First of all, let me say they shouldn't be worried about XBox 360's supposed lead. You still can't buy one of those, and as far as I'm concerned Microsoft's inability to actually put them on store shelves has blown any advantage they might have gotten from an earlier release. As far as I'm concerned, Xbox 360 doesn't exist until I can actually buy one.
But that's not why we're here. We're here to rag on Sony.
They've got themselves a mess. They are trying to bring BluRay and PS3 to market this year. They want the analysts to believe that PS3 is not late because of PS3-specific problems, but because of BluRay problems. At the same time, they're trying to convince analysts that BluRay will roll out without a hitch in May. Maybe they're praying the same analysts don't go to both press conferences.
But I'm guessing that the reality is that they can't make enough BluRay drives and disks to satisfy both markets. And if they don't satisfy the BluRay movie market, they will get creamed by HD DVD. I bet there's a big Betamax poster on the wall of every cubile in the BluRay division.
And then there's price. BluRay players will be expensive. Sony won't even talk about the price of their players, and they're due on the market in 2 months. A lot of people are thinking a BluRay player will start at almost a grand (twice HD DVD). So that's an uphill battle already. And what happens if they price a BluRay movie-playing PS3 at $300? Nobody buys the BluRay players, they get the much cheaper PS3, which is being sold at a loss. And since they're only buying it for the movies, Sony doesn't get the loss back in game licensing fees.
I'm sure glad I'm not Sony right now. They've bet their future on these two products, and they have to delay one or the other, and either way, they lose market share to a competitor.
1. eBay should get a bunch of Congressmen and their staffers hooked on Buy It Now, and the patents will be magically tossed out. Or does that only work for RIM?
2. Q: What's the difference Buy It Now and dickering at a yard sale? A: The return on investment of suing yard sales.
I would think they would be encouraging victims to withdraw from the class action. Maybe the victims who did so would get nothing (as opposed to next-to-nothing), but every victim who withdrew from the class would cost the lawyers who agreed to this worthless settlement a little bit of their fee.
Not only does the agreement not compensate the victims for real damages ($7.50 is what, 10 minutes of tech support?), but contains no punitive damages. Let's not forget that Sony didn't just use DRM, they infected their victims computers with a virus, stole personal information, opened up their computers to further attacks, and then took deliberate actions to cover up their wrongdoing. If you or I did that, we'd be facing jail time.
Hollywood will continue to blame their problems on everything except the cause of their problems: A significant percentage of today's movie suck simply because Hollywood has greatly underestimated the intelligence of its audience.
Meanwhile, back at home, Earth scientists are busy building plausible explanations as to how fossil fuel loving Republicans are behind this major environmental ship on our solar system's largest planet.
After reading the article, it's not rocket science to figure out what's going on here. Verizon has been spoiled by the cell phone model, where service providers get a piece of the pie on all the content users download. Now they want the same deal across the board - they want complete control of all the content their customers have access to so that they can nickle and dime them for content, just like they do in the cell phone market.
My advice to Verizon - if expanding your network is not profitable, then stop. Duh.
We are sorry to inform you that you will no longer be able to access Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and other high-bandwidth commercial sites through your Verizon internet connection. Due to the loads that these services place on Verizon's network system, Verizon has instituted a new policy which states that high-bandwidth commercial web sites must compensate Verizon for their usage of our network. The companies listed above, and others, have elected not to do so. Therefore, we have no choice but to discontinue the availability of these and other web sites on your internet connection.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Sincerely,
Verizon Customer Service
------------------
Dear Verizon,
Pbbbbbtttthhhppp.
Sincerely,
A Valued Soon-To-Be Ex-Verizon Customer.
but it's not like you won't get checks yourself when you retire.
That's exactly what it's like!! With people living longer and longer, where do you thing the money will come from? As the population gets older, you have to raise the amount of money you take from those still working, which means they will have less to save for their own retirement, which makes them more dependent on Social Security. It becomes a vicious cycle. And since Social Security doesn't pay enough to keep you above the poverty level, that means more of the elderly will live under the poverty level. Something has to change.
The issue of Social Security is always viewed as "I GOTTA GIV UP MAH DAMN MONEY TO SOMEONE ELSE?" and never "The government is taking my money and holding it so I don't blow it foolhardily in between now and when I am old".
Grab your last Social Security statement and figure out the present value of you future SS checks, and compare it with how much money you've put in, and tell me that they're going to give it back.
It may be there for us, but it will be coming out of children's and grandchildren's paychecks. If I offered to write my father a check for $100 every week, there's no way in hell he'd take it. But every week, that's exactly what Social Security does.
Because children in third-world countries can afford to pony up $30/month for a cell phone plan.
(And yes, I'm aware that in many 3rd world countries, cell phones are more plentiful than land lines, but that's only because there are very few land lines.)
1. In a Government agency, EVERYTHING is reviewed by Public Affairs before it's released to the press.
2. Review != censorship; Censorship == remove;
3. If he doesn't like NASA's policies, he can quit. Or does he think keeping his salary is more important than saving the planet? I'm sure he could find a better paying job with "top climate scientist at NASA" on his resume.
