I think Lucas misspelled it and called it 'midichlorians' or some pap like that..
Its not entirely his fault, he's been clearly been ingesting too much chlorian... er chlorine from his pool for years now. I suspect was part of a conspiracy to sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids.
And MS WILL find a way to recoup the money from ALL of us, their customers....unless we decide not to be their customers anymore.
And exactly what's in it for "us", their customers? We get to pay a little more to cover Microsofts illegal activities? That's hardly a "critical feature" worth a premium to me.
1) This is bad press for Microsoft. Shareholders KNOW the price of products will have to go up to cover this, and they won't see any return on that increase. Prices and sales will have to rise much higher than otherwise for them to see a return. Companies KNOW they will ultimately pay the price for this, and they have better things to do with their money than pay higher prices to pay microsofts fines.
2) As the price goes up customers get more annoyed, their is no value increase, and microsoft doesn't even see a profit from it. (Even if microsoft does bundle new features in with the price increase, the value increase will still be diluted.)
3) If customers are sufficiently annoyed they will look to alternatives, and reduce their commitment to microsoft.
4) Meanwhile, competition is given a bit of a wedge. The tremendous advantage Microsoft has thanks to its entrenched monopoly is countered slightly by the burden the fines place on the company. When bidding against a microsoft burdened by heavy fines, the competition stands to profit more on any deal at a given price (or break even when microsoft would lose money, etc...) It doesn't level the playing field by any means, but its slightly more level than it was.
How can a push to virtualisation - the process of running an OS on "virtual hardware" - possibly be the end of a company that's core business involves selling an OS?
Simple. Businesses deploy computers with windows to support their existing software, legacy applications, etc. Once a business is on a given OS its pretty much stuck with that OS in perpetuity because if it switches some (or most, or all) existing applications will no longer work. Switching is thus a monstrous task, difficult to perform, and difficult to justify.
Virtualization allows it to deploy an alternative OS, while keeping the legacy OS and legacy applications. In the short term that isn't bad news for Microsoft, as people will still need licenses for Windows to run legacy apps.
But all new applications the business adopts post "switch" will not need windows, and the self-perpetuating windows requirement is broken. As as the legacy apps gradually get phased out windows will get phased out with them.
Having a handle bar within reach sort of undermines the idea of free floating in the middle of a zero-g space. I mean, if its in reach, and your doing anything acrobatic, its going to get in the way...
You could bang into it and hurt yourself, and even a mild bump might serve to send you drifting accross the room.
After giving it some thought though it would be resolvable with a retractable "handle" (be it a ladder or rope or bar or whatever. You "climb out into the middle of the room", release the handle, set it to retract and enjoy free floating bliss. When you are done, you could push off eachother or have a voice-command system so you can just call for it to extend the handle again. Some minor logistics issue remain (like dealing with minor drift etc), but overall its a sound concept...
No bondage is necessary, just push yourself to the center of the room... there are no external forces
That solves the problem posed by Newton's 3rd law... "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.", but it doesn't really solve newton's first law:
Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
In other words: Once you reach the 'center' how exactly do you plan to stop?
Great games to use for settling a game of Risk when it's down to two people and no-one wants to take the two-three hours it'll take to arrive at a real winner. Honorable combat between two great generals:)
I think I'd rather just flip a coin rather than challenge some guy at a video game he owns which I've never even played.:)
Or, better yet, blitz-chess with a 5-minute timer.
So anyone who holds the 'most people are idiots' philosophy is not elibigle to vote, in my book, because they have not thought things through to the obvious consequences.
I hold that philosophy, yet, like I said, I also advocate the status quo because I don't beleive there is any way to separate the people who should from those shouldn't that is equitable, safe from abuse, and I suppose safe from the inversion of priviledge you proposed.
Indeed the situation you propose is precisely what the incumbent political structure would love to see happen.
The reason people look at you like you're a Nazi is because once you start with "these people aren't fit to vote, I know what's best for them", then you start feeling entitled to make other decisions for them, such as what kinds of jobs they can hold, where they can live, and whether they are allowed to reproduce. The 'slippery slope' card is one that's too often use where it's not warranted, but this is a place where it's obviously warranted, by historical precedent.
So what if he said some people aren't fit to drive...? Does that imply he's on a slippery slope leading to where he claims knows what's best for them, what kind of jobs they can hold, where they can live, whether they can reproduce?
Or does it just mean that he, like most people, think that driving is serious enough that people doing it ought to at least pass some sort of basic competency test?
We approve of a system that has a minor obstacle designed to try and keep inexperienced total idiots from driving their cars, but we let these same twits drive the country?
Frankly I agree with him. I also however see NO equitable method of determining who is and is not competent to vote, and thus side with the status quo where everyone can vote, no matter how ignorant and idiotic they might be...
Oh noes, I'm afraid of gays, terr'ists, and think flag burning laws is the most important issue for congress...
I think killing is wrong, God said so! But if we call a guy a terr'ist instead of a criminal then its ok to drop bombs on his house to kill him (and anyone near him), and then celebrate by parading around with his corpse on display. That's wicked cool not sick and demented. Its not murder. Its not even morally wrong, 'cuz we're at WAR see?...
Killings ok if we're at WAR because we're defending our FREEDOMS!! We're defending them by pre-emptively killing anyone we're afraid will take them away. Even if it turns out they can't.
Our FREEDOMS are so important that we should give them up so the gubmint can more effectively defend them from the terr'ists. That's just logcal; and if you says diff'rent yur probly a terr'ist and hates 'merica.
Next time someone bitches the gubmint is taking away freedoms, I'll noes he's just trying to to help the terr'ists so Ima set bombs off in his house to kill him 'cuz its ok to kill terr'ists 'cuz we're at war with them! I saw so on the TV.
Jesus is love and he hates terrists and wants us to kill them where they live so they can't get us were we live.
Ima 'maercan hero!!
But yeah... if I could think of a way to deny idiots like that the vote. I would. There should be some sort of level of critical thinking that must be achieved and demonstrated before you get to decide what the country does.
You think the phone company would just tell you who a line belonged to if you called them up?
