I work with a clinic that does email notifications of appointments
Are you in the United States? Do you send these notifications in plain text? My understanding of HIPAA regulations would rule out any such plain-text notifications. I suppose if you're really careful and just say "you have an appointment next Wednesday at 3 pm" you might be okay. But if you say "with Dr. So-and-So" I think you've crossed the line. Suppose I'm an employer, and I intercept such a notice to one of my employees. Being a nosy sort, I check out who Dr. So-and-So is and discover she's a specialist in breast cancer. Now the employee didn't tell me she (potentially) has breast cancer, but I decide that keeping her on might result in a rise in my medical insurance premiums so I let her go as soon as possible.
Hell, I didn't even want to enable patients to view private medical information online even with good authentication, SSL, etc., to preserve the integrity of the connection. What happens if I stop by an employee's desk and casually hit the back button in his browser a few times? I might come across private medical information lurking in the browser's cache.
Re:Here's hoping
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Unlike videogames, the movie producers need to work with distributors around the world (theater owners, etc.). Region coding makes sense for movies because they have staggered release schedules. A foreign theater chain is not going to be happy if a movie for which theatrical display rights are not yet available in that country is suddenly available on an HD videodisc. Videogames obviously don't have these issues.
I've had very good experiences with DirectNIC http://www.directnic.com/. I was especially impressed with how their New Orleans-based operations survived Katrina. I've also needed to contact customer service in a couple of cases, and all my cases were handled quickly and courteously.
BTW, they charge a whopping $15/year for domains. I guess that seems like a lot to someone used to GoDaddy pricing, but if your business makes key decisions on the basis of $15 vs. $9, good luck to you.
Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs.
Funny you should mention that. I have a couple of physician acquaintances who expect to see this sort of thing start to happen as medical costs continue to outpace the growth of income.
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall microsoft or its
suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, punitive, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever
(including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence, and for any other pecuniary or other loss
whatsoever) arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the product, the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, informaton, software, and related content through the product or otherwise arising out of the use of the product, or otherwise under or in connection with any provision of this EULA, even in the event of the fault, tort (including negligence), strict liability, breach of contract or breach of warranty of microsoft or any supplier, and even if Microsoft or any supplier has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Essentially if you register the software, you agree to hold MS harmless for any damages; you cannot sue them for nonperformance. BTW, this is a pretty standard EULA; MS is not out of line with industry practice here.
I have installed and used Fedora since FC1 and have had frequent problems with anaconda in the past, so luckily I was prepared for these new glitches.
I've installed every Fedora release on the Dell Dimension I'm writing this on and never had anaconda problems. However, the most recent beta of FC5, FC5 Test 3, had such massive video problems with my hardware (an Intel 8xx chipset and a 10-yr-old Dell monitor) that I gave up with the installation. Today I tried the release version of FC5 and had none of those problems.
Unlike the gaming fanboys here, I doubt many people are holding their breaths awaiting the arrival of the PS3. Sure if it cost $149 like the PS2 I might consider buying one. In reality, though, it's the games that matter, not the hardware. Consoles are an appliance; you buy one because you can't play the games otherwise. If I were a development house, I certainly would wait quite a while before releasing any games for this platform or the XBOX 360. If I'm in the business of selling games, I want to make them for platforms that have lots of owners. Maybe I'd get around to making a PS3 game in 2008.
From TFA:
Feudale ruled Feb. 23 that the state could seize the computers but view only Internet data relevant to the case. The judge also ordered the agent who withdraws the data to show them to him first - before passing them to prosecutors - to ensure that the journalists' other confidential files are not compromised.
Personally I think the entire process ought to be handled by a third-party on behalf of the court, and not by the state which is a party at interest. How could anyone be sure that only the material shown to the judge is made available to the prosecutors? How can anyone be sure that a complete copies of the entire contents of the drives weren't made and handed to the prosecution on the sly?
I also had the same reaction as the initial commentators here. Why isn't it proof enough that webserver log entries exist showing access to the restricted areas from the IPs of the newspaper? Sure IP addresses don't give you any information about the actual identity of the person(s) accessing the site, but seizing the computers is no better. How can you prove that the use of the computers wasn't by an unauthorized person? In fact, if you're out to undermine a local newspaper, sneaking into their offices and accessing a protected government website and then claiming foul sounds like a good strategy.
