A few people in our organization have them and I find them (the devices) to be somewhat distracting. During meetings, I see coworkers constantly, not so covertly, glancing down to IM someone, read their mail, or mostly check stock quotes. However, I suppose this is mostly a cultural issue. Here in North America, that would be considered rude. When I'm in China, I notice that people don't think twice about stopping mid-sentence to take a call or read an incoming IM. When I asked a few people about the practice, they seemed genuinely puzzled by the question and said that it wasn't considered rude or out of the ordinary at all. So I guess the answer is "it depends on where you are.":-)
Sony has an enormous cultural hurdle to overcome for any buyer. Just ask the guys at BMG who get told to effectively mind their own business on the record label side of things. Having the cash to buy a piece of Sony is probably only 5% of the battle. The other 95% would be trying to integrate with a company who's management is very antagonistic to any outside "interference".
The labels are coming to the realization that content is only as strong as your means of distributing it. They spent so much time and energy trying to corner the physical delivery of media that digital distribution has mostly passed them by. If Apple and some of the other digital distributors can draw a line in the sand and stick to their guns, the labels will have to play ball...or they can sit on the sidelines and watch as their physical media distribution model withers on the vine and try to starve out the digital distributors. Given the level of greed and focus on short-term profits in the music industry, I don't see a "strike" in their future. They'll blink first.
heh...Stallman is still at his old game of "if I tell people it's mine over and over, someone will eventually believe it."
The FSF has already had its chance to bundle their tools around their own kernel with Hurd and that has failed miserably after MANY years of wasting resources on it. I wish he/they would stop trying to claim ownership of someone else's kernel to buy them the air of legitimacy needed to foist their political ideals on anyone who decides to use free software. The existing GPL isn't broken and weighing it down with political anti-DRM diatribe does not appeal to me, as a user, at all...even though I agree that DRM is not a great idea. I also don't agree with clubbing baby seals, but I don't think THAT needs to be part of the free software licensing scheme either...
pr0n. Say what you want about it, but it drives the Internet and probably pulls in a LOT more jingle than all "legit" music/movie sites on the Internet combined.
Unless the company's written policy was "you cannot delete files from this laptop we've given you" then I can't see where there is a problem. If they really needed those files, they should have taken possession of the laptop BEFORE the fit hit the shan rather than cry foul after the fact.
Oh come on. Check your political baggage at the door please. Trying to paint this poster as someone who thinks Enron-style white collar crime is OK is simply in very poor taste.
Tracking large movements of cash by private citizens is certainly useful in keeping track of criminal activity. Yes, it does inconvenience legitimate users of big wads of cash and I think we can all agree that this case was a waste of law enforcement resources.
And perhaps you are willing to wink at criminal behaviour so that you can secretly wire a few thousand quid to your mistress without having a few questions raised. I am not.
Personally, I give it another 20 years before cash as we know it today to be almost completely worthless. It would be like walking into a Walmart with gold bullion and expecting the teller to accomodate you. The world is changing.
Large financial transactions are monitored. They always have been. However, the threshold of "what's interesting" to the government has been lowered. Do I think this particular instance makes sense? Of course not. The government is simply trying to track "large" movements of cash that are outside of the mainstream to catch money laundering. I had a similar experience recently when I bought a new car and paid cash (recently inherited some $$$). Do I find it annoying? Yes. However, I also find it a necessary nuissance to help keep smugglers and criminals from easily moving money around through our banking system.
If you've got a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
Ten years ago, Apple and Microsoft weren't feuding with the labels and weren't throwing bucketloads of $$$ at politicians to "level the playing field."
I think the labels see their doom, but they just don't understand how to make a legitimate go of things as the old style payola model is being stripped away and artists have other distribution outlets for their content. So I suspect you'll see them continue to dig in their heels and make increasingly desperate moves to maintain the status quo...because they just don't know how to do it any other way.
I'd been avoiding the whole mini-mp3/video ipod thing, but recently caved into my young daughter's pleas for a PSP. It plays games, it plays mp4 movies, it plays mp3's, has a *usable* screen size, has easily removable memory sticks, and has reasonable battery life (I was able to use it to watch two feature-length movies on a single charge on a recent flight to Tokyo and still had enough juice to play games for an hour or two afterwards). I can't imagine wanting anything much smaller as the screen just becomes too unusable.
