See? This is what happens when you don't build your computer by hand, by yourself! You get shafted with crapware and stupid stickers!
The lawsuit is really because the stickers weren't holographic. You'd think that after all that hub-bub and marketing they'd at least shell out the money for those famous Redmond holographic stickers. THAT'S what people pay for!
You take a chance no matter what bucket of bits you pick.
One will keep you up at night on the phone with tech support (or at least listening to their hold music) and the other will keep you up late at night reading the documentation and emailing the original developers.
Imagine the market for de-crapifiers! Run this shell script, and this will remove all crapware from Dell machines! Updated as of 20120417!
Quite a bit easier than uninstalling crapware on Windows. There could be residue in system32, or some in %HOME%\Application Settings, or what about those cryptic {987AS-3ASD3A-FOOBAR} directories? What about them? And don't get me started about decrapifying the registry! Entire programs can live in there!
What I see is Microsoft flailing uselessly at an imagined threat from Linux and Mac.
Linux isn't being actively bombarded at OEMs like Windows. Mac isn't stealing their core business (the business). OEMs feinted by threatening to sell more Linux, and a few even shipped a few machines with Linux just to make MSFT sweat. Apple feinted by building Exchange support into iPhone, and still sells an (excellent) office suite, but they aren't actively sending ninja marketing squads to ACME Corporation and infiltrating the business market.
Their feints worked - Microsoft has responded with their knee-jerk reaction. Invade and destroy. Only the feints came on the fronts where Microsoft is technologically weakest. Multimedia and home user satisfaction (supposed to be fixed a la Vista) and with... well... I don't know what their battle plan against Apple is. I'm not even sure they know what they're doing.
The result is that Microsoft put themselves into an environment where they're ten years behind and in doing so alienated their core businesses by putting them on the back burner. Just in time for the unknown third parties - J. Random Linux Foundation - to infiltrate the business sector by spilling over from the server room, where Linux is already dominant.
Just in time for Microsoft to come trooping back from their failed anti-Apple sortie to come crying back to their business contemporaries, only to find the fortress locked and full of unfriendly defenders.
Which leaves Microsoft out in the cold. Their employees will all be the recipients of bailouts, and after their four years of welfare will move back into their parents homes, go back to college, then re-enter the workforce four years later. Ballmer will make history by being the first person to commit suicide by throwing a chair at himself. The Microsoft campus will be bought by a new venture and turned into a zoo with many interesting exhibits including elephants, giraffes, zebras, and a few penguins, which are [poetically] gaining in popularity at aquariums, zoos, and science academies as exhibits.
As for Windows 7 making any ground, the only way in hell they're going to get me to use 7 is to give it to me free. I legally own Vista. I'm also in the process of migrating to Mac. I'm not throwing any more cash at my PC! It's plenty powerful, so it should last me long enough to upgrade to a Mac desktop (I already have a Mac laptop).
So I repeat: give Vista owners a free upgrade. I want to believe that Microsoft isn't a great big evil corporation and I want to believe that there's still some good left in them, but they keep removing reasons for me to stick around.
My best way of explaining IB is a technological jewel(1) peddling an esoteric connection mantra(2).
1) loading pre-chewed GUIs from a file is fucking brilliant - coming from Java where you have to wait for ten seconds for a layout engine to recompute everything is a real drag
2) dragging and dropping connections is incredibly strange to me. On the one hand, it's far more efficient than the Java way of manually typing in all the action events and implementing them (either in anonymous classes or in their own little files). Yet again... it uses the mouse! how could that possibly be reliable?
It was a five-year exclusivity contract in order to get the phone out the door. Carriers are notorious for refusing to put phones on their network unless there's something in it for them. Remember the Razr craze a few years ago? It's was exclusive to Cingular for the first year and a half or so. Then they started unlocking them, and now you can get them on Verizon and AT&T, etc.
It's because the cellphone service market is a sad oligopolis. Your carrier doesn't give a damn about the quality of their service as long as they can spam the television with propaganda commercials claiming they're better than the other guy. AT&T has better coverage in Europe, from what I hear.
Requiring money for an SDK isn't really that big a crime. Microsoft requires a large sum of money for their best SDKs and IDEs. Nintendo demands about $300 or so for an SDK license.
Requiring a sum of money to gain access to the app store isn't that bad, either. Requiring a cut of the money isn't terribly horrible. What, would you honestly rather buy and maintain your own servers to host that content? What if someone Slashdots your app? What if it gets put in the top ten list? How will you connect your billing to a bank? Do you really want to pay $100 a month for an SSL certificate, or do you want to ignore that and let people transmit their credentials without the advantage of SSL? For only 30% it's a real bargain.
