The Grandparent post is right in their sentiment. They need to test this in more than just sunny temperate california. It has nothing to do with how hydrogen reacts to extreme climates, but it has everything to do with how the Car reacts to extreme climates.
We have enough posts on how people like MS aren't testing their software enough, but now we criticize someone who thinks they should be testing more?:)
You might think Honda would do this, but be cautious. This is brand new technology, of course, and businesses love to cut corners in order to make it to market on time.
There have been numerous articles posted to slashdot on how Bill has attempted to "donate" PCs to schools and other places. While making straight cash donations is fine, the Gates foundation has done some things that make anti-trust advocates cringe. Donating PCs seems like a good thing, but it's anti-competitive. A monopoly giving away it's product (in this case the OS and office/student software made by microsoft) is illegal and should not be allowed. Bill is not above trying this sleazy tactic and he knows what he's doing, even if Melissa does not acknowledge it.
That would be so damn cool if this wasn't added at the end of the page.
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The first thing is to definite what jobs you have there. Web designer vs network engineer vs help desk level 2 or whatever you have. List out their responsibilities and required skills. Do this like HR, but make it seem important, don't over do it It's important to define the role as best you can and identify if the job that person is either completely unique or can be taken over by someone else. For example, if you have one DBA who manages the database for your system, and no one else really has his responsibilities or his skills then that's a specific job. If some guy is responsible for keeping an eye the email server but 5 other guys could do it, then his role is more broad, that of a generic IT tech.
Once you have a definition of their jobs, then create levels. Four levels is typical. Each position has levels for which for which the level gets both more responsibilities and more pay. First level is entry level. Second level is "certified" in that they've proven themselves over months or even up to a year as being good employee. 3rd level is senior in that they know the processes well, are fairly independent, and have high quality of work. 4th level are those few shining examples of great employees who do outstanding work on many different levels and would be very hard to replace.
Create paths to different groups to. For example, in a lot of IT departments, the path from a department that helps with desktop leads to network or server support as advancement.
Create requirements for each level to move from level 1 to 2. Some people use written tests to grade someone skills, others simply use management review. Some require a specific certification in a computer technology.
Finally, make sure everyone in IT starts out as level 1 and create a short term plan to have everyone move through the levels. This will help you figure out who's worth holding onto, and reward them appropriately. Be Prepared for a little backlash from those who don't warrant promotion, but if they don't warrant it, you have documentation as to why not.
And make sure you have guidelines for how managers should document everyone under their pervue so that they have a more standardized way of grading people and don't go off doing their own thing. When one manager grades easy and one grades hard, the people under the harsh manager feel left out while the easy guys get the money.
Keeping PC gaming alive: What factors do you think help keep PC gaming alive when competing with consoles, and do you foresee that PC gaming will continue to survive when confronted with the next generation of consoles? From the reverse perspective, what prevents consoles from finally killing off PC gaming?
I missed this question when the original article asking for questions was posted. But this is a silly waste. Sid's answer is spot on, and I wish I knocked this down a knotch with a mod point.
Lumping an entire market together and insisting they are direct competitors for the exact same dollar is stupid. Civ4 cannot be played well with a PS2 controller, and Grand Turismo plays crappy on a keyboard. You can find a way to make it work, but no one is going to spend the time to try to code it. It's a waste. The market will show you that there is room for both, and while there are lots of crossovers, you will also see that there are lots of areas where there is absolutely no crossover, simply because of interface issues.
Sid makes some other great points about graphics and upgrades you can do to a PC. This goes into the fact that a $100-$300 console can run a fast paced racing game with better performance than a $1500 computer. PC games are notorious for being slow and skipping frames. Some console games do this, but that's considered a bug in the console game and it doesn't do so well if it performs badly. However, in the PC world if a game has godly system requirements for any reason, the blame is more often put on the PC and not the person who coded it to require too much power. Sometimes that's deserving but having to spend hours just to fine tune your system to play Quake or Doom is nuts.
They are all gaming companies, but different games for different platforms will always be here, and I hope it gets even more diverse, because we need the diversity.
