I seem to recall that it wasn't bundling the browser so much as dictating what the computer distributors could do. Microsoft did a Darth Vader vs. Lando Calrissian ("But we had a deal!" "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.") with the license distribution arrangements they had with vendors like Dell. The vendors were allowed to install a bunch of crapware in their standard Windows distributions that come on the hard drives of new PCs, but they were forbidden to pre-install Netscape, thus cutting off Netscape's air supply. MS threatened to unilaterally change the terms of the license distribution if the vendor installed Netscape. This was an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly power, as the PC vendors had no choice but to do what MS said, since there was no way for the vendors to compete with other PC makers if they couldn't pre-install Windows.
This is possibly covered in the article, but I haven't got around to reading it yet.
I saw the same four square inch text box thing. I've always replied to comments by opening the reply page in a new tab (heck, I opened them in new browser windows before there were tabs, to avoid reloading a long page of comments, over a shared 56kbps modem, on a 100MHz machine where the time penalty to redraw a long page was severe). I saw some options on the reply page to change the area of the text box, but only the length changed.
However, in a moment of desperation (did I mention it's a really old habit of mine to reply in a new window?) I left-clicked on the Reply to This lozenge button. Lo and behold! A properly-sized comment box opened up beneath your post.
To be fair, the editors did say that they were going to experiment with the user interface in idle. Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out how to make paragraphs anymore.
You will probably not find any nuns with woodies in Playboy, though they did feature Caroline Cossey. Either your source material's suspect, or you've got the nuns and priests mixed up.
I would really like to know how many people go to their system settings for a calendar? It happened a lot at the call center where I used to work, with agents handling insurance calls involving working with dates months ahead. The agents would normally run the internal app in a maximized, or at least pretty large, window. The Date/Time gadget could be called up and dismissed faster than Outlook, and it was fairly common for them to click a month ahead and then click OK instead of Cancel. Pretty soon after that, Active Directory would stop letting them do anything useful.
They had to have administrator-level access to their PCs in order to run some of the insurance-carrier-specific desktop applications. And mandatory network profiles actually work if the user's an admin on the box. If they're a normal user, all the icons on the desktop get shunted into the upper left. If they're a power user, the icons are in the right spot, but the mandated-from-upon-high desktop background doesn't appear. If they're admins, the background works and the computer's display is presentable to the random tours through the call center floor. If there's another way to get the background up, I never managed to figure it out.
Most trucks are moving towards having small "lawnmower" engines called APUs (axillary power units) that power the heat/AC system and provide electricity when the truck would normally be idling. I don't know how widespread it is, but in Knoxville, TN there is a company called IdleAire which provides a honkin' big umbilical hose that connects to a truck's window at truck stops. The hose carries power, data, and HVAC into the cab. It's got a touchscreen so you can watch movies on demand or surf the web, and RJ-45 jacks if you want to surf from your own laptop.
Knoxville has perennial poor air quality, and this was developed to allow truckers to shut the big engines down when overnighting.
No amount of proof is going to convince the true nutters, tinfoil hats, and conspiracy theorists. They're very focused, and the ones I saw on a recent documentary about the ones who claim the moon landings were faked (on either The Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel, I can't remember which) seemed to be the kinds of guys who have a lot of time on their hands. No mere truth would be enough to persuade them to believe differently.
Please, if you have a hairy chest and button down shirt that is thin, wear an undershirt. I had an interview where the interviewer did this... it was distracting. Somebody should have pointed it out to her discreetly.
2) There are technologies that would benefit from having more information available. Imagine being able to extract enough information from a recording to simulate that vocalist singing something else. http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/01/Prodigy
Granted, they still have to record the singer reading from a cue sheet so they can collect phonemes, but phoneme collection might still be possible given a large enough body of work from a particular artist.
Imagine Shakira singing her songs in Spanish! Er, maybe not.
Or Peter Gabriel in German! Dang it.
Kidding aside, the samples I heard sounded remarkably natural.
Home users don't care about running a domain controller and most business users are not too keen on media center.
Yeah, because if I didn't want Windows Movie Maker, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player installed on the desktop PCs at work, I should have opted for Windows XP Professional.
Oh, wait... I did.
You can "uninstall" OE and WMP, but all that does is remove the shortcuts.
And I really can't tell you how much my TIFF-printing users (FAX images are a way of life at work) enjoyed moving from 1-click process in Windows 2000 to the 7-click process in the unremovable Photo Printing Wizard. I had to add more software to our standard distribution to deal with the crap Microsoft added themselves!
