Heaven forbid that Windows won the poll because most of the world's computer users run windows, and after Linux picked up a bunch of votes early on (Likely because assorted Linux sites saw the poll and linked.) Windows won out over the weekend.
I don't like M$, and I hate Windows, but how can you not expect Windows to win a poll on a news site? Especially one frequented by Windows users that get there via IE's built in links or links from MSN!
Windows won this poll because most of the world's computer users buy a PC, and run Windows because Windows comes with the PC. Those people outnumber Linux lovers now, and will continue to for quite some time. Stop creating a conspiracy where there isn't one.
I gotta hand it to Courtney, she really knows how to make a point. The has got to be THE funniest thing I have seen happen in a long time. The best part of it all is that if she wins, all the other artists will join in, and if she loses, she makes the record companies look like even BIGGER assholes.
I know this is redundant, and everyone else is also posting this, but I just had too. This is just too funny.
Price switching is nothing new. Most mail order firms have been doing this with catalogs for years. They will send one catalog to people who haven't bought anything in a few years, and another to people who have bought recently. Item numbers in the catalogs will then have a different prefix and higher prices for old customers. If you tell the people who take your order that you want the "new customer" price, they will often give you the lower price.
Even more recently, I recieved a catalog that sold the same ornamental bird house in two areas of the same catalog, but for $10 more in one area of the catalog than in another.
This is just another old marketing gimmick that made its way onto the net.
Tell them that the patent is overly broad, extends beyond the borders of your specific ideas, and refuse to sign it (At least if that is the case.). It's not like you still work for them, and chances are that they won't bother to sue you if you explain to them that this extends beyond your original idea. But consult a lawyer first, and make sure to give him ALL of the details.
And if you really did give them that idea when you worked for them, in all of its greadt bredth, well, tough. Looks like greed got the best of you, and you gave over an idea under the terms of your contract as you agreed to do to earn you wages. You made this bed, hop on in.
It looks like these guys really have this idea together well. Hopefully they will be successful..
I wonder, though, how do they keep it from being destroyed by space debris? It can't maneuver around space junk. It would seem that making sure to keep the orbit clear so that floating chunks of steel don't whack a cable at some insane speed and snap it. I guess they could have robotic controlled guns on the some of the cables to blast the shit out of any nearby debris. Then again, in 50 years they might just have robots that can zip around space clearing out all the crap in the way 24/7....
Acutally, I had loads of cash as a teenager. I jsut didn't blow it on games, because I worked to hard to get it for that (Instead I pirated games and bought cars). Kids in those "different" hoods live there because they have rich parents who are the ones paying the bills, even the bills for toys.
Outsource development means that once the code is done, the developer moves on and doesn't have to worry about it. They don't care if they do a crappy job and future product versions go to someone else, because the market for outsourced programming is still huge, and they can always get more clients.
We have such a problem here where I work. An app was outsourced, and the code was so bad that several of our NT admins (Yes, bad code on NT, even worse! Seeing it was what made me decide to walk away from Windows forever so I never have to deal with something like that on Wintel.) ended up getting devoted to working with the people brought in to fix the mess. Those poor admins spent months with their pagers and cel-phones going off endlessly day and night, and one of them just stopped coming in one day.
If your company tries this, tell them no. If they do it anyway, RUN LIKE HELL!
This will help the game industry more than hurt it. They came up with age based rating ages ago, and would have been saved most of the headache had stores enforced the ratings this way all along.
It isn't like this will hurt game sales. How many people under 17 buy their own games anyway? Games are expensive, not too many teenagers (Much less young children.) have $50 to blow on games on a regular basis. This will just result in parents purchasing the games, just like they do with R-rated movies. How many dads do you know that would tell their teenage sons no if the kid wanted to play a violent game? Chances are that if a kid has parents stupid enough to shelter the kid from violent games, the kid is probably too stupid to figure the games out anyway.
It frees the game industry from people being able to claim that they didn't know what their kids were into. That will really do a lot more good than harm in the long run. Age limits were never able to stop porn, or R level content in movies, or cigarettes, or alcohol. They won't stop violent games. If anything, they will help.
