Huh? That's never been a "way around" licensing issues. The *owner* of the machine is the one who agreed to the EULA. You don't sign a EULA when you use your work PC either. Most likely, the I.T. department already "signed" it on your behalf when they installed the computer.
If you do things that violate the EULA on public computers (such as in a library), the owners of said systems would be responsible for taking action to prevent the violations, or else ultimately, they would be held accountable.
Realistically though, I'm not sure how many things violating a Vista EULA you'd benefit personally from doing on a PC that wasn't yours? (EG. The Vista Home EULA supposedly prevents the use of the OS inside a virtual machine. Ridiculous, really - but how would the ability to violate this "rule" improve your user-experience on a library computer running Vista natively, and in all likelihood, not having VM software set up on it anyway?)
Honestly, I can't see why more companies aren't setting up Microsoft's WSUS server? It's free of charge, and basically acts like a subset of their commercial SMS Server product. It uses the Windows Auto-Update service built into XP, 2000 and 2003 Server but you simply modify the workstations to get update info from it, rather then over the Internet.
It has a fairly decent web-based administration interface that tracks all the Microsoft updates that are available to deploy, and lets you determine which ones your workstations on your LAN will receive, and which will be ignored. It keeps tracks of the list of updates already applied to each of your machines, and lets you group your systems into arbitrary "containers" for easy reference.
Unlike SMS, it doesn't let you roll your own deployment packages for 3rd. party products, but it handles such things as MS Office updates and SQL Server patches, as well as all the Windows updates themselves.
Personally, I found SMS too difficult to set up and maintain as a one-man I.T. department where I work, yet WSUS was perfect for our environment of roughly 50 PCs.
Consumer Reports magazine has the right idea... If you're going to review and test products, you need to obtain them the exact same way, and through the same channels, that end-users do. Even if a manufacturer can seemingly be trusted not to withhold new products from reviewers to retaliate for a bad review, it doesn't mean they're not "cherry picking" the products they're sending them!
Especially in cases where there are high numbers of D.O.A. or malfunctioning units, reviewers simply don't catch this problem if they're only receiving pre-tested, pre-selected samples for free evaluation.
Interesting theory, but I don't think it really holds much water. Advertising and marketing types might prefer a homogenized society where men and women all buy the same products, but I don't see evidence that they're able to actively change that?
If this was the plan, you'd think they'd start with the small children - stopping such things as selling Barbie dolls and bright pink and yellow ponies to the girls, while selling action figures and race car toys to the boys. Instead, I see advertisers trying quite hard to market completely different types of toys to males and females.
On the other hand, I think the womens' rights movement has been pushing for women to gain acceptance doing more traditionally "male" things. When it comes to trucks, for example, I run into more women than men who are really impressed with or excited about buying one. It's almost to the point where guys buying sports cars end up only impressing other guys, vs. the women they still *think* will dig their ride.
You've also got the rise of the 1-parent families to thank for some of this. It's hard to really be a traditional "man's man" when you're raising a child by yourself, which happens more and more nowdays. And by contrast, women raising kids by themselves find themselves having to learn to tackle things like repairing broken plumbing or electrical work - because there's no man in the house to do it for them.
Actually, just for the record, I tried someone's "Logic Pro 7" crack for Mac a while ago. Looked like they simply took some files out of Logic Express and swapped them for the original Logic Pro files (since Express has no dongle.
It seemed to work, although it was a rather "sketchy" crack... (EG. Not real confident doing something like that wouldn't break at least some feature/function in the program.)
Agreed! I buy CDs to hear the music... I don't think I ever even looked at the "bonus material" they've included on some of my music CDs in the past. (EG. Windows screen savers and wallpaper on those dual-format discs.)
There's not much they could add to a CD to make me buy it besides more songs I want to hear. That's its purpose. What I want to see are lower prices. Even 10+ years ago, I started buying mostly used CDs because even if I didn't get the latest tracks first that way, I could get 3x as much music for my money or more!
The issue many people have with what you claim is "straightforward" is; Who really should be able to give that permission?
Right now, the RIAA and MPAA say you need *their* permission, yet they haven't created a single second of the content itself. The artists did. And in many cases, the artists would be perfectly happy with you redistributing their content, despite the complaints of the RIAA or MPAA.
Of course, strictly legally speaking, the RIAA and MPAA are right. If you pushed them, they surely could provide a piece of paper that the artist signed, giving them control of the work. But this battle goes beyond what's strictly legal, according to the "letter of the law".
What many folks out there are saying (and putting into action) is that realistically, the idea of making no copies for others without permission is nonsense. It's an artificially constructed legal scenario that you need this permission, because as long as industries like the RIAA or MPAA can threaten people with it, they stand to squeeze extra profit from consumers who feel "compelled" to buy something they would have otherwise just made a copy of.