The net result of this: there is a lot of electricity available at night. Large businesses pay way more for electricity at peak. Off-peak loads aren't even measured some times
You may find this interesting. I used to work at a nuclear power plant. The cooling reservoir was connected via a spillway to a nearby river. To cover peak loads, there was a hydroelectric plant on the spillway. At night, the power company I worked for bought tons of cheap electricity from another utility to run the hydro plant backwards to refill the reservoir.
The plant I worked at stayed running at 100% the whole time, but as far as I know, its power was not used to refill the reservoir. I assume that was because the utility that owned the plant could sell that station's power for more than it was paying the other utility for the power to refill the reservoir.
One of the engineers told me it took approximately twice as much power to refill the lake as was obtained by draining it, and this happened on a fairly nightly basis during the summer. I used to run a few miles at the plant every morning, and there were usually fishermen trying to get as close to lake side of the dam as possible without getting chased off by the guards. The churning water apparently stirred up a lot of stuff and attracted the hungry fish in the lake.
The Chinese will economize in the supply chain simply by ordering more uranium. Some of it will go in the reactor to produce power. The rest of it will go on the reactor to become lead paint.
I surf from my phone occasionally, and a couple months ago Verizon started putting fscking BANNER ADS on their mobile web portal. And if I choose to go to my stored URLs, there's so much crap on the page, the stuff I want to see doesn't even show up on the first screenful. And the browser's crap: I have not yet found a way to enter a phrase containing a space character in a password field, it's hard to use the drop-downs that have terms you've previously entered into text boxes (I've only managed it once, and that was by accident), and you can only add bookmarks to your favorite URLs by inputting them manually since there's no way to copy the current URL to a clipboard. I could live with the last one as merely a limitation of the platform if they hadn't cocked-up the first two so badly.
True story from a company I used to work for: The president wants to buy some sporting goods online. There is a chain of sporting goods stores named "Dick's Sporting Goods". "Dick's" takes a lot more space on the signs than "Sporting Goods", so everyone just calls it Dick's in the course of normal conversation.
Anyway, he attempts to do some online shopping at work and instead of Googling for the correct URL, he just types in dicks.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it in Slashdot proper or was it in TacoHell? I feel like I read the same ancient post.
On an only tangentially-related note, one of my favorite comments ever was this one:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30833&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=3313595
I wonder if there's an inverse correlation between a post's average UID and average IQ?
I got that one today, too. Dammit!
I seem to recall that it wasn't bundling the browser so much as dictating what the computer distributors could do. Microsoft did a Darth Vader vs. Lando Calrissian ("But we had a deal!" "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.") with the license distribution arrangements they had with vendors like Dell. The vendors were allowed to install a bunch of crapware in their standard Windows distributions that come on the hard drives of new PCs, but they were forbidden to pre-install Netscape, thus cutting off Netscape's air supply. MS threatened to unilaterally change the terms of the license distribution if the vendor installed Netscape. This was an abuse of Microsoft's monopoly power, as the PC vendors had no choice but to do what MS said, since there was no way for the vendors to compete with other PC makers if they couldn't pre-install Windows.
This is possibly covered in the article, but I haven't got around to reading it yet.
I submitted a story that was posted, and didn't get the achievement:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/04/09/1342256
Yeah, almost 10 years ago! Maybe they didn't go back that far for the achievements, heh heh.
Yep, I thought that too. Now I'm posting in this one to try to get the achievement.
I feel so... used.
I'm only doing this for the achievement myself.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out how to make paragraphs anymore.
It seems paragraphs work fine except in the preview, heh.
I saw the same four square inch text box thing. I've always replied to comments by opening the reply page in a new tab (heck, I opened them in new browser windows before there were tabs, to avoid reloading a long page of comments, over a shared 56kbps modem, on a 100MHz machine where the time penalty to redraw a long page was severe). I saw some options on the reply page to change the area of the text box, but only the length changed.
However, in a moment of desperation (did I mention it's a really old habit of mine to reply in a new window?) I left-clicked on the Reply to This lozenge button. Lo and behold! A properly-sized comment box opened up beneath your post.
To be fair, the editors did say that they were going to experiment with the user interface in idle. Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out how to make paragraphs anymore.
You will probably not find any nuns with woodies in Playboy, though they did feature Caroline Cossey. Either your source material's suspect, or you've got the nuns and priests mixed up.
