends actually do any app-dev work. Is that accurate? Maybe 10% of all users? If more 'regular people' started using FFX, ditching IE, you think you're still going to have 10%?
Safari and FFx are safe for now, because they're not being targeted by hundreds/thousands/millions. I would contend that 10% is a wildly inaccurate estimate. There are millions of FF users, including my parents, sister and all of my friends/professors here at the University. There might be one person among that group who has contributed code... I doubt 10% of the FF user base has the knowledge or technical ability to patch/hack Mozilla source. Perhaps 10% contribute if you include QA/Bug reports/Documentation etc, but not "App-Dev" work.
Two years ago Firefox Downloads passed 25,000,000. To illustrate my point, lets say FF has 5,000,000 active users world wide (probably an order of magnitude more in reality). Now if 10% of those people hacked out the source and contributed code on a regular basis, Mozilla would have 500,000 patches to deal with. That's just too much to handle as each patch needs to be analyzed, merged and tested independently! If just 1% of the user base contribute code to this project, it will remain a wild success. I don't know of any project that needs over 50,000 developers working on it except maybe the overall Linux initiative. IE surely doesn't have more than a couple of dozen, maybe hundred, developers. What's your point again?
Is he going to sue anyone who uses this?
Is he going to sue those who host the code? Doubtful and maybe. This shows us once again that Microsoft is truly fearful that Linux will be eating away at MS market share. With more governments and big business (IBM, et al) starting to pass law and policy to lessen their dependence on Microsoft products, Microsoft needs to act. Following the [Microsoft-sponsored] highly-public SCO debacle, MS is counting on the business world understanding the repercussions of IP in Linux. So, Microsoft can indeed sue businesses that use community software, and therefore their patents, illegally. Especially PC makers that are very valuable to Microsoft (like Dell) who would love to offer a free linux alternative to Windows. With the current state of things the worst that could happen is that companies stop using Linux in the US, I don't see how they want to sue anyone based in Europe?
Would the US government then start supporting Microsoft in trade wars? I believe you can sue (in the US) a foreign company that does business in the US. The US laws have no bearing on a foreign entity, however you could probably get a ban the product, thereby preventing foreign companies from doing any business in the US. A bad situation... This whole software patent thing is beyond my understanding, I wonder if anyone out there really get the idea behind this? The lobbyists do.
I wish Google released the data they found because it would force the crappy drive companies to improve their products.
The post was clearly craftd very carefully to spur head-on-head mud slinging... Why must we place blame for something so menial? There are so many more problems with Visa and third-party software that this is just pathetic to speak of. It just means you should charge your iPod via the included wall adapter for a little while. Or an even better strategy is to either dual boot vista+xp or JUST WAIT ON VISTA.
Why don't we talk more about how Nvidia promised us Vista support and largely failed. Note that Apple never promised us that... If you can't even install Vista on your computer, why worry about syncing your iPod with it. I personally just got vista on my high-end Nforce4 machine yesterday. I had to use these workaround drivers from a community website to get Vista to even install on my integrated nvidia RAID setup. Now with all the WHCL signed drivers and the machine all set up, it will periodically just crash. Works great other than that, except for using 515 MB of RAM just to boot.
Pick your battles fools. BTW, iTunes works perfectly for playing music on Vista.
Has anybody else noticed on the top of the Yahoo! search results page, there is some text in red that reads "Search with Yahoo! from your browser"? When you hover over that text, a box pops up advertising the Yahoo! search bar, EXCEPT that the little image is a Google icon...
This type of problem is not at all uncommon in the corporate big bussiness world. Ideally all proper channels are in place to guarantee that everything various deparment and policies align with the common company goals. BUT, the world is not ideal, and large companies are not exception.
Lesson
Unless somebody has proven themselves trustworthy and competant, always assume that they are not. Assume that everybody you meet will screw you over by accident. Finally, ALWAYS get everything in writing and rubber stamped! If they refuse to provide that, its a red flag... screw 'em.
There are two issues here, not one.
Google has done an excellent job of making high resolution aerial photography readily available. Obviously they recognized the need for discretion over sensitive areas. The article does mention the "pixel-out" effect that can be used. For example, until a year or so ago, the roof of the white house was precisely erased and replaced with a solid white overlay. I assume this was done for national security, and has been deemed no longer needed. The same for Area 51, which use to be a very very grainy low resolution image overlaid at the location (not so any more). Clearly there are mechanisms in place to allow for obfuscation of small areas. I would think it was the job of the military to tell Google what areas it thinks are sensitive. Such areas could be replaced by out of date, but still interesting images of how the bases use to look.