I have used my fish to translate this from the language of reactionary journalists to something an intelligent person will understand:
/translator on
1: Some *NIX based OSs are open to format string attacks that may allow malicious users to gain root level access.
2: This does not mean that *NIX is less secure than Windows, because these attacks require far more intelligence than it takes to crack a Windows box, as well as requiring the cracker to be able to access the system to begin with (In most cases.).
3: This is actually an old thing that has been around forever, and as usual, nobody other than the BSD folks bothered to fix it, just like the dozens of other security holes in various OSs that vendors have never bothered to fix. As the media, however, we must pretend that this is a big new thing and draw as much attention to it as usual, because:
I - Our parent company depends on advertising from Microsoft for a large portion of its revenue base.
II - We aren't actually capable journalists, and this reactionary crap is the best we can do.
/translation off
I would really love it if the/. people would add a disclaimer whenever they link to CNET, CNN, Yahoo!, and ZDNET stating that the work of said companies is biased, reactionary TRASH.
I wasted two years of my life in college. I was spoonfed outdated information about computers that served no real purpose other than to get class credits. I was wasting time being spoonfed outdated material along with the usual liberal arts bullshit that comprises elective classes. I started getting reall sick of it when I realized how much more I was learning hanging out with my geek friends (Thanks to Mike, Brad, and James!) and reading/..
The final straw was when I realized that to graduate I would need to take out student loans to pay for my classes, which still included things like Phys Ed., Orientation, and Biology - crap classes that are remedial of things I didn't like in high school. I just couldn't see getting myself in debt for thousands of dollars when I could just drop out, work tech support jobs to learn the ropes, and be making over $50,000 (US) a year before I turn 22.
Beats the hell out of wasting in college. I might make a little less than college grads starting out, but I can make up for it by collecting certifications for enterprise level UNIX operating systems and the software that runs on them. And by the time my friends get out of college in 3 years (Everybody does it in 5 years now...) I'll be zipping from work to the bars at night in my new Porsche, and going home to my nice big house.
"Think about the sonystation vs. the MS Xbox. Sony is still paying microsoft for windows while competeing with them in the console space."
Dude, what the HELL are you talking about? Are you tanked? I'm assuming you mean the Sony Playstation or Playstation 2, neither of which run anything like Windows... and if not, WTF is a "sonystation?"
Call me jaded, but I just have a hard time believing that George Lucas gives a damn about anything but the cash after I saw how much merchandising he allowed Episode I to get wrapped up in. Then again, maybe there is still good in him, and he is trying to avoid falling to the dark side.
"When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore."
I damn well hope so. I want to get bored and make baby universes or something. Someone get Stephen Hakwing to stop wasting time on faster than light travel and have him work on that idea!
Dye based burned CDs do, I don't know about gold burns. Regular CD data is pressed glass, so if they use those they might be fine. I say might because except at most extremely cold temperatures, glass eventually moves a little (This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.). Given that in an Earth orbit the casing for this thing will get plenty of sunlight, it might be warm enough for the glass to shift a little. Over 50,000 years, that could make the disc unreadable.
Of course, at the same time, it is also likely that the plastic around the glass would hold it in place, at least if the plastic fills in the gaps between the tracks in the glass.
Perhaps someone that knows more about the materials used in a CD could comment further on this?
" I work for DirecTV, and we get training to the point to where we're absolutely blue in the face with it."
I never mentioned DirecTV training. Read the sentence from the original post again.
"On top of that, tech support calls for the PC stuff are more common, and expensive to deal with. The call centers have specially *cough*POORLY*cough* trained staff"
All I said about the DirecTV staff was that their job was easier. I will say that at the time I worked there, the TV was very well trained.
It is of course, possible that their training methods have changed drastically in the last month. I stopped working there 9 months ago, but it was still the same when I left, because I have a friend who worked there until SITEL (The DirecPC/TV support contractor.) moved the site from Virginia to Georgia, and we set up several other people with jobs there, and their training was as bad as it was when I was there. Let me sum up the training they gave me.
- One week of in class training. That was it. The only resource was a bad website to use as a text.
- The content of the website was incorrect in regards to the products in some areas.