How would YOU like to be the one to get complained at by an irate school district (some of the most ass-backwards, vindictive people on the face of the planet) that their POOR yearbook class was STYMIED that their pictures DIDN'T LOOK RIGHT because the resolution was too low!
Nevermind that it's just viewing the high-res zoomed-in version on the computer and that when you're no longer looking at it at 800% magnification on a computer screen it will look just fine.
If that's not sadistic enough for you, how could you possibly resist dropping 800 GB of data onto a poor unprepared school district? The raw joy in doing that to a school which still hasn't managed to find a single hard drive over 250gb would be absolute techno-thuggish nirvana!
My old school and the schools my Uncle services used those pictures for the yearbook as well, so higher resolutions were non-negotiable. Keeping a detailed record of all the shots, an having a way to transmitting the work to the school for the poor yearbook kids to make into a book is also non-negotiable.
Yes, but the main purpose of a patent according to liberals is to allows the proverbial "little guy" to claim his idea and fight "the man" (the really big corporations).
By increasing the cost required to patent an idea, you're destroying the patent's perceived use to the millions of non-corporate non-megalomanic people.
It's getting to the point that there are so many problems with the patent system and the way it's being abused by corporations that it might become better for the economy to completely dissolve the patent system. If the corps don't behave themselves, why should we continue to put up with their bullshit?
I know, what are the chances that you find the one person who hasn't played WoW (not even a trial, what can I say, the prospect of grinding levels bores the hell out of me, so I stayed the heck away from the game from the get-go).
My parakeet would consistently toss shiny objects off the dresser and onto the floor (which was wildly amusing, then wildly painful when she did it when I wasn't watching, then stepped on some nailclippers - barefoot) but sadly she died this summer.
My dog will be on anything edible (and many things that aren't!) like a liberal on a bailout bill if it's within "snout level". How do I not have my food eaten? I keep track of my stuff and keep it out of range of the dog.
How did I keep track of my shiny objects? I knew where they last were, and the likely subjects that would have transported them (or in this case tossed them), and thus known where to look to find them.
I guess it all ties into that whole "Who Moved My Cheese?" theory, that we grow accustomed to "things that are mine" being in their places. If they always are, then it's easy to find. When they're not, you have a centre to start searching from.
It's easier to comb your house for you keys if you actually know where they were. If I hid your keys in your house, then said "go fetch!" it'd take you significantly longer (and not just because I can be really devious at hiding stuff in stupid places that people never look).
One of his largest client bases are public schools which pay to have pictures taken of all the kids for the student ID cards.
For some of the larger schools, you're looking at 2,000 kids, and you want a minimum of four to six good photos of each kid. 2,000 times 4 is 8,000 photos.
Granted, he brings computers and other equipment on those shoots and sets them up on-site (with cool card-printing machines and stuff) but the point is that if he's far away from his studio, he can't go running back to get more cards, and stores don't reliably have cards in stock. The best way is to have many of them on hand. If you're away from studio, you may shoot many different events before going back to process the images, filter out the bad shots, touch up the color (he's a color freak - subtle things that I can't even begin to pick up bug the snot out of him) and do other things.
If he's out of state (not uncommon) the dangers of being caught unprepared where your professional reputation is on the line are catastrophic. And how does he manage all these little cards?
Simple habits that scale from managing a house of 10 flash cards to photo studios with hundreds.
So grab your family, their memory cards, and a sharpie, and establish a system and good habits of keeping track of your things. Nothing is cheaper, and nothing is more effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell yes, I got modded as a troll!
'Tis better to shoot for +5 Funny and miss, than to shoot for +5 Informative and hit! Er, wait...
$8bn USD is a lot less than it used to be.
See? This is what happens when you don't build your computer by hand, by yourself! You get shafted with crapware and stupid stickers!
The lawsuit is really because the stickers weren't holographic. You'd think that after all that hub-bub and marketing they'd at least shell out the money for those famous Redmond holographic stickers. THAT'S what people pay for!
You take a chance no matter what bucket of bits you pick.
One will keep you up at night on the phone with tech support (or at least listening to their hold music) and the other will keep you up late at night reading the documentation and emailing the original developers.
I'll let you guess which one is which.
Hopefully, this will knock some sense into the big production companies.
My magic 8-ball says "don't count on it."
Sorry Gentoo Users, Portage doesn't cut it.