(There's also the whole debate on whether artists fully realized what they were getting into when they signed these contracts in the first place... but that's a secondary issue. Nonetheless, it also influences people who feel like there's no moral/ethical "need" to obey a corporation that lied to the artists to get them to agree to the terms and conditions they enforce.)
I'm in total agreement with you, except if I'm reading this original story correctly, didn't he plead guilty rather than fight his case in court?
If you admit guilt, then all bets are off. Government no longer has to justify why you deserve your punishment, or explain why running a tracker site is, to them, equivalent to actually distributing the material illegally.
Yep! I've also found that in a corporate environment, repeatedly trying to "save money" by purchasing MS product upgrades (which require a "qualifying" previous product to be present in some form in order to install) is a BIG hassle down the road.
If and when you're asked to do a software audit to prove everything is legal, you end up in a THICK paper-trail. Instead of just producing proof of purchase of your existing OS, for example, you're stuck proving the complete record of how you got to point Y from point X.
Worse yet, if this process happened over several years and you weren't even working at the company when the first products were purchased, sometimes it gets really difficult to figure out how the whole thing went together. I remember years ago, for example, MS offered a program where you could use a copy of Microsoft Works as a "qualifying product" to buy an "upgrade" version of MS Office. A company I used to work for took advantage of that, because they had 50 or 60 Dell Pentium towers that came bundled with MS Works '95. Of course, someone tossed out the old MS Works CDs and keys a couple years later, figuring nobody was using THAT product anymore.... Well, around comes Office 2000 and again, we want to buy the upgrade version to save a bunch of money on the upgrade from Office '97. Then we qualify for Office XP since they've got the "upgrade advantage" MS "insurance" policy providing free upgrades while you're enrolled in the program. NOW - I'm supposed to do an audit and make sure all the copies of Office XP we've got are legal. Fun times!!
Yes, but that's not exaactly my point. I'm not arguing it's a very effective and efficient way for computers to verify the correct spelling of words. We've been doing it for at least what, 15-20 years now, in our software packages?
My point was more the fact that a human would usually catch certain errors that a spell checker won't necessarily catch. For example, in the English language, we know that q is always followed by u in our words. But a spell checker has no such information coded into it. It probably "just works anyway" in this situation, because we don't have that many words with "qu" in them, and a decent dictionary of word spellings will likely cover all of the possibilities. But it doesn't make it any less of a "hack", as far as how the computer solves the problem (brute force comparisons from a predefined list).
But don't we almost always get a computer to solve a problem that's not strictly a mathematical one using "hacks that only work in restricted conditions"?
Our spell-checkers in our word processors don't actually know anything about the rules of a language, phonics, etc. They just do lookups from a dictionary. If a word's not listed, it has no idea if it's spelled properly or not -- even if the misspelling is one that's simply not a possible correct sequence of letters for the language. Most don't even realize if a word is misspelled in the context of the sentence, as long as it matches a correct spelling in the word list.
Until we figure out how the human brain recognizes faces as individuals, we can't expect anything *but* a clever hack for a computer to do the same. And truthfully, I suspect the human brain takes many things into account to do a "recognition" on a person. How often do you see somebody in the store that you're pretty sure you know from a previous job, school, etc. but you're not quite sure? I've had this happen a few times, and to make a better determination, I had to take other factors into account, like the sound of their voice if I heard them speak, the way they walked, or maybe an expression that came across their face. Humans "key in" on specific things that help them remember a person. And depending on which "features" they chose, they may or may not be effective. (Say you remember a gal really well because of her long, flowing hair? If she cuts it real short, there's a good chance you won't recognize her at all anymore if she walks by you.)
On that subject, I'm curious if anyone has done any studies to see if music converted from compressed format to compressed format has more playback "artifacting" issues if it's played through a stereo that does some sort of signal processing?
For example, most car stereos nowdays have settings that claim to simulate various types of listening environments. My Kenwood home stereo does the same type of thing, where you can select "Jazz Club", "Concert Hall", and so forth.
When I first started using a Windows package that digitally re-encoded.WMA files to.MP3 format, I got what sounded like a perfect result on my computer speakers. (I was using 192 bit encoding for the MP3 and the.WMAs were, I believe, 160-bit to start with.) But I noticed a slight muddiness to the sound when I played them back on my car stereo that has a default setting of doing some signal processing to the music.
I'm not a teacher, but I think that's an unfair statement. The beauty of the Internet is rapidly changing, updated content on all sorts of topics. Taking it out of the computing experience reverts back to the "pre-computing" era of teaching, more or less -- where students only get to view the static content you've pre-picked for them to see.
EG. Say you want students to do some family history research as part of a class project? Do you assume you can provide them with all the useful content they'll need for that search in advance and host it all locally for them?
Oh, come on! Rickover asking that type of question wasn't a "childish game" to begin with? Nor was that "brilliant" idea of sawing legs off chairs so interviewees would be uncomfortable?