And, for those of you who want to analogize this situation to a simple burglary, remember that there are important press freedom issues here that don't arise in normal criminal acts. When printing presses were invented, states first tried destroying them, then licensing them. Governments have a very strong incentive to restrict press access as much as possible. That's why we have a First Amendment.
I don't usually reply to my own comments, but later reflection on Jim's comment suggests an interesting analogy.
If tiered Internet services rely on the QOS flag in the packet header, that could conceivably be treated as the equivalent of the the envelope. If so, then I guess one could argue that using QOS flags is analogous to classes of service in the postal world. If, however, tiering is based on something inside the actual packet itself, and not in the header, then I'd argue this definitely violates the non-discrimination requirement of common carriage.
I doubt there's any regulatory decisions or case law in this area yet. The only analogous thing I know of is email scanning by law enforcement (e.g., the FBI Carnivore system), where the headers are considered fair game, but the content of the message is not.
US ISP's are not treated as common carriers nor do they want to be. It's true that some legislation exempts US ISPs from responsibility for the content on their servers, but those are specific exemptions granted in particular cases.
If ISPs were common carriers, the current controversy over a "tiered" Internet structure would be moot. Common carriers, by definition, cannot discriminate based on the content of the information being transmitted. Giving priority to particular types of data, or data sent by particular providers (e.g., Google), would be clearly illegal in a common carrier regime.
Congress and the FCC distinguish between "telecommunications" services, which are usually covered by common carrier regulation, and "information" services which are not. These issues were generally resolved in the late 1990's in the context of payments by common carriers to the universal service fund which helps cover the cost of delivering telecom services to rural and other underserved areas. ISPs didn't want to make these payments (even if they were providing VOIP) and were successful in getting Congress to treat them as "information services." http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Rel eases/1998/nrcc8031.html
My understanding of the current state of ISP regulation is that, as private entities, they can refuse to host anything they dislike. However, unlike Canada, if the Federal government were to require the removal of content it found distasteful, the government would lose on First Amendment grounds. (I don't know whether this applies to state governments, though I'd guess that it does.)
the Japanese release on the PSP of Valkyrie Profile
If I were SquareEnix, I'd just start selling copies of the old PSOne version of this game again. Right now it costs well over $100 for used copies on eBay, and the few available new copies sell for ~$225! I've wanted to play this game for a while, but not at these prices. And, I'm certainly not going to go out and buy a PSP just to play it.
Windows Live Mail, the new version of Microsoft's flagship Hotmail e-mail, is hosting 750,000 users, and the company hopes it will host 20 million by June, according to the memo.
Isn't it reasonable to assume that all this means is that all the Hotmail users will be automatically converted over to Live Mail in June? Doesn't anyone at BusinessWeek have the smarts, or the chutzpah, to ask whether this is even plausible?
Are there any reliable estimates of the number of free mail users out there? 20 million seems to me like an awfully large chunk of the entire market.
Baby boomers have all the cash, increasingly have time on their hands to spend it, but the movie industry (actually, make that the entire entertainment industry) seems to target only 13-30 year olds
As a 56-yo boomer, I'd love to agree with this, but unfortunately there's more involved than population size. Frequency of attendance also matters a lot.
Back in the 1980's I worked with AC Nielsen on a consulting study for Fox examining movie-going patterns. At that time, people over age 40 attended on average only about 4 movies per year in theaters; people 18-24 averaged about 15. So Hollywood targets the 18-29 market not because of the numbers of people in that group, but because they represent a disproportionate share of ticket revenues.
That was back in the days when most people didn't have cable or satellite TV, VCR rentals were just getting going, and the only DVD-like devices were 12" videodiscs. My guess is that the explosion of in-home entertainment alternatives has exacerbated the age gap in theater attendance, not narrowed it. For most teens and young adults movie-going is as much a social experience as an artistic one. Most older folks aren't going to movies for dating.
In addition, most "artistic" movies that rely on plot, characterization, and acting just don't need to be seen in theaters. The number of movies that I care about seeing in a theater is pretty limited. Unless they make use of the wide screen and multichannel sound, the experience is just as good, if not better, at home. When I've gone to movies like Broken Flowers in a theater, it was primarily because I wanted to go out to a movie with a friend. I wouldn't have missed much watching it at home instead. The exceptions for me are movies like Star Wars where the immersive aspects of a large screen and lots of loudspeakers are an integral part of the viewing experience.
As Russ observes, this has nothing to do with random spammers who want to send Viagra messages to AOL users. This has to do with legitimate opt-in senders who want their AOL recipients to see their carefully-constructed HTML messages with graphics and links.
