It didn't , but AT&T is a shadow of its former self. The almighty Broadband unit, the one that was going to return the company to its old glory, is being spun off after hemmorhaging money for a long time - after the @Home debacle.
I think he was referring to the fact that all of the large "baby Bell's", many of them as large as AT&T was back in the day, were parts of the broken up AT&T. Hence if you want to look at where AT&T is today, don't look just at the one named "AT&T", but how all the children have done as well.
Whether it's something that you personally would do is irrelevant: Obviously these people want to do this. Having said that, I don't see the original post saying "Man getting together to play a game is dumb!", I see it fingering the fact that ASUS is using this for marketing as instantly rendering it a big waste of time, regardless of what's happening at the event itself.
While the "grossly overpay for ugly furniture that you'll have at the curbside in three years" industry wants us to believe that Ikea products are poor quality, I've found quite the opposite: Not only are they overengineered and long lasting, but they actually use gorgeously smooth rollers on drawers, for instance. Just had to defend IKEA as I've noticed a pretty concerted attack on them lately (the bigger they get the more enemies they acquire).
I guess the Swedes have a lot of time on their hands... to be able to host a 4 day slumberparty/advertisement for ASUS...
How does the fact that ASUS is using this for marketing diminish the event whatsoever? It's one thing to be cynical about marketing and "big business", but it's quite another to take that to the point that you fail to see the positives when you've overblown the negativity.
They seem to have loads of money to push those ads, but the basic premise behind it, like many ".COM ideas" just seems absurd: If you pay by a credit card, you have to go through a line and let them verify your credit card: How has that saved any time? If you haven't paid by credit card...well what other way is there to pay online?
Even if you just paid by kiosks the only advantage is if, ironically, the method of payment is a brutal failure. If it isn't a failure then you'll have the same lines just transposed over to bar code scanner while some granny with a dot matrix printer tries incessantly to get it to read her smudge print (well I suppose that would be more the realm of inkjets).
Definitely silly idea in my opinion. I have no doubt that they're gushing money out on those ads, and getting very little response.
I apologize. I did a find actually curious for the second, and discovered (after the fact) an interesting bug in the way Opera 6 on Windows does finds (namely that it'll find the first couple of instances, but then stops finding...it even stops highlighting the found items properly).
Well that's the damndest thing: This points out a flaw in Opera 6: Do a search for "proprietary" and it'll find the first couple, but will then stop finding hits on F3. Weird.
Unfortunately that quote actually isn't in there (unless The Register dynamically reorganizes text). You really shouldn't present something as a quote when it isn't (at least state that you're paraphrasing). Of course it would hardly surprize me to see such an interpretation on the Register.
Having said that, many arguments against including GPL code is that it limits the options: BSD or commercial code usually don't dictate the future development of the rest of the project (i.e. it can include open source, other companies proprietary code, other companies tightly held copyrighted source code, etc), whereas the highly political GPL pretty much does: GPL only interacts well with GPL (hence why it's called viral licensing: Someone steals some BSD code, sticks a GPL license on it [it happens frequently], and then claims that anything it touches must also be GPLd])
How useful of this in the era of switched networks though? These sorts of things made a lot of sense in the hub broadcast everywhere world, but now that most networks are a cascade of switches, and individual lines from one node to another 5 switches away could be saturated without being apparent to other users.
Indeed it looks like Boa was made specifically for the efficient serving of static content, where Apache, like IIS, is made in a very versatile, full featured manner. Does this render comparisons irrelevant though? Absolutely not. The reality is that most of the content that people do serve up is static content (images, CSS files, etc), and it is entirely reasonable that a server system could include a Boa or similar hyper-optimized server specifically for the static content (i.e. http://www.static.myurl.com/css/styles.css), with the Apache or IIS server being the front line real content system. Using the right tools for the specific tasks could be very beneficial and help avoid the dreaded Slashdotting while Apache or IIS is busy serving up GB of images or static HTML files.
Far worse are those who refuse to acknowledge and learn from change or new experiences. These are the people who love to say "But wait...didn't you used to say...".
Unless you're in politics you have the priviledge of changing your opinion.
I don't know about that. Word 95 looks an awful lot like Wordperfect 6.0.