- The teacher was a CNE who was so bad at what he did that he couldn't get any other job in the area. The area is northern Virginia, where anyone with a CNE can get a job in a heartbeat. This guy couldn't even tell us what UDP stood for.
I could go on, but I have work to get to.
All consoles are just another console.
on
Salon on the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Stories like this pop up about all game consoles. People said it about the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and Sony Playstation. Last year Maximum PC ran a story about how the Playstation 2 would redefine the game industry, kill PC gaming, etc.. Now developers are already talking about how the PS2 won't be able to compete because it has a strange architecture and not enough RAM, and it hasn't even been released outside of Japan!
The X-Box is the same way. People just pay more attention because Microsoft has been all over the news for the last few years. But the X-Box is just another console, and like the others, it will be getting blown away by PC games two years after it ships.
The worst part is that the intelligent guys at/. link to this sort of drivel. This article doesn't raise anything new, its just another person spouting about the problems in the PC game industry and assuming that a console, doomed to be obosolete and impossible to upgrade meaningfully (Sort of like Windows, no wonder Microsoft is getting into it!).
"why can't the dishes and setup be free like they are with satellite TV promotions?"
Because the hardware is more expensive, and targeting them is a pain in the ass. I used to work for DirecPC (The company that does this with AOL.) and their signal bandwidth is very tight, so a satellite must be pointed within several tenths of an inch, versus within half a foot or so for a TV dish. The TV signal is also much stronger, so the parts to pick it up cost less.
On top of that, tech support calls for the PC stuff are more common, and expensive to deal with. The call centers have specially *cough*POORLY*cough* trained staff who are all in front of high end windows machines (To simulate the kind of machine that someone hard-core enough to want satellite net access would have.) running these satellite systems as well as good, I mean, land-based internet connections, and the costs for all of that get high pretty fast, as opposed to TV where most of the calls are just "Ok now push the select button on the remote. It's the one that says "select" on it.
Anyway, these systems are pretty much guaranteed to suck, as they are all being run by companies that have done little more than muck up the net as it is.
The guys at intel seem to be far more comfortable sticking with what they "know" than moving ahead. This explains why the ISA bus has lasted far longer than it should have, why they haven't substantially changed CPU architectures in ages, and why they have decided that the next big graphics bus will be, again, serial.
This is also why intel is starting to get an ass-whooping from the competition. Their processors are getting stomped by AMD (Not that intel cares, because the yeild rates on their ancient designs are so low that they still sell out all their CPU stocks.). Their chipsets are getting trounced by VIA. Their age old alliance with Microsoft burned OEMs who are now happy to move to the competition. Their endless anti-competitive practices brought on the wrath of the feds, and only a lot of ass kissing and campaign contributions *cough*BRIBES*cough* kept that from becoming disasterous. Their sneaky Rambus strategy will likely cost them more in angered customers than they will ever make back off of all those $10 Rambus stock options, and they only get those if they can convince the public is worth buying over faster, cheaper, DDR.
Chipzilla is starting to fall. intel was able to do well before the web got big, but now they can't hide all of their faults from the people. Sure they can continue to buy off the mainstream media with all of those commercials, but they can't sustain off of people buying cheesy OEM machines to sell off those old Fleetwood Mac lps on ebay.
Anyone who bothers too look around online can see that intel is no longer a market leader, but just an old dog trying to win attention with the same old tricks. Too bad the dog next door has better tricks at a more reasonable cost.
Many people will look at it this way and come up with the following:
UNIX+NT+Novell= ~3 OSs to support
UNIX+Win2k with AD= 2 OSs to support
23 therefore the total operating cost will be lower because the organization won't need Novell people any more.
This could work in an organization with a strong staff of well trained, experienced UNIX/NT people, that wasn't short staffed and could spare the resources to deal with all the AD problems. Good luck finding such an organization tho....
Slashdot Mirror
Heaven forbid that Windows won the poll because most of the world's computer users run windows, and after Linux picked up a bunch of votes early on (Likely because assorted Linux sites saw the poll and linked.) Windows won out over the weekend.