As someone who provides email filtering services for a number of clients, let me tell you it's oftentimes pretty difficult to differentiate between spam and legitimate, but highly stylized, messages. I've had to whitelist a number of senders (Travelocity, for example) for just these reasons.
Nonprofit organizations have other problems arising from lack of funds and lack of technical expertise. For instance, mail from many nonprofits originates from servers that don't have reverse-DNS configured because whoever installed their Exchange server on their DSL line didn't know it mattered. When AOL started filtering messages on this basis a couple of years ago, a lot of commercial entities fixed up their DNS because of the potential loss of access to AOL users. However it's still the case that the correspondents of my nonprofit clients continue to send mail from servers without complete DNS records.
The reality is that my friends with AOL accounts have seen an enormous decline in the amount of spam they receive. AOL is not about to start forging deals with real spammers any time soon. I just don't think it's unreasonable that companies like Travelocity pay a fee to ensure that messages to their customers arrive in all their richly-formatted splendor. Just how many messages do you think AOL users receive from some place like Travelocity anyway? My guess is that the answer is probably in the six- or seven-figure range each day.
One interesting side issue in all this concerns how marketing organizations can exploit CDs like these to end-run the do-not-call rule in telemarketing. In later comments by the original Minnesota Public Radio author http://www.publicradio.org/columns/minnesota/polin aut/ he cites an executive at the firm that developed this CD who talks about how marketers can use this approach to establish a "prior relationship" with people that can then be used to justify calling them for marketing purposes. I'd be curious if marketing versions of this CD make any of this explicit. Apparently the only terms of use on the MN Republican CD enforce the rights of the software developers.
Note that this doesn't apply to the Minnesota Republican Party's use of this technology since political solicitations are explicitly excluded from the do-not-call law (wonder why?).
Just the other day a friend of my who admininters a small office upgraded the computer of one of the staffers. Once she tried to do a mailmerge with the newer version of Word that came on the machine, she collapsed and declared it was impossible. Why? Because the dialog boxes in the mailmerge wizard had changed.
The emphasis on games in this discussion (and the countless earlier ones) is ridiculous. Most people don't use their computers primarily, or even at all, for gaming. Even more important, though, are the millions of office workers whose daily computing activities could be done just as well on a Linux machine as on a Windows machine, but whose companies continue to support only Windows. There are lots of good reasons for this, but the inability to play games isn't one of them.
As for 3D accelerator cards, which of the following activities that "regular people" do in their offices every day requires an 3D accelerator card:
1) Browse websites? 2) Exchange e-mail? 3) Write a letter? 4) Use a spreadsheet? 5) Access company databases using a browser or a proprietary app?
The real problem in my mind is that every time this conversation starts up, it's always ends up being about problems with nVidia and ATI providing drivers. Guess what, folks. The road to Linux adoption does not run first through households. Let's get some businesses to switch over first, and then see what happens.
How many digital and video cameras can you plug into a Linux box and have them work right away, WITHOUT having to install extra software which may not exist?
I can't answer the question about "how many," but my 3-year-old Canon works fine with a default Fedora 4 installation.
Once the pictures or videos have somehow gotten into the computer, can I edit them?
GIMP.
What do I edit the video with and then burn a DVD?
I can burn DVDs with K3b. I don't edit video so I don't know the answer to that, but I'm pretty sure you can't do this with a stock WinXP installation either.
Can I plug in a Windows formatted USB or Firewire drive and read/write data?
Sure. I connect my Archos video player to my Fedora boxes this way all the time.
If I have a laptop, can I automatically connect to WiFi access points available in many places?
Once I downloaded the proprietary firmware for my Intel Centrino chip, it worked right away.
How many printers work with Linux where the system recognizes the printer when I plug it in and asks if I want to use this as my default printer?
If it's a USB printer, the answer is usually right away. CUPS has lots and lots of drivers these days, and HP provides Linux drivers for its printers.
Um, I'm 56 years old, and I'm definitely not "overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the modern videogame." While I tend toward RPG's as a genre, and dislike most FPS's, I've played a variety of videogames and never found managing complexity to be a problem.