Are you kidding? Microsoft beat Wordperfect to the GUI Wordprocessor game by a wide margin, and when Wordperfect finally joined the game they did so with a product that was universally panned as a monstrously bloated POS.
Oh you mean the tabs that Mozilla/Netscape ripped off from Opera? Righhhtttt.
If Office had abandoned the Mac, the Mac would be but a footnote in history. This idea that the platform would have thrived and somehow neglected products would thrive on a barren platform just boggles the mind. Would you mind serving up an extra helping of that fantasty hindsight?
You know it's funny you mention that: I subscribe to the National Post and there really are some great sections and inserts that you get monthly, weekly, etc, however by and large I despise the editorial board and some of the frothing maniacs columnists (David Fum, Barbara something or other. The ones that they are humorously most proud of) who never fail to turn every event into an indictment of Canada. These people are so extreme and one-sided in their criticism of my homeland and every single action that it takes that they literally exceed the worst criticism of our worst enemies. It is ironic that you mention Pat Buchanan as in a letter to the editor that I half authored but never completed, I opined that there's a bitter humor in the fact that it's the diatribes of the National Post that maniacs like Pat Buchanan use to criticize Canada.
On the flip side though the big alternative for Toronto area folk is The Toronto Star: An EXTREME left wing newspaper that paints every story as "the man versus the little guy". Their tired rhetoric is even more banal that what the National Post writes up. I've considered the Globe and Mail but just have never gotten around to subscribing.
It just is humorous that the specific example that you chose is pretty much the only large retailer to buck the.99 trend. Indeed there was a fascinating story on the marketing behind the technique of Walmart pricing in the Canadian National Post recently, however unfortunately they don't have it in their online version.
That would almost make sense if it weren't for the fact that Walmart is virtually the only store that doesn't end their prices in the ubiquitous.99. Instead Walmart is the oddman out with prices like "12.64" and "13.28".
I completely agree with you. People seem to have some sort of mega cheap gene that comes out at times like that. Every now and then at Union Station in Toronto there is some Something Or Other Association giving out Something Or Other (for example peaches), and people herd like madmen to get whatever free is being given out...it's always something that would cost you less than $0.20 to buy with your own money. These people, many of whom stomp the accelerator to make up a spare second, waste the time to get something so incredibly cheap.
The same thing holds for COMDEX. I went several times, each time seemingly with coworkers who would sit through pathetic demonstrations and weasle up to booth employees all in the hopes of getting some piece of crap or other. The only nice thing that I ever got from a comdex was a little fabric SQL Server frisbee. Oh, and a spider ball. That was pretty cool too. Everything else was loads of half-fun crap pens and super-low threadcount with cheesy iron-on style decals t-shirts.
A brand new account to claim great success with rebates. Surprising.
I've sent away probably a dozen non-Microsoft rebates and NEVER HAVE RECEIVED SO MUCH AS A REJECTION (though I've had perfect success with the Microsoft rebates). Note that I don't bother sending away rebates for $3, so obviously we're dealing in different spheres here: It makes a lot more sense for a company to hope to weasle by with people not sending in rebates when they're for $3 than for $100.
Yet another claim that it's all about reading the fine print. What BS. "Fill form, attach the receipt and the UPC and mail to XYZ". That's some difficult stuff, clearly prone to multiple errors. Give me a break.
Secondly, the rebate industry DID depend upon non-senders in the nascent rebate era, however now almost everything has rebates. Everyone sends them in (at least beyond the "$3 rebate on a pack of CD-Rs"). Obviously there is something more than "hoping people just don't bother" going on when you're talking about $75 video card rebates.
As far as taxes, that's a government issue.
It is, is it? When someone prices a $200 value product at $800 with a $650 rebate, I'm paying sales taxes on a $800 rebate. That's an issue to ME because they're grossly inflating the cost of their product.
Actually that brings up one more point of the giant rebate scam: It allows companies like Best Buy to grossly inflate their sales figures as customers spend hundreds more than they intended, awaiting the soon to come "rebate".
Visiontek video card: Rebate sent and nothing received. About 6 months later the company went belly up so I'd say that the likelihood of getting it now is pretty low. It was a $75 CDN rebate.