I demand Slashdot put a new option to identify any slashdot posting that contains a link to a John Dvorak piece of trash article. I filtered out JonKatz a long time ago when all I saw were whiny repetitive stupid opinion pieces with no real insight. John Dvorak is the same way, and I go out of my way to avoid his trash. Please someone put this in so I can just skip over these postings, too.
Most people want to highlight why it's bad. With music, as most slashdotters recognise, it's far more portable than video. You can listen to video while driving to work, travelling, standing in line, exercising, jogging, etc. Video requires eyeballs, of course, which are often doing other things. It might work while travelling on a train or plane, standing in line, or exercising, but video is not workable on 40% of the list I mentioned
However:
1) People do want to take video with them. Take a look at the recent portable kid video players. They've mostly been crap, but they are for kids who don't care as much about quality, and for parents who want to occupy their children on long trips and commutes. Also, if you are riding the train to work every day, why not get that extra episode in during the commute?
2) Get into the market now and define the standard everyone has to beat. Those kid players I mentioned were dismissed as toys. The iPod has a mystique as a sexy "entertainment device." The video isn't all that bad, for that size of a screen anyway, and you don't need high quality video for Desperate Housewives, it's a dialog and situationally driven show.
Apple is always on the edge. If they are first to market, a lukewarm response as the front runner is just as good as a strong success in a large field of competitors. Now the competitors have to play catchup while Apple surges forward with new ideas.
3) It's still a 30/60 GB audio iPod. The high end iPods before video could practically be replaced by the shuffle and Nano because those two fill strong niches and are just about perfect for their market segment. The high end iPod needed an update to justify it's existence. In this manner, Apple keeps the high end and justifies distributing new versions. It's similar to the idea of putting a camera in a phone. It won't but hugely useful but it will be cute and people will eventually catch on and want to have it.
Personally, I don't want a Video iPod for any of these reasons and I'm a touch of a videophile so the screen will be way too small for me. Come back to me when someone creates widely available sunglasses that project an image for me that looks like a 30 inch widescreen TV that no one else can see and I'll buy it.
However, in terms of the market, this isn't all that bad as people make it out to be. The NY times smells that, unlike the other products, the video iPod is not a huge smash, and therefore wants to start the FUD right away, just like any other sensationalistic ad-driven media whore of a news paper.
Yanno, I've always had a problem with people saying animals like pythons are dangerous. Well let's see, considering more people die annually from dog attacks than pythons, we should be microchipping all pets. Okay, those figures are for the United States, but pythons are no more common as pets in Japan in the US. Hey, mice can carry diseases, despite the fact that most white mice owners don't let their mice near trash piles, but let's microchip them just in case! This is a non-problem.
I also have a problem with opening the door to using the tracking of pets to track people. This smacks of over-reaction and the singling out of one class of pet owner either as a weird form of discrimination, or simply fear of what most people don't understand.
Go out and start tagging mosquitos since they carry west nile and malaria, they are far more dangerous world wide to humans than pythons.
Or at least they will be for several centuries. It has nothing to do with AI or realism or functionality. It has to do with the psychology of humans and that little off switch on the back of each. When a human is done with their gigapet or Aibo, they turn it off until they come back later. It's not a virtual pet, it's a toy. Toy's are put away when you are done with them. There never will be any real sense of responsibility to take care of a pet if you can turn it off. Even if you can't turn it off, it becomes very frustrating when the batteries run out and you basically have to start over with a new pet in the same body.
Pet's are reasonably self sufficient compared to toys. If you feed them, they eat it themselves. They nap frequently and you can adapt them to your schedule making it convenient for you. When you play with them, you have to discover the quirks in the pet's personality that make that pet unique. They can be very frustrating to deal with, but very rewarding when they come back to you and give you attention when you need it. Most importantly, most humans want real contact with another being. If it feels like a toy, it's a toy. Pets feel real and can snuggle 100000 times better than a metal or plastic toy.
I tinkered with with one of those gigapets back in the day (hey, I play with all my son's toys, sue me:P). It could only do a few things, and it's charm wore out really quick. It demanded things at odd times when it wasn't convenient and was a hassle.
Even if AI advances that far, who would pay for a quirky emotional robot? That's extremely difficult to program, and annoying if it doesn't behave exactly like a real pet.