They would have to create one. Microsoft is going to eventually shut down their most lucrative market since consumers are more likely to trust Microsoft's own virus solution rather than pay a 3rd party. (I'm not saying that it is actually true that Microsoft is a better security guardian, but that's how average people are likely to react.) So the virus software vendors are about to become frantic for an alternate source of revenue.
The old boy network is too busy arguing amongst themselves over which "standard" will reap them the most rewards to spend any real time considering the effect of these decisions on mere consumers...the people who are supposed to lap this stuff up at their local electronics store and video rental outlet....
They found anomolies in 40 machines? How many machines were there in total? Did all of the anomolies favor one candidate or were they seemingly random? Was the constantly rebooting machine having hardware problems? Were the machines with wierd date stamps having hardware clock issues?
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors. Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer.
Don't the malware folks get hip to the honeypots rather quickly or do they just unleash their plague and hope the hits overwhelm any setbacks from the honeypot?
the warp engine patent discussed a few days ago? Hell, even the USPTO threw THAT one out. Maybe he figured he'd slip the perpetuatl motion machine in the mix now that he's got the examiners off balance. 8-) Coming to a penny stock near you!!!
I also have an R3000Z and it is absolutely merciless on the battery when I've got to use it as a laptop (rather than as a desktop replacement). It's a very powerful and relatively cheap laptop though. If such an upgrade was possible, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
It's not the crime that gets you into trouble....it's the cover up. ATI is foolish to try to cover this up. They should have just announced a "mistake" and made some offer to existing customers to make things better. They are a public company and the SEC is going to be very interested in this since they are listed on the NASDAQ exchange in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we've seen how the adoption of UMD on the Sony PSP console did wonders for that media format. 8-)
Britney Spears is lame...
And Survivor is lame...
And all reality TV is lame...
Christ, it seems that the masses really do have no taste.
Just because thinking humans think it sucks doesn't mean that the lemmings won't congregate there.
I dunno. I look forward to getting my first spam hawking nanites that will migrate through my body and increase the size of my m4nh00d.
A few people in our organization have them and I find them (the devices) to be somewhat distracting. During meetings, I see coworkers constantly, not so covertly, glancing down to IM someone, read their mail, or mostly check stock quotes. However, I suppose this is mostly a cultural issue. Here in North America, that would be considered rude. When I'm in China, I notice that people don't think twice about stopping mid-sentence to take a call or read an incoming IM. When I asked a few people about the practice, they seemed genuinely puzzled by the question and said that it wasn't considered rude or out of the ordinary at all. So I guess the answer is "it depends on where you are." :-)
Sony has an enormous cultural hurdle to overcome for any buyer. Just ask the guys at BMG who get told to effectively mind their own business on the record label side of things. Having the cash to buy a piece of Sony is probably only 5% of the battle. The other 95% would be trying to integrate with a company who's management is very antagonistic to any outside "interference".
The labels are coming to the realization that content is only as strong as your means of distributing it. They spent so much time and energy trying to corner the physical delivery of media that digital distribution has mostly passed them by. If Apple and some of the other digital distributors can draw a line in the sand and stick to their guns, the labels will have to play ball...or they can sit on the sidelines and watch as their physical media distribution model withers on the vine and try to starve out the digital distributors. Given the level of greed and focus on short-term profits in the music industry, I don't see a "strike" in their future. They'll blink first.
We ought to switch to the teddy and pointy bra model. Madonna seems to be shipping lots of product. :-)
heh...Stallman is still at his old game of "if I tell people it's mine over and over, someone will eventually believe it."
The FSF has already had its chance to bundle their tools around their own kernel with Hurd and that has failed miserably after MANY years of wasting resources on it. I wish he/they would stop trying to claim ownership of someone else's kernel to buy them the air of legitimacy needed to foist their political ideals on anyone who decides to use free software. The existing GPL isn't broken and weighing it down with political anti-DRM diatribe does not appeal to me, as a user, at all...even though I agree that DRM is not a great idea. I also don't agree with clubbing baby seals, but I don't think THAT needs to be part of the free software licensing scheme either...
It's a reliable "clone" of RHEL, it's free, it's very well supported and it placed 2nd in the most recent Linux Journal reader's choice awards.
I'd say that makes it important and relevant for hobbyists and people who are using their servers for real work alike.