And Carter did answer the original question honestly. He gave it thought and said he supposed he just didn't try hard enough. That's as straightforward as it gets, is it not?
It's too bad Carter didn't answer back with "With all due respect, sir, may I ask what your class standing was?" I'm assuming Rickover didn't graduate 1st. in his graduating class, did he? And if he did, well... what can you really say to that? It's pretty clear he just thinks too much of himself.
I'm not even so sure about that.... I've only worked for smaller companies, but in some respects, it's easier to see the "big picture" of what's going on in a smaller firm. And I have no reason to suspect things radically change with the abilitiy of the CEO's to make decisions just because the business is larger?
My observations have usually been that the company owners are likely to repeatedly make bad decisions that get "fixed" by people further down the corporate food chain. Most people working for a place want to see it succeed, if for no other reason than the fact that they spend 8 hours every day doing something there, and they want to make sure they keep getting their paychecks. Department heads know much more about the details of what their little portion of the business does than the owner(s) know. So when an order comes down that a dept. knows is foolish, they tend to modify it a bit. They probably won't directly disobey the instruction - but they can see the big flaws and try to temper them. (EG. They might promise the boss that "Yep - we've started keeping written records of that sales data you asked us to start tracking and reviewing each week." But if they all know it's "busy work" and is hurting their efficiency at selling, they probably don't really update the thing too often. They just throw something together if there's a worry the boss is going to come looking for a copy of it.)
The OS X dock is probably one of the most debated parts of the OS. Somebody's always making that claim that it "doesn't let them see enough about what's running" and so on. I'm not sure I understand that one? Every app that's running shows a black triangle under its dock icon. Many apps show a miniature status bar in their dock icon while they're busy doing a task like burning a CD or encoding a video too. (You can always press ALT-TAB just like in Windows to tab through all of your running apps also.) If you need more info than that about what's running, you're talking about something you'd want to do elsewhere in an OS anyway, right? (EG. The "Task Manager" on a Windows box, vs. the bar along the bottom of the screen showing what's running.)
I'd also say that the wireless setup on Macs is one of the most straightforward I've ever seen! Not sure what you found so confusing about it? My experience has been the opposite. On Windows boxes, you've got several different possible ways they might handle your wireless connection, depending on if you've got some manufacturer's software loaded or you're just using the connection manager built into Windows. If you don't use XP, you can't even get WPA wireless security to work without a 3rd. party helper application. On a Mac, all of these formats are always built in and working. I can't speak for wi-fi in Ubuntu since I haven't yet tried it, but like you said yourself, wi-fi in Linux was never traditionally an easy thing to get going.
Where I live, a couple people have hung onto to very successful nightclubs with years and years of "staying power" by re-inventing them every so often. One of them had a rather unique strategy of closing down at the end of the summer, transforming into a different type of club, and opening back up again until the next spring/summer, when it again closed and transformed back into its "beach club" motif.
Another one has changed names and themes every couple years, when the old one got too "dull" and "passe".
I think it's just as possible for these social networking sites to do. They just need to realize that it's not enough to build the thing once and consider it "finished". They need to plan on constantly monitoring the types of users they're getting and what the competitors do that draws them away again, and keep re-designing the site to accomodate the changes.
Right.... p2p sharing and other forms of music sharing are simply part of the whole economic "ball of wax". Legal issues completely aside for a minute, the bottom line is always "Do I, the customer, feel like the seller is offering goods or services I want at a price that's reasonable?"
The recording industry basically had 4 options available to them.
1. Follow the trend towards digital music distribution. Quit selling music on pre-recorded CD, and instead, start their own online digital music services, plus kiosks at stores which could burn discs on-demand for customers.
2. Fight to preserve the status-quo with legal wrangling and threats.
3. Reduce prices to make it a more cost-effective option to keep buying their music CDs than to waste time and effort downloading them digitally.
4. Do nothing and let their business die.
I think a combination of choices 1 and 3 would have been optimal, but either would have been acceptable. Instead, they chose 2, which will ultimately bring them similar results to chosing option 4.
All the file sharing they throw fits about comes about because their product, despite having some "value" to people, is overpriced. If I could buy albums at the store for $2-3 each, I'd do so all the time, and buy many more than I've ever bought at a time in the past. That would also drastically reduce p2p sharing because the cost of someone's blank media plus time, plus hassle of getting the occasional sub-standard audio quality download wouldn't make it worth doing anymore.
I couldn't agree more! Every time I read a news article about some supposed concern over eating a food (or the opposite - a recommendation that such-and-such is "good for you"), evidence is brought up challenging their opinion.