Besides, I don't know what the pet situation is in Japan, but in America a real pet can be had for a lot less money (free if you keep your eyes open) and there are plenty to go around. Visit your local kennel and adopt a real pet that needs a good home.
You forgot the 1 comment wishing for a beowulf cluster of tool-using gorillas.
Yes you can expect this
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
If you read up on Civ4.com and every interview Sid has posted about Civ4, there will be four layers of customization in Civ4. As such, I think this should be modded down slightly so that we can make from for a question that hasn't already been answered.
See, what the slashdo community calls "okay" and what Microsoft calls "okay" are not the same thing.
Slashdot see's work as work. You got to work, come up with a new idea, change a very small pocket of the world, make a paycheck and go home. This is their idea of fine and after Google gets done with MS this is exactly where MS will be, a company that is smaller but makes software, turns a profit, and goes on their merry way.
Microsoft see's work like any major company. We need growth, greater profits, more control, higher market share, more more more! If you aren't, you are either shrinking or just about to, because you won't be able to get capital if you aren't growing. The stock market is all about growth. Companies need to be turning more and more profits. If you aren't no one buys your stock and you don't get any capital.
The web will be a platform, not the platform. As a platform its far cheaper to develop and companies retain more control of their own creations if they develop it themselves. They create the application they want, market it to their niche, or use it internally to cut costs, and completely cut microsoft out of the equation. You can't use it for everything, but that's the point, there really isn't one answer for everything out there. Microsoft has been pushing their one size fits all philosophy but corporations are outgrowing that, like children outgrowing their shoes.
So as more web platforms are developed, fewer people buy windows solutions for their specific tasks. Some companies find that web based solutions may work on Linux or Mac, and decide to switch. Not everyone will do it, but there will be options, and corporations will take it.
Then Microsoft will lose revenue. They'll shrink. Windows will not be the choice for everyone. They'll scale back to a majority player, maybe retain a #1 status, but not the same dominant force. They'll effectively lose money and control. Microsoft is basically afraid of losing control and losing money. In that way they won't be fine. They won't be "Microsoft, ruler of the computer universe." Anything that threatens that is not fine to them.
Skin grafting already exists for these types of cases, which takes skin from one part of your body and puts it on another. And if the skin comes from you, it shouldn't be rejected. If most plastic surgeons can reconstruct most faces I don't see why face transplantation is all that interesting for anyone who needs it for burns.
Now, if you are burned over a significant portion of your body I could understand that, but if you have 3 degree burns over more than 50% of your body you have a lot of more things to worry about before you get that face transplant.
... Is anyone wondering what's going on at Microsoft right now?
It starts with a slashdot geek working in the email department spitting up his coffee, followed by a few rumors which make it up to a guy in accounting and customer service, followed by frantic management emails, including some inappropriate language, from Steve and Bill. Then a few good geeks start tracing who this cfsmp3 guy is and try to trace him to a company while the salesreps begin coldcalling any customers running around 1 million customers.
And Microsoft will botch it because they have no experience in cowtowing and bootlicking, which are important skills for any company who wants to humbly keep its customers.
This is not a problem with the existence of forward and backwards buttons, it's an issue with their implementation.
In other words, the grandparent's problem is with I.E., and that most sensible browsers I've used other than I.E. don't blow away post information when I use the back and forward buttons by mistake.
Just wanted to make sure the I.E. flamethrowers knew this was fuel;)
If it doesn't make sense to you that a person highly intelligent about some subject such as astronomy could be completely computer dumb then you are assuming that everyone who reads slashdot is only here because they are linux geeks who do heavy coding. Slashdot is "news for nerds" but my point is not everyone who reads slashdot is computer savvy, even if they read every firefox posting here. Some are more interested in the social and scientific articles which barely scratch upon computer and technical areas.
Allow me to list people who would be denied the goodness of slashdot if you didn't create something that allowed IE to be compatible:
1) People who for some stupid reason or another can only use IE at work and don't have enough control of their PC to install something better. 2) Geeks and nerds who do not fall into the category of computer nerd. There are science geeks, english geeks, political geeks, math geeks, but just because one is a geek about one thing doesn't mean they are geek about computers.
