They've had sixteen or seventeen years to get the various iterations of MSN right, and after billions of dollars have still failed to show much for it. Sure, they've turned Yahoo from competitor into customer, but Google is so far ahead one has to question Microsoft's long term strategic capacity. Even the XBox division, while perhaps having some quarters in the black, is still a big hole that Microsoft shoveled money into to buy market share, and is many years away from ever paying back its investment.
Microsoft has three major profit areas; enterprise volume licensing, OEM consumer licensing and Exchange-Office. It has made a shitload of money off of them, and while it's likely to lose the consumer crown pretty soon as the home PC begins to fade as a must-have computer product, it will still have the enterprise world locked up for some time to come.
Frankly I think they should admit defeat on their mobile and tablet offerings, buy Blackberry, which at least still has some corporate penetration, and tighten the links between those mobile products and Office-Exchange. RT and Surface are still demonstrating just how much Microsoft is on the wrong side of the door trying to get in.
Parent is flamebaiting a bit, but I agree. There are no lack of Debian-based distros which don't come with the increasingly concerning baggage that Ubuntu is being bundled with. I retired my last Ubuntu machine about eight months ago and am Debian-only now.
It's a Westminster-styled arrangement. The executive is divided; the ceremonial executive (the Queen in the Commonwealth Realms, Presidents in Parliamentary republics) and a governmental executive (the Cabinet). The ceremonial executive still usually retains some important reserve powers, so, with the exception of countries like Sweden or Japan (where the monarchy has been deprived of the use of any reserve powers without the advise of the government), they still represent some degree of executive power.
We can certainly debate the way the Electoral College is formulated (or whether it should exist at all) but the Senate is intended to be the voice of the States, a counter balance to the rep by pop House of Representatives.
Even in the mid 19th century Walter Bagehot in his great defence of the Westminster system; The English Constitution, saw the US electoral college as a failed institution that had never really fulfilled its intended function.
How much alcohol do you have to drink before LaPoop starts to look he has range?
People talk about what ruined the last Indiana Jones movie, and while it was a bit goofy at points, LaPoop is the answer. It's hard to imagine how such a completely untalented slob like him ever got in a film, let alone got to fuck around in a major franchise.
Yup. Let's face it. The most watchable parts of the original movies are any scene with Harrison Ford in it and any scene with James Earl Jones talking.
I'm sure Disney did buy Lucasfilms out for all the subsidiaries. But let's think about this. The world-wide proceeds from three highly successful new Star Wars films could likely pay for Disney's investment. If they handle it right, the whole package; subsidiaries and the Star Wars property itself could make Disney obscene amounts of money. We're living in the post-Avatar age, where if you can do a ultra big budget SF film well, you can make a helluva lot of money, and Cameron had to create his film from the ground up, whereas Star Wars has a huge world-wide fan base and basically cultural icon status.
I'm a contractor for a government agency that has implemented an entirely new system based on Siebel (yeah, that's right, 1999 called and wants their CRM back). The system has been "designed" (I use the word loosely) to replace several departments systems. It has, of course, been a disaster. On a technical level, Siebel sucks. It's back-end is convoluted and not well designed for massive customization. On the front end, the ActiveX controls it relies on only work perfectly in IE6, so it's compatibility mode from later versions, with some quirkiness.
I'll wager if you look at all the failed big buck IT programs, you will find they started with the phrase "You will get an entirely new system..."
I would never do it like that. The approach would be modular. Existing systems would be as much as possible adapted to new frameworks, and new systems brought online only as they could be demonstrated to be stable and usable. But then you wouldn't be talking about one single monster contract at some multiple of $100 million, you would be talking about a lot of smaller contracts, possibly with some percentage of the work done by in-house IT staff rather than contractors, and well, nobody ever bought themselves a tropical island on small modular contracts.
Oh, I think the prequels could have been done better, but ultimately we know how the story goes, and most importantly we know the ending. Certainly better writers could have told it far far better, but I still think that sequels are ultimately going to stand up better than prequels.
The chief problem now is whether they're going to deal with the bazillion novels and comics that make up the Expanded Universe. If they try to fit these films into that universe, they may suffer a lot of the same problems the prequels had. If they don't, a lot of expanded universe fans are going to be pissed.