I'd guess that my hand-eye coordination has declined over the years, so I'm not quite so good at things like racing a hover board/bike in Ratchet and Clank as I once was. I'm also more discriminating about the amount of time I'm willing to invest in a game. For instance, I enjoyed Xenosaga, but quit playing the sequel about half-way through because it was just too boring. Similarly I'm currently playing Square's Parasite Eve, which is a pretty decent game, but the story definitely isn't as compelling as those found in, say, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X, or the Shadow Hearts games. As a result, I find myself playing PE for a couple of hours at a stretch, as compared to much longer periods playing those other titles.
What I find most disheartening about current trends in the gaming industry is the replacement of well-written scripts with bigger explosions. (The decline of the Ratchet and Clank series is a good example of this phenomenon.) For instance, next-generation consoles are not promoted because they will enable game developers to tell richer, more nuanced stories, but because they will enable developers to tell the same old tired stories with better graphics. As the gaming industry looks more and more like Hollywood, with an emphasis on blockbuster hits and sequels galore, I doubt I'll be as interested in gaming when I'm 66.
From TFA:
The BSA [Business Software Association] had a program back then [2000] called "Nail Your Boss," where they encouraged disgruntled employees to report on their company...and that's what happened to us. Anyways, they basically shut us down...We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops).
How did that happen? We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation.
Since when? Why can't the clerical worker use the software on the hand-me-down machine in a perfectly legal manner if new copies of the software are purchased for the new engineering PC? Aren't both using licensed copies? Why has the license for say, Windows, suddenly expired when the machine is transferred to another user within the company?
I decided to see if the BSA had an explanation for this position. Now I can't say that I read the entire site, but I didn't see any mention of wiping hard drives in the most likely places it would appear, for instance documents linked from the Tools for IT Managers page. Searching for "wipe hard drive" or variants thereof, using both the BSA site's search engine and "site:bsa.org wipe hard drive" at Google turned up nothing.
Is this some piece of common wisdom among IT managers, that they should routinely wipe the hard drives of hand-me-down computers? Does that imply I need to purchase a brand-new license for the software (like Windows) that was already on the machine before the next person may use it? Why does my common-sense view that I've already paid for these licenses not apply? Don't licenses for things like Windows apply in perpetuity to the CPU on which they are installed?
By the way, this is one of the most persuasive pieces I've ever read on converting a small-to-medium enterprise from Windows to Linux. The best parts concern Ernie's reaction to being mauled by the BSA. His family-run guitar string company was made to look like a bunch of despicable criminals in a horribly public way (armed marshals at the doorstep). After settling for $65,000 in penalties, and paying another $35,000 to cover the BSA's legal costs (as guaranteed by Congress) plus his own attorneys' fees, Ernie turned his back on all commercial software and moved his business to Linux.
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion of a "firewall" put forth in this proposal. From TFA:
The proposed law has two prongs: First, "public Internet access" may not be provided without a network gateway server equipped with a firewall. Second, any business or home office that stores personal information also must install such a firewall-outfitted server even if its wireless connection is encrypted and not open to the public.
So what kind of firewall is this? It certainly isn't the kind of firewall you can buy at Staples and install out-of-the-box. Normal appliance routers are designed to block inbound connections from the Internet to the local network and masquerade internal networks out onto the Internet. If the point is to protect sensitive business information from WiFi intruders, it would require a custom firewall configuration that blocks access to the local network by WiFi users. Where are these firewalls supposed to come from, and who is supposed to do the custom configuration required?
Of course, if all the proposal means is that the business have some type of firewall between the local network and the Internet, it provides no protection for the data on the local network at all. What's the point?
My daughter and I stopped playing the Ratchet sequels after the second. It appears that Insomniac decided that the best way to attract players was to have bigger explosions. The original R&C was one of our favorite platformers because it continued the witty story lines that Insomniac began with the three Spiro the Dragon games for the PS1. (The PS2 versions of Spiro by Universal suck rocks in comparison.) I was quite sad to see how the quality of the writing declined in later R&C sequels. For me, the writing and story line in R&C I transformed a shoot-em-up platformer into a truly entertaining experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with a clinic that does email notifications of appointments
Are you in the United States? Do you send these notifications in plain text? My understanding of HIPAA regulations would rule out any such plain-text notifications. I suppose if you're really careful and just say "you have an appointment next Wednesday at 3 pm" you might be okay. But if you say "with Dr. So-and-So" I think you've crossed the line. Suppose I'm an employer, and I intercept such a notice to one of my employees. Being a nosy sort, I check out who Dr. So-and-So is and discover she's a specialist in breast cancer. Now the employee didn't tell me she (potentially) has breast cancer, but I decide that keeping her on might result in a rise in my medical insurance premiums so I let her go as soon as possible.