4. Searching the news archives, it looks like nobody knew who he was before December.
5. An unrealistic sense of self-importance is a mandatory requirement for paranoia. Chances are pretty good the Bush administration doesn't know who this guy is, and doesn't care, either.
The NASDAQ got hit for 2.35%, S&P 500 for 1.8%. Big losses across the board, and I'd expect a young tech company with a high PE like Google to get slammed worse than the averages. So I doubt this has anything to do with the DoJ. Typical stock rag reporting. A happened. B happened later. Therefore, B was caused by A.
Actually, even though the article credits Franklin for the invention of the patent, patents were in use hundreds of years before he was even born, as a quick Google of "history of patents" will reveal:
The earliest known English patent for invention was granted by Henry VI to Flemish-born John of Utynam in 1449. The patent gave John a 20-year monopoly for a method of making stained glass, required for the windows of Eton College, that had not been previously known in England. http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/whatis/fivehundred /origins.htm)
I doubt the origin of the patent clause in the US Constitution has any more significance than simply "business as usual", since patent and copyright rights had previously afforded to colonists under British law.
FYI - Benjamin Franklin is responsible for hundreds of inventions, yet refused to file a patent for any of them. In fact, he published them openly, often with explanations of how they worked, so that others could copy and use them without paying him roylties.
The purpose of a DC is to allow the programmer to render the image without having to give a rat's ass as to whether he's rendering to a printed page, display screen, or other device. In other words, the DC is an abstraction layer between the program and the rendering device's device driver - you only have to write one set of code to render to any device, instead of one set of code for a printer, one for a screen, one for a plotter, etc.
The purpose of a metafile is to allow a program to save the commands used to render an image and play them back later. I.e., a program could "print" to a file, the file to be transferred to a printshop, and then be played back on a printing press. A metafile is Windows equivalent of PostScript, or PCL.
In order for the abstraction to be complete, all DCs must accept all commands (or else the program has to figure out what commands are valid or invalid for the current DC type). So the metafile must accept AetAbortProc(). Ergo: "there would presumably be no reason for not allowing an abort proc to be set."
But since an abort procedure has no meaning in the context of a metafile: "it makes no sense to set an abort proc in a metafile."
As to why the metafile code is actually executing code - beats me. Most likely, MS had plans for some useful purpose, decided against it, and figured deleting it from the documentation was more stable than deleting it from the source code (or the programmer who wrote retired before telling anybody about it).
I doubt this is any sort of super secret back door. MS doesn't need a back door to execute code on our machine - they have auto-update for this.
A link to the agreement was posted on/. a week or so ago. The best part of it: Sony will promise not to do it again - for the next to years. After that? Open season.
Let's, $6B/yr taxpayer money to support analog, 30M analog receivers, that's $200/year per TV. Motorola says they can mass produce receivers at $67/ea cost out the door (source: Mark's Monday Memo). Hmmm, it's not really rocket science here.
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First of all, let me say they shouldn't be worried about XBox 360's supposed lead. You still can't buy one of those, and as far as I'm concerned Microsoft's inability to actually put them on store shelves has blown any advantage they might have gotten from an earlier release. As far as I'm concerned, Xbox 360 doesn't exist until I can actually buy one.
But that's not why we're here. We're here to rag on Sony.
They've got themselves a mess. They are trying to bring BluRay and PS3 to market this year. They want the analysts to believe that PS3 is not late because of PS3-specific problems, but because of BluRay problems. At the same time, they're trying to convince analysts that BluRay will roll out without a hitch in May. Maybe they're praying the same analysts don't go to both press conferences.
But I'm guessing that the reality is that they can't make enough BluRay drives and disks to satisfy both markets. And if they don't satisfy the BluRay movie market, they will get creamed by HD DVD. I bet there's a big Betamax poster on the wall of every cubile in the BluRay division.
And then there's price. BluRay players will be expensive. Sony won't even talk about the price of their players, and they're due on the market in 2 months. A lot of people are thinking a BluRay player will start at almost a grand (twice HD DVD). So that's an uphill battle already. And what happens if they price a BluRay movie-playing PS3 at $300? Nobody buys the BluRay players, they get the much cheaper PS3, which is being sold at a loss. And since they're only buying it for the movies, Sony doesn't get the loss back in game licensing fees.
I'm sure glad I'm not Sony right now. They've bet their future on these two products, and they have to delay one or the other, and either way, they lose market share to a competitor.
1. eBay should get a bunch of Congressmen and their staffers hooked on Buy It Now, and the patents will be magically tossed out. Or does that only work for RIM?
2. Q: What's the difference Buy It Now and dickering at a yard sale? A: The return on investment of suing yard sales.
... EFF Finally Sells Out.
I would think they would be encouraging victims to withdraw from the class action. Maybe the victims who did so would get nothing (as opposed to next-to-nothing), but every victim who withdrew from the class would cost the lawyers who agreed to this worthless settlement a little bit of their fee.
Not only does the agreement not compensate the victims for real damages ($7.50 is what, 10 minutes of tech support?), but contains no punitive damages. Let's not forget that Sony didn't just use DRM, they infected their victims computers with a virus, stole personal information, opened up their computers to further attacks, and then took deliberate actions to cover up their wrongdoing. If you or I did that, we'd be facing jail time.