I don't like M$, and I hate Windows, but how can you not expect Windows to win a poll on a news site? Especially one frequented by Windows users that get there via IE's built in links or links from MSN!
Windows won this poll because most of the world's computer users buy a PC, and run Windows because Windows comes with the PC. Those people outnumber Linux lovers now, and will continue to for quite some time. Stop creating a conspiracy where there isn't one.
I gotta hand it to Courtney, she really knows how to make a point. The has got to be THE funniest thing I have seen happen in a long time. The best part of it all is that if she wins, all the other artists will join in, and if she loses, she makes the record companies look like even BIGGER assholes.
I know this is redundant, and everyone else is also posting this, but I just had too. This is just too funny.
Price switching is nothing new. Most mail order firms have been doing this with catalogs for years. They will send one catalog to people who haven't bought anything in a few years, and another to people who have bought recently. Item numbers in the catalogs will then have a different prefix and higher prices for old customers. If you tell the people who take your order that you want the "new customer" price, they will often give you the lower price.
Even more recently, I recieved a catalog that sold the same ornamental bird house in two areas of the same catalog, but for $10 more in one area of the catalog than in another.
This is just another old marketing gimmick that made its way onto the net.
"A company I used to work for..."
Tell them that the patent is overly broad, extends beyond the borders of your specific ideas, and refuse to sign it (At least if that is the case.). It's not like you still work for them, and chances are that they won't bother to sue you if you explain to them that this extends beyond your original idea. But consult a lawyer first, and make sure to give him ALL of the details.
And if you really did give them that idea when you worked for them, in all of its greadt bredth, well, tough. Looks like greed got the best of you, and you gave over an idea under the terms of your contract as you agreed to do to earn you wages. You made this bed, hop on in.
Intel currently sells out every processor they can produce in advance. They aren't losing out to anyone.
We are all ready. I want to be able to host my own porn site from home on my 100mbit connection, and I want it now!
I like to smoke pot and play Quake, and when I do it feels pretty damned righteous.... does that count?
It looks like these guys really have this idea together well. Hopefully they will be successful..
I wonder, though, how do they keep it from being destroyed by space debris? It can't maneuver around space junk. It would seem that making sure to keep the orbit clear so that floating chunks of steel don't whack a cable at some insane speed and snap it. I guess they could have robotic controlled guns on the some of the cables to blast the shit out of any nearby debris. Then again, in 50 years they might just have robots that can zip around space clearing out all the crap in the way 24/7....
Acutally, I had loads of cash as a teenager. I jsut didn't blow it on games, because I worked to hard to get it for that (Instead I pirated games and bought cars). Kids in those "different" hoods live there because they have rich parents who are the ones paying the bills, even the bills for toys.
Outsource development means that once the code is done, the developer moves on and doesn't have to worry about it. They don't care if they do a crappy job and future product versions go to someone else, because the market for outsourced programming is still huge, and they can always get more clients.
We have such a problem here where I work. An app was outsourced, and the code was so bad that several of our NT admins (Yes, bad code on NT, even worse! Seeing it was what made me decide to walk away from Windows forever so I never have to deal with something like that on Wintel.) ended up getting devoted to working with the people brought in to fix the mess. Those poor admins spent months with their pagers and cel-phones going off endlessly day and night, and one of them just stopped coming in one day.
If your company tries this, tell them no. If they do it anyway, RUN LIKE HELL!
This will help the game industry more than hurt it. They came up with age based rating ages ago, and would have been saved most of the headache had stores enforced the ratings this way all along.
It isn't like this will hurt game sales. How many people under 17 buy their own games anyway? Games are expensive, not too many teenagers (Much less young children.) have $50 to blow on games on a regular basis. This will just result in parents purchasing the games, just like they do with R-rated movies. How many dads do you know that would tell their teenage sons no if the kid wanted to play a violent game? Chances are that if a kid has parents stupid enough to shelter the kid from violent games, the kid is probably too stupid to figure the games out anyway.
It frees the game industry from people being able to claim that they didn't know what their kids were into. That will really do a lot more good than harm in the long run. Age limits were never able to stop porn, or R level content in movies, or cigarettes, or alcohol. They won't stop violent games. If anything, they will help.