Just yesterday, Yahoo News had some piece about 4 things you could do to reduce your risk of cancer, and at least 3 of the 4 were pure speculation and questionable at best! (For example, one "tip" was to use spices like cinnamon, because of it's supposed cancer-inhibiting properties. Funny, because I remember reading an article a few years ago warning people to go lightly on cinnamon consumption since it contains a substance known to be a toxin in animals. Another was not to drink fluids out of plastic bottles that were allowed to freeze or get heated, since "toxins in the plastic could leech into your drink". Excuse me? Freezing should reduce the ability of a chemical to dissolve out of the plastic and into the fluid, no?)
They rarely address another question I've always had. What about the interaction between foods someone eats at the same time? We constantly monitor prescription drug interactions, yet act like it's a non-issue for foods. Just because item X is supposed to be "bad for you" doesn't mean it would be processed in the body the same way if it was mixed with items Y and Z, does it?
I remember this time period as well, but I think I missed being involved in it first-hand by just a couple years or so. At the time the Mac was first introduced, I was avidly reading computer magazines like "Byte" that covered it in detail, and I had a friend who owned an Apple//e. But my only real hands-on computer experience other than that seemed to be Radio Shack TRS-80 machines. The school I was going to had a lab of Model III's and my neighbor down the street owned one too. Another neighbor spent big $'s on a "Model 12" for his heating and cooling business, so of course, us kids tried to find cool games and things to do with it also. (Not much for the Model 12 and 16 if spreadsheets weren't your idea of a good time, though!)
My first machine was a lowly Timex/Sinclair 1000 (only $99 at the local K-Mart!), so I chugged along with that for a few years before finally getting a Tandy Color Computer 2.
When I finally did get my hands on a used Macintosh, I remember being really unimpressed by the small, black and white display. It was sharp and crisp, but I just couldn't quite see what made it so great. My friend's old//e seemed *far* more fun to use, by contrast. It's interesting how Apple stubbornly ran with the Mac line though, and let the hugely popular// series die a slow death. (People were so hooked on their//e's that Apple had to sell a "compatibility card" for the Macs for a long time that let you run all your//e software on it and use your old//e joysticks!)
Today, the Mac is great (and a FAR cry from the original models)... but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if Wozniak was at the helm the whole time, vs. Jobs.
Honestly, the "out of office" autoreply feature (most notably used in MS Outlook) could use some work. For starters, it really needs to be designed so users turning it on are immediately prompted for whether they'd like it to respond to all incoming email, or only to internal corporate mail. Quite often, I've emailed a salesperson at some company, only to get back an auto-reply that's intended only for other employees of his/her business -- not outside customers.
Yeah.... my sentiments too. Still, you can't really knock the guy for his success. The fact that you can mention his name in a place like this and everyone's familiar with him shows he's vastly more successful than most radio talk-show DJs.
One thing I guess you can count on in America is plenty of immature guys!
It strikes me as a bit odd that these social networking sites all seem to be concerned with having massive marketshare, when in reality, they all seem doomed from the start to either finding a comfortable niche, or fading away.
MySpace, Friendster, and the others seem to be aiming to be THE site to use to connect with anybody else out there in the world, for any reason. But the topics and people that interest the teenage crowd are vastly different than the ones that interest, say, retirees or 30-somethings.
It seems like the way to go is to focus on one area where you can shine, and accept the fact that the people not fitting into that demographic probably won't be one of your users. That's what Facebook originally had going for it, but they blew it by opening themselves up to everybody - and I think time will bear out the fact that it diluted their "potency".
MySpace probably should have looked closely at their usage trends, early in the game, and said "Hey - right now, we're mostly drawing the under 25 crowd here!", and re-engineered the site to squarely cater to that demographic. Then, someone like Friendster could have said "Hmm... We need to focus on an area the competition is ignoring. Let's slant our site to an older audience." Instead, I think they got greedy and seeing older users catching on to using their system, they assumed they were "dominating the social networking world". Nope.. just riding the peak of the wave of "trendy" for a little while.
Whatever.... You really mean, you were using BMI as an excuse for being heavier than was healthy for you, personally, and you finally stopped making excuses for yourself and lost a bunch of weight. Fine, but that doesn't apply to everyone. For that matter, I'd say it's really questionable just how big an "issue" it is that the U.S. has so many people who are a little "overweight" by currently accepted medical standards.
Not everybody cares about going to the gym regularly, and for many of us, it's only important that we stay around whatever size we're presently at because we'd rather not have to buy a whole new wardrobe. And some of us believe the currently accepted medical standards aren't necessarily the "end all, be all" rules for good health.
I'm not even a little bit overweight by current BMI standards or any of the height/weight charts I've seen published. But I still know a few people who are much larger than me, don't work out at all, and yet are arguably in better health than I am, overall. You have to take into account one's blood pressure, cholesterol count, stamina/endurance, and many other factors. Not to mention, genetic predispositions play a big role (and one we tend to ignore or understate, just because it's not currently feasible to change them).