They had to have administrator-level access to their PCs in order to run some of the insurance-carrier-specific desktop applications. And mandatory network profiles actually work if the user's an admin on the box. If they're a normal user, all the icons on the desktop get shunted into the upper left. If they're a power user, the icons are in the right spot, but the mandated-from-upon-high desktop background doesn't appear. If they're admins, the background works and the computer's display is presentable to the random tours through the call center floor. If there's another way to get the background up, I never managed to figure it out.
Knoxville has perennial poor air quality, and this was developed to allow truckers to shut the big engines down when overnighting.
...I would much rather watch the Thundercats (if only because Cheetara was fit). That's because she was the Thunder... Thunder... Thundercats' ho.No amount of proof is going to convince the true nutters, tinfoil hats, and conspiracy theorists. They're very focused, and the ones I saw on a recent documentary about the ones who claim the moon landings were faked (on either The Discovery Channel or the National Geographic Channel, I can't remember which) seemed to be the kinds of guys who have a lot of time on their hands. No mere truth would be enough to persuade them to believe differently.
To be honest, though, I do turn the ads back on for sites that I frequent who also run ads that aren't too obnoxious.
Granted, they still have to record the singer reading from a cue sheet so they can collect phonemes, but phoneme collection might still be possible given a large enough body of work from a particular artist.
Imagine Shakira singing her songs in Spanish! Er, maybe not.
Or Peter Gabriel in German! Dang it.
Kidding aside, the samples I heard sounded remarkably natural.
Home users don't care about running a domain controller and most business users are not too keen on media center.
Yeah, because if I didn't want Windows Movie Maker, MSN Messenger, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player installed on the desktop PCs at work, I should have opted for Windows XP Professional.
Oh, wait... I did.
You can "uninstall" OE and WMP, but all that does is remove the shortcuts.
And I really can't tell you how much my TIFF-printing users (FAX images are a way of life at work) enjoyed moving from 1-click process in Windows 2000 to the 7-click process in the unremovable Photo Printing Wizard. I had to add more software to our standard distribution to deal with the crap Microsoft added themselves!
We'll have to wait for 70+ years after Lucas kicks it for that, I'm betting.
:-/
Even longer if he comes back as one of those Force Ghost guys.
You may find this interesting. I used to work at a nuclear power plant. The cooling reservoir was connected via a spillway to a nearby river. To cover peak loads, there was a hydroelectric plant on the spillway. At night, the power company I worked for bought tons of cheap electricity from another utility to run the hydro plant backwards to refill the reservoir.
The plant I worked at stayed running at 100% the whole time, but as far as I know, its power was not used to refill the reservoir. I assume that was because the utility that owned the plant could sell that station's power for more than it was paying the other utility for the power to refill the reservoir.
One of the engineers told me it took approximately twice as much power to refill the lake as was obtained by draining it, and this happened on a fairly nightly basis during the summer. I used to run a few miles at the plant every morning, and there were usually fishermen trying to get as close to lake side of the dam as possible without getting chased off by the guards. The churning water apparently stirred up a lot of stuff and attracted the hungry fish in the lake.
Peer pressure is powerful. That it only works in kids is a myth.
Yeah, those commercials for Flomax are loaded with old guys experiencing peer pressure!
The Chinese will economize in the supply chain simply by ordering more uranium. Some of it will go in the reactor to produce power. The rest of it will go on the reactor to become lead paint.
:-)
Fish, barrel: Pew! Pew!
Amen, brother!
I surf from my phone occasionally, and a couple months ago Verizon started putting fscking BANNER ADS on their mobile web portal. And if I choose to go to my stored URLs, there's so much crap on the page, the stuff I want to see doesn't even show up on the first screenful. And the browser's crap: I have not yet found a way to enter a phrase containing a space character in a password field, it's hard to use the drop-downs that have terms you've previously entered into text boxes (I've only managed it once, and that was by accident), and you can only add bookmarks to your favorite URLs by inputting them manually since there's no way to copy the current URL to a clipboard. I could live with the last one as merely a limitation of the platform if they hadn't cocked-up the first two so badly.
True story from a company I used to work for: The president wants to buy some sporting goods online. There is a chain of sporting goods stores named "Dick's Sporting Goods". "Dick's" takes a lot more space on the signs than "Sporting Goods", so everyone just calls it Dick's in the course of normal conversation.
Anyway, he attempts to do some online shopping at work and instead of Googling for the correct URL, he just types in dicks.com.
D'oh!