I'm all for scolding IE for not complying to standards, but since MS's philosophy of embrace, extend and extinguish is still in use in IE, don't allow yourself to be extinguished by designing a page that doesn't work around I.E. bugs and cut off major portions of your audience.
Damnit why do/.ers continue to think their requirements match everyone elses? This kind of thinking shows that you think what's good enough for you is good enough for everyone else. That's bullshit.
I personally want an all in one PDA that has MP3s and a phone. Why? I do not want to be carrying around three devices all the time. I'm a man so I don't carry a pocket book, and I don't want to be carrying around a briefcase or anything like that. I want one device on my hip that does it all.
The iPod is the king of MP3 players right now there's no disputing that. But a phone that has a pared down mp3 player is just fine by me, I don't want to load 1000 songs, maybe just 50.
I continue to insist that the Treo 600 and 650 is the device that hits this market perfectly. Great phone, Great PDA, simple MP3 player. This is my dream phone right now and it's all I need.
And it's immune to these worms. Maybe the problem is Symbian is a vulnerable OS, like Windows, and people are so used to viruses on on Windows that they think it's just something all electronic equipment suffers from. In that case, replace your Symbian phone with a Palm or Blackberry or Linux phone and your in good shape.
No it would not necessarily stop. If that's the only way you can get your product to market is by signing away the rights, then you have to do it. Companies like the software publishers and music recording industry create a stranglehold on the market so smaller companies can't break in and make a huge amount of headway. You can't compete if the 800 lb gorilla says you can't unless you play the game their way.
Artists should have the same rights as any other tradesman. Does the carpenter own the rights to your kitchen just because he builds the cabinets?
Wrong Metaphor.
If I ask a carpenter to design a kitchen and I pay him for it, does he have the right to go to other houses and install the same kitched?
The answer is... it depends on your contract. The answer should be yes.
The gaming industry right now is evolving into the music and movie industries. To get published you have to sign away your life to a publisher who blasts the game all over the media. The internet is a great tool for indie developer shops but when I go to gamespot I only see games from the bigtime publishers in all the advertisements.
What has to stop is the person who commissioned the kitchen from saying in a contract "If you install this kitchen in anyone elses house, I get half of what you make on the sale."
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is.
I'd be a rich man if had a nickel for every time I heard this.
Wake up!!! Bad patents like this will not solve the problem, because the politicians don't care. They like this because it favors business and it's easier to legislate if companies just duke it out in court. One of the following things must happen before real patent reform occurs:
1) The US elects a president and congress interested in the people's well being and take an interest in reasonable intellectual property laws (ha!) 2) A major public incident occurs which hurts a major company in a very visible way and which a particular industry takes to heart and decides to inact patent reform. Note this will require a little luck too, as something like this could make things better or worse. 3) A fee select companies have an attack of conscience and join those who've already started the patent reform campaign in order to get it on lawmakers radar. (ya right!) 4) A bad patent directly affects the US government and a huge battle ensues where by the US wakes up and applies some partial fixes and revamps the patent office which only fix part of the problem but are a step in the right direction.
Stuff like this is so far down the priority list of politicians. I'm sorry but I'm not optimistic about US patent laws. Control over laws for intellectual property was lost the moment someone decided to extend copywrite laws past the original 20 year rule and someone decided the PTO was too busy to actually give patent applications a real quality overview.
The most significant problem with trying to use IT technology to fix this that more and more households have both parents working. School allows kids to be monitored while parents can go off and make the money.
The implication here is that somehow IT will make it so that kids won't have to leave home, and right now in US society that's not realistic. Children need to go somewhere else to be taught and monitored until society shifts back to a model where only one parent is a breadwinner.
You might think this will work for teenagers in high school, but I guarentee you no matter what controls you put on your lessons to try to motivate them to attend a "lesson" online, you'll have a dramatic rise in goof offs unless you have a parent who has the time to stay home and make sure they stay involved.
The answer here is alternative sources of energy, not alternative teaching methods.
Slashdot Mirror
The Grandparent post is right in their sentiment. They need to test this in more than just sunny temperate california. It has nothing to do with how hydrogen reacts to extreme climates, but it has everything to do with how the Car reacts to extreme climates.