You've got to admit it *seems* reasonable. After all they handed over the information on every call made in the country to the government without even blinking. Why not tell a customer about one little number?;)
The problems we have aren't a result of where we live, but how we live.
However, several key vulnerabilities to the survival of the species result from the fact that we all inhabit the same rock. Bio-engineered plagues, massive metor Strikes, nuclear holocaust etc can be survived better by having self-sufficient extra-terrestrial colonies. First as isolated colonies unaffected by the incident, and later as a source of people and working infrastructure to help bootstrap the survivors back to civilization... or re-conlonize.
I never bother with commercials of a product I want to buy, I think it is more important to do real research and look at the details and features.
But then you wouldn't know that the model you researched and are looking to buy has a $2000 cashback and 0.9% financing if you buy it at Bob's Auto next weekend.;)
As for the crossfire, if you are in the market for a roadster and you were mostly looking at Lotus, Porsche and BMW you might never think to stop in at a Chrysler dealership. If nothing else commercials let you know products exist that counts for more than you might think, from cars to shampoo to cereal.
Do I misunderstand, or is there are real advantage on running product X in one VM and product Y in another (or even second instance of product X). What is the advantage of that scenario over simply running X and Y (or two X) on the same box.
Well for one, it makes separating X and Y onto different boxes a year down the road pretty well effortless. (whether its for load balancing, hardware upgrades, or whatever)
For another it makes upgrading X possible without having to worry about an impact on Y. Doubly handly in "validated" environments (e.g. FDA regulated)
For another it gives another tool to manage security, as its trivial to partition users and applications.
Not to mention the ability to mix OSes at will (including different versions of the same OS). X has been certified on Debian but not RHEL? Y has been certified on RHEL but not debian? Run that X on debian, Y on RHEL, oh and run Z on Windows 2003, all on one physical box. Very convenient if you need to run 3 low load apps but on different OSes.
You might need it for document sharing with others with MS formats. It's not exactly rare even to have teachers require things be handed in in MS formats, or hand things out in MS formats (which even today OpenOffice can sometimes misrender compared to the intended view, which can be devastating in diagrams).
I find that interesting. And I think it would be more true of NON-computing courses than otherwise.
That said, all my profs wanted paper, and when they wanted something electronically it was usually source code so they wanted plaintext. They distributed assignmments in the first years primarily as postscript (.ps), and later on as pdf or just on the web as html. The few cases I was asked for electronic submissions of papers with diagrams, they accepted.pdf and.ps. Word was in fact explicitly forbidden. (Most of these guys were were *nix guys to the core).
I, agree I could see a computer illiterate english prof asking for Word, in theory, but really I can't imagine anyone turning PDF down, and really, even the correspondance courses I took wanted printed paper virtually all of the time - easier to mark, harder to dispute. (and printed at my expense not theirs)
MATLAB, DataStudio (beyond the slightly-too-short trial period), certain professional PSpice implementations, are just a few pieces of professional software that were required of me, for a time, on a daily basis. Not a one-shot that I knew about 3 weeks beforehand.
Yeah, I get that. I took a logic-design course and had to build logic functions, FSMs, and entire cpus out of logic gates and other components and then simulate them. I probably spent 6-8 hours a week in the lab using the software to do it, every week for the entire semester. The software was ridiculously expensive, even the university only had like 25 concurrent licenses for it. (There were more than 100 people in the class.) It was rough.
Universities didn't tell you "go buy a computer" any more than they told you to go buy a pen, but all the Universities I looked at basically told you you needed it for an engineering education and gave recommendations in the P4 2.4 GHz or equivalent range
You know, that's a fair comment, really. I'd like to re-iterate that I've maintained all along that you really *should* plan to have a computer going into university now. And especially if you are pursuing a computing intensive field. However, going back 10-20 years it was much easier to get by without one. The main reason you need a computer today is email/web and word processing. And yeah, for engineering you should probably plan to shell out for matlab academic.
Back to your comment though: they simply recommended a decent new computer. What else were they going to recommend? That said, did you *really* need a 2.4GHz P4? Would not a PentiumIII 800 have run everything you needed? I'd bet it would.
Did you go to a small school?
Not particularly. I did most of my time at SFU, which, while smaller than, say UofT, is around the same size as other major Canadian universities like McMaster, UofM, UofC, Waterloo, etc. It was ranked best comprehensive university in Canada by Maclean's several times while I was there, and was consistently ranked highly even when it wasn't #1, which may actually be a factor in my experience... but that's all I can think of.
Finally, I will give an anecdote: I was outright told to pirate Matlab,
The student version is $99, less than many of my text books. Individual toolboxes are $59, odds are you only need a few. Really, this is not expensive for course materials, especially for something that will last the whole program.
and was told that "we find engineering science students are typically 'resourceful' enough to get around the limited lab space" for DataStudio -- which simply was overbooked, all the time, by rampant hordes of physics students. Plus that building closed at 8.
I bet you are 18-19 years old, right? I went to college on 86-90, and I have to say GPs experience is dead on.
No. I went to university from 93-00, and I'd say his experience has been significantly exaggerated.
For example, needing fancy "word processors" for assignments. In 93 I had both lab and telnet remote access to vt100 terminals giving access to a shell with vi, elm, c, c++, and modula-2 compilers, and emacs with lisp. That's **all** that was required to complete compsci assignments for the first couple years. Some of my peers were even logging in remotely from Apples (Apples not Macs). Acceptable word processing for the average assignment amounted to a vi created text document dumped out to a campus laser printer, with gaps left in the text for figures and drawings to be done by hand with red/black/blue pens and a ruler.
It was years later before there was any expectation that we use latex, equation editor, or something like maple to "draw" mathematical formula for the average assignment. Similarly for piecharts / barcharts, and graphs, etc hand drawn (with ruler & graph paper) was generally acceptable, although you could also use the basic charting features of Excel for Windows 3.1 if you could get into the pc labs (the busiest labs) -- most of the labs in 93 were just dumb text-only vt100 unix terminals. (by 2000 most of these had been updated to PCs/Macs with MS Office.)
If graphics output (like opengl renderings), 3d function plots, cad drawings, circuitry diagrams, or something more exotic was required, you pretty much were expected to generate those in the lab.
