Walmart also doesn't allow labor unions. and goes to great lengths to keep them from forming. some guy wrote a book on it.
if you expect me to bother actually looking up stuff I don't know off of the top of my head, you'll have to rise above the level of defending google purely as a knee-jerk reaction. I'm seriously getting sick of slashdot. yes, I hate microsoft, yes, I love linux, yes, I think the patent system is horribly broken, and yes, I'm boycotting the RIAA. but when one of these issues come up I still manage to think before I speak, and on the rare occasion that something unfavorable to the standard theology here comes up, and very well may be true, (like perhaps OOo is more memory intensive than MSOffice), I won't just disregard it.
now on to the specifics of your "argument." for all you know he did get along well with his co-workers. if he didn't, and that was the reason they didn't hire him, he should have just been told that they felt there wasn't good chemestry between him and the rest of the group. instead, he was told that he was too old. too old. sounds like they're basing it on age to me.
the difference is, each of those "deaths" was caused by a difference in convineince, not sound quality. I'm going to replace 8-tracks with vynl for the purposes of my point, not because they nessicarily offer a counterpoint, but just because I don't know much about them.
records had better sound quality that cassettes. cassettes took up a significant share of music sales, dispite far far poorer quality, because in some ways they were more convineint. they didn't replace vynl completely, or even effectively so. the sound quality had something to do with it, but mostly because the difference was gargantuan. the ability to skip through records quickly though made them stil more convineint in some ways; while cassettes were more portable, rewinding could be a pain. then came cds, which were still lower quality than vynl, but not by a ton. they were also much smaller, you could skip through them even more easily, and if you kept them in the case, which was a very reasonable size comparatively, they were very portable. finally mp3's. again, lower quality than CDs, much more convinent, and though I definately don't think cds have died yet, the advent of portable mp3 players has made that day hasten it's way here. it will actually get here when online music downloads are more convinent than CDs, which they most definately are not now, at least the legal ones, thanks to DRM. in the mean time, cds are merely a transportation mechanism, many people buy hundreds of cds now and never listen to them, just rip them and listen to mp3s.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray most decidedly are not more convinient, they most likely are less, with stronger DRM that further infringes on fair use rights. the GP is right, they have provided no solid reason to upgrade, but yes, in the past they most definately have. It's entirely possible that neither of these formats will ever catch on, and people will just use hi-def pay per view services. there you have both quality, and more importantly, convinience.
I'm on the exact same page as you, and my tv is 53". I watched remember the titans on TNT in hi-def tonight, and it does look beautiful, but not better than batman begins on dvd. and as a side note, it actually sounds worse on my cambridge soundworks 5.1 system, because while some hi-def channels support digital surround, TNT is one that doesn't, so I have to switch to pro logic to get it to use all 5 speakers and the subwoofer.
in the coming months and years, this is going to be a new challange for the consumer electronics market: what happens when your products are already so good, that when you make them better, it is humanly impossilbe to notice? dvds are relatively new, but the industry is already calling them dead. cds have been around since the 80's, and though the industry has introduced two competeing formats, sacd and dvd audio, no one is buying either for the same reason. I have excellent hearing, and I have one dvd audio disc, with which I'm pretty sure (not certain) that I can hear a difference in sound quality. it's so slight however, that I wouldn't even consider spending extra money. indeed I rip cds into a lossy format anyway usually mp3's at 192kbps. 128 is crap, but 192 gets into that same range where I'm not even certain I can hear a difference.
who's going to pay extra for high quality media when the "low" quality media already breaks the limit of many people's senses?
so of course it has to be all marketing from here, since they have to manage to sell a product that for all intensive purposes the consumer already has, and has no need for a spare.