:)
We have enough posts on how people like MS aren't testing their software enough, but now we criticize someone who thinks they should be testing more?
You might think Honda would do this, but be cautious. This is brand new technology, of course, and businesses love to cut corners in order to make it to market on time.
There have been numerous articles posted to slashdot on how Bill has attempted to "donate" PCs to schools and other places. While making straight cash donations is fine, the Gates foundation has done some things that make anti-trust advocates cringe. Donating PCs seems like a good thing, but it's anti-competitive. A monopoly giving away it's product (in this case the OS and office/student software made by microsoft) is illegal and should not be allowed. Bill is not above trying this sleazy tactic and he knows what he's doing, even if Melissa does not acknowledge it.
or for Time Warner, which owns CNN, to charge a premium if I want to watch Fox News on my computer.
That may not necessarily be a bad thing. Anything that keeps idiots from watching people who take advantage of idiots is fine by me.
That would be so damn cool if this wasn't added at the end of the page.
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The first thing is to definite what jobs you have there. Web designer vs network engineer vs help desk level 2 or whatever you have. List out their responsibilities and required skills. Do this like HR, but make it seem important, don't over do it It's important to define the role as best you can and identify if the job that person is either completely unique or can be taken over by someone else. For example, if you have one DBA who manages the database for your system, and no one else really has his responsibilities or his skills then that's a specific job. If some guy is responsible for keeping an eye the email server but 5 other guys could do it, then his role is more broad, that of a generic IT tech.
Once you have a definition of their jobs, then create levels. Four levels is typical. Each position has levels for which for which the level gets both more responsibilities and more pay. First level is entry level. Second level is "certified" in that they've proven themselves over months or even up to a year as being good employee. 3rd level is senior in that they know the processes well, are fairly independent, and have high quality of work. 4th level are those few shining examples of great employees who do outstanding work on many different levels and would be very hard to replace.
Create paths to different groups to. For example, in a lot of IT departments, the path from a department that helps with desktop leads to network or server support as advancement.
Create requirements for each level to move from level 1 to 2. Some people use written tests to grade someone skills, others simply use management review. Some require a specific certification in a computer technology.
Finally, make sure everyone in IT starts out as level 1 and create a short term plan to have everyone move through the levels. This will help you figure out who's worth holding onto, and reward them appropriately. Be Prepared for a little backlash from those who don't warrant promotion, but if they don't warrant it, you have documentation as to why not.
And make sure you have guidelines for how managers should document everyone under their pervue so that they have a more standardized way of grading people and don't go off doing their own thing. When one manager grades easy and one grades hard, the people under the harsh manager feel left out while the easy guys get the money.
Keeping PC gaming alive:
What factors do you think help keep PC gaming alive when competing with consoles, and do you foresee that PC gaming will continue to survive when confronted with the next generation of consoles? From the reverse perspective, what prevents consoles from finally killing off PC gaming?
I missed this question when the original article asking for questions was posted. But this is a silly waste. Sid's answer is spot on, and I wish I knocked this down a knotch with a mod point.
Lumping an entire market together and insisting they are direct competitors for the exact same dollar is stupid. Civ4 cannot be played well with a PS2 controller, and Grand Turismo plays crappy on a keyboard. You can find a way to make it work, but no one is going to spend the time to try to code it. It's a waste. The market will show you that there is room for both, and while there are lots of crossovers, you will also see that there are lots of areas where there is absolutely no crossover, simply because of interface issues.
Sid makes some other great points about graphics and upgrades you can do to a PC. This goes into the fact that a $100-$300 console can run a fast paced racing game with better performance than a $1500 computer. PC games are notorious for being slow and skipping frames. Some console games do this, but that's considered a bug in the console game and it doesn't do so well if it performs badly. However, in the PC world if a game has godly system requirements for any reason, the blame is more often put on the PC and not the person who coded it to require too much power. Sometimes that's deserving but having to spend hours just to fine tune your system to play Quake or Doom is nuts.
They are all gaming companies, but different games for different platforms will always be here, and I hope it gets even more diverse, because we need the diversity.