I am old enough to remember watching Episode IV in the theater in its first run in 1977 (mainly remember my dad going "Wow!" a lot). And yes, when I was a kid, Star Wars was the THING. I remember my dad buying my brother and I our first figurines; Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obiwan, Chewbacca , Princess Leia and a Storm Trooper, in the days before toys had to be safe and they came with little tiny detachable guns. I was very popular when I brought them to school.
I recently rewatched all six films from prequels through to original trilogy. I'll freely admit that Episode IV is pretty cheesy, but no worse than your average cowboy film, and part of its charm lies in the underlying goofiness. The most awkward parts of the first film are the Jedi mysticism, and I can imagine Alec Guinness coughing on some of the neo-hippy lines Obiwan was spouting. The second one, other than the Hoth battle which went on a little long, is by far still the best. In RotJ, the whole Jabba's Palace sequence just takes too long, but once we're into the action, it's a pretty decent film with an ending that ties up the loose ends.
The prequels just don't stand up. Elements are not bad, in particular Ewan McGregor's casting as Obiwan and the return of Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine. I won't go into how awful Jar Jar is, or how bad an actor Hayden Christensen is. Suffice it to say that, pull all the flash, and these are inferior works made by a guy who had made what was originally a whiz-bang set of adventure films with characters that you could care about, and turned into a ponderous bad-dialogue laden set of films where you really couldn't give a shit by the end if Padme died or whether Anakin became Darth Vader or not.
The problem was that Lucas was too rich and too capable of doing whatever he wanted regardless of input. It was a hard fast rule of the original trilogy that the better the film, the less Lucas directly had to do with it. The problem with the prequels is that Lucas was deeply involved. He was literally able, especially by the prequels, to do anything he wanted it, and did it all to excess. The prequels had every flaw in Lucas's inabilities with plotting and dialogue that the old films did, but magnified many times over.
But worst of all, even under good direction, I think the prequels would have been lame. We already knew the outline of what had happened; that the Old Republic fell, that the Emperor perverted Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, that Skywalker's children had been separated so that the Emperor could not gain both of them. The prequels were inevitably going to be little more than a "fill in the blanks" exercise, and would be necessarily anticlimactic. But Lucas could even do that exercise right; throwing in midichlorians, pointless characters, theme worlds and dull chase scenes, not to mention not even being able to stick to the elements of the story line as they stood at the end of RotJ. One of the most jarring things to me was Padme dying immediately after giving birth to Luke and Leia, when we know from RotJ that Leia was old enough to vaguely remember her mother.
I have some hope that a return of the original main characters and under solid new direction with writers not hampered by Lucas's problems and desire to transform Star Wars from Hidden Fortress In Space to some sort of political statement, this new trilogy can at least recapture some of the old spirit.
Actually what legislators should realize is that even good cops abuse their powers. Police have a very narrow focus, and often seem to view civil liberties as intrusions into their ability to do their job. Bad cops are the least of my worries.
It's a $20,000 ceiling for commercial infringement and $5,000 for personal. Does this mean that the entertainment industry is going to claim all infringement in Canada is commercial?
Here's my tip folks. If you get a letter that claims you could be on the hook for up to $20k, retain a lawyer. Might cost you a few hundred bucks, but with these companies now prepared to jump to commercial claims, I imagine they'll be prepared to walk away from any defendant who retains a lawyer.
Perhaps interested Canadians should band together to create a legal fund to fight such civil suits.
I think the point is that the telescope is so sensitive that it's likely that no matter how much you crank down the dBs, it would still splatter too much.
P.E. is now largely seen as a solution without a problem. And missing link? Come on, what is this, 1940?
As to your claims about testability. Where the fuck did you learn about science? Prediction and test doesn't just mean "grow lots of generations and see what happens."
You're a good example of how fucked up American education is.
Slashdot Mirror
They've had sixteen or seventeen years to get the various iterations of MSN right, and after billions of dollars have still failed to show much for it. Sure, they've turned Yahoo from competitor into customer, but Google is so far ahead one has to question Microsoft's long term strategic capacity. Even the XBox division, while perhaps having some quarters in the black, is still a big hole that Microsoft shoveled money into to buy market share, and is many years away from ever paying back its investment.