when I set up the aformentioned sound system, I found I had failed to get all of the cables nessicary, I need another component video if I wanted to be able to switch video and audio sources just by pressing one button. at this point I have five remote controlls to keep track of already, so I figured I would spend the money to consolidate one more feature. I also needed an audio cable for my hi-def cable box. it already sounded sweet with analog, but not quite at the level of dvds (which if the programming supports it, it now is), so I dropped by circut city to pick one up. at cambridge soundworks, they just handed me a coaxil cable to use with my dvd player. it was just one cable, they didn't give me options, and this didn't suprise me for a digtial cable; if you were getting cable loss on a usb cord, would you accept it as a trade off for not paying extra for higher quality cables? so when I went into circut city looking for optical audio cables (my cable box doesn't support coaxil), I assumed the only varations would be the lengths. they weren't, some were supposedly higher quality in some way, which might have made sense if they were analog, but even rock bottom quality digital cables should have perfect signal reproduction. I bought the cheapo, which being fiber optic cable, was still not so cheap. it sounds as good as it did in the store. monstercable, which was the only brand circut city carried, must not think much of consumers.
FUD was a terrible choice of a term, but I agree that ignoring goodle as a threat is foolish.
that said, yeah, IBM is probably a bigger threat. not because google isn't a tough competetor, but because right now, even if google knocks microsoft out of every they are competeing in, Microsoft is still the big bad evil OS monopoly, and they can still levarage that to get into new markets. IBM on the other hand, is heavily supporting linux, and if microsoft were knocked out of that market, they'd be fucked.
the USPTO handles both patent and trademarks... perhaps the patent side has taken a toll on the quality of trademarks as well? besides which, in some cases, they hold trademarks on the full product name, but not the short version, i.e. they have a trademark on microsoft windows, but now windows. if they tried to get people to pay royalties on using the term 'word' outside the context of the title of a product, they would not fare well.
not all distros do have the same kernel, or the same versions of the same applications, but granted plenty of them overlap.
by that argument though, why should a distro provider have to test their distro? the kernel and all of the other software have been tested far more than one organization is capable of doing right? yeah, but not in that exact combination. software can encounter problems because it's running on the same computer as other software, problems that if it were running alone wouldn't occur. I'm having issues with KDE in kubuntu 5.10 on this machine, so I'm more or less forced to use GNOME instead, even though I've used that version of KDE with no problems before on other distros.
plus, there is software that is specific to one or two distros only, like YAST or fedora's online update. often these programs overlap in function, and in a proprietary OS, only one would exist, so it's not fair to count problems in both of them as issues with one OS.
good point, that likely puts it in the upper thousands, vs what? 5 or 6? at this point unix becomes comparatively so much more secure that it's not even remotely funny.
Actually, I think you get a much more accurate perspective just lumping all of linux together, and all of windows together, in which case, the GGGP was right on the ball. there's a lot more wrong with this survey anyhow.
ok granted. however, if you're going to count each windows OS as a separate OS, you also, in maintaining fairness, have to count each linux distro as a separate OS. maybe the same with OSX, I'm not familiar with the platform so I don't know how different the 4 versions have been. in any case, if you break it out that far, you're dealing with several hundred unix/linux OS's with 10 times (at least) as many apps, vs just a handful of windows OS's.
Then again I can live with the fact that I have first to click on a link then choose to save the torrent file then go azureus select open torrent, select the torrent and finally be able to start leeching.
or you can just click on the link and say open with azureus (which consits of clicking the mouse twice if you have it set as the defult app for that file type) and start leeching. as simple as a direct download. Using individual apps for each an every task can be a little less fluid, but doesn't have to be. you picked a particularly bad example.
Yup. The notion that people might actually become educated without the government coercing it on everyone - I told you, it is simply too radical for people to handle.
doubtlessly some of them will. but relatively few, as most will be too busy doing manual labor in order to earn enough to eat to have the energy or the time to even think of educating themselvs. these will be the people whose parents are stuck in the same situation. the ones that will educate themselves will be the ones whose parents were educated (maybe themselves doesn't quite fit) and managed to make enough money to be able to have a comfortable lifestyle. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. great system.