Hell, I didn't even want to enable patients to view private medical information online even with good authentication, SSL, etc., to preserve the integrity of the connection. What happens if I stop by an employee's desk and casually hit the back button in his browser a few times? I might come across private medical information lurking in the browser's cache.
Unlike videogames, the movie producers need to work with distributors around the world (theater owners, etc.). Region coding makes sense for movies because they have staggered release schedules. A foreign theater chain is not going to be happy if a movie for which theatrical display rights are not yet available in that country is suddenly available on an HD videodisc. Videogames obviously don't have these issues.
I've had very good experiences with DirectNIC http://www.directnic.com/. I was especially impressed with how their New Orleans-based operations survived Katrina. I've also needed to contact customer service in a couple of cases, and all my cases were handled quickly and courteously.
BTW, they charge a whopping $15/year for domains. I guess that seems like a lot to someone used to GoDaddy pricing, but if your business makes key decisions on the basis of $15 vs. $9, good luck to you.
Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs.
Funny you should mention that. I have a couple of physician acquaintances who expect to see this sort of thing start to happen as medical costs continue to outpace the growth of income.
How can they? Read the EULA http://proprietary.clendons.co.nz/licenses/eula/wi ndowsxpprofessional-eula.htm:
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall microsoft or its suppliers be liable for any special, incidental, punitive, indirect, or consequential damages whatsoever (including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits or confidential or other information, for business interruption, for personal injury, for loss of privacy, for failure to meet any duty including of good faith or of reasonable care, for negligence, and for any other pecuniary or other loss whatsoever) arising out of or in any way related to the use of or inability to use the product, the provision of or failure to provide support or other services, informaton, software, and related content through the product or otherwise arising out of the use of the product, or otherwise under or in connection with any provision of this EULA, even in the event of the fault, tort (including negligence), strict liability, breach of contract or breach of warranty of microsoft or any supplier, and even if Microsoft or any supplier has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Essentially if you register the software, you agree to hold MS harmless for any damages; you cannot sue them for nonperformance. BTW, this is a pretty standard EULA; MS is not out of line with industry practice here.
I have installed and used Fedora since FC1 and have had frequent problems with anaconda in the past, so luckily I was prepared for these new glitches.
I've installed every Fedora release on the Dell Dimension I'm writing this on and never had anaconda problems. However, the most recent beta of FC5, FC5 Test 3, had such massive video problems with my hardware (an Intel 8xx chipset and a 10-yr-old Dell monitor) that I gave up with the installation. Today I tried the release version of FC5 and had none of those problems.
Unlike the gaming fanboys here, I doubt many people are holding their breaths awaiting the arrival of the PS3. Sure if it cost $149 like the PS2 I might consider buying one. In reality, though, it's the games that matter, not the hardware. Consoles are an appliance; you buy one because you can't play the games otherwise. If I were a development house, I certainly would wait quite a while before releasing any games for this platform or the XBOX 360. If I'm in the business of selling games, I want to make them for platforms that have lots of owners. Maybe I'd get around to making a PS3 game in 2008.
From TFA:
Feudale ruled Feb. 23 that the state could seize the computers but view only Internet data relevant to the case. The judge also ordered the agent who withdraws the data to show them to him first - before passing them to prosecutors - to ensure that the journalists' other confidential files are not compromised.
Personally I think the entire process ought to be handled by a third-party on behalf of the court, and not by the state which is a party at interest. How could anyone be sure that only the material shown to the judge is made available to the prosecutors? How can anyone be sure that a complete copies of the entire contents of the drives weren't made and handed to the prosecution on the sly?
I also had the same reaction as the initial commentators here. Why isn't it proof enough that webserver log entries exist showing access to the restricted areas from the IPs of the newspaper? Sure IP addresses don't give you any information about the actual identity of the person(s) accessing the site, but seizing the computers is no better. How can you prove that the use of the computers wasn't by an unauthorized person? In fact, if you're out to undermine a local newspaper, sneaking into their offices and accessing a protected government website and then claiming foul sounds like a good strategy.
And, for those of you who want to analogize this situation to a simple burglary, remember that there are important press freedom issues here that don't arise in normal criminal acts. When printing presses were invented, states first tried destroying them, then licensing them. Governments have a very strong incentive to restrict press access as much as possible. That's why we have a First Amendment.