Cheers,
Unless you're working on a laptop, how many people work such that their EAR is within 1M of their PC?
pr0n. Say what you want about it, but it drives the Internet and probably pulls in a LOT more jingle than all "legit" music/movie sites on the Internet combined.
Unless the company's written policy was "you cannot delete files from this laptop we've given you" then I can't see where there is a problem. If they really needed those files, they should have taken possession of the laptop BEFORE the fit hit the shan rather than cry foul after the fact.
Now that they're cutting back on services and making it more difficult to avoid commercials, surely there must be a better service out there...
Is there?
Oh come on. Check your political baggage at the door please. Trying to paint this poster as someone who thinks Enron-style white collar crime is OK is simply in very poor taste.
Tracking large movements of cash by private citizens is certainly useful in keeping track of criminal activity. Yes, it does inconvenience legitimate users of big wads of cash and I think we can all agree that this case was a waste of law enforcement resources.
And perhaps you are willing to wink at criminal behaviour so that you can secretly wire a few thousand quid to your mistress without having a few questions raised. I am not.
Personally, I give it another 20 years before cash as we know it today to be almost completely worthless. It would be like walking into a Walmart with gold bullion and expecting the teller to accomodate you. The world is changing.
Large financial transactions are monitored. They always have been. However, the threshold of "what's interesting" to the government has been lowered. Do I think this particular instance makes sense? Of course not. The government is simply trying to track "large" movements of cash that are outside of the mainstream to catch money laundering. I had a similar experience recently when I bought a new car and paid cash (recently inherited some $$$). Do I find it annoying? Yes. However, I also find it a necessary nuissance to help keep smugglers and criminals from easily moving money around through our banking system.
If you've got a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
Ten years ago, Apple and Microsoft weren't feuding with the labels and weren't throwing bucketloads of $$$ at politicians to "level the playing field."
I think the labels see their doom, but they just don't understand how to make a legitimate go of things as the old style payola model is being stripped away and artists have other distribution outlets for their content. So I suspect you'll see them continue to dig in their heels and make increasingly desperate moves to maintain the status quo...because they just don't know how to do it any other way.
I'd been avoiding the whole mini-mp3/video ipod thing, but recently caved into my young daughter's pleas for a PSP. It plays games, it plays mp4 movies, it plays mp3's, has a *usable* screen size, has easily removable memory sticks, and has reasonable battery life (I was able to use it to watch two feature-length movies on a single charge on a recent flight to Tokyo and still had enough juice to play games for an hour or two afterwards). I can't imagine wanting anything much smaller as the screen just becomes too unusable.
Cheers,
They would have to create one. Microsoft is going to eventually shut down their most lucrative market since consumers are more likely to trust Microsoft's own virus solution rather than pay a 3rd party. (I'm not saying that it is actually true that Microsoft is a better security guardian, but that's how average people are likely to react.) So the virus software vendors are about to become frantic for an alternate source of revenue.
The old boy network is too busy arguing amongst themselves over which "standard" will reap them the most rewards to spend any real time considering the effect of these decisions on mere consumers...the people who are supposed to lap this stuff up at their local electronics store and video rental outlet....
I think I'll pass.
They found anomolies in 40 machines? How many machines were there in total? Did all of the anomolies favor one candidate or were they seemingly random? Was the constantly rebooting machine having hardware problems? Were the machines with wierd date stamps having hardware clock issues?
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors. Folks might want to consider the more mundane potential causes of these problems before heading for their tinfoil hat drawer.
Don't the malware folks get hip to the honeypots rather quickly or do they just unleash their plague and hope the hits overwhelm any setbacks from the honeypot?
the warp engine patent discussed a few days ago? Hell, even the USPTO threw THAT one out. Maybe he figured he'd slip the perpetuatl motion machine in the mix now that he's got the examiners off balance. 8-) Coming to a penny stock near you!!!
I also have an R3000Z and it is absolutely merciless on the battery when I've got to use it as a laptop (rather than as a desktop replacement). It's a very powerful and relatively cheap laptop though. If such an upgrade was possible, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
There once was a dude with a Mac
Who's code he tried to attack
His grin was short-lived
When Jobs did not forgive
And gave him a boot in the sack.
It's not the crime that gets you into trouble....it's the cover up. ATI is foolish to try to cover this up. They should have just announced a "mistake" and made some offer to existing customers to make things better. They are a public company and the SEC is going to be very interested in this since they are listed on the NASDAQ exchange in the US.