QuickBooks Pro: Rebate sent 5 months ago. Nothing yet. This is a $75 CDN rebate.
These are just two of the ones most recently that I can remember. Do I think some people don't send them in and they rely on that? Absolutely. Do I think a majority of people do that? Not any more. In the old days rebates would be $15 on a $100 purchase, and there's a good likelihood that people just wouldn't bother. Now rebates are a substantial percentage of the cost, and are on virtually every product, sometimes going into the hundreds of dollars. I doubt very many people fail to send those in, making me question the logic of rebates existing in the first place.
Do I think they "lose" rebates that come in? Without a doubt. This is one of the reasons that most organizations farm out rebates to nefarious third party companies that disappear and then reappear under a new name. The original company can now claim culpability as it's "out of their hands".
Of all the rebates I've ever sent in, the only ones that I've had success with are Microsoft rebates (and while I'm not sure, I believe that they handle rebates in house). In reply the other poster: I have horrible handwriting and printing (a lifetime and typing) so my wife fills it and dots every i and crosses every t. We read the fine print and follow every instruction.
As a sidenote, I do believe that the rebate industry has become a multibillion dollar industry, and that there undoubtedly is paid fudsters told to troll the message boards to help quell any anti-rebate rebellion. I'm casting no stones here but to say that it's interesting how everyone I talk to in person has had horrible rebate experiences, but those who reply online always seem to have great rebate experiences.
While I dont mine the WINCE OS and the apps etc.. The size of all these things are just too big to carry around. Compared to a totally slim Palm, it's like night and day.
Have you tried out a Toshibe e310 or e730. They're as slim as any Palm (literally), and far more powerful to boot. I have an e310 and it's been a fantastic experience.
I actually disregard post-rebate prices as in my personal experience I actually receive about 1 out of every 4 promised rebates (which makes sense: Why are so many companies addicated to rebates? Because they don't actually give them out in many cases). Personally I think rebates should be illegal as there is virtually nothing redeeming about them, yet they are the center of a vast swath of problems:
-Overtaxation (you don't get the taxes back for the overpayment that you've made) -Misreported company expenses (overcharging purchases when a rebate is actually received) -Employee theft (employees who send in the rebate under their own name)
etc. Rebates are dirty and it's sad that so many organizations are addicted to them now.
It is *very* flawed. This is how you can destroy a Win2K system as a normal user
Despite your probable pleas to the contrary, you were not a regular user when you carried that out. Windows has ACLs on virtually everything in the OS (contrary to Linux, for example, with its incredible large granularity security), and the registry is no exception. The HKLM registry branch has only READ access for anyone but System and Administrators (in some cases also Power Users, which much like Administrators is not an account that you should regularly run under). The registry applications abide by these permissions quite simply because they can't fail not to. I see two possible scenarios here, one that you were in an account as PowerUser or Administrator, or two that there is a complex fault that somehow bypassed the ACLs. I suspect the former as being dramatically more likely.
Having said, you weren't actually trying to do that in a serious way, were you? (copying the tree from 98 to 2K) As a sidenote, virtually all Windows variants keep one or more backup to the registry tree, and choosing "last known good configuratin" would have fixed it for you immediately.
I can quickly solve any problem that arises. For example I have a script to prefix files with a given string. (simple shellscript) With Windows, it's of course possible, but it's much harder because I would have to learn VBscript which is different to normal commands.
Virtually every shell and shell scripting is available in Windows that is available in any UNIX variant. Furthermore your argument seems to be "But I don't feel like learning it in Windows, so therefore it isn't possible", and that's a rather weak way of arguing it.
is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
Re-read the SEC filing. Microsoft didn't make all their money on "two out of thousands" of products: They have split their company, financially, into 7 divisions (a division being something like "Server Platform" which includes everything from Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Backoffice, Proxy Server, etc), of which the 3 biggest made money. Others, like Microsoft's Business Solutions, including the recently acquired accounting software, and Home and Entertainment (XBox) lost money. This is completely ordinary for any business and this really isn't all that startling. It's also laughable that some are casting this as "My copy of Windows carries the company", when the profitable divisions include virtually every large and successful Microsoft application (i.e. not your claim of "2 out of 1000s").