I wasn't in engineering, but I was friends with quite a few (the compsci and engineering shared some of the labs and were physically in the same space so we mingled quite a bit. We did our OpenGL/Graphics programming assignments on the same SGI's they used for CAD. For the most part they had to do CAD in the lab, although some of the assignments (usually the earlier ones) were doable in some inexpensive autocad knockoff - logicad? (maybe, the name rings a bell), that could be had for like $60 bucks on the academic pricing.
And yeah, while most of us comp sci and engineering guys had our own pcs, and while software piracy was rampant it was mostly recreational. Most of us used the labs for graphics intensive coursework, and for other stuff, like c programming, we mostly telneted in from home. Honestly, there was never the slightest bit of pressure from the school or course-work to have an "advanced computer". And even the minority who didn't have any computer at all coped just fine.
Suggesting that 5 years EARLIER the expectation for fancy wordprocessing and computer generated graphics was higher is absurd.
I find it incredible (as in lacks credibility) that in 86-90 it was completely different, with all the successful students running "high end" pcs with pirated software. Technology in the 80's moved particularly fast. But considering that in '85 a 386 ran $15,000-20,000, and a mere 1 MB stick of RAM cost over 100 bucks a student would have been pretty lucky to have a 286 clone with 1MB ram, EGA graphics, and a pair of 5.25" drives. A hard drive would have been a pretty big deal. The 720k 3.5" floppy was just showing up on brand new PCs.
Needing to do "fancy wordproccessing" with expensive pirated software for assignments in this era of PC? Sounds pretty shrill to me. Really, how much did WordPerfect 4 cost again anyway? Basides there were adquate text editors for a fraction of the price. I think I paid around $9 for the ones I used for most of the 80s, until I got windows 3.1.
Given a "sweet machine" like that using the $50,000+ SGI CAD stations in the lab would actually have been a treat;) -- instead of trying to do it with a ripped off copy of AutoCAD version 1.0 (ok ok, 1.4) at home. Even in 93, when I was running a 486SX-25 with 4MB RAM those SGIs were something special.
Plus, teachers expected you to have it because back then piracy wa
Note the past tense. Open office didn't exist back in 1996 and Star Office support for MS formats was kind of crappy in the early days.
Why would you need top notch support for MS Formats to compose essays, write reports and assignments, etc?
Like I tried to point out (and you ignored it), for some university educations you don't need a very powerful machine.
I didn't ignore it. I denied it.
For others, like engineering you do.
Why? Because you "need" to run illegitimate software in order to pass? Does your entire argument really boil down to needing a fast computer so that you can run a pile of pirated software?? (Or do suspect these kids own Oracle Application Server? Windows 2003 Server? AutoCAD? Maya? Avid? etc..) That's utter bullshit.
I happened to be in university from '93 - 2000 myself and lots of my peers in comp sci and engineering did just fine without illegitmate copies of major software applications; some of them did just fine without any computer at all (although I agree they were pretty rare -- by the mid nineties a fast 486 or a Pentium 1 with Windows 95 was pretty much within nearly anyones grasp). And yeah, students who left things to the last minute had trouble getting lab time in certain labs, but anyone who did a little time management came out just fine.
It is simply untrue that an engineering or comp sci student needs a top end computer and 20,000+ worth of illegitimate software to succeed in school or life.
Maybe it's all you need, but your peers in the "Advanced Nonlinear Editing" class are going to be enjoying lots of practice time at home while you spend hundreds of hours in the lab, at school, late at night - because your iBook won't run any of the current NLE tools. Or maybe you're an aspiring photojournalist and need to quickly manipulate 30-50MB image files. A 2001 iBook isn't going to cut it.
Why would you need to manipulate them "quickly"? Is that part of the assignment? Make sure your PC loads them in under 15 seconds?
You really emphasized the wrong word. instead of "you" it should have been "need". You said it yourself, if you don't own the hardware and software you'll have to practice in the lab, while your peers will be practicing at home. Or maybe not, how many of my Peers are likely to have an Avid setup at home? Complete with HD breakout box? How many plugins will they have? Even at academic pricing owning this legitimately would add up to another year of school easy.
Sure your peers at home will be able to get some or all of the work done at home using their MacBook and FinalCut Pro or whatever, but the guy who had to spend 100s of hours in the lab likely had access to more tools, and probably learnt more too.
The ibook is to write papers, do writeups, read assignments, internet research, check email. For the actual course work, if it requires NLE tools or whatever, then yeah, you'll be in the lab.
Why are people here grousing about a $900.00 price point...
Beats me. If you can afford a good PC get a good one. I'm not saying you should handicap yourself with a used ibook if you can do better, I'm just saying at the very least you should plan to have access to a computer with internet etc. If your coursework has specialized requirements like Avid, or Autodesk Maya, or whatever the campus facilities will cover that.
That said, if you are in an NLE course, the course requirements might very well specify that you need a computer with XYZ software on it. (As is the case in some web design, graphic arts, programming, and other computer-intensive programs.)
What part of "back then" don't you understand? (Some of us graduated from college before Linus took a stab at building OSes. Where was OO.o then?)
Give me a break. "back then" universities did NOT remotely expect students to have a PC in the "pre-linux" PC era, never mind fancy word processing software. DOS + Wordperfect maybe, by the END of that era. And in the meantime the labs would have offered a terminal session with vi and/or emacs.
And what part of engineering student needing a CAD program didn't you understand?
If you are going back far enough that linux was still a gleam in Linus' eye, then you are in an era when the 80286 was HOT SHIT, and VGA delivered 256 colors at 320x200. And CAD was primarily run on computers from companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC. AutoCAD for DOS was just getting started, and had nothing on its big iron brethren.
The poster was speaking of his own experiences and you accuse him of lying?
Pretty much. No matter what the time was, I'm sure lots of his fellow students without computers (or using Apple IIs, Commodore 128s, and Tandys), and using the campuses lab facilities, managed not only not to flunk, but to excel.
I spend so much time in MATLAB that if my use of it had to be comfined to the lab, I would go out of mind. It's not just one part of the year. It's constant. Nearly day in and day out.