I don't usually reply to my own comments, but later reflection on Jim's comment suggests an interesting analogy.
If tiered Internet services rely on the QOS flag in the packet header, that could conceivably be treated as the equivalent of the the envelope. If so, then I guess one could argue that using QOS flags is analogous to classes of service in the postal world. If, however, tiering is based on something inside the actual packet itself, and not in the header, then I'd argue this definitely violates the non-discrimination requirement of common carriage.
I doubt there's any regulatory decisions or case law in this area yet. The only analogous thing I know of is email scanning by law enforcement (e.g., the FBI Carnivore system), where the headers are considered fair game, but the content of the message is not.
The USPS still can't look inside the envelope and decide whether to carry the message or not.
US ISP's are not treated as common carriers nor do they want to be. It's true that some legislation exempts US ISPs from responsibility for the content on their servers, but those are specific exemptions granted in particular cases.
l eases/1998/nrcc8031.html
u sc_sec_17_00000512----000-.html.
If ISPs were common carriers, the current controversy over a "tiered" Internet structure would be moot. Common carriers, by definition, cannot discriminate based on the content of the information being transmitted. Giving priority to particular types of data, or data sent by particular providers (e.g., Google), would be clearly illegal in a common carrier regime.
Congress and the FCC distinguish between "telecommunications" services, which are usually covered by common carrier regulation, and "information" services which are not. These issues were generally resolved in the late 1990's in the context of payments by common carriers to the universal service fund which helps cover the cost of delivering telecom services to rural and other underserved areas. ISPs didn't want to make these payments (even if they were providing VOIP) and were successful in getting Congress to treat them as "information services." http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Re
Perhaps you were thinking about the section of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that exempted ISPs if the material they hosted infringed copyrights
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/
There's nothing in this provision that applies common carrier regulation to ISPs.
My understanding of the current state of ISP regulation is that, as private entities, they can refuse to host anything they dislike. However, unlike Canada, if the Federal government were to require the removal of content it found distasteful, the government would lose on First Amendment grounds. (I don't know whether this applies to state governments, though I'd guess that it does.)
the Japanese release on the PSP of Valkyrie Profile
If I were SquareEnix, I'd just start selling copies of the old PSOne version of this game again. Right now it costs well over $100 for used copies on eBay, and the few available new copies sell for ~$225! I've wanted to play this game for a while, but not at these prices. And, I'm certainly not going to go out and buy a PSP just to play it.
Windows Live Mail, the new version of Microsoft's flagship Hotmail e-mail, is hosting 750,000 users, and the company hopes it will host 20 million by June, according to the memo.
Isn't it reasonable to assume that all this means is that all the Hotmail users will be automatically converted over to Live Mail in June? Doesn't anyone at BusinessWeek have the smarts, or the chutzpah, to ask whether this is even plausible?
Are there any reliable estimates of the number of free mail users out there? 20 million seems to me like an awfully large chunk of the entire market.
Baby boomers have all the cash, increasingly have time on their hands to spend it, but the movie industry (actually, make that the entire entertainment industry) seems to target only 13-30 year olds
As a 56-yo boomer, I'd love to agree with this, but unfortunately there's more involved than population size. Frequency of attendance also matters a lot.
Back in the 1980's I worked with AC Nielsen on a consulting study for Fox examining movie-going patterns. At that time, people over age 40 attended on average only about 4 movies per year in theaters; people 18-24 averaged about 15. So Hollywood targets the 18-29 market not because of the numbers of people in that group, but because they represent a disproportionate share of ticket revenues.
That was back in the days when most people didn't have cable or satellite TV, VCR rentals were just getting going, and the only DVD-like devices were 12" videodiscs. My guess is that the explosion of in-home entertainment alternatives has exacerbated the age gap in theater attendance, not narrowed it. For most teens and young adults movie-going is as much a social experience as an artistic one. Most older folks aren't going to movies for dating.
In addition, most "artistic" movies that rely on plot, characterization, and acting just don't need to be seen in theaters. The number of movies that I care about seeing in a theater is pretty limited. Unless they make use of the wide screen and multichannel sound, the experience is just as good, if not better, at home. When I've gone to movies like Broken Flowers in a theater, it was primarily because I wanted to go out to a movie with a friend. I wouldn't have missed much watching it at home instead. The exceptions for me are movies like Star Wars where the immersive aspects of a large screen and lots of loudspeakers are an integral part of the viewing experience.
I wish I had mod points today.