Microsoft has three major profit areas; enterprise volume licensing, OEM consumer licensing and Exchange-Office. It has made a shitload of money off of them, and while it's likely to lose the consumer crown pretty soon as the home PC begins to fade as a must-have computer product, it will still have the enterprise world locked up for some time to come.
Frankly I think they should admit defeat on their mobile and tablet offerings, buy Blackberry, which at least still has some corporate penetration, and tighten the links between those mobile products and Office-Exchange. RT and Surface are still demonstrating just how much Microsoft is on the wrong side of the door trying to get in.
Parent is flamebaiting a bit, but I agree. There are no lack of Debian-based distros which don't come with the increasingly concerning baggage that Ubuntu is being bundled with. I retired my last Ubuntu machine about eight months ago and am Debian-only now.
Only the idiotic or evil despise the increasing of knowledge.
I suspect you probably belong in the first category.
It's a Westminster-styled arrangement. The executive is divided; the ceremonial executive (the Queen in the Commonwealth Realms, Presidents in Parliamentary republics) and a governmental executive (the Cabinet). The ceremonial executive still usually retains some important reserve powers, so, with the exception of countries like Sweden or Japan (where the monarchy has been deprived of the use of any reserve powers without the advise of the government), they still represent some degree of executive power.
Let me amend. There is little scientific debate.
We can certainly debate the way the Electoral College is formulated (or whether it should exist at all) but the Senate is intended to be the voice of the States, a counter balance to the rep by pop House of Representatives.
Even in the mid 19th century Walter Bagehot in his great defence of the Westminster system; The English Constitution, saw the US electoral college as a failed institution that had never really fulfilled its intended function.
India certainly has an indirect method for choosing its President. The Indian parliament elects the President.
There is a whole branch of common and criminal law called "conspiracy". You can most certainly be charged prior to committing a crime.
Of course it can be. Violate an NDA and there isn't a government funded court in the land that won't make you pay through the nose.
If the long term effects are far worse for our species, then concentrating in short term benefit is not only greedy, but frankly evil.
And none of the proposed solutions require we become hunter gatherers again. That's inflammatory to the point of outright dishonesty.
Except the research is still ongoing and there is very little debate on whether AGW is happening or not.
Or do you think nature gives a crap about a political and ideological debate?
Meanwhile France and Germany are along the world's largest weapons exporters.
I vaguely remember a saying about those in glass houses.
How much alcohol do you have to drink before LaPoop starts to look he has range?
People talk about what ruined the last Indiana Jones movie, and while it was a bit goofy at points, LaPoop is the answer. It's hard to imagine how such a completely untalented slob like him ever got in a film, let alone got to fuck around in a major franchise.
Yup. Let's face it. The most watchable parts of the original movies are any scene with Harrison Ford in it and any scene with James Earl Jones talking.
I'm sure Disney did buy Lucasfilms out for all the subsidiaries. But let's think about this. The world-wide proceeds from three highly successful new Star Wars films could likely pay for Disney's investment. If they handle it right, the whole package; subsidiaries and the Star Wars property itself could make Disney obscene amounts of money. We're living in the post-Avatar age, where if you can do a ultra big budget SF film well, you can make a helluva lot of money, and Cameron had to create his film from the ground up, whereas Star Wars has a huge world-wide fan base and basically cultural icon status.
I'm a contractor for a government agency that has implemented an entirely new system based on Siebel (yeah, that's right, 1999 called and wants their CRM back). The system has been "designed" (I use the word loosely) to replace several departments systems. It has, of course, been a disaster. On a technical level, Siebel sucks. It's back-end is convoluted and not well designed for massive customization. On the front end, the ActiveX controls it relies on only work perfectly in IE6, so it's compatibility mode from later versions, with some quirkiness.
I'll wager if you look at all the failed big buck IT programs, you will find they started with the phrase "You will get an entirely new system..."
I would never do it like that. The approach would be modular. Existing systems would be as much as possible adapted to new frameworks, and new systems brought online only as they could be demonstrated to be stable and usable. But then you wouldn't be talking about one single monster contract at some multiple of $100 million, you would be talking about a lot of smaller contracts, possibly with some percentage of the work done by in-house IT staff rather than contractors, and well, nobody ever bought themselves a tropical island on small modular contracts.