Boy, I sure hit the nail on the head. After all, who could ever possibly accept the notion that millions won't die unless the government coerces people to pay for retirement and health care. Yes, it is truely too radical to handle.
the whole reason why the government does this is because the elderly often can't afford to pay for it themselves. millions of them would die without the young paying their medical bills. when you hit 75, tell me if you still think social security is a bad idea.
I'm not even going to adress your whole give homeless, starving, ignorant, desperate men guns idea. assuming the poor that are being oppressed can afford them anyway. Generally they'd just go for a few beers to drown their misery in.
I think the only real way to get total freedom would be to move out into the jungle, or some such traditionally uninviting, and hence government free zone. you can do anything you want, right? tell me how much you value your freedom over safety after being chased by wild animals for a few months. Ben Franklin said that those who would sacrifice liberty for saftey deserve niether. I like the quote, but there's a point at which you can no longer argue that it is true. the jungle scenario is way beyond this. We need to agree on some rules so that we are not slaves to basic survival instincts. where exactly that point is is up for debate.
yes, your ideas are radical, but too radical? probably not. your original comment wasn't marked insightful, which would have been a step to much, but I support the interesting. I don't agree with you, but it's fun to debate this stuff, no? Thing with radical ideas is, if you expect anyone to listen, you'd better be able to support them. If someone said women are just as good as men, most people these days, myself included, would say, well duh. we get it. I agree. we take ideas like that for granted. when you're talking about vastly modifying the running of the government, or even abolishing it, you'd better be ready for a debate. that doesn't mean people aren't taking you seriously.
so why, after millions of years of evolution, are we so bad at finding it?
because what we want does not equate to what we evolve towards. We evolve towards what makes us good at surving and reproducing. has nothing to do with happiness. That said, back in the days when we were curling up next to this new thing called fire in a cave somewhere after a long day of throwing sharp pointed objects at potential food, did we even have time to think "am I really happy with my life?" most likely not, the instinct of survival, being one of the most key things to the "fitness" of any creature, tends to take precidence in our minds when it is a serious concern.
These days, survival is such a given for many people that they need other things to occupy their minds. Reproduction is most decidedly still there, but given the comparitively rediculous time frame we have to work with, we can't devote our whole lives to it. so then comes the question, "How can I be happy with my life?" It's an important question, but a tertiary one, and one that we aren't being molded towards.
Re:PatentHawk charges $125/hour
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah. didn't even check that myself, but I clicked the link thinking, "this is going to be a load of shit" but then quickly forced myself to at least listen to it.
after the third time they reffered to the author of the article they were disputing as "BeavisWeek" though, I decided it was impossible to take them seriously.
thing is, with linux, the components of the OS aren't exactly all made by the same people. with windows, you only get that kind of titling with the programs microsoft makes itself. if I'd prefer to use another media player over windows media player, I can't really expect real, nullsoft, or apple to all name their players "media player" as well, can I?
you're assuming that all applications are features of the operating system, and you really can't do that. they're not. some of them are availible for other operating systems, and in this case, NONE (as far as I know) of them are made by the same people who make the kernel. they're not features, they're products. GIMP isn't tied to the linux kernel, hell, I use it in windows. It's just included because of the nature of F/OSS. GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program is actually quite intuitive if you know what the acronym stands for, but even if you don't, most distros say right next to it "Image Editor" or something of that nature.
Nothing worse then searching for one thing, and coming up with a "*ultra-midget-fetish-sex-in-chocolate*" result when your g/f is around..........
Your tastes frigthen me.
and you can just say "Don't index folder X." google desktop so far has been very good about pretending my porn doesn't exist. don't index stuff you don't want to find.
digital to analouge is fine according to this bill, just not analouge to digital. if you outlaw the former, we go back to VHS tapes, or silent films. you have to convert a digital audio signal to analouge just to play it.
no link to the actual bill, (anyone?) but the article says it would oulaw the manufacture of devices that convert analogue to digital, not the actual act of converting analouge to digital. so yes, you could still do that, but if you lose that mic, you're fucked. again, no link to the actual bill, so we can't be sure exactly what it would entail.