MOD PARENT UP
As Russ observes, this has nothing to do with random spammers who want to send Viagra messages to AOL users. This has to do with legitimate opt-in senders who want their AOL recipients to see their carefully-constructed HTML messages with graphics and links.
As someone who provides email filtering services for a number of clients, let me tell you it's oftentimes pretty difficult to differentiate between spam and legitimate, but highly stylized, messages. I've had to whitelist a number of senders (Travelocity, for example) for just these reasons.
Nonprofit organizations have other problems arising from lack of funds and lack of technical expertise. For instance, mail from many nonprofits originates from servers that don't have reverse-DNS configured because whoever installed their Exchange server on their DSL line didn't know it mattered. When AOL started filtering messages on this basis a couple of years ago, a lot of commercial entities fixed up their DNS because of the potential loss of access to AOL users. However it's still the case that the correspondents of my nonprofit clients continue to send mail from servers without complete DNS records.
The reality is that my friends with AOL accounts have seen an enormous decline in the amount of spam they receive. AOL is not about to start forging deals with real spammers any time soon. I just don't think it's unreasonable that companies like Travelocity pay a fee to ensure that messages to their customers arrive in all their richly-formatted splendor. Just how many messages do you think AOL users receive from some place like Travelocity anyway? My guess is that the answer is probably in the six- or seven-figure range each day.
One interesting side issue in all this concerns how marketing organizations can exploit CDs like these to end-run the do-not-call rule in telemarketing. In later comments by the original Minnesota Public Radio author http://www.publicradio.org/columns/minnesota/polin aut/ he cites an executive at the firm that developed this CD who talks about how marketers can use this approach to establish a "prior relationship" with people that can then be used to justify calling them for marketing purposes. I'd be curious if marketing versions of this CD make any of this explicit. Apparently the only terms of use on the MN Republican CD enforce the rights of the software developers.
Note that this doesn't apply to the Minnesota Republican Party's use of this technology since political solicitations are explicitly excluded from the do-not-call law (wonder why?).
Just the other day a friend of my who admininters a small office upgraded the computer of one of the staffers. Once she tried to do a mailmerge with the newer version of Word that came on the machine, she collapsed and declared it was impossible. Why? Because the dialog boxes in the mailmerge wizard had changed.
Thankfully most children aren't quite so rigid.
The emphasis on games in this discussion (and the countless earlier ones) is ridiculous. Most people don't use their computers primarily, or even at all, for gaming. Even more important, though, are the millions of office workers whose daily computing activities could be done just as well on a Linux machine as on a Windows machine, but whose companies continue to support only Windows. There are lots of good reasons for this, but the inability to play games isn't one of them.
As for 3D accelerator cards, which of the following activities that "regular people" do in their offices every day requires an 3D accelerator card:
1) Browse websites?
2) Exchange e-mail?
3) Write a letter?
4) Use a spreadsheet?
5) Access company databases using a browser or a proprietary app?
The real problem in my mind is that every time this conversation starts up, it's always ends up being about problems with nVidia and ATI providing drivers. Guess what, folks. The road to Linux adoption does not run first through households. Let's get some businesses to switch over first, and then see what happens.
How many digital and video cameras can you plug into a Linux box and have them work right away, WITHOUT having to install extra software which may not exist?
I can't answer the question about "how many," but my 3-year-old Canon works fine with a default Fedora 4 installation.
Once the pictures or videos have somehow gotten into the computer, can I edit them?
GIMP.What do I edit the video with and then burn a DVD?
I can burn DVDs with K3b. I don't edit video so I don't know the answer to that, but I'm pretty sure you can't do this with a stock WinXP installation either.
Can I plug in a Windows formatted USB or Firewire drive and read/write data?
Sure. I connect my Archos video player to my Fedora boxes this way all the time.
If I have a laptop, can I automatically connect to WiFi access points available in many places?
Once I downloaded the proprietary firmware for my Intel Centrino chip, it worked right away.
How many printers work with Linux where the system recognizes the printer when I plug it in and asks if I want to use this as my default printer?
If it's a USB printer, the answer is usually right away. CUPS has lots and lots of drivers these days, and HP provides Linux drivers for its printers.
Um, I'm 56 years old, and I'm definitely not "overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the modern videogame." While I tend toward RPG's as a genre, and dislike most FPS's, I've played a variety of videogames and never found managing complexity to be a problem.