I have had more problems with apt and yum than I have ever had with Portage. Hell, I've never had an issue with Portage... So, my reaction to you is:
Oh noes, baby doesn't have the widdle gooey to hold hiz hands!
GET OVER IT!!!
Gentoo is for grown-ups. If you can't play with the big dogs, then stay the hell on the porch!
There's a lot of crap that's being passed off as an OS these days, in case you haven't noticed.
The MSDN subscription for Visual Studio Team Edition costs $10,000 per seat per year (USD, even though that isn't worth much any more). (1)
Linux hasn't put a plug in MSFT's tax increases at all.
1) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/bb841434.aspx
Imagine the market for de-crapifiers! Run this shell script, and this will remove all crapware from Dell machines! Updated as of 20120417!
Quite a bit easier than uninstalling crapware on Windows. There could be residue in system32, or some in %HOME%\Application Settings, or what about those cryptic {987AS-3ASD3A-FOOBAR} directories? What about them? And don't get me started about decrapifying the registry! Entire programs can live in there!
I don't see any innovation going to market.
What I see is Microsoft flailing uselessly at an imagined threat from Linux and Mac.
Linux isn't being actively bombarded at OEMs like Windows. Mac isn't stealing their core business (the business). OEMs feinted by threatening to sell more Linux, and a few even shipped a few machines with Linux just to make MSFT sweat. Apple feinted by building Exchange support into iPhone, and still sells an (excellent) office suite, but they aren't actively sending ninja marketing squads to ACME Corporation and infiltrating the business market.
Their feints worked - Microsoft has responded with their knee-jerk reaction. Invade and destroy. Only the feints came on the fronts where Microsoft is technologically weakest. Multimedia and home user satisfaction (supposed to be fixed a la Vista) and with... well... I don't know what their battle plan against Apple is. I'm not even sure they know what they're doing.
The result is that Microsoft put themselves into an environment where they're ten years behind and in doing so alienated their core businesses by putting them on the back burner. Just in time for the unknown third parties - J. Random Linux Foundation - to infiltrate the business sector by spilling over from the server room, where Linux is already dominant.
Just in time for Microsoft to come trooping back from their failed anti-Apple sortie to come crying back to their business contemporaries, only to find the fortress locked and full of unfriendly defenders.
Which leaves Microsoft out in the cold. Their employees will all be the recipients of bailouts, and after their four years of welfare will move back into their parents homes, go back to college, then re-enter the workforce four years later. Ballmer will make history by being the first person to commit suicide by throwing a chair at himself. The Microsoft campus will be bought by a new venture and turned into a zoo with many interesting exhibits including elephants, giraffes, zebras, and a few penguins, which are [poetically] gaining in popularity at aquariums, zoos, and science academies as exhibits.
I guess most Americans just like getting screwed.
Why do you think they voted for Obama?
As for Windows 7 making any ground, the only way in hell they're going to get me to use 7 is to give it to me free. I legally own Vista. I'm also in the process of migrating to Mac. I'm not throwing any more cash at my PC! It's plenty powerful, so it should last me long enough to upgrade to a Mac desktop (I already have a Mac laptop).
So I repeat: give Vista owners a free upgrade. I want to believe that Microsoft isn't a great big evil corporation and I want to believe that there's still some good left in them, but they keep removing reasons for me to stick around.
I want to believe...
Yer screwed, life sucks, take a number.
My best way of explaining IB is a technological jewel(1) peddling an esoteric connection mantra(2).
1) loading pre-chewed GUIs from a file is fucking brilliant - coming from Java where you have to wait for ten seconds for a layout engine to recompute everything is a real drag
2) dragging and dropping connections is incredibly strange to me. On the one hand, it's far more efficient than the Java way of manually typing in all the action events and implementing them (either in anonymous classes or in their own little files). Yet again... it uses the mouse! how could that possibly be reliable?
It was a five-year exclusivity contract in order to get the phone out the door. Carriers are notorious for refusing to put phones on their network unless there's something in it for them. Remember the Razr craze a few years ago? It's was exclusive to Cingular for the first year and a half or so. Then they started unlocking them, and now you can get them on Verizon and AT&T, etc.
It's because the cellphone service market is a sad oligopolis. Your carrier doesn't give a damn about the quality of their service as long as they can spam the television with propaganda commercials claiming they're better than the other guy. AT&T has better coverage in Europe, from what I hear.
Requiring money for an SDK isn't really that big a crime. Microsoft requires a large sum of money for their best SDKs and IDEs. Nintendo demands about $300 or so for an SDK license.