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Huh? That's never been a "way around" licensing issues. The *owner* of the machine is the one who agreed to the EULA. You don't sign a EULA when you use your work PC either. Most likely, the I.T. department already "signed" it on your behalf when they installed the computer.
If you do things that violate the EULA on public computers (such as in a library), the owners of said systems would be responsible for taking action to prevent the violations, or else ultimately, they would be held accountable.
Realistically though, I'm not sure how many things violating a Vista EULA you'd benefit personally from doing on a PC that wasn't yours? (EG. The Vista Home EULA supposedly prevents the use of the OS inside a virtual machine. Ridiculous, really - but how would the ability to violate this "rule" improve your user-experience on a library computer running Vista natively, and in all likelihood, not having VM software set up on it anyway?)
Honestly, I can't see why more companies aren't setting up Microsoft's WSUS server? It's free of charge, and basically acts like a subset of their commercial SMS Server product. It uses the Windows Auto-Update service built into XP, 2000 and 2003 Server but you simply modify the workstations to get update info from it, rather then over the Internet.
It has a fairly decent web-based administration interface that tracks all the Microsoft updates that are available to deploy, and lets you determine which ones your workstations on your LAN will receive, and which will be ignored. It keeps tracks of the list of updates already applied to each of your machines, and lets you group your systems into arbitrary "containers" for easy reference.
Unlike SMS, it doesn't let you roll your own deployment packages for 3rd. party products, but it handles such things as MS Office updates and SQL Server patches, as well as all the Windows updates themselves.
Personally, I found SMS too difficult to set up and maintain as a one-man I.T. department where I work, yet WSUS was perfect for our environment of roughly 50 PCs.
Consumer Reports magazine has the right idea... If you're going to review and test products, you need to obtain them the exact same way, and through the same channels, that end-users do. Even if a manufacturer can seemingly be trusted not to withhold new products from reviewers to retaliate for a bad review, it doesn't mean they're not "cherry picking" the products they're sending them!
Especially in cases where there are high numbers of D.O.A. or malfunctioning units, reviewers simply don't catch this problem if they're only receiving pre-tested, pre-selected samples for free evaluation.
Interesting theory, but I don't think it really holds much water. Advertising and marketing types might prefer a homogenized society where men and women all buy the same products, but I don't see evidence that they're able to actively change that?
If this was the plan, you'd think they'd start with the small children - stopping such things as selling Barbie dolls and bright pink and yellow ponies to the girls, while selling action figures and race car toys to the boys. Instead, I see advertisers trying quite hard to market completely different types of toys to males and females.
On the other hand, I think the womens' rights movement has been pushing for women to gain acceptance doing more traditionally "male" things. When it comes to trucks, for example, I run into more women than men who are really impressed with or excited about buying one. It's almost to the point where guys buying sports cars end up only impressing other guys, vs. the women they still *think* will dig their ride.
You've also got the rise of the 1-parent families to thank for some of this. It's hard to really be a traditional "man's man" when you're raising a child by yourself, which happens more and more nowdays. And by contrast, women raising kids by themselves find themselves having to learn to tackle things like repairing broken plumbing or electrical work - because there's no man in the house to do it for them.
Actually, just for the record, I tried someone's "Logic Pro 7" crack for Mac a while ago. Looked like they simply took some files out of Logic Express and swapped them for the original Logic Pro files (since Express has no dongle.
It seemed to work, although it was a rather "sketchy" crack... (EG. Not real confident doing something like that wouldn't break at least some feature/function in the program.)
Agreed! I buy CDs to hear the music... I don't think I ever even looked at the "bonus material" they've included on some of my music CDs in the past. (EG. Windows screen savers and wallpaper on those dual-format discs.)
There's not much they could add to a CD to make me buy it besides more songs I want to hear. That's its purpose. What I want to see are lower prices. Even 10+ years ago, I started buying mostly used CDs because even if I didn't get the latest tracks first that way, I could get 3x as much music for my money or more!
The issue many people have with what you claim is "straightforward" is; Who really should be able to give that permission?
... but that's a secondary issue. Nonetheless, it also influences people who feel like there's no moral/ethical "need" to obey a corporation that lied to the artists to get them to agree to the terms and conditions they enforce.)
Right now, the RIAA and MPAA say you need *their* permission, yet they haven't created a single second of the content itself. The artists did. And in many cases, the artists would be perfectly happy with you redistributing their content, despite the complaints of the RIAA or MPAA.
Of course, strictly legally speaking, the RIAA and MPAA are right. If you pushed them, they surely could provide a piece of paper that the artist signed, giving them control of the work. But this battle goes beyond what's strictly legal, according to the "letter of the law".
What many folks out there are saying (and putting into action) is that realistically, the idea of making no copies for others without permission is nonsense. It's an artificially constructed legal scenario that you need this permission, because as long as industries like the RIAA or MPAA can threaten people with it, they stand to squeeze extra profit from consumers who feel "compelled" to buy something they would have otherwise just made a copy of.