I think anyone going into university without a computer should pretty much be EXPECTING to spend a LOT of time in the computer labs, whether they are english majors writing a 20 page essay every week or a compsci tweaking lisp in emacs, or a math major using maple or matlab...or a compsci/physics/biochem/engineer... using maple/matlab... those two were just useful to everybody.:)
That said, yeah, if you are using matlab that much, you'd probably want to buy a copy. Academic pricing was pretty good; less than 2 textbooks as I recall.
I could never have afforded to buy it back then, even with student discounts, and yet it was more or less a requirement to have expensive word processing software
You mean like OpenOffice for 0$? What features are needed in n school (or even university) paper that aren't more than admirably handled by OpenOffice?
and even massively expensive software like Autocad since the teachers didn't just place importance on content and academic achievement but also the way the reports and assignments were finished and laid-out and they lowered the grade automatically for what they judged to be clumsy and unprofiessionally laid-out reports or assignments.
You needed autocad to lay out reports? Riiiiiiight....
The school claimed that they had enough computers in their labs to cover all the student's needs but that was of course complete crap. At the end of the term the labs were packed and having your own computer could make the difference between finishing your big end-of-term assignments/reports or flunking out.
EVERY university I attended or even evaluated had ample computer labs to provide access to the more exotic software that was required.
Yeah at finals the labs were packed, but anyone with more than a half brain knows this happens, and ensures projects that need access to specialized resources are completed early, and if they don't have access to even a word processor they ensure they plan to be on campus for a several evenings a week or two before the paper is due.
What sort of machine you have to buy depends very much on what you are studying. I suppose you could get away with buying some older-than-your-granny Pentium II laptop at scrap value if you are a philosophy major and only need to run Office 95 or Windows ME but If you are an engineering student something of the caliber of this machine is pretty much an entry level requirement these days.
Not even close.
At the universities I attended the expensive engineering apps like Autocad, the software for designing/simulating ICs and stuff like that was on dedicated units in dedicated labs that only relevant classes had access to and the units therein that didn't have general internet access, or word processing software specifically to ensure that students didn't tie up the scarce software resources surfing the web, writing email, or writing their english paper.
Nobody was expected to purchase or run any of that high end engineering stuff on their own equipment.
For what its worth, yeah, at this stage I'd highly recommend someone purchase an entry level laptop, e.g. an ibook (used is fine) or a used PC but that is ALL they need to succeed at university in any field. You could even make do without, if you had to, but the convenience of not having to plan and schedule around lab access or be on campus to get all your work & research done is well worth the money.
But anyone who tells you that you need a dual core PC and Autocad to get a decent mark is just outright lieing. It would only be true if they were so disorganized and idiotic that they left an entire semesters worth of lab work to the last 5 days and then expect to have a unit waiting for them without any competition for it. And yeah, plenty of those people exist, but the proper solution is better time management not a fancy PC and $10,000 worth of stolen software.
What if it's my music, and I don't want you to have it for free, regardless of how else it might "help" me?
Then don't play it, or allow it to be played in places where people might hear it. Nobody is making you share it.
The issue is that once you've made it available, it is utterly absurd that people should pay an "industry" to issue a "sanctioned copy" when they can do it themselves for nothing.
Enacting laws to force people to do it that way just annoys them and turns them into criminals, because the laws are just absurd and the people largely ignore them.
You can't cling to the 'old way' simply because YOU like it. The world has moved on, the laws may still be in effect but they make absurd demands of citizens.
That said, we all still agree that artists should get paid, but attaching their income to 'copies sold' is now absurd. So the trick is to find new ways of paying the artists. And there are several.
For example a major artist could choose to 'ransom' his music. They write a new album, and then ask for 5,000,000 to release it. They open an account, let fans deposit as much or as little money as they like, and after 6 months, if the total is 5,000,000 the record is released, if not then not and the money is refunded. If it didn't sell, then they can try again at a lower figure, or sweeten the deal by adding another single, or go on tour to promote it...
They could apply their taxes to media, hard drives, flash cards, etc. (Which they already do.) And then distribute money (which they claim to do). Or better by far they could let the fans allocate the money themselves. I'd be thrilled if I could log into a service like iTunes, punch in the serial number of my new hard drive, and have the tax sent over to the band(s) of my choice, or allocated to the artists in my music library. The money at the end of each year that's unallocated can be distributed by the riaa etc.
Services like iTunes can continue to exist, sans DRM, at 10 cents or 25 cents, or even a dollar, whatever the market will bear. People are happy to pay a small premium if they get instant delivery, the product isn't inferior to what they'd get from p2p networks, and it supports the artist. But they are competing against p2p so the premium can't be high, and above all, the product shouldn't be inferior.
The point is there are a million innovative ways of solving the problem. Insisting that we prop up a dead end technology just because that's what "you" would like is absurd.
If we invented some magical teleportation device, would you continue to pay the USPS for postage? Of course not! What if customs got all upset because these teleporters were being used to bypass duty fees and tarrifs would you support banning teleportation and reinstating the USPS to transport your packages? Or would you prefer to re-think how duties are assessed, and levied?
As an artist you are in the same position as a government duty collections agency. Up until now you were able to levy your cut where the cd went from manufacturer to retailer or wherever along that chain to the end customer it happens; it was convenient place to put your "tollbooth". Same with duty, putting the booths at the border was a convenient place to intercept goods crossing it. In a world with trivial perfect copy technology or teleportation technology these logical interception points no longer exist. Its absurd to try and restrict the technology and enact absurd laws just to prop up an artificial boundary so you can continue levying your fees at the same place you are accustomed to.
A new place to erect that tollbooth has to be found. In a recording artists case, attaching a tax to media is one place, inserting a giant toll before it gets released to the public is another place. I'm sure there are other innovative ways of getting paid. I'm not against the music industry, nor against copyright. Most of the copyright act is still sensible; with respect to restrictions on public performances, or plagiarism, or the right to charge money for the work, etc. Those should still belong to the artist (or delegate). However, the monopoly on the right to copy, especially when applied to a computer file, just doesn't make sense.
So? Keep a separate account for buying. You get the odd bad "retaliation" feed back, big fucking deal.