I'd guess that my hand-eye coordination has declined over the years, so I'm not quite so good at things like racing a hover board/bike in Ratchet and Clank as I once was. I'm also more discriminating about the amount of time I'm willing to invest in a game. For instance, I enjoyed Xenosaga, but quit playing the sequel about half-way through because it was just too boring. Similarly I'm currently playing Square's Parasite Eve, which is a pretty decent game, but the story definitely isn't as compelling as those found in, say, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy X, or the Shadow Hearts games. As a result, I find myself playing PE for a couple of hours at a stretch, as compared to much longer periods playing those other titles.
What I find most disheartening about current trends in the gaming industry is the replacement of well-written scripts with bigger explosions. (The decline of the Ratchet and Clank series is a good example of this phenomenon.) For instance, next-generation consoles are not promoted because they will enable game developers to tell richer, more nuanced stories, but because they will enable developers to tell the same old tired stories with better graphics. As the gaming industry looks more and more like Hollywood, with an emphasis on blockbuster hits and sequels galore, I doubt I'll be as interested in gaming when I'm 66.
Sounds like a great student project for someone in political AI.
From TFA:
The BSA [Business Software Association] had a program back then [2000] called "Nail Your Boss," where they encouraged disgruntled employees to report on their company...and that's what happened to us. Anyways, they basically shut us down...We were out of compliance I figure by about 8 percent (out of 72 desktops).
How did that happen?
We pass our old computers down. The guys in engineering need a new PC, so they get one and we pass theirs on to somebody doing clerical work. Well, if you don't wipe the hard drive on that PC, that's a violation.
Since when? Why can't the clerical worker use the software on the hand-me-down machine in a perfectly legal manner if new copies of the software are purchased for the new engineering PC? Aren't both using licensed copies? Why has the license for say, Windows, suddenly expired when the machine is transferred to another user within the company?
I decided to see if the BSA had an explanation for this position. Now I can't say that I read the entire site, but I didn't see any mention of wiping hard drives in the most likely places it would appear, for instance documents linked from the Tools for IT Managers page. Searching for "wipe hard drive" or variants thereof, using both the BSA site's search engine and "site:bsa.org wipe hard drive" at Google turned up nothing.
Is this some piece of common wisdom among IT managers, that they should routinely wipe the hard drives of hand-me-down computers? Does that imply I need to purchase a brand-new license for the software (like Windows) that was already on the machine before the next person may use it? Why does my common-sense view that I've already paid for these licenses not apply? Don't licenses for things like Windows apply in perpetuity to the CPU on which they are installed?
By the way, this is one of the most persuasive pieces I've ever read on converting a small-to-medium enterprise from Windows to Linux. The best parts concern Ernie's reaction to being mauled by the BSA. His family-run guitar string company was made to look like a bunch of despicable criminals in a horribly public way (armed marshals at the doorstep). After settling for $65,000 in penalties, and paying another $35,000 to cover the BSA's legal costs (as guaranteed by Congress) plus his own attorneys' fees, Ernie turned his back on all commercial software and moved his business to Linux.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I've known some women who could block your popup with just one withering glance!
I'm a bit puzzled by the notion of a "firewall" put forth in this proposal. From TFA:
The proposed law has two prongs: First, "public Internet access" may not be provided without a network gateway server equipped with a firewall. Second, any business or home office that stores personal information also must install such a firewall-outfitted server even if its wireless connection is encrypted and not open to the public.
So what kind of firewall is this? It certainly isn't the kind of firewall you can buy at Staples and install out-of-the-box. Normal appliance routers are designed to block inbound connections from the Internet to the local network and masquerade internal networks out onto the Internet. If the point is to protect sensitive business information from WiFi intruders, it would require a custom firewall configuration that blocks access to the local network by WiFi users. Where are these firewalls supposed to come from, and who is supposed to do the custom configuration required?
Of course, if all the proposal means is that the business have some type of firewall between the local network and the Internet, it provides no protection for the data on the local network at all. What's the point?
My daughter and I stopped playing the Ratchet sequels after the second. It appears that Insomniac decided that the best way to attract players was to have bigger explosions. The original R&C was one of our favorite platformers because it continued the witty story lines that Insomniac began with the three Spiro the Dragon games for the PS1. (The PS2 versions of Spiro by Universal suck rocks in comparison.) I was quite sad to see how the quality of the writing declined in later R&C sequels. For me, the writing and story line in R&C I transformed a shoot-em-up platformer into a truly entertaining experience.