(There's also the whole debate on whether artists fully realized what they were getting into when they signed these contracts in the first place
I'm in total agreement with you, except if I'm reading this original story correctly, didn't he plead guilty rather than fight his case in court?
If you admit guilt, then all bets are off. Government no longer has to justify why you deserve your punishment, or explain why running a tracker site is, to them, equivalent to actually distributing the material illegally.
Yep! I've also found that in a corporate environment, repeatedly trying to "save money" by purchasing MS product upgrades (which require a "qualifying" previous product to be present in some form in order to install) is a BIG hassle down the road.
If and when you're asked to do a software audit to prove everything is legal, you end up in a THICK paper-trail. Instead of just producing proof of purchase of your existing OS, for example, you're stuck proving the complete record of how you got to point Y from point X.
Worse yet, if this process happened over several years and you weren't even working at the company when the first products were purchased, sometimes it gets really difficult to figure out how the whole thing went together. I remember years ago, for example, MS offered a program where you could use a copy of Microsoft Works as a "qualifying product" to buy an "upgrade" version of MS Office. A company I used to work for took advantage of that, because they had 50 or 60 Dell Pentium towers that came bundled with MS Works '95. Of course, someone tossed out the old MS Works CDs and keys a couple years later, figuring nobody was using THAT product anymore.... Well, around comes Office 2000 and again, we want to buy the upgrade version to save a bunch of money on the upgrade from Office '97. Then we qualify for Office XP since they've got the "upgrade advantage" MS "insurance" policy providing free upgrades while you're enrolled in the program. NOW - I'm supposed to do an audit and make sure all the copies of Office XP we've got are legal. Fun times!!
Yes, but that's not exaactly my point. I'm not arguing it's a very effective and efficient way for computers to verify the correct spelling of words. We've been doing it for at least what, 15-20 years now, in our software packages?
My point was more the fact that a human would usually catch certain errors that a spell checker won't necessarily catch. For example, in the English language, we know that q is always followed by u in our words. But a spell checker has no such information coded into it. It probably "just works anyway" in this situation, because we don't have that many words with "qu" in them, and a decent dictionary of word spellings will likely cover all of the possibilities. But it doesn't make it any less of a "hack", as far as how the computer solves the problem (brute force comparisons from a predefined list).
But don't we almost always get a computer to solve a problem that's not strictly a mathematical one using "hacks that only work in restricted conditions"?
Our spell-checkers in our word processors don't actually know anything about the rules of a language, phonics, etc. They just do lookups from a dictionary. If a word's not listed, it has no idea if it's spelled properly or not -- even if the misspelling is one that's simply not a possible correct sequence of letters for the language. Most don't even realize if a word is misspelled in the context of the sentence, as long as it matches a correct spelling in the word list.
Until we figure out how the human brain recognizes faces as individuals, we can't expect anything *but* a clever hack for a computer to do the same. And truthfully, I suspect the human brain takes many things into account to do a "recognition" on a person. How often do you see somebody in the store that you're pretty sure you know from a previous job, school, etc. but you're not quite sure? I've had this happen a few times, and to make a better determination, I had to take other factors into account, like the sound of their voice if I heard them speak, the way they walked, or maybe an expression that came across their face. Humans "key in" on specific things that help them remember a person. And depending on which "features" they chose, they may or may not be effective. (Say you remember a gal really well because of her long, flowing hair? If she cuts it real short, there's a good chance you won't recognize her at all anymore if she walks by you.)
On that subject, I'm curious if anyone has done any studies to see if music converted from compressed format to compressed format has more playback "artifacting" issues if it's played through a stereo that does some sort of signal processing?
.WMA files to .MP3 format, I got what sounded like a perfect result on my computer speakers. (I was using 192 bit encoding for the MP3 and the .WMAs were, I believe, 160-bit to start with.) But I noticed a slight muddiness to the sound when I played them back on my car stereo that has a default setting of doing some signal processing to the music.
For example, most car stereos nowdays have settings that claim to simulate various types of listening environments. My Kenwood home stereo does the same type of thing, where you can select "Jazz Club", "Concert Hall", and so forth.
When I first started using a Windows package that digitally re-encoded
I'm not a teacher, but I think that's an unfair statement. The beauty of the Internet is rapidly changing, updated content on all sorts of topics. Taking it out of the computing experience reverts back to the "pre-computing" era of teaching, more or less -- where students only get to view the static content you've pre-picked for them to see.
EG. Say you want students to do some family history research as part of a class project? Do you assume you can provide them with all the useful content they'll need for that search in advance and host it all locally for them?
Oh, come on! Rickover asking that type of question wasn't a "childish game" to begin with? Nor was that "brilliant" idea of sawing legs off chairs so interviewees would be uncomfortable?