I have used my fish to translate this from the language of reactionary journalists to something an intelligent person will understand:
/. people would add a disclaimer whenever they link to CNET, CNN, Yahoo!, and ZDNET stating that the work of said companies is biased, reactionary TRASH.
/translator on
1: Some *NIX based OSs are open to format string attacks that may allow malicious users to gain root level access.
2: This does not mean that *NIX is less secure than Windows, because these attacks require far more intelligence than it takes to crack a Windows box, as well as requiring the cracker to be able to access the system to begin with (In most cases.).
3: This is actually an old thing that has been around forever, and as usual, nobody other than the BSD folks bothered to fix it, just like the dozens of other security holes in various OSs that vendors have never bothered to fix. As the media, however, we must pretend that this is a big new thing and draw as much attention to it as usual, because:
I - Our parent company depends on advertising from Microsoft for a large portion of its revenue base.
II - We aren't actually capable journalists, and this reactionary crap is the best we can do.
/translation off
I would really love it if the
I wasted two years of my life in college. I was spoonfed outdated information about computers that served no real purpose other than to get class credits. I was wasting time being spoonfed outdated material along with the usual liberal arts bullshit that comprises elective classes. I started getting reall sick of it when I realized how much more I was learning hanging out with my geek friends (Thanks to Mike, Brad, and James!) and reading /..
The final straw was when I realized that to graduate I would need to take out student loans to pay for my classes, which still included things like Phys Ed., Orientation, and Biology - crap classes that are remedial of things I didn't like in high school. I just couldn't see getting myself in debt for thousands of dollars when I could just drop out, work tech support jobs to learn the ropes, and be making over $50,000 (US) a year before I turn 22.
Beats the hell out of wasting in college. I might make a little less than college grads starting out, but I can make up for it by collecting certifications for enterprise level UNIX operating systems and the software that runs on them. And by the time my friends get out of college in 3 years (Everybody does it in 5 years now...) I'll be zipping from work to the bars at night in my new Porsche, and going home to my nice big house.
College is for chumps.
"Think about the sonystation vs. the MS Xbox. Sony is still paying microsoft for windows while competeing with them in the console space."
Dude, what the HELL are you talking about? Are you tanked? I'm assuming you mean the Sony Playstation or Playstation 2, neither of which run anything like Windows... and if not, WTF is a "sonystation?"
Call me jaded, but I just have a hard time believing that George Lucas gives a damn about anything but the cash after I saw how much merchandising he allowed Episode I to get wrapped up in. Then again, maybe there is still good in him, and he is trying to avoid falling to the dark side.
"When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore."
I damn well hope so. I want to get bored and make baby universes or something. Someone get Stephen Hakwing to stop wasting time on faster than light travel and have him work on that idea!
"don't CDs go bad after about 100 years or so?"
Dye based burned CDs do, I don't know about gold burns. Regular CD data is pressed glass, so if they use those they might be fine. I say might because except at most extremely cold temperatures, glass eventually moves a little (This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.). Given that in an Earth orbit the casing for this thing will get plenty of sunlight, it might be warm enough for the glass to shift a little. Over 50,000 years, that could make the disc unreadable.
Of course, at the same time, it is also likely that the plastic around the glass would hold it in place, at least if the plastic fills in the gaps between the tracks in the glass.
Perhaps someone that knows more about the materials used in a CD could comment further on this?
"How Many Applications Depend On Windows?"
Too many. Which is why I have to log into Citrix to access my companies Lotus Notes stuff.
Nice suggestion.
Good point. I'll be changing the sig today.
" I work for DirecTV, and we get training to the point to where we're absolutely blue in the face with it."
I never mentioned DirecTV training. Read the sentence from the original post again.
"On top of that, tech support calls for the PC stuff are more common, and expensive to deal with. The call centers have specially *cough*POORLY*cough* trained staff"
All I said about the DirecTV staff was that their job was easier. I will say that at the time I worked there, the TV was very well trained.