The second issue in play is far more serious. Consider that Google has not launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit as of yet. The image data it has is gathered from many third-party providers including state GIS services, and the NAVTEQ and TeleAtlas companies. Those companies sell the data in question as their business. Even if Google dismantled its Earth/Maps services, the data would still be available to moderately funded terrorist groups. Ultra-high res image data, infrastructure maps and 3D building data on almost every square foot of Massachusetts is available for free here: MassGIS. The military should be aware of this by now and should be taking action to minimize the threat. Google Maps is far less accurate than flying a spy plane over a base because the images are likely months out of date. Flying spy plane has been possible for decades. It would be much more difficult to determine where the lavatories are located and where the light armor is parked if those areas had some light tent's or shrouds around them. The cost to do that in a base is probably less than the cost of one of the heavy tanks it would protect.
The argument is really strange in my opinion. Now, being experienced consumers of the products from capitalist corporations, we all KNOW that every single one of the MP3 player companies that complains about Apple's system lock-in would not have hesitated to do it themselves if given the chance. The easiest example is Sony... a company that absolutely loves to lock consumers to their devices. The Mini Disc fad, for example was the same thing. Sony player, Sony PC software, Sony format only. Even worse, until MD started losing customers, it required all music be in the Sony-only ATRAC3 format. The iPod on the other hand could always play MP3s just fine. Nobody really complained all that loudly that Sony was trying to lock customers into their product line because the situation worked itself out. MD became undesirable when the micro hard drive and high capacity flash era arrived. Nobody wanted to carry around 50 small CD-like plastic data squares.
Along comes Apple with an MP3 player that was high capacity like the market leading Creative product, but much much smaller, lighter and easier to use. Coupled with tightly integrated iTunes software and cheap/flexible Apple music store, it killed all the competition. Now a problem comes along because Apple did its job too well! Their easy-to-use system becomes so popular that the competing devices and music services can't compete. The Apple systems *grows* not because of lock-in, but because of customers choosing the most appealing device. So they all flounder and compete for small slices of the remaining 30ish% of the digital music player market.
I think this whole issue is ridiculous. Apple has shown us that a company with a great idea can corner a market really quickly. This is not because they locked people in... how many iTunes songs have you actually purchased?? I have purchased maybe 6 in 5+ years... big deal. The reason I am on my 3rd iPod is because when it comes time to get a new portable music player, I examine the competition, and decide that the iPod is right for me. Whether or not SanDisk or Creative can play my iTMS songs makes no difference to me, and I suspect the vast majority of people. It only makes a difference to angry MP3/online music companies who want to find a reason... nay, who want to find something to blame their lack of success on.
Forcing Apple to make their DRM licensable would not in itself solve anything. Apple could just set the price per device license at $400. Who could compete with a pre-manufacture cost of $400? So we have to force Apple to make it licensable, and affordable! It is like saying "Hey Apple, Great job!! Your product is so good that we need to require that you let the competition share the profits from what you have built without their help."
The iPod will lose its top seat when something better comes along. It'd be nice if all MP3 players played nice together, but even then I would still but iPod's until something more elegant, functional, affordable and appealing came along...
Me too. The prices are about $100 higher than the max I would have thought. 2-year contract is acceptable, but a downer. My collection is 20gb, but an 8gb phone would be fine. Just put your favorite few hundred songs on there! The real problem is that programs will probably take most of the space
Realize that whatever license texts appear on screen, you don't practically accept the license until you activate windows. Before activation you could easily just format the hard drive a few times and wipe all proof of ever reading the license at all.
I think that really won't be a problem and Google might not even need to include race/sex/etc information. If they're looking for self-motivated, intelligent, and approachable super geeks with good programming skills, why should the bias information matter? In fact, the ideal system could actually (forcebly) remove some of biases that might be imposed by manual recruitment. Just ignore sensitive but useless data points like gender.
On another note, the official Google employment application does not ask for race or gender information (though a name can usually reveal those) and starts with the ubiquitous statement: "Google is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Qualified applicants are considered without regard to race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability or any other status protected by applicable law." So it really comes down to interviewer bias, in which this system has NO bearing at all.