And Carter did answer the original question honestly. He gave it thought and said he supposed he just didn't try hard enough. That's as straightforward as it gets, is it not?
It's too bad Carter didn't answer back with "With all due respect, sir, may I ask what your class standing was?" I'm assuming Rickover didn't graduate 1st. in his graduating class, did he? And if he did, well ... what can you really say to that? It's pretty clear he just thinks too much of himself.
I'm not even so sure about that.... I've only worked for smaller companies, but in some respects, it's easier to see the "big picture" of what's going on in a smaller firm. And I have no reason to suspect things radically change with the abilitiy of the CEO's to make decisions just because the business is larger?
My observations have usually been that the company owners are likely to repeatedly make bad decisions that get "fixed" by people further down the corporate food chain. Most people working for a place want to see it succeed, if for no other reason than the fact that they spend 8 hours every day doing something there, and they want to make sure they keep getting their paychecks. Department heads know much more about the details of what their little portion of the business does than the owner(s) know. So when an order comes down that a dept. knows is foolish, they tend to modify it a bit. They probably won't directly disobey the instruction - but they can see the big flaws and try to temper them. (EG. They might promise the boss that "Yep - we've started keeping written records of that sales data you asked us to start tracking and reviewing each week." But if they all know it's "busy work" and is hurting their efficiency at selling, they probably don't really update the thing too often. They just throw something together if there's a worry the boss is going to come looking for a copy of it.)
The OS X dock is probably one of the most debated parts of the OS. Somebody's always making that claim that it "doesn't let them see enough about what's running" and so on. I'm not sure I understand that one? Every app that's running shows a black triangle under its dock icon. Many apps show a miniature status bar in their dock icon while they're busy doing a task like burning a CD or encoding a video too. (You can always press ALT-TAB just like in Windows to tab through all of your running apps also.) If you need more info than that about what's running, you're talking about something you'd want to do elsewhere in an OS anyway, right? (EG. The "Task Manager" on a Windows box, vs. the bar along the bottom of the screen showing what's running.)
I'd also say that the wireless setup on Macs is one of the most straightforward I've ever seen! Not sure what you found so confusing about it? My experience has been the opposite. On Windows boxes, you've got several different possible ways they might handle your wireless connection, depending on if you've got some manufacturer's software loaded or you're just using the connection manager built into Windows. If you don't use XP, you can't even get WPA wireless security to work without a 3rd. party helper application. On a Mac, all of these formats are always built in and working. I can't speak for wi-fi in Ubuntu since I haven't yet tried it, but like you said yourself, wi-fi in Linux was never traditionally an easy thing to get going.
Where I live, a couple people have hung onto to very successful nightclubs with years and years of "staying power" by re-inventing them every so often. One of them had a rather unique strategy of closing down at the end of the summer, transforming into a different type of club, and opening back up again until the next spring/summer, when it again closed and transformed back into its "beach club" motif.
Another one has changed names and themes every couple years, when the old one got too "dull" and "passe".
I think it's just as possible for these social networking sites to do. They just need to realize that it's not enough to build the thing once and consider it "finished". They need to plan on constantly monitoring the types of users they're getting and what the competitors do that draws them away again, and keep re-designing the site to accomodate the changes.
Right.... p2p sharing and other forms of music sharing are simply part of the whole economic "ball of wax". Legal issues completely aside for a minute, the bottom line is always "Do I, the customer, feel like the seller is offering goods or services I want at a price that's reasonable?"
The recording industry basically had 4 options available to them.
1. Follow the trend towards digital music distribution. Quit selling music on pre-recorded CD, and instead, start their own online digital music services, plus kiosks at stores which could burn discs on-demand for customers.
2. Fight to preserve the status-quo with legal wrangling and threats.
3. Reduce prices to make it a more cost-effective option to keep buying their music CDs than to waste time and effort downloading them digitally.
4. Do nothing and let their business die.
I think a combination of choices 1 and 3 would have been optimal, but either would have been acceptable. Instead, they chose 2, which will ultimately bring them similar results to chosing option 4.
All the file sharing they throw fits about comes about because their product, despite having some "value" to people, is overpriced. If I could buy albums at the store for $2-3 each, I'd do so all the time, and buy many more than I've ever bought at a time in the past. That would also drastically reduce p2p sharing because the cost of someone's blank media plus time, plus hassle of getting the occasional sub-standard audio quality download wouldn't make it worth doing anymore.
I couldn't agree more! Every time I read a news article about some supposed concern over eating a food (or the opposite - a recommendation that such-and-such is "good for you"), evidence is brought up challenging their opinion.