Sellers aren't going to blink at selling to someone with a 90%+ positive rating, especially if looking at the feedback makes it clear the negative feedback is all retaliatory.
And if a seller does get all freaky and won't deal with you because you've been hit with some revenge feedback, he's probably not someone you want to deal with anyway. His loss.
Each and every single time it came back telling me there was no additional information. I turned it off. (System Control Panel -> Advanced -> Error Reporting -> Disable Error Reporting for those that might not know how.)
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I think Lucas misspelled it and called it 'midichlorians' or some pap like that..
;)
Its not entirely his fault, he's been clearly been ingesting too much chlorian... er chlorine from his pool for years now. I suspect was part of a conspiracy to sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids.
That and fluoridation
And MS WILL find a way to recoup the money from ALL of us, their customers. ...unless we decide not to be their customers anymore.
And exactly what's in it for "us", their customers? We get to pay a little more to cover Microsofts illegal activities? That's hardly a "critical feature" worth a premium to me.
1) This is bad press for Microsoft. Shareholders KNOW the price of products will have to go up to cover this, and they won't see any return on that increase. Prices and sales will have to rise much higher than otherwise for them to see a return. Companies KNOW they will ultimately pay the price for this, and they have better things to do with their money than pay higher prices to pay microsofts fines.
2) As the price goes up customers get more annoyed, their is no value increase, and microsoft doesn't even see a profit from it. (Even if microsoft does bundle new features in with the price increase, the value increase will still be diluted.)
3) If customers are sufficiently annoyed they will look to alternatives, and reduce their commitment to microsoft.
4) Meanwhile, competition is given a bit of a wedge. The tremendous advantage Microsoft has thanks to its entrenched monopoly is countered slightly by the burden the fines place on the company. When bidding against a microsoft burdened by heavy fines, the competition stands to profit more on any deal at a given price (or break even when microsoft would lose money, etc...) It doesn't level the playing field by any means, but its slightly more level than it was.
the odds are infinitely favourable.
Just ask Whitman, Price, and Haddad!!
How can a push to virtualisation - the process of running an OS on "virtual hardware" - possibly be the end of a company that's core business involves selling an OS?
Simple. Businesses deploy computers with windows to support their existing software, legacy applications, etc. Once a business is on a given OS its pretty much stuck with that OS in perpetuity because if it switches some (or most, or all) existing applications will no longer work. Switching is thus a monstrous task, difficult to perform, and difficult to justify.
Virtualization allows it to deploy an alternative OS, while keeping the legacy OS and legacy applications. In the short term that isn't bad news for Microsoft, as people will still need licenses for Windows to run legacy apps.
But all new applications the business adopts post "switch" will not need windows, and the self-perpetuating windows requirement is broken. As as the legacy apps gradually get phased out windows will get phased out with them.
At least that's one theory...
Having a handle bar within reach sort of undermines the idea of free floating in the middle of a zero-g space. I mean, if its in reach, and your doing anything acrobatic, its going to get in the way...
You could bang into it and hurt yourself, and even a mild bump might serve to send you drifting accross the room.
After giving it some thought though it would be resolvable with a retractable "handle" (be it a ladder or rope or bar or whatever. You "climb out into the middle of the room", release the handle, set it to retract and enjoy free floating bliss. When you are done, you could push off eachother or have a voice-command system so you can just call for it to extend the handle again. Some minor logistics issue remain (like dealing with minor drift etc), but overall its a sound concept...
No bondage is necessary, just push yourself to the center of the room... there are no external forces
That solves the problem posed by Newton's 3rd law... "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.", but it doesn't really solve newton's first law:
Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
In other words: Once you reach the 'center' how exactly do you plan to stop?
Great games to use for settling a game of Risk when it's down to two people and no-one wants to take the two-three hours it'll take to arrive at a real winner. Honorable combat between two great generals :)
:)
I think I'd rather just flip a coin rather than challenge some guy at a video game he owns which I've never even played.
Or, better yet, blitz-chess with a 5-minute timer.
So anyone who holds the 'most people are idiots' philosophy is not elibigle to vote, in my book, because they have not thought things through to the obvious consequences.
I hold that philosophy, yet, like I said, I also advocate the status quo because I don't beleive there is any way to separate the people who should from those shouldn't that is equitable, safe from abuse, and I suppose safe from the inversion of priviledge you proposed.
Indeed the situation you propose is precisely what the incumbent political structure would love to see happen.
So what if he said some people aren't fit to drive...? Does that imply he's on a slippery slope leading to where he claims knows what's best for them, what kind of jobs they can hold, where they can live, whether they can reproduce?
Or does it just mean that he, like most people, think that driving is serious enough that people doing it ought to at least pass some sort of basic competency test?
We approve of a system that has a minor obstacle designed to try and keep inexperienced total idiots from driving their cars, but we let these same twits drive the country?
Frankly I agree with him. I also however see NO equitable method of determining who is and is not competent to vote, and thus side with the status quo where everyone can vote, no matter how ignorant and idiotic they might be...
But yeah... if I could think of a way to deny idiots like that the vote. I would. There should be some sort of level of critical thinking that must be achieved and demonstrated before you get to decide what the country does.
Yep. My bad.
The ignorance of others should not affect one's vocabulary.
If its the people listening who are ignorant, then yes, it should affect one's vocabulary.
A compliment you will never hear a politician say:
I don't like half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.
-JRR Tolkien (The Hobbit)
You think the phone company would just tell you who a line belonged to if you called them up?
;)
You've got to admit it *seems* reasonable. After all they handed over the information on every call made in the country to the government without even blinking. Why not tell a customer about one little number?
The problems we have aren't a result of where we live, but how we live.
However, several key vulnerabilities to the survival of the species result from the fact that we all inhabit the same rock. Bio-engineered plagues, massive metor Strikes, nuclear holocaust etc can be survived better by having self-sufficient extra-terrestrial colonies. First as isolated colonies unaffected by the incident, and later as a source of people and working infrastructure to help bootstrap the survivors back to civilization... or re-conlonize.
I never bother with commercials of a product I want to buy, I think it is more important to do real research and look at the details and features.