Why on Earth would I buy eBooks? Can anybody give me one compelling argument?
I can give you one good reason not to buy eBooks: I've never had the batteries on a paperback die out on me 1/2 way through a 9-hour flight.
Hollywood will continue to blame their problems on everything except the cause of their problems: A significant percentage of today's movie suck simply because Hollywood has greatly underestimated the intelligence of its audience.
You mean Open Office is like MS Office was, back before MS Office became a bloated mess of unwanted and unused features?
That's about the best advertisement for Open Office that anyone could have come up with!
And when they're done with that, they can investigate price fixing in everything else from video games to Weber grills.
:)
(OK, so I realize examples that spanned more of the alphabet than from V to W would have been better, but it's early.
Garrr!! Shift, not ship. Where's my caffeine...
Meanwhile, back at home, Earth scientists are busy building plausible explanations as to how fossil fuel loving Republicans are behind this major environmental ship on our solar system's largest planet.
They don't really think so much as they run for office.
After reading the article, it's not rocket science to figure out what's going on here. Verizon has been spoiled by the cell phone model, where service providers get a piece of the pie on all the content users download. Now they want the same deal across the board - they want complete control of all the content their customers have access to so that they can nickle and dime them for content, just like they do in the cell phone market.
My advice to Verizon - if expanding your network is not profitable, then stop. Duh.
Dear Verizon Customer,
We are sorry to inform you that you will no longer be able to access Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and other high-bandwidth commercial sites through your Verizon internet connection. Due to the loads that these services place on Verizon's network system, Verizon has instituted a new policy which states that high-bandwidth commercial web sites must compensate Verizon for their usage of our network. The companies listed above, and others, have elected not to do so. Therefore, we have no choice but to discontinue the availability of these and other web sites on your internet connection.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Sincerely,
Verizon Customer Service
------------------
Dear Verizon,
Pbbbbbtttthhhppp.
Sincerely,
A Valued Soon-To-Be Ex-Verizon Customer.
It may be there for us, but it will be coming out of children's and grandchildren's paychecks. If I offered to write my father a check for $100 every week, there's no way in hell he'd take it. But every week, that's exactly what Social Security does.
Because children in third-world countries can afford to pony up $30/month for a cell phone plan.
(And yes, I'm aware that in many 3rd world countries, cell phones are more plentiful than land lines, but that's only because there are very few land lines.)
1. In a Government agency, EVERYTHING is reviewed by Public Affairs before it's released to the press. 2. Review != censorship; Censorship == remove; 3. If he doesn't like NASA's policies, he can quit. Or does he think keeping his salary is more important than saving the planet? I'm sure he could find a better paying job with "top climate scientist at NASA" on his resume. 4. Searching the news archives, it looks like nobody knew who he was before December. 5. An unrealistic sense of self-importance is a mandatory requirement for paranoia. Chances are pretty good the Bush administration doesn't know who this guy is, and doesn't care, either.
The NASDAQ got hit for 2.35%, S&P 500 for 1.8%. Big losses across the board, and I'd expect a young tech company with a high PE like Google to get slammed worse than the averages. So I doubt this has anything to do with the DoJ. Typical stock rag reporting. A happened. B happened later. Therefore, B was caused by A.
FYI - Benjamin Franklin is responsible for hundreds of inventions, yet refused to file a patent for any of them. In fact, he published them openly, often with explanations of how they worked, so that others could copy and use them without paying him roylties.
The purpose of a DC is to allow the programmer to render the image without having to give a rat's ass as to whether he's rendering to a printed page, display screen, or other device. In other words, the DC is an abstraction layer between the program and the rendering device's device driver - you only have to write one set of code to render to any device, instead of one set of code for a printer, one for a screen, one for a plotter, etc. The purpose of a metafile is to allow a program to save the commands used to render an image and play them back later. I.e., a program could "print" to a file, the file to be transferred to a printshop, and then be played back on a printing press. A metafile is Windows equivalent of PostScript, or PCL. In order for the abstraction to be complete, all DCs must accept all commands (or else the program has to figure out what commands are valid or invalid for the current DC type). So the metafile must accept AetAbortProc(). Ergo: "there would presumably be no reason for not allowing an abort proc to be set." But since an abort procedure has no meaning in the context of a metafile: "it makes no sense to set an abort proc in a metafile." As to why the metafile code is actually executing code - beats me. Most likely, MS had plans for some useful purpose, decided against it, and figured deleting it from the documentation was more stable than deleting it from the source code (or the programmer who wrote retired before telling anybody about it). I doubt this is any sort of super secret back door. MS doesn't need a back door to execute code on our machine - they have auto-update for this.
A link to the agreement was posted on /. a week or so ago. The best part of it: Sony will promise not to do it again - for the next to years. After that? Open season.
Let's, $6B/yr taxpayer money to support analog, 30M analog receivers, that's $200/year per TV. Motorola says they can mass produce receivers at $67/ea cost out the door (source: Mark's Monday Memo). Hmmm, it's not really rocket science here.