I demand Slashdot put a new option to identify any slashdot posting that contains a link to a John Dvorak piece of trash article. I filtered out JonKatz a long time ago when all I saw were whiny repetitive stupid opinion pieces with no real insight. John Dvorak is the same way, and I go out of my way to avoid his trash. Please someone put this in so I can just skip over these postings, too.
Most people want to highlight why it's bad. With music, as most slashdotters recognise, it's far more portable than video. You can listen to video while driving to work, travelling, standing in line, exercising, jogging, etc. Video requires eyeballs, of course, which are often doing other things. It might work while travelling on a train or plane, standing in line, or exercising, but video is not workable on 40% of the list I mentioned
However:
1) People do want to take video with them. Take a look at the recent portable kid video players. They've mostly been crap, but they are for kids who don't care as much about quality, and for parents who want to occupy their children on long trips and commutes. Also, if you are riding the train to work every day, why not get that extra episode in during the commute?
2) Get into the market now and define the standard everyone has to beat. Those kid players I mentioned were dismissed as toys. The iPod has a mystique as a sexy "entertainment device." The video isn't all that bad, for that size of a screen anyway, and you don't need high quality video for Desperate Housewives, it's a dialog and situationally driven show.
Apple is always on the edge. If they are first to market, a lukewarm response as the front runner is just as good as a strong success in a large field of competitors. Now the competitors have to play catchup while Apple surges forward with new ideas.
3) It's still a 30/60 GB audio iPod. The high end iPods before video could practically be replaced by the shuffle and Nano because those two fill strong niches and are just about perfect for their market segment. The high end iPod needed an update to justify it's existence. In this manner, Apple keeps the high end and justifies distributing new versions. It's similar to the idea of putting a camera in a phone. It won't but hugely useful but it will be cute and people will eventually catch on and want to have it.
Personally, I don't want a Video iPod for any of these reasons and I'm a touch of a videophile so the screen will be way too small for me. Come back to me when someone creates widely available sunglasses that project an image for me that looks like a 30 inch widescreen TV that no one else can see and I'll buy it.
However, in terms of the market, this isn't all that bad as people make it out to be. The NY times smells that, unlike the other products, the video iPod is not a huge smash, and therefore wants to start the FUD right away, just like any other sensationalistic ad-driven media whore of a news paper.
Yanno, I've always had a problem with people saying animals like pythons are dangerous. Well let's see, considering more people die annually from dog attacks than pythons, we should be microchipping all pets. Okay, those figures are for the United States, but pythons are no more common as pets in Japan in the US. Hey, mice can carry diseases, despite the fact that most white mice owners don't let their mice near trash piles, but let's microchip them just in case! This is a non-problem.
I also have a problem with opening the door to using the tracking of pets to track people. This smacks of over-reaction and the singling out of one class of pet owner either as a weird form of discrimination, or simply fear of what most people don't understand.
Go out and start tagging mosquitos since they carry west nile and malaria, they are far more dangerous world wide to humans than pythons.
5. Walmart buys K-mart
:)
K-mart was already bought by Sears. Pay attention you ninny
Or at least they will be for several centuries. It has nothing to do with AI or realism or functionality. It has to do with the psychology of humans and that little off switch on the back of each. When a human is done with their gigapet or Aibo, they turn it off until they come back later. It's not a virtual pet, it's a toy. Toy's are put away when you are done with them. There never will be any real sense of responsibility to take care of a pet if you can turn it off. Even if you can't turn it off, it becomes very frustrating when the batteries run out and you basically have to start over with a new pet in the same body.
:P). It could only do a few things, and it's charm wore out really quick. It demanded things at odd times when it wasn't convenient and was a hassle.
Pet's are reasonably self sufficient compared to toys. If you feed them, they eat it themselves. They nap frequently and you can adapt them to your schedule making it convenient for you. When you play with them, you have to discover the quirks in the pet's personality that make that pet unique. They can be very frustrating to deal with, but very rewarding when they come back to you and give you attention when you need it. Most importantly, most humans want real contact with another being. If it feels like a toy, it's a toy. Pets feel real and can snuggle 100000 times better than a metal or plastic toy.