;)
But then you wouldn't know that the model you researched and are looking to buy has a $2000 cashback and 0.9% financing if you buy it at Bob's Auto next weekend.
As for the crossfire, if you are in the market for a roadster and you were mostly looking at Lotus, Porsche and BMW you might never think to stop in at a Chrysler dealership. If nothing else commercials let you know products exist that counts for more than you might think, from cars to shampoo to cereal.
Do I misunderstand, or is there are real advantage on running product X in one VM and product Y in another (or even second instance of product X). What is the advantage of that scenario over simply running X and Y (or two X) on the same box.
Well for one, it makes separating X and Y onto different boxes a year down the road pretty well effortless. (whether its for load balancing, hardware upgrades, or whatever)
For another it makes upgrading X possible without having to worry about an impact on Y. Doubly handly in "validated" environments (e.g. FDA regulated)
For another it gives another tool to manage security, as its trivial to partition users and applications.
Not to mention the ability to mix OSes at will (including different versions of the same OS). X has been certified on Debian but not RHEL? Y has been certified on RHEL but not debian? Run that X on debian, Y on RHEL, oh and run Z on Windows 2003, all on one physical box. Very convenient if you need to run 3 low load apps but on different OSes.
You might need it for document sharing with others with MS formats. It's not exactly rare even to have teachers require things be handed in in MS formats, or hand things out in MS formats (which even today OpenOffice can sometimes misrender compared to the intended view, which can be devastating in diagrams).
.pdf and .ps. Word was in fact explicitly forbidden. (Most of these guys were were *nix guys to the core).
I find that interesting. And I think it would be more true of NON-computing courses than otherwise.
That said, all my profs wanted paper, and when they wanted something electronically it was usually source code so they wanted plaintext. They distributed assignmments in the first years primarily as postscript (.ps), and later on as pdf or just on the web as html. The few cases I was asked for electronic submissions of papers with diagrams, they accepted
I, agree I could see a computer illiterate english prof asking for Word, in theory, but really I can't imagine anyone turning PDF down, and really, even the correspondance courses I took wanted printed paper virtually all of the time - easier to mark, harder to dispute. (and printed at my expense not theirs)
MATLAB, DataStudio (beyond the slightly-too-short trial period), certain professional PSpice implementations, are just a few pieces of professional software that were required of me, for a time, on a daily basis. Not a one-shot that I knew about 3 weeks beforehand.
Yeah, I get that. I took a logic-design course and had to build logic functions, FSMs, and entire cpus out of logic gates and other components and then simulate them. I probably spent 6-8 hours a week in the lab using the software to do it, every week for the entire semester. The software was ridiculously expensive, even the university only had like 25 concurrent licenses for it. (There were more than 100 people in the class.) It was rough.
Universities didn't tell you "go buy a computer" any more than they told you to go buy a pen, but all the Universities I looked at basically told you you needed it for an engineering education and gave recommendations in the P4 2.4 GHz or equivalent range
You know, that's a fair comment, really. I'd like to re-iterate that I've maintained all along that you really *should* plan to have a computer going into university now. And especially if you are pursuing a computing intensive field. However, going back 10-20 years it was much easier to get by without one. The main reason you need a computer today is email/web and word processing. And yeah, for engineering you should probably plan to shell out for matlab academic.
Back to your comment though: they simply recommended a decent new computer. What else were they going to recommend? That said, did you *really* need a 2.4GHz P4? Would not a PentiumIII 800 have run everything you needed? I'd bet it would.
Did you go to a small school?
Not particularly. I did most of my time at SFU, which, while smaller than, say UofT, is around the same size as other major Canadian universities like McMaster, UofM, UofC, Waterloo, etc. It was ranked best comprehensive university in Canada by Maclean's several times while I was there, and was consistently ranked highly even when it wasn't #1, which may actually be a factor in my experience... but that's all I can think of.
Finally, I will give an anecdote: I was outright told to pirate Matlab,
The student version is $99, less than many of my text books. Individual toolboxes are $59, odds are you only need a few. Really, this is not expensive for course materials, especially for something that will last the whole program.
and was told that "we find engineering science students are typically 'resourceful' enough to get around the limited lab space" for DataStudio -- which simply was overbooked, all the time, by rampant hordes of physics students. Plus that building closed at 8.
That's really sad. All my experienc
I bet you are 18-19 years old, right? I went to college on 86-90, and I have to say GPs experience is dead on.
;) -- instead of trying to do it with a ripped off copy of AutoCAD version 1.0 (ok ok, 1.4) at home. Even in 93, when I was running a 486SX-25 with 4MB RAM those SGIs were something special.
No. I went to university from 93-00, and I'd say his experience has been significantly exaggerated.
For example, needing fancy "word processors" for assignments. In 93 I had both lab and telnet remote access to vt100 terminals giving access to a shell with vi, elm, c, c++, and modula-2 compilers, and emacs with lisp. That's **all** that was required to complete compsci assignments for the first couple years. Some of my peers were even logging in remotely from Apples (Apples not Macs). Acceptable word processing for the average assignment amounted to a vi created text document dumped out to a campus laser printer, with gaps left in the text for figures and drawings to be done by hand with red/black/blue pens and a ruler.
It was years later before there was any expectation that we use latex, equation editor, or something like maple to "draw" mathematical formula for the average assignment. Similarly for piecharts / barcharts, and graphs, etc hand drawn (with ruler & graph paper) was generally acceptable, although you could also use the basic charting features of Excel for Windows 3.1 if you could get into the pc labs (the busiest labs) -- most of the labs in 93 were just dumb text-only vt100 unix terminals. (by 2000 most of these had been updated to PCs/Macs with MS Office.)
If graphics output (like opengl renderings), 3d function plots, cad drawings, circuitry diagrams, or something more exotic was required, you pretty much were expected to generate those in the lab.
I wasn't in engineering, but I was friends with quite a few (the compsci and engineering shared some of the labs and were physically in the same space so we mingled quite a bit. We did our OpenGL/Graphics programming assignments on the same SGI's they used for CAD. For the most part they had to do CAD in the lab, although some of the assignments (usually the earlier ones) were doable in some inexpensive autocad knockoff - logicad? (maybe, the name rings a bell), that could be had for like $60 bucks on the academic pricing.