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't , but AT&T is a shadow of its former self. The almighty Broadband unit, the one that was going to return the company to its old glory, is being spun off after hemmorhaging money for a long time - after the @Home debacle.
I think he was referring to the fact that all of the large "baby Bell's", many of them as large as AT&T was back in the day, were parts of the broken up AT&T. Hence if you want to look at where AT&T is today, don't look just at the one named "AT&T", but how all the children have done as well.
Whether it's something that you personally would do is irrelevant: Obviously these people want to do this. Having said that, I don't see the original post saying "Man getting together to play a game is dumb!", I see it fingering the fact that ASUS is using this for marketing as instantly rendering it a big waste of time, regardless of what's happening at the event itself.
While the "grossly overpay for ugly furniture that you'll have at the curbside in three years" industry wants us to believe that Ikea products are poor quality, I've found quite the opposite: Not only are they overengineered and long lasting, but they actually use gorgeously smooth rollers on drawers, for instance. Just had to defend IKEA as I've noticed a pretty concerted attack on them lately (the bigger they get the more enemies they acquire).
I guess the Swedes have a lot of time on their hands... to be able to host a 4 day slumberparty/advertisement for ASUS...
How does the fact that ASUS is using this for marketing diminish the event whatsoever? It's one thing to be cynical about marketing and "big business", but it's quite another to take that to the point that you fail to see the positives when you've overblown the negativity.
They seem to have loads of money to push those ads, but the basic premise behind it, like many ".COM ideas" just seems absurd: If you pay by a credit card, you have to go through a line and let them verify your credit card: How has that saved any time? If you haven't paid by credit card...well what other way is there to pay online?
Even if you just paid by kiosks the only advantage is if, ironically, the method of payment is a brutal failure. If it isn't a failure then you'll have the same lines just transposed over to bar code scanner while some granny with a dot matrix printer tries incessantly to get it to read her smudge print (well I suppose that would be more the realm of inkjets).
Definitely silly idea in my opinion. I have no doubt that they're gushing money out on those ads, and getting very little response.
I apologize. I did a find actually curious for the second, and discovered (after the fact) an interesting bug in the way Opera 6 on Windows does finds (namely that it'll find the first couple of instances, but then stops finding...it even stops highlighting the found items properly).
Well that's the damndest thing: This points out a flaw in Opera 6: Do a search for "proprietary" and it'll find the first couple, but will then stop finding hits on F3. Weird.
Unfortunately that quote actually isn't in there (unless The Register dynamically reorganizes text). You really shouldn't present something as a quote when it isn't (at least state that you're paraphrasing). Of course it would hardly surprize me to see such an interpretation on the Register.
Having said that, many arguments against including GPL code is that it limits the options: BSD or commercial code usually don't dictate the future development of the rest of the project (i.e. it can include open source, other companies proprietary code, other companies tightly held copyrighted source code, etc), whereas the highly political GPL pretty much does: GPL only interacts well with GPL (hence why it's called viral licensing: Someone steals some BSD code, sticks a GPL license on it [it happens frequently], and then claims that anything it touches must also be GPLd])
How useful of this in the era of switched networks though? These sorts of things made a lot of sense in the hub broadcast everywhere world, but now that most networks are a cascade of switches, and individual lines from one node to another 5 switches away could be saturated without being apparent to other users.
Indeed it looks like Boa was made specifically for the efficient serving of static content, where Apache, like IIS, is made in a very versatile, full featured manner. Does this render comparisons irrelevant though? Absolutely not. The reality is that most of the content that people do serve up is static content (images, CSS files, etc), and it is entirely reasonable that a server system could include a Boa or similar hyper-optimized server specifically for the static content (i.e. http://www.static.myurl.com/css/styles.css), with the Apache or IIS server being the front line real content system. Using the right tools for the specific tasks could be very beneficial and help avoid the dreaded Slashdotting while Apache or IIS is busy serving up GB of images or static HTML files.
Far worse are those who refuse to acknowledge and learn from change or new experiences. These are the people who love to say "But wait...didn't you used to say...".
Unless you're in politics you have the priviledge of changing your opinion.
You do realize that he was jokingly referring to condoms, right?
I don't know about that. Word 95 looks an awful lot like Wordperfect 6.0.