I tinkered with with one of those gigapets back in the day (hey, I play with all my son's toys, sue me
Even if AI advances that far, who would pay for a quirky emotional robot? That's extremely difficult to program, and annoying if it doesn't behave exactly like a real pet.
Besides, I don't know what the pet situation is in Japan, but in America a real pet can be had for a lot less money (free if you keep your eyes open) and there are plenty to go around. Visit your local kennel and adopt a real pet that needs a good home.
You forgot the 1 comment wishing for a beowulf cluster of tool-using gorillas.
If you read up on Civ4.com and every interview Sid has posted about Civ4, there will be four layers of customization in Civ4. As such, I think this should be modded down slightly so that we can make from for a question that hasn't already been answered.
See, what the slashdo community calls "okay" and what Microsoft calls "okay" are not the same thing.
Slashdot see's work as work. You got to work, come up with a new idea, change a very small pocket of the world, make a paycheck and go home. This is their idea of fine and after Google gets done with MS this is exactly where MS will be, a company that is smaller but makes software, turns a profit, and goes on their merry way.
Microsoft see's work like any major company. We need growth, greater profits, more control, higher market share, more more more! If you aren't, you are either shrinking or just about to, because you won't be able to get capital if you aren't growing. The stock market is all about growth. Companies need to be turning more and more profits. If you aren't no one buys your stock and you don't get any capital.
The web will be a platform, not the platform. As a platform its far cheaper to develop and companies retain more control of their own creations if they develop it themselves. They create the application they want, market it to their niche, or use it internally to cut costs, and completely cut microsoft out of the equation. You can't use it for everything, but that's the point, there really isn't one answer for everything out there. Microsoft has been pushing their one size fits all philosophy but corporations are outgrowing that, like children outgrowing their shoes.
So as more web platforms are developed, fewer people buy windows solutions for their specific tasks. Some companies find that web based solutions may work on Linux or Mac, and decide to switch. Not everyone will do it, but there will be options, and corporations will take it.
Then Microsoft will lose revenue. They'll shrink. Windows will not be the choice for everyone. They'll scale back to a majority player, maybe retain a #1 status, but not the same dominant force. They'll effectively lose money and control. Microsoft is basically afraid of losing control and losing money. In that way they won't be fine. They won't be "Microsoft, ruler of the computer universe." Anything that threatens that is not fine to them.
Skin grafting already exists for these types of cases, which takes skin from one part of your body and puts it on another. And if the skin comes from you, it shouldn't be rejected. If most plastic surgeons can reconstruct most faces I don't see why face transplantation is all that interesting for anyone who needs it for burns.
Now, if you are burned over a significant portion of your body I could understand that, but if you have 3 degree burns over more than 50% of your body you have a lot of more things to worry about before you get that face transplant.
Does this mean Larry only purchased Siebel for......
One Meellion Dollars!!!> (dramatic music)
What a steal!
... Is anyone wondering what's going on at Microsoft right now?
It starts with a slashdot geek working in the email department spitting up his coffee, followed by a few rumors which make it up to a guy in accounting and customer service, followed by frantic management emails, including some inappropriate language, from Steve and Bill. Then a few good geeks start tracing who this cfsmp3 guy is and try to trace him to a company while the salesreps begin coldcalling any customers running around 1 million customers.
And Microsoft will botch it because they have no experience in cowtowing and bootlicking, which are important skills for any company who wants to humbly keep its customers.
This is not a problem with the existence of forward and backwards buttons, it's an issue with their implementation.
;)
In other words, the grandparent's problem is with I.E., and that most sensible browsers I've used other than I.E. don't blow away post information when I use the back and forward buttons by mistake.
Just wanted to make sure the I.E. flamethrowers knew this was fuel
If it doesn't make sense to you that a person highly intelligent about some subject such as astronomy could be completely computer dumb then you are assuming that everyone who reads slashdot is only here because they are linux geeks who do heavy coding. Slashdot is "news for nerds" but my point is not everyone who reads slashdot is computer savvy, even if they read every firefox posting here. Some are more interested in the social and scientific articles which barely scratch upon computer and technical areas.
Allow me to list people who would be denied the goodness of slashdot if you didn't create something that allowed IE to be compatible:
1) People who for some stupid reason or another can only use IE at work and don't have enough control of their PC to install something better.