It is of course, possible that their training methods have changed drastically in the last month. I stopped working there 9 months ago, but it was still the same when I left, because I have a friend who worked there until SITEL (The DirecPC/TV support contractor.) moved the site from Virginia to Georgia, and we set up several other people with jobs there, and their training was as bad as it was when I was there. Let me sum up the training they gave me.
- One week of in class training. That was it. The only resource was a bad website to use as a text.
- The content of the website was incorrect in regards to the products in some areas.
- The teacher was a CNE who was so bad at what he did that he couldn't get any other job in the area. The area is northern Virginia, where anyone with a CNE can get a job in a heartbeat. This guy couldn't even tell us what UDP stood for.
I could go on, but I have work to get to.
Stories like this pop up about all game consoles. People said it about the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and Sony Playstation. Last year Maximum PC ran a story about how the Playstation 2 would redefine the game industry, kill PC gaming, etc.. Now developers are already talking about how the PS2 won't be able to compete because it has a strange architecture and not enough RAM, and it hasn't even been released outside of Japan!
/. link to this sort of drivel. This article doesn't raise anything new, its just another person spouting about the problems in the PC game industry and assuming that a console, doomed to be obosolete and impossible to upgrade meaningfully (Sort of like Windows, no wonder Microsoft is getting into it!).
The X-Box is the same way. People just pay more attention because Microsoft has been all over the news for the last few years. But the X-Box is just another console, and like the others, it will be getting blown away by PC games two years after it ships.
The worst part is that the intelligent guys at
"why can't the dishes and setup be free like they are with satellite TV promotions?"
Because the hardware is more expensive, and targeting them is a pain in the ass. I used to work for DirecPC (The company that does this with AOL.) and their signal bandwidth is very tight, so a satellite must be pointed within several tenths of an inch, versus within half a foot or so for a TV dish. The TV signal is also much stronger, so the parts to pick it up cost less.
On top of that, tech support calls for the PC stuff are more common, and expensive to deal with. The call centers have specially *cough*POORLY*cough* trained staff who are all in front of high end windows machines (To simulate the kind of machine that someone hard-core enough to want satellite net access would have.) running these satellite systems as well as good, I mean, land-based internet connections, and the costs for all of that get high pretty fast, as opposed to TV where most of the calls are just "Ok now push the select button on the remote. It's the one that says "select" on it.
Anyway, these systems are pretty much guaranteed to suck, as they are all being run by companies that have done little more than muck up the net as it is.
The guys at intel seem to be far more comfortable sticking with what they "know" than moving ahead. This explains why the ISA bus has lasted far longer than it should have, why they haven't substantially changed CPU architectures in ages, and why they have decided that the next big graphics bus will be, again, serial.
This is also why intel is starting to get an ass-whooping from the competition. Their processors are getting stomped by AMD (Not that intel cares, because the yeild rates on their ancient designs are so low that they still sell out all their CPU stocks.). Their chipsets are getting trounced by VIA. Their age old alliance with Microsoft burned OEMs who are now happy to move to the competition. Their endless anti-competitive practices brought on the wrath of the feds, and only a lot of ass kissing and campaign contributions *cough*BRIBES*cough* kept that from becoming disasterous. Their sneaky Rambus strategy will likely cost them more in angered customers than they will ever make back off of all those $10 Rambus stock options, and they only get those if they can convince the public is worth buying over faster, cheaper, DDR.
Chipzilla is starting to fall. intel was able to do well before the web got big, but now they can't hide all of their faults from the people. Sure they can continue to buy off the mainstream media with all of those commercials, but they can't sustain off of people buying cheesy OEM machines to sell off those old Fleetwood Mac lps on ebay.
Anyone who bothers too look around online can see that intel is no longer a market leader, but just an old dog trying to win attention with the same old tricks. Too bad the dog next door has better tricks at a more reasonable cost.
Many people will look at it this way and come up with the following:
UNIX+NT+Novell= ~3 OSs to support
UNIX+Win2k with AD= 2 OSs to support
23 therefore the total operating cost will be lower because the organization won't need Novell people any more.
This could work in an organization with a strong staff of well trained, experienced UNIX/NT people, that wasn't short staffed and could spare the resources to deal with all the AD problems. Good luck finding such an organization tho....