Instead of whatever lousy marketing agency they are using now, they used John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Vern Fonk to sell Windows, they'd get much better reviews of their commercials.
Encarta, possibly the most successful commercial digital encyclopedia of all time is based on the old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia which unfortunately was subpar to Brittanica and World Book by miles.
Microsoft took that shoddy encyclopedia, added content, added media, added hyperlinks, and turned the paper volumes into the best digital encyclopedia you could (at that time) buy.
But facts are facts. You can't really alter the information of an encyclopedia without someone calling you on it. In the same way, search engines categorize and comb through volumes of information and return data as best it can. Sometimes that data is useless (spam), but other times it is very pertinent (vanity searches).
If Google or Bing can't restrict what is shown in their search results, the value of the search tool is reduced. As we have seen in recent years, Google's search results are getting worse and worse, being flooded by spammers and expertsexchange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search or require registration to access.
Leave the right to determine what they will return to the search providers. Guarantee that the tool remains useful by allowing them to cull the results responsibly.
Though not as prevalent as it was just a couple decades ago, "white guilt" is a feeling of responsibility particularly experienced by privileged white people for the suffering of blacks under the slave system. It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery. The guilt manifests itself as an embrace of Black culture, a willingness to provide undeserved support to the African American underclass, and a tendency to promote multiculturalism and its anti-judgmental system of evaluating cultures.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves. Of course, they do it in a way that doesn't actually put them in direct contact with the have-nots. This is typical behavior of those embracing cultural/technological guilt as a path to spiritual salvation.
The global domestic product is approximately 60 trillion USD. If 6 trillion is lost to IT failure, then on average, every company is losing 10% productivity to IT failures.
This is simply not credible, and this guy should be strung up by his pinkie toes and flogged with ostrich feathers until he admits he eats eggs benedict on Tuesday mornings.
User: What a pretty GUI you have. YImf: All the better to confuse you with, my dear. U: And what strange fonts you have. Y: All the better to break your layouts with, my dear. U: And what a lack of app support you have. Y: All the better to irritate you with, my dear. U: And what terrible hardware support you have. Y: All the better to eat up your time with, my dear!
Just then the hunter entered the house and cut the YImf right down the belly.
They should introduce a controversial character into the mix. Maybe have a mouthy Russian hang out with the straitlaced American scientists. Or a breakout character like Puck to pull everyone's strings to the breaking point.
Or they could introduce some kind of challenge that the characters have to overcome. See which astronaut can escape fastest from a burning capsule. Or who can eat the most astronaut food without getting sick.
Science TV is the ultimate reality TV.
Or we can read this article as an indictment of the lack of attention span of the average American TV viewer.
How can free/open source software co-exist with a plan to put DRM on broadcasts?
It's simple, really.
Someone develops an Open Source DRM software solution, and the BBC uses it.
It's no different from a closed source DRM solution, except that since it is OSS, it may have a stronger encryption system since it can't rely on security through obscurity.
"Open Source" means a lot of different things to different people, but the basic concept is that it is the software which is free. How the users use the tools isn't part of the equation. So a good OSS DRM solution is a boon for some users (and a bane for their users). But either way, FOSS is not at all at odds with DRM.
In the movie Evolution with David Duchovny and Orlando Jones, the Earth was "seeded" by alien life forms. What happened next was an evolutionary explosion with the alien life mutating at a rate far beyond the rate of normal Earth life. Things like primates and birds and even dinosaur-ish creatures developed and proliferated.
However, in the race for evolutionary supremacy, it wasn't these super-advanced life forms that finally won out. Rather it was the amorphous blob which did little except consume and grow.
Even here in the "real world", humans may be considered the apex of evolutionary development, but consider how outnumbered we are by bacteria, insects, and other small, hardy life forms that swarm everywhere.
Now extrapolate that observation to robots. Yes, there are impressive implementations of technology and these things seem really great at what they do. But human-like robots are only one genus. There are others that are much more successful in the wild, like botnets. These intelligent agents swarm together, proliferate on their own, have complex behaviors, and number in the hundreds of thousands.
Evolutionarily-speaking, botnets are the most successful robots of any year.
The answer is Yes. When you run software, you are running it under 1 of the following 3 assumptions:
1. You implicitly trust the vendor 2. You have tested it yourself and trust your tests 3. You are oblivious (the vast majority of users are)
What's more, since Open Source software lacks any single person you could possibly sue in case things go terribly wrong, it makes sense to mistrust it a priori. OSS isn't magically secure because it is open. It still needs testing and validation if you intend to run it in any serious corporate environment.