And yeah, while most of us comp sci and engineering guys had our own pcs, and while software piracy was rampant it was mostly recreational. Most of us used the labs for graphics intensive coursework, and for other stuff, like c programming, we mostly telneted in from home. Honestly, there was never the slightest bit of pressure from the school or course-work to have an "advanced computer". And even the minority who didn't have any computer at all coped just fine.
Suggesting that 5 years EARLIER the expectation for fancy wordprocessing and computer generated graphics was higher is absurd.
I find it incredible (as in lacks credibility) that in 86-90 it was completely different, with all the successful students running "high end" pcs with pirated software. Technology in the 80's moved particularly fast. But considering that in '85 a 386 ran $15,000-20,000, and a mere 1 MB stick of RAM cost over 100 bucks a student would have been pretty lucky to have a 286 clone with 1MB ram, EGA graphics, and a pair of 5.25" drives. A hard drive would have been a pretty big deal. The 720k 3.5" floppy was just showing up on brand new PCs.
Needing to do "fancy wordproccessing" with expensive pirated software for assignments in this era of PC? Sounds pretty shrill to me. Really, how much did WordPerfect 4 cost again anyway? Basides there were adquate text editors for a fraction of the price. I think I paid around $9 for the ones I used for most of the 80s, until I got windows 3.1.
Given a "sweet machine" like that using the $50,000+ SGI CAD stations in the lab would actually have been a treat
Plus, teachers expected you to have it because back then piracy wa
Note the past tense. Open office didn't exist back in 1996 and Star Office support for MS formats was kind of crappy in the early days.
Why would you need top notch support for MS Formats to compose essays, write reports and assignments, etc?
Like I tried to point out (and you ignored it), for some university educations you don't need a very powerful machine.
I didn't ignore it. I denied it.
For others, like engineering you do.
Why? Because you "need" to run illegitimate software in order to pass? Does your entire argument really boil down to needing a fast computer so that you can run a pile of pirated software?? (Or do suspect these kids own Oracle Application Server? Windows 2003 Server? AutoCAD? Maya? Avid? etc..) That's utter bullshit.
I happened to be in university from '93 - 2000 myself and lots of my peers in comp sci and engineering did just fine without illegitmate copies of major software applications; some of them did just fine without any computer at all (although I agree they were pretty rare -- by the mid nineties a fast 486 or a Pentium 1 with Windows 95 was pretty much within nearly anyones grasp). And yeah, students who left things to the last minute had trouble getting lab time in certain labs, but anyone who did a little time management came out just fine.
It is simply untrue that an engineering or comp sci student needs a top end computer and 20,000+ worth of illegitimate software to succeed in school or life.
Maybe it's all you need, but your peers in the "Advanced Nonlinear Editing" class are going to be enjoying lots of practice time at home while you spend hundreds of hours in the lab, at school, late at night - because your iBook won't run any of the current NLE tools. Or maybe you're an aspiring photojournalist and need to quickly manipulate 30-50MB image files. A 2001 iBook isn't going to cut it.
Why would you need to manipulate them "quickly"? Is that part of the assignment? Make sure your PC loads them in under 15 seconds?
You really emphasized the wrong word. instead of "you" it should have been "need". You said it yourself, if you don't own the hardware and software you'll have to practice in the lab, while your peers will be practicing at home. Or maybe not, how many of my Peers are likely to have an Avid setup at home? Complete with HD breakout box? How many plugins will they have? Even at academic pricing owning this legitimately would add up to another year of school easy.
Sure your peers at home will be able to get some or all of the work done at home using their MacBook and FinalCut Pro or whatever, but the guy who had to spend 100s of hours in the lab likely had access to more tools, and probably learnt more too.
The ibook is to write papers, do writeups, read assignments, internet research, check email. For the actual course work, if it requires NLE tools or whatever, then yeah, you'll be in the lab.
Why are people here grousing about a $900.00 price point...
Beats me. If you can afford a good PC get a good one. I'm not saying you should handicap yourself with a used ibook if you can do better, I'm just saying at the very least you should plan to have access to a computer with internet etc. If your coursework has specialized requirements like Avid, or Autodesk Maya, or whatever the campus facilities will cover that.
That said, if you are in an NLE course, the course requirements might very well specify that you need a computer with XYZ software on it. (As is the case in some web design, graphic arts, programming, and other computer-intensive programs.)
What part of "back then" don't you understand? (Some of us graduated from college before Linus took a stab at building OSes. Where was OO.o then?)
Give me a break. "back then" universities did NOT remotely expect students to have a PC in the "pre-linux" PC era, never mind fancy word processing software. DOS + Wordperfect maybe, by the END of that era. And in the meantime the labs would have offered a terminal session with vi and/or emacs.
And what part of engineering student needing a CAD program didn't you understand?
If you are going back far enough that linux was still a gleam in Linus' eye, then you are in an era when the 80286 was HOT SHIT, and VGA delivered 256 colors at 320x200. And CAD was primarily run on computers from companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC. AutoCAD for DOS was just getting started, and had nothing on its big iron brethren.
The poster was speaking of his own experiences and you accuse him of lying?
Pretty much. No matter what the time was, I'm sure lots of his fellow students without computers (or using Apple IIs, Commodore 128s, and Tandys), and using the campuses lab facilities, managed not only not to flunk, but to excel.
I spend so much time in MATLAB that if my use of it had to be comfined to the lab, I would go out of mind. It's not just one part of the year. It's constant. Nearly day in and day out.
...or a compsci/physics/biochem/engineer... using maple/matlab... those two were just useful to everybody. :)
I think anyone going into university without a computer should pretty much be EXPECTING to spend a LOT of time in the computer labs, whether they are english majors writing a 20 page essay every week or a compsci tweaking lisp in emacs, or a math major using maple or matlab
That said, yeah, if you are using matlab that much, you'd probably want to buy a copy. Academic pricing was pretty good; less than 2 textbooks as I recall.