Meanwhile, Google will keep making some really cool things for Joe Sixpack on his Intar-nets and Microsoft will try to chase after all those bright, shiny things that Google has. Microsoft won't die, but I'm just not digging this Vista too much. So it's going to make searching for files really, really cool! Ooh, who cares?! I put my files where I can find them... I SEARCH for stuff online.
the vista search feature would be one of those things that MS is chasing after google on. I'm like you, I manage to keep stuff organzied enough that I rarely use any kind of local search feature, but I've tried google desktop, and it's nice. MS would be hard pressed to match that, and even more hopless in terms of making it supiror enough to get people to actually buy an upgrade for that feature.
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps, but I think it's more critical that they seem to think that sourceforge has no downloads.
I'm pretty sure it means 100,000 total, so it's 10^5. besides which, they automate much of the process.
Walmart also doesn't allow labor unions. and goes to great lengths to keep them from forming. some guy wrote a book on it.
if you expect me to bother actually looking up stuff I don't know off of the top of my head, you'll have to rise above the level of defending google purely as a knee-jerk reaction. I'm seriously getting sick of slashdot. yes, I hate microsoft, yes, I love linux, yes, I think the patent system is horribly broken, and yes, I'm boycotting the RIAA. but when one of these issues come up I still manage to think before I speak, and on the rare occasion that something unfavorable to the standard theology here comes up, and very well may be true, (like perhaps OOo is more memory intensive than MSOffice), I won't just disregard it.
now on to the specifics of your "argument." for all you know he did get along well with his co-workers. if he didn't, and that was the reason they didn't hire him, he should have just been told that they felt there wasn't good chemestry between him and the rest of the group. instead, he was told that he was too old. too old. sounds like they're basing it on age to me.
records had better sound quality that cassettes. cassettes took up a significant share of music sales, dispite far far poorer quality, because in some ways they were more convineint. they didn't replace vynl completely, or even effectively so. the sound quality had something to do with it, but mostly because the difference was gargantuan. the ability to skip through records quickly though made them stil more convineint in some ways; while cassettes were more portable, rewinding could be a pain. then came cds, which were still lower quality than vynl, but not by a ton. they were also much smaller, you could skip through them even more easily, and if you kept them in the case, which was a very reasonable size comparatively, they were very portable. finally mp3's. again, lower quality than CDs, much more convinent, and though I definately don't think cds have died yet, the advent of portable mp3 players has made that day hasten it's way here. it will actually get here when online music downloads are more convinent than CDs, which they most definately are not now, at least the legal ones, thanks to DRM. in the mean time, cds are merely a transportation mechanism, many people buy hundreds of cds now and never listen to them, just rip them and listen to mp3s.
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray most decidedly are not more convinient, they most likely are less, with stronger DRM that further infringes on fair use rights. the GP is right, they have provided no solid reason to upgrade, but yes, in the past they most definately have. It's entirely possible that neither of these formats will ever catch on, and people will just use hi-def pay per view services. there you have both quality, and more importantly, convinience.
in the coming months and years, this is going to be a new challange for the consumer electronics market: what happens when your products are already so good, that when you make them better, it is humanly impossilbe to notice? dvds are relatively new, but the industry is already calling them dead. cds have been around since the 80's, and though the industry has introduced two competeing formats, sacd and dvd audio, no one is buying either for the same reason. I have excellent hearing, and I have one dvd audio disc, with which I'm pretty sure (not certain) that I can hear a difference in sound quality. it's so slight however, that I wouldn't even consider spending extra money. indeed I rip cds into a lossy format anyway usually mp3's at 192kbps. 128 is crap, but 192 gets into that same range where I'm not even certain I can hear a difference.
who's going to pay extra for high quality media when the "low" quality media already breaks the limit of many people's senses?
so of course it has to be all marketing from here, since they have to manage to sell a product that for all intensive purposes the consumer already has, and has no need for a spare.