From what I understand, it isnt always as easy as just saying 'fire them'. Many countries make firing employees extremely difficult to do. I hear that France is the worst (2 jobs ago, we had a sales team in Paris), but it can be difficult in the U.S. as well.
If a manager is constantly singling out one person, it may appear that they have some personal grudge. I think that is the real reason why they would send a whole team to training instead of one or two person. If you are in a management position and considering firing somebody, you need to have some data to back up your choice. Namely, be able to show that the employee in question was given all the same chances to correct themselves as you would give somebody else.
Job security is very important to people like me (software engineers), even though the market is really good right now. We like to feel valuable... part of that is feeling comes from knowing that we can screw up on rare occasion and get a fair chance to make it right, so to speak. Additionally there are things like severence that can complicate firing people without having a solid, legally valid reason. If there is a contract involved, it is pretty easy to imagine cases where it would be cheaper to keep a bad employee on staff while you make a good case for firing them.
All this pertains to small tech firms or 50-100 employees, since that is where I have been employed. Things are probably very different at the warehouse...
They probably carry a Polygraph Examiners of America card. YOU too can be a member for as little as $95/year and a "sample report"!! If you recruit two of your friends, you can be a "Senior" member too!
Well yeah, but it is misleading that you suggest Windows is less secure just because it is closed source. To disqualify that statement you just need to consider that if Linux became closed source tomorrow it would be no less secure than it is today.
No, the problem with Windows is that M$ made some bad design choices in the early days (90's) and opted to endlessly patch problems rather than rearchitect the kernel/OS (what Vista is supposed to be). The community around linux on the other hand represents "oversight" and helps force speedy correction of underlying flaws. So basically I am saying that with Linux-like oversight on its closed source code, Windows would be really good. To bad that is not feasable.
I think it was only a matter of time until this was officially stated. It isnt very suprising at all, and actually pretty logical if you stop to think about why this is so.
Non-technical reasons:
Downloading content, espectially movies is downright easy. At this point, with the popular and mainstream bit torrent programs, getting most pirated content takes little more than a single-click. Then just sit back and wait a short while. There are so many GOOD and FREE piracy search engines out there that you can pretty much find recently released pirated material nearly as fast as you could find it on Amazon. Legally, pirates are breaking the law and the penatlies can be extremely severe.... but the is virtually no risk! My friends pirates ridiculous amounts of material on an almost daily basis (almost only movies and TV shows). None of them has ever gotten caught, or even fears getting caught.
Technical reasons:
The bussiness model is almost perfect. Bit torrent in particular enables the ENTIRE burden and cost of distribution to be shifted to the end-users. Most end-users don't really care or understand that they are actually powering the piracy network with their own purchased bandwidth. And why should they? They've paid the ISP for the traffic. Mass disctribution via a central server on the other hand is just so damn expensive that DVD downloads can't yet be offered for less than you can purchase a DVD for.. not that it matters as anything is more expensive than free.
Pirated content is DRM-free. Enough said.
Pirated content is generally higher quality. I'm referrring to DVD rips or HDTV show rips. Since the pirates are not paying for the distribution costs, they have no problem using high-quality compression. Movie download service right now don't offer anything comparable in quality for a low price.
Pirated content is highly accessable. The torrent search engines run on ad revenue, and basically just index the contents of various torrent trackers.
This turned into a rant, so I am ending it here. Eventually (soon) somebody will come up with a solution that that will address all these issues and manage to design a VIABLE CHEAP, POSSIBLY FREE legal alternative to piracy that *works*. It will happen, always does. It won't eliminate piracy (which has always existed in some form), but the creators will probably become billionaires in a short time. Just my prediction.
According to the article posted, it was not legally required to cooperate with mainland police. From wikipedia: "In contrast to mainland China's civil law system, Hong Kong continues to follow the common law tradition established by British colonial rule." That includes a seperate British-esq court system...
It isnt. Not all companies complied with requests like that, and the ones that did probably got a few law suits. I imagine it was not hard to get a court order for anything in the weeks following 9/11 anyway.
Agreed. There are certain things you just have to do to stay in bussiness, and compliance with law is one of them. You should recognize the massive difference between abiding by the law and following customs. Laws are written, voted on, and known to all citizens of a government. Customs are unwritten and subject to extreme variations in interpetation. Basically an excuse that can be applied to anything.