Requiring a sum of money to gain access to the app store isn't that bad, either. Requiring a cut of the money isn't terribly horrible. What, would you honestly rather buy and maintain your own servers to host that content? What if someone Slashdots your app? What if it gets put in the top ten list? How will you connect your billing to a bank? Do you really want to pay $100 a month for an SSL certificate, or do you want to ignore that and let people transmit their credentials without the advantage of SSL? For only 30% it's a real bargain.
When I was a kid the van was black.
How would YOU like to be the one to get complained at by an irate school district (some of the most ass-backwards, vindictive people on the face of the planet) that their POOR yearbook class was STYMIED that their pictures DIDN'T LOOK RIGHT because the resolution was too low!
Nevermind that it's just viewing the high-res zoomed-in version on the computer and that when you're no longer looking at it at 800% magnification on a computer screen it will look just fine.
If that's not sadistic enough for you, how could you possibly resist dropping 800 GB of data onto a poor unprepared school district? The raw joy in doing that to a school which still hasn't managed to find a single hard drive over 250gb would be absolute techno-thuggish nirvana!
This would only be complete if we referenced the GNU Lawyer Jokes page.
My old school and the schools my Uncle services used those pictures for the yearbook as well, so higher resolutions were non-negotiable. Keeping a detailed record of all the shots, an having a way to transmitting the work to the school for the poor yearbook kids to make into a book is also non-negotiable.
See! You use a simple organization system involving force of habit to keep the cards in consistent places! Is it expensive? No. Is it simple? Yes.
You just have fewer cards than my Uncle, I take it. My family is well-known for being a bunch of stingy pack-ratting scrooges, so I guess it figures.
Where did you get the idea of using actual lasers?
A floppy case (I have many) is an example of a specific tool that gets the job done. It's a "laser-targeted" system so to speak.
Yes, but the main purpose of a patent according to liberals is to allows the proverbial "little guy" to claim his idea and fight "the man" (the really big corporations).
By increasing the cost required to patent an idea, you're destroying the patent's perceived use to the millions of non-corporate non-megalomanic people.
It's getting to the point that there are so many problems with the patent system and the way it's being abused by corporations that it might become better for the economy to completely dissolve the patent system. If the corps don't behave themselves, why should we continue to put up with their bullshit?
Ironic, I've never played WoW.
I know, what are the chances that you find the one person who hasn't played WoW (not even a trial, what can I say, the prospect of grinding levels bores the hell out of me, so I stayed the heck away from the game from the get-go).
My parakeet would consistently toss shiny objects off the dresser and onto the floor (which was wildly amusing, then wildly painful when she did it when I wasn't watching, then stepped on some nailclippers - barefoot) but sadly she died this summer.
My dog will be on anything edible (and many things that aren't!) like a liberal on a bailout bill if it's within "snout level". How do I not have my food eaten? I keep track of my stuff and keep it out of range of the dog.
How did I keep track of my shiny objects? I knew where they last were, and the likely subjects that would have transported them (or in this case tossed them), and thus known where to look to find them.
I guess it all ties into that whole "Who Moved My Cheese?" theory, that we grow accustomed to "things that are mine" being in their places. If they always are, then it's easy to find. When they're not, you have a centre to start searching from.
It's easier to comb your house for you keys if you actually know where they were. If I hid your keys in your house, then said "go fetch!" it'd take you significantly longer (and not just because I can be really devious at hiding stuff in stupid places that people never look).
One of his largest client bases are public schools which pay to have pictures taken of all the kids for the student ID cards.
For some of the larger schools, you're looking at 2,000 kids, and you want a minimum of four to six good photos of each kid. 2,000 times 4 is 8,000 photos.
Granted, he brings computers and other equipment on those shoots and sets them up on-site (with cool card-printing machines and stuff) but the point is that if he's far away from his studio, he can't go running back to get more cards, and stores don't reliably have cards in stock. The best way is to have many of them on hand. If you're away from studio, you may shoot many different events before going back to process the images, filter out the bad shots, touch up the color (he's a color freak - subtle things that I can't even begin to pick up bug the snot out of him) and do other things.
If he's out of state (not uncommon) the dangers of being caught unprepared where your professional reputation is on the line are catastrophic. And how does he manage all these little cards?
Simple habits that scale from managing a house of 10 flash cards to photo studios with hundreds.
So grab your family, their memory cards, and a sharpie, and establish a system and good habits of keeping track of your things. Nothing is cheaper, and nothing is more effective.