when I set up the aformentioned sound system, I found I had failed to get all of the cables nessicary, I need another component video if I wanted to be able to switch video and audio sources just by pressing one button. at this point I have five remote controlls to keep track of already, so I figured I would spend the money to consolidate one more feature. I also needed an audio cable for my hi-def cable box. it already sounded sweet with analog, but not quite at the level of dvds (which if the programming supports it, it now is), so I dropped by circut city to pick one up. at cambridge soundworks, they just handed me a coaxil cable to use with my dvd player. it was just one cable, they didn't give me options, and this didn't suprise me for a digtial cable; if you were getting cable loss on a usb cord, would you accept it as a trade off for not paying extra for higher quality cables? so when I went into circut city looking for optical audio cables (my cable box doesn't support coaxil), I assumed the only varations would be the lengths. they weren't, some were supposedly higher quality in some way, which might have made sense if they were analog, but even rock bottom quality digital cables should have perfect signal reproduction. I bought the cheapo, which being fiber optic cable, was still not so cheap. it sounds as good as it did in the store. monstercable, which was the only brand circut city carried, must not think much of consumers.
perhaps this would revive esparanto?
that said, yeah, IBM is probably a bigger threat. not because google isn't a tough competetor, but because right now, even if google knocks microsoft out of every they are competeing in, Microsoft is still the big bad evil OS monopoly, and they can still levarage that to get into new markets. IBM on the other hand, is heavily supporting linux, and if microsoft were knocked out of that market, they'd be fucked.
the USPTO handles both patent and trademarks... perhaps the patent side has taken a toll on the quality of trademarks as well? besides which, in some cases, they hold trademarks on the full product name, but not the short version, i.e. they have a trademark on microsoft windows, but now windows. if they tried to get people to pay royalties on using the term 'word' outside the context of the title of a product, they would not fare well.
by that argument though, why should a distro provider have to test their distro? the kernel and all of the other software have been tested far more than one organization is capable of doing right? yeah, but not in that exact combination. software can encounter problems because it's running on the same computer as other software, problems that if it were running alone wouldn't occur. I'm having issues with KDE in kubuntu 5.10 on this machine, so I'm more or less forced to use GNOME instead, even though I've used that version of KDE with no problems before on other distros.
plus, there is software that is specific to one or two distros only, like YAST or fedora's online update. often these programs overlap in function, and in a proprietary OS, only one would exist, so it's not fair to count problems in both of them as issues with one OS.
Still less than 20, but good point.
good point, that likely puts it in the upper thousands, vs what? 5 or 6? at this point unix becomes comparatively so much more secure that it's not even remotely funny. Actually, I think you get a much more accurate perspective just lumping all of linux together, and all of windows together, in which case, the GGGP was right on the ball. there's a lot more wrong with this survey anyhow.
ok granted. however, if you're going to count each windows OS as a separate OS, you also, in maintaining fairness, have to count each linux distro as a separate OS. maybe the same with OSX, I'm not familiar with the platform so I don't know how different the 4 versions have been. in any case, if you break it out that far, you're dealing with several hundred unix/linux OS's with 10 times (at least) as many apps, vs just a handful of windows OS's.
or you can just click on the link and say open with azureus (which consits of clicking the mouse twice if you have it set as the defult app for that file type) and start leeching. as simple as a direct download. Using individual apps for each an every task can be a little less fluid, but doesn't have to be. you picked a particularly bad example.
doubtlessly some of them will. but relatively few, as most will be too busy doing manual labor in order to earn enough to eat to have the energy or the time to even think of educating themselvs. these will be the people whose parents are stuck in the same situation. the ones that will educate themselves will be the ones whose parents were educated (maybe themselves doesn't quite fit) and managed to make enough money to be able to have a comfortable lifestyle. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. great system.
Boy, I sure hit the nail on the head. After all, who could ever possibly accept the notion that millions won't die unless the government coerces people to pay for retirement and health care. Yes, it is truely too radical to handle.
the whole reason why the government does this is because the elderly often can't afford to pay for it themselves. millions of them would die without the young paying their medical bills. when you hit 75, tell me if you still think social security is a bad idea.