2) Geeks and nerds who do not fall into the category of computer nerd. There are science geeks, english geeks, political geeks, math geeks, but just because one is a geek about one thing doesn't mean they are geek about computers.
I'm all for scolding IE for not complying to standards, but since MS's philosophy of embrace, extend and extinguish is still in use in IE, don't allow yourself to be extinguished by designing a page that doesn't work around I.E. bugs and cut off major portions of your audience.
Damnit why do /.ers continue to think their requirements match everyone elses? This kind of thinking shows that you think what's good enough for you is good enough for everyone else. That's bullshit.
I personally want an all in one PDA that has MP3s and a phone. Why? I do not want to be carrying around three devices all the time. I'm a man so I don't carry a pocket book, and I don't want to be carrying around a briefcase or anything like that. I want one device on my hip that does it all.
The iPod is the king of MP3 players right now there's no disputing that. But a phone that has a pared down mp3 player is just fine by me, I don't want to load 1000 songs, maybe just 50.
I continue to insist that the Treo 600 and 650 is the device that hits this market perfectly. Great phone, Great PDA, simple MP3 player. This is my dream phone right now and it's all I need.
And it's immune to these worms. Maybe the problem is Symbian is a vulnerable OS, like Windows, and people are so used to viruses on on Windows that they think it's just something all electronic equipment suffers from. In that case, replace your Symbian phone with a Palm or Blackberry or Linux phone and your in good shape.
No it would not necessarily stop. If that's the only way you can get your product to market is by signing away the rights, then you have to do it. Companies like the software publishers and music recording industry create a stranglehold on the market so smaller companies can't break in and make a huge amount of headway. You can't compete if the 800 lb gorilla says you can't unless you play the game their way.
Artists should have the same rights as any other tradesman. Does the carpenter own the rights to your kitchen just because he builds the cabinets?
Wrong Metaphor.
If I ask a carpenter to design a kitchen and I pay him for it, does he have the right to go to other houses and install the same kitched?
The answer is... it depends on your contract. The answer should be yes.
The gaming industry right now is evolving into the music and movie industries. To get published you have to sign away your life to a publisher who blasts the game all over the media. The internet is a great tool for indie developer shops but when I go to gamespot I only see games from the bigtime publishers in all the advertisements.
What has to stop is the person who commissioned the kitchen from saying in a contract "If you install this kitchen in anyone elses house, I get half of what you make on the sale."
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is.
I'd be a rich man if had a nickel for every time I heard this.
Wake up!!! Bad patents like this will not solve the problem, because the politicians don't care. They like this because it favors business and it's easier to legislate if companies just duke it out in court. One of the following things must happen before real patent reform occurs:
1) The US elects a president and congress interested in the people's well being and take an interest in reasonable intellectual property laws (ha!)
2) A major public incident occurs which hurts a major company in a very visible way and which a particular industry takes to heart and decides to inact patent reform. Note this will require a little luck too, as something like this could make things better or worse.
3) A fee select companies have an attack of conscience and join those who've already started the patent reform campaign in order to get it on lawmakers radar. (ya right!)
4) A bad patent directly affects the US government and a huge battle ensues where by the US wakes up and applies some partial fixes and revamps the patent office which only fix part of the problem but are a step in the right direction.
Stuff like this is so far down the priority list of politicians. I'm sorry but I'm not optimistic about US patent laws. Control over laws for intellectual property was lost the moment someone decided to extend copywrite laws past the original 20 year rule and someone decided the PTO was too busy to actually give patent applications a real quality overview.
The most significant problem with trying to use IT technology to fix this that more and more households have both parents working. School allows kids to be monitored while parents can go off and make the money.
The implication here is that somehow IT will make it so that kids won't have to leave home, and right now in US society that's not realistic. Children need to go somewhere else to be taught and monitored until society shifts back to a model where only one parent is a breadwinner.
You might think this will work for teenagers in high school, but I guarentee you no matter what controls you put on your lessons to try to motivate them to attend a "lesson" online, you'll have a dramatic rise in goof offs unless you have a parent who has the time to stay home and make sure they stay involved.
The answer here is alternative sources of energy, not alternative teaching methods.