Are you kidding? Microsoft beat Wordperfect to the GUI Wordprocessor game by a wide margin, and when Wordperfect finally joined the game they did so with a product that was universally panned as a monstrously bloated POS.
Oh you mean the tabs that Mozilla/Netscape ripped off from Opera? Righhhtttt.
If Office had abandoned the Mac, the Mac would be but a footnote in history. This idea that the platform would have thrived and somehow neglected products would thrive on a barren platform just boggles the mind. Would you mind serving up an extra helping of that fantasty hindsight?
You know it's funny you mention that: I subscribe to the National Post and there really are some great sections and inserts that you get monthly, weekly, etc, however by and large I despise the editorial board and some of the frothing maniacs columnists (David Fum, Barbara something or other. The ones that they are humorously most proud of) who never fail to turn every event into an indictment of Canada. These people are so extreme and one-sided in their criticism of my homeland and every single action that it takes that they literally exceed the worst criticism of our worst enemies. It is ironic that you mention Pat Buchanan as in a letter to the editor that I half authored but never completed, I opined that there's a bitter humor in the fact that it's the diatribes of the National Post that maniacs like Pat Buchanan use to criticize Canada.
On the flip side though the big alternative for Toronto area folk is The Toronto Star: An EXTREME left wing newspaper that paints every story as "the man versus the little guy". Their tired rhetoric is even more banal that what the National Post writes up. I've considered the Globe and Mail but just have never gotten around to subscribing.
It just is humorous that the specific example that you chose is pretty much the only large retailer to buck the .99 trend. Indeed there was a fascinating story on the marketing behind the technique of Walmart pricing in the Canadian National Post recently, however unfortunately they don't have it in their online version.
That would almost make sense if it weren't for the fact that Walmart is virtually the only store that doesn't end their prices in the ubiquitous .99. Instead Walmart is the oddman out with prices like "12.64" and "13.28".
I completely agree with you. People seem to have some sort of mega cheap gene that comes out at times like that. Every now and then at Union Station in Toronto there is some Something Or Other Association giving out Something Or Other (for example peaches), and people herd like madmen to get whatever free is being given out...it's always something that would cost you less than $0.20 to buy with your own money. These people, many of whom stomp the accelerator to make up a spare second, waste the time to get something so incredibly cheap.
The same thing holds for COMDEX. I went several times, each time seemingly with coworkers who would sit through pathetic demonstrations and weasle up to booth employees all in the hopes of getting some piece of crap or other. The only nice thing that I ever got from a comdex was a little fabric SQL Server frisbee. Oh, and a spider ball. That was pretty cool too. Everything else was loads of half-fun crap pens and super-low threadcount with cheesy iron-on style decals t-shirts.
A brand new account to claim great success with rebates. Surprising.
I've sent away probably a dozen non-Microsoft rebates and NEVER HAVE RECEIVED SO MUCH AS A REJECTION (though I've had perfect success with the Microsoft rebates). Note that I don't bother sending away rebates for $3, so obviously we're dealing in different spheres here: It makes a lot more sense for a company to hope to weasle by with people not sending in rebates when they're for $3 than for $100.
Yet another claim that it's all about reading the fine print. What BS. "Fill form, attach the receipt and the UPC and mail to XYZ". That's some difficult stuff, clearly prone to multiple errors. Give me a break.
Secondly, the rebate industry DID depend upon non-senders in the nascent rebate era, however now almost everything has rebates. Everyone sends them in (at least beyond the "$3 rebate on a pack of CD-Rs"). Obviously there is something more than "hoping people just don't bother" going on when you're talking about $75 video card rebates.
As far as taxes, that's a government issue.
It is, is it? When someone prices a $200 value product at $800 with a $650 rebate, I'm paying sales taxes on a $800 rebate. That's an issue to ME because they're grossly inflating the cost of their product.
Actually that brings up one more point of the giant rebate scam: It allows companies like Best Buy to grossly inflate their sales figures as customers spend hundreds more than they intended, awaiting the soon to come "rebate".
Visiontek video card: Rebate sent and nothing received. About 6 months later the company went belly up so I'd say that the likelihood of getting it now is pretty low. It was a $75 CDN rebate.