I'm not even going to adress your whole give homeless, starving, ignorant, desperate men guns idea. assuming the poor that are being oppressed can afford them anyway. Generally they'd just go for a few beers to drown their misery in.
I think the only real way to get total freedom would be to move out into the jungle, or some such traditionally uninviting, and hence government free zone. you can do anything you want, right? tell me how much you value your freedom over safety after being chased by wild animals for a few months. Ben Franklin said that those who would sacrifice liberty for saftey deserve niether. I like the quote, but there's a point at which you can no longer argue that it is true. the jungle scenario is way beyond this. We need to agree on some rules so that we are not slaves to basic survival instincts. where exactly that point is is up for debate.
yes, your ideas are radical, but too radical? probably not. your original comment wasn't marked insightful, which would have been a step to much, but I support the interesting. I don't agree with you, but it's fun to debate this stuff, no? Thing with radical ideas is, if you expect anyone to listen, you'd better be able to support them. If someone said women are just as good as men, most people these days, myself included, would say, well duh. we get it. I agree. we take ideas like that for granted. when you're talking about vastly modifying the running of the government, or even abolishing it, you'd better be ready for a debate. that doesn't mean people aren't taking you seriously.
because what we want does not equate to what we evolve towards. We evolve towards what makes us good at surving and reproducing. has nothing to do with happiness. That said, back in the days when we were curling up next to this new thing called fire in a cave somewhere after a long day of throwing sharp pointed objects at potential food, did we even have time to think "am I really happy with my life?" most likely not, the instinct of survival, being one of the most key things to the "fitness" of any creature, tends to take precidence in our minds when it is a serious concern.
These days, survival is such a given for many people that they need other things to occupy their minds. Reproduction is most decidedly still there, but given the comparitively rediculous time frame we have to work with, we can't devote our whole lives to it. so then comes the question, "How can I be happy with my life?" It's an important question, but a tertiary one, and one that we aren't being molded towards.
after the third time they reffered to the author of the article they were disputing as "BeavisWeek" though, I decided it was impossible to take them seriously.
you're assuming that all applications are features of the operating system, and you really can't do that. they're not. some of them are availible for other operating systems, and in this case, NONE (as far as I know) of them are made by the same people who make the kernel. they're not features, they're products. GIMP isn't tied to the linux kernel, hell, I use it in windows. It's just included because of the nature of F/OSS. GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program is actually quite intuitive if you know what the acronym stands for, but even if you don't, most distros say right next to it "Image Editor" or something of that nature.
not when the article was a complaint about an equally stupid UI issue.
(seriously, right in the article there's a screenshot of the K menu which has perfectly clear descriptions.)
I think it was fairly clear that he meant Desktop OS, as opposed to server OS, search engine, etc.
Yeah... I just sorta stared at the headline for a couple minutes when I saw it...
he's getting a much worse deal than you. $48 CAN is roughly $41 USD nowadays (yeah, I know.) he's a bit misinformed about US prices.
Your tastes frigthen me.
and you can just say "Don't index folder X." google desktop so far has been very good about pretending my porn doesn't exist. don't index stuff you don't want to find.
digital to analouge is fine according to this bill, just not analouge to digital. if you outlaw the former, we go back to VHS tapes, or silent films. you have to convert a digital audio signal to analouge just to play it.
no link to the actual bill, (anyone?) but the article says it would oulaw the manufacture of devices that convert analogue to digital, not the actual act of converting analouge to digital. so yes, you could still do that, but if you lose that mic, you're fucked. again, no link to the actual bill, so we can't be sure exactly what it would entail.
the vista search feature would be one of those things that MS is chasing after google on. I'm like you, I manage to keep stuff organzied enough that I rarely use any kind of local search feature, but I've tried google desktop, and it's nice. MS would be hard pressed to match that, and even more hopless in terms of making it supiror enough to get people to actually buy an upgrade for that feature.