Oh, I think the prequels could have been done better, but ultimately we know how the story goes, and most importantly we know the ending. Certainly better writers could have told it far far better, but I still think that sequels are ultimately going to stand up better than prequels.
The chief problem now is whether they're going to deal with the bazillion novels and comics that make up the Expanded Universe. If they try to fit these films into that universe, they may suffer a lot of the same problems the prequels had. If they don't, a lot of expanded universe fans are going to be pissed.
I think we all long ago came to grips with the fact that what Lucas says "I originally intended" has always been highly variable.
I am old enough to remember watching Episode IV in the theater in its first run in 1977 (mainly remember my dad going "Wow!" a lot). And yes, when I was a kid, Star Wars was the THING. I remember my dad buying my brother and I our first figurines; Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obiwan, Chewbacca , Princess Leia and a Storm Trooper, in the days before toys had to be safe and they came with little tiny detachable guns. I was very popular when I brought them to school.
I recently rewatched all six films from prequels through to original trilogy. I'll freely admit that Episode IV is pretty cheesy, but no worse than your average cowboy film, and part of its charm lies in the underlying goofiness. The most awkward parts of the first film are the Jedi mysticism, and I can imagine Alec Guinness coughing on some of the neo-hippy lines Obiwan was spouting. The second one, other than the Hoth battle which went on a little long, is by far still the best. In RotJ, the whole Jabba's Palace sequence just takes too long, but once we're into the action, it's a pretty decent film with an ending that ties up the loose ends.
The prequels just don't stand up. Elements are not bad, in particular Ewan McGregor's casting as Obiwan and the return of Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine. I won't go into how awful Jar Jar is, or how bad an actor Hayden Christensen is. Suffice it to say that, pull all the flash, and these are inferior works made by a guy who had made what was originally a whiz-bang set of adventure films with characters that you could care about, and turned into a ponderous bad-dialogue laden set of films where you really couldn't give a shit by the end if Padme died or whether Anakin became Darth Vader or not.
The problem was that Lucas was too rich and too capable of doing whatever he wanted regardless of input. It was a hard fast rule of the original trilogy that the better the film, the less Lucas directly had to do with it. The problem with the prequels is that Lucas was deeply involved. He was literally able, especially by the prequels, to do anything he wanted it, and did it all to excess. The prequels had every flaw in Lucas's inabilities with plotting and dialogue that the old films did, but magnified many times over.
But worst of all, even under good direction, I think the prequels would have been lame. We already knew the outline of what had happened; that the Old Republic fell, that the Emperor perverted Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, that Skywalker's children had been separated so that the Emperor could not gain both of them. The prequels were inevitably going to be little more than a "fill in the blanks" exercise, and would be necessarily anticlimactic. But Lucas could even do that exercise right; throwing in midichlorians, pointless characters, theme worlds and dull chase scenes, not to mention not even being able to stick to the elements of the story line as they stood at the end of RotJ. One of the most jarring things to me was Padme dying immediately after giving birth to Luke and Leia, when we know from RotJ that Leia was old enough to vaguely remember her mother.
I have some hope that a return of the original main characters and under solid new direction with writers not hampered by Lucas's problems and desire to transform Star Wars from Hidden Fortress In Space to some sort of political statement, this new trilogy can at least recapture some of the old spirit.
Actually what legislators should realize is that even good cops abuse their powers. Police have a very narrow focus, and often seem to view civil liberties as intrusions into their ability to do their job. Bad cops are the least of my worries.
It's a $20,000 ceiling for commercial infringement and $5,000 for personal. Does this mean that the entertainment industry is going to claim all infringement in Canada is commercial?
Here's my tip folks. If you get a letter that claims you could be on the hook for up to $20k, retain a lawyer. Might cost you a few hundred bucks, but with these companies now prepared to jump to commercial claims, I imagine they'll be prepared to walk away from any defendant who retains a lawyer.
Perhaps interested Canadians should band together to create a legal fund to fight such civil suits.
I think the point is that the telescope is so sensitive that it's likely that no matter how much you crank down the dBs, it would still splatter too much.
P.E. is now largely seen as a solution without a problem. And missing link? Come on, what is this, 1940?
As to your claims about testability. Where the fuck did you learn about science? Prediction and test doesn't just mean "grow lots of generations and see what happens."
You're a good example of how fucked up American education is.