QuickBooks Pro: Rebate sent 5 months ago. Nothing yet. This is a $75 CDN rebate.
These are just two of the ones most recently that I can remember. Do I think some people don't send them in and they rely on that? Absolutely. Do I think a majority of people do that? Not any more. In the old days rebates would be $15 on a $100 purchase, and there's a good likelihood that people just wouldn't bother. Now rebates are a substantial percentage of the cost, and are on virtually every product, sometimes going into the hundreds of dollars. I doubt very many people fail to send those in, making me question the logic of rebates existing in the first place.
Do I think they "lose" rebates that come in? Without a doubt. This is one of the reasons that most organizations farm out rebates to nefarious third party companies that disappear and then reappear under a new name. The original company can now claim culpability as it's "out of their hands".
Of all the rebates I've ever sent in, the only ones that I've had success with are Microsoft rebates (and while I'm not sure, I believe that they handle rebates in house). In reply the other poster: I have horrible handwriting and printing (a lifetime and typing) so my wife fills it and dots every i and crosses every t. We read the fine print and follow every instruction.
As a sidenote, I do believe that the rebate industry has become a multibillion dollar industry, and that there undoubtedly is paid fudsters told to troll the message boards to help quell any anti-rebate rebellion. I'm casting no stones here but to say that it's interesting how everyone I talk to in person has had horrible rebate experiences, but those who reply online always seem to have great rebate experiences.
While I dont mine the WINCE OS and the apps etc .. The size of all these things are just too big to carry around. Compared to a totally slim Palm, it's like night and day.
Have you tried out a Toshibe e310 or e730. They're as slim as any Palm (literally), and far more powerful to boot. I have an e310 and it's been a fantastic experience.
I actually disregard post-rebate prices as in my personal experience I actually receive about 1 out of every 4 promised rebates (which makes sense: Why are so many companies addicated to rebates? Because they don't actually give them out in many cases). Personally I think rebates should be illegal as there is virtually nothing redeeming about them, yet they are the center of a vast swath of problems:
-Overtaxation (you don't get the taxes back for the overpayment that you've made)
-Misreported company expenses (overcharging purchases when a rebate is actually received)
-Employee theft (employees who send in the rebate under their own name)
etc. Rebates are dirty and it's sad that so many organizations are addicted to them now.
It is *very* flawed. This is how you can destroy a Win2K system as a normal user
Despite your probable pleas to the contrary, you were not a regular user when you carried that out. Windows has ACLs on virtually everything in the OS (contrary to Linux, for example, with its incredible large granularity security), and the registry is no exception. The HKLM registry branch has only READ access for anyone but System and Administrators (in some cases also Power Users, which much like Administrators is not an account that you should regularly run under). The registry applications abide by these permissions quite simply because they can't fail not to. I see two possible scenarios here, one that you were in an account as PowerUser or Administrator, or two that there is a complex fault that somehow bypassed the ACLs. I suspect the former as being dramatically more likely.
Having said, you weren't actually trying to do that in a serious way, were you? (copying the tree from 98 to 2K) As a sidenote, virtually all Windows variants keep one or more backup to the registry tree, and choosing "last known good configuratin" would have fixed it for you immediately.
I can quickly solve any problem that arises. For example I have a script to prefix files with a given string. (simple shellscript) With Windows, it's of course possible, but it's much harder because I would have to learn VBscript which is different to normal commands.
Virtually every shell and shell scripting is available in Windows that is available in any UNIX variant. Furthermore your argument seems to be "But I don't feel like learning it in Windows, so therefore it isn't possible", and that's a rather weak way of arguing it.
is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
Re-read the SEC filing. Microsoft didn't make all their money on "two out of thousands" of products: They have split their company, financially, into 7 divisions (a division being something like "Server Platform" which includes everything from Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Backoffice, Proxy Server, etc), of which the 3 biggest made money. Others, like Microsoft's Business Solutions, including the recently acquired accounting software, and Home and Entertainment (XBox) lost money. This is completely ordinary for any business and this really isn't all that startling. It's also laughable that some are casting this as "My copy of Windows carries the company", when the profitable divisions include virtually every large and successful Microsoft application (i.e. not your claim of "2 out of 1000s").