I could never have afforded to buy it back then, even with student discounts, and yet it was more or less a requirement to have expensive word processing software
You mean like OpenOffice for 0$? What features are needed in n school (or even university) paper that aren't more than admirably handled by OpenOffice?
and even massively expensive software like Autocad since the teachers didn't just place importance on content and academic achievement but also the way the reports and assignments were finished and laid-out and they lowered the grade automatically for what they judged to be clumsy and unprofiessionally laid-out reports or assignments.
You needed autocad to lay out reports? Riiiiiiight....
The school claimed that they had enough computers in their labs to cover all the student's needs but that was of course complete crap. At the end of the term the labs were packed and having your own computer could make the difference between finishing your big end-of-term assignments/reports or flunking out.
EVERY university I attended or even evaluated had ample computer labs to provide access to the more exotic software that was required.
Yeah at finals the labs were packed, but anyone with more than a half brain knows this happens, and ensures projects that need access to specialized resources are completed early, and if they don't have access to even a word processor they ensure they plan to be on campus for a several evenings a week or two before the paper is due.
What sort of machine you have to buy depends very much on what you are studying. I suppose you could get away with buying some older-than-your-granny Pentium II laptop at scrap value if you are a philosophy major and only need to run Office 95 or Windows ME but If you are an engineering student something of the caliber of this machine is pretty much an entry level requirement these days.
Not even close.
At the universities I attended the expensive engineering apps like Autocad, the software for designing/simulating ICs and stuff like that was on dedicated units in dedicated labs that only relevant classes had access to and the units therein that didn't have general internet access, or word processing software specifically to ensure that students didn't tie up the scarce software resources surfing the web, writing email, or writing their english paper.
Nobody was expected to purchase or run any of that high end engineering stuff on their own equipment.
For what its worth, yeah, at this stage I'd highly recommend someone purchase an entry level laptop, e.g. an ibook (used is fine) or a used PC but that is ALL they need to succeed at university in any field. You could even make do without, if you had to, but the convenience of not having to plan and schedule around lab access or be on campus to get all your work & research done is well worth the money.
But anyone who tells you that you need a dual core PC and Autocad to get a decent mark is just outright lieing. It would only be true if they were so disorganized and idiotic that they left an entire semesters worth of lab work to the last 5 days and then expect to have a unit waiting for them without any competition for it. And yeah, plenty of those people exist, but the proper solution is better time management not a fancy PC and $10,000 worth of stolen software.
What if it's my music, and I don't want you to have it for free, regardless of how else it might "help" me?
Then don't play it, or allow it to be played in places where people might hear it. Nobody is making you share it.
The issue is that once you've made it available, it is utterly absurd that people should pay an "industry" to issue a "sanctioned copy" when they can do it themselves for nothing.
Enacting laws to force people to do it that way just annoys them and turns them into criminals, because the laws are just absurd and the people largely ignore them.
You can't cling to the 'old way' simply because YOU like it. The world has moved on, the laws may still be in effect but they make absurd demands of citizens.
That said, we all still agree that artists should get paid, but attaching their income to 'copies sold' is now absurd. So the trick is to find new ways of paying the artists. And there are several.
For example a major artist could choose to 'ransom' his music. They write a new album, and then ask for 5,000,000 to release it. They open an account, let fans deposit as much or as little money as they like, and after 6 months, if the total is 5,000,000 the record is released, if not then not and the money is refunded. If it didn't sell, then they can try again at a lower figure, or sweeten the deal by adding another single, or go on tour to promote it...
They could apply their taxes to media, hard drives, flash cards, etc. (Which they already do.) And then distribute money (which they claim to do). Or better by far they could let the fans allocate the money themselves. I'd be thrilled if I could log into a service like iTunes, punch in the serial number of my new hard drive, and have the tax sent over to the band(s) of my choice, or allocated to the artists in my music library. The money at the end of each year that's unallocated can be distributed by the riaa etc.
Services like iTunes can continue to exist, sans DRM, at 10 cents or 25 cents, or even a dollar, whatever the market will bear. People are happy to pay a small premium if they get instant delivery, the product isn't inferior to what they'd get from p2p networks, and it supports the artist. But they are competing against p2p so the premium can't be high, and above all, the product shouldn't be inferior.
The point is there are a million innovative ways of solving the problem. Insisting that we prop up a dead end technology just because that's what "you" would like is absurd.
If we invented some magical teleportation device, would you continue to pay the USPS for postage? Of course not! What if customs got all upset because these teleporters were being used to bypass duty fees and tarrifs would you support banning teleportation and reinstating the USPS to transport your packages? Or would you prefer to re-think how duties are assessed, and levied?
As an artist you are in the same position as a government duty collections agency. Up until now you were able to levy your cut where the cd went from manufacturer to retailer or wherever along that chain to the end customer it happens; it was convenient place to put your "tollbooth". Same with duty, putting the booths at the border was a convenient place to intercept goods crossing it. In a world with trivial perfect copy technology or teleportation technology these logical interception points no longer exist. Its absurd to try and restrict the technology and enact absurd laws just to prop up an artificial boundary so you can continue levying your fees at the same place you are accustomed to.
A new place to erect that tollbooth has to be found. In a recording artists case, attaching a tax to media is one place, inserting a giant toll before it gets released to the public is another place. I'm sure there are other innovative ways of getting paid. I'm not against the music industry, nor against copyright. Most of the copyright act is still sensible; with respect to restrictions on public performances, or plagiarism, or the right to charge money for the work, etc. Those should still belong to the artist (or delegate). However, the monopoly on the right to copy, especially when applied to a computer file, just doesn't make sense.
So? Keep a separate account for buying. You get the odd bad "retaliation" feed back, big fucking deal.
Sellers aren't going to blink at selling to someone with a 90%+ positive rating, especially if looking at the feedback makes it clear the negative feedback is all retaliatory.
And if a seller does get all freaky and won't deal with you because you've been hit with some revenge feedback, he's probably not someone you want to deal with anyway. His loss.
Please, just try it out
I tried it probably a dozen times.
Each and every single time it came back telling me there was no additional information. I turned it off. (System Control Panel -> Advanced -> Error Reporting -> Disable Error Reporting for those that might not know how.)
I don't miss it.