Just yesterday, Yahoo News had some piece about 4 things you could do to reduce your risk of cancer, and at least 3 of the 4 were pure speculation and questionable at best! (For example, one "tip" was to use spices like cinnamon, because of it's supposed cancer-inhibiting properties. Funny, because I remember reading an article a few years ago warning people to go lightly on cinnamon consumption since it contains a substance known to be a toxin in animals. Another was not to drink fluids out of plastic bottles that were allowed to freeze or get heated, since "toxins in the plastic could leech into your drink". Excuse me? Freezing should reduce the ability of a chemical to dissolve out of the plastic and into the fluid, no?)
They rarely address another question I've always had. What about the interaction between foods someone eats at the same time? We constantly monitor prescription drug interactions, yet act like it's a non-issue for foods. Just because item X is supposed to be "bad for you" doesn't mean it would be processed in the body the same way if it was mixed with items Y and Z, does it?
I remember this time period as well, but I think I missed being involved in it first-hand by just a couple years or so. At the time the Mac was first introduced, I was avidly reading computer magazines like "Byte" that covered it in detail, and I had a friend who owned an Apple //e. But my only real hands-on computer experience other than that seemed to be Radio Shack TRS-80 machines. The school I was going to had a lab of Model III's and my neighbor down the street owned one too. Another neighbor spent big $'s on a "Model 12" for his heating and cooling business, so of course, us kids tried to find cool games and things to do with it also. (Not much for the Model 12 and 16 if spreadsheets weren't your idea of a good time, though!)
//e seemed *far* more fun to use, by contrast. It's interesting how Apple stubbornly ran with the Mac line though, and let the hugely popular // series die a slow death. (People were so hooked on their //e's that Apple had to sell a "compatibility card" for the Macs for a long time that let you run all your //e software on it and use your old //e joysticks!)
... but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if Wozniak was at the helm the whole time, vs. Jobs.
My first machine was a lowly Timex/Sinclair 1000 (only $99 at the local K-Mart!), so I chugged along with that for a few years before finally getting a Tandy Color Computer 2.
When I finally did get my hands on a used Macintosh, I remember being really unimpressed by the small, black and white display. It was sharp and crisp, but I just couldn't quite see what made it so great. My friend's old
Today, the Mac is great (and a FAR cry from the original models)
Honestly, the "out of office" autoreply feature (most notably used in MS Outlook) could use some work. For starters, it really needs to be designed so users turning it on are immediately prompted for whether they'd like it to respond to all incoming email, or only to internal corporate mail. Quite often, I've emailed a salesperson at some company, only to get back an auto-reply that's intended only for other employees of his/her business -- not outside customers.
Yeah.... my sentiments too. Still, you can't really knock the guy for his success. The fact that you can mention his name in a place like this and everyone's familiar with him shows he's vastly more successful than most radio talk-show DJs.
One thing I guess you can count on in America is plenty of immature guys!
It strikes me as a bit odd that these social networking sites all seem to be concerned with having massive marketshare, when in reality, they all seem doomed from the start to either finding a comfortable niche, or fading away.
.. just riding the peak of the wave of "trendy" for a little while.
MySpace, Friendster, and the others seem to be aiming to be THE site to use to connect with anybody else out there in the world, for any reason. But the topics and people that interest the teenage crowd are vastly different than the ones that interest, say, retirees or 30-somethings.
It seems like the way to go is to focus on one area where you can shine, and accept the fact that the people not fitting into that demographic probably won't be one of your users. That's what Facebook originally had going for it, but they blew it by opening themselves up to everybody - and I think time will bear out the fact that it diluted their "potency".
MySpace probably should have looked closely at their usage trends, early in the game, and said "Hey - right now, we're mostly drawing the under 25 crowd here!", and re-engineered the site to squarely cater to that demographic. Then, someone like Friendster could have said "Hmm... We need to focus on an area the competition is ignoring. Let's slant our site to an older audience." Instead, I think they got greedy and seeing older users catching on to using their system, they assumed they were "dominating the social networking world". Nope
Whatever.... You really mean, you were using BMI as an excuse for being heavier than was healthy for you, personally, and you finally stopped making excuses for yourself and lost a bunch of weight. Fine, but that doesn't apply to everyone. For that matter, I'd say it's really questionable just how big an "issue" it is that the U.S. has so many people who are a little "overweight" by currently accepted medical standards.
Not everybody cares about going to the gym regularly, and for many of us, it's only important that we stay around whatever size we're presently at because we'd rather not have to buy a whole new wardrobe. And some of us believe the currently accepted medical standards aren't necessarily the "end all, be all" rules for good health.
I'm not even a little bit overweight by current BMI standards or any of the height/weight charts I've seen published. But I still know a few people who are much larger than me, don't work out at all, and yet are arguably in better health than I am, overall. You have to take into account one's blood pressure, cholesterol count, stamina/endurance, and many other factors. Not to mention, genetic predispositions play a big role (and one we tend to ignore or understate, just because it's not currently feasible to change them).