To simply accept a software package without assuming it is riddled with bugs and security vulnerabilities is foolish. No matter if it is a proprietary software package or an Open Source community project, any sane CIO will want some sort of evidence that the product will not end up losing them money and customer trust due to security vunerabilities.
When you ride your ten-speed bike, you can usually spin the pedals backwards without any resistance whatsoever. It doesn't matter how fast you pedal backwards, you never will affect your forward momentum. The course you have already chosen remains unchanged.
So when we see scientists trying to come up with excuses for why ice packs are melting without a huge increase in global temperatures, we need to question both their motives and their data. Yes, we can see oceanic water levels rising *in certain localized areas*, but we aren't seeing the massive deluge that was predicted.
Hopefully we can finally put to bed the reality of global warming and focus on the real problem of global pollution.
Most comic book superheroes are vigilantes. They work outside the law to bring evildoers to justice. When drawn like Adonii and Venii, with skin-tight spandex costumes and long flowing capes, their actions are well understood to be for the common good.
Contrast this with vigilantes in real life. When people act outside the law to bring down "evildoers" we call them terrorists, murderers, and Menaces to society. We simply can't tolerate vigilantism in a civilized society. Justice must operate within the confines of the law, and that implies that the accused must have some level of privacy.
To open the case up to the general public means forcing any shred of privacy of every employee of AIG out into the open. It also means that anyone with an agenda can use the material to find ways to destroy those employees. It encourages vigilantism and erodes the rights of everyone for no good reason.
Nature is cool, and Science is cool. The majesty of these auroras is impressive, and the scientific mind to study it is just as impressive.
If there were ever a reason to want to believe in a "Creator", it's things like these spectacular astronomical occurrences.
What set me off about this is a story I heard on NPR about Uganda's Christian population proposing and overwhelmingly supporting a bill that would outlaw homosexual behavior. The punishments ranged from jail time for being found to be gay all the way to the death penalty if you were found to be HIV positive. How much energy is being wasted on these witch hunts? How much progress could be made if these religious fanatics (including Islamic states like Iran) could focus their energy on science rather than their own petty prejudices?
America also has this problem, and slowly but surely there is a growing contingent that would rather blind our kids with Bible stories than provide them a good scientific education. How long before we are the backwards Uganda of the world? Not long, I'm afraid.
If you look at the arc of any modern technology, you'll find that gaming typically makes up a very brief interlude between initial takeup and the final settling on a backbone of business usage. So arguing over how gaming will proceed on these new social networks seems futile in the long run.
At this point, if you aren't already making money from social gaming (in whatever capacity), you won't be able to get on board now and make any money from it at all. The gaming stage of technology is short, and it has already passed by for the cellular phone network.
It isn't gaming that people love about their cells, it's the communication aspect. As we pass through the gaming stage of this technology, we're seeing more and more "service-based" features that will make money for service providers and allow users to enhance their money-making abilities through the usage of these new services. The future of every technology is in how it makes business more profitable.
The total lack of customer service, the terrible coverage, and the relatively subpar implementation of cellular service in the US compared to other countries is not just a problem with Verizon. It is a problem industry-wide, and it is only getting worse.
With the economy in the toilet, these companies are losing customers like the Bucs lose football games. This means they don't have the financial wherewithal to build out the necessary networks. And due to this, customer service continues to decline.
Maybe it is time to nationalize the whole wireless carrier system and slowly parcel out contracts to private companies for the day-to-day operations. If we can punish these carriers by taking away their networks, we will see real change in customer service and subsequently real competition and improvements across the board.
As long as private companies run these networks, we're stuck with the worst possible system for cellular phone users. It may be a cultural thing because Asian and European companies don't seem to screw over their customers so badly, but it's our culture and we should (as a nation) take it back.
We exist in space-time. 4 dimensional beings. Everything we know corresponds to these 4 dimensions.
So what happens when you have a gravitational field? Space bends. Time bends. Since everything with mass exerts a gravitational force, everything bends space around itself to a degree.
But movement is another form of energy, and energy is crucial to completing the 4 dimensional universe. Something with no energy means it has no movement. No movement means it must radiate all of its energy as gravitation. In the end, it will lose all of its mass to this gravitational leaching.
So by reducing the temperature of the sensor to half a degree Kelvin, they have reduced the energy level of the sensor to almost nothing. Yes, it interacts with incoming particles, but it also radiates gravitational waves that could be misinterpreted as external particles. In essence, the detector is detecting itself.
Of course, there is a 23% chance I am completely wrong.
This really boils down to whether you want to give your customers few options and watch them work within the boundaries to create great experiences or whether you want to provide a multitude of options and basically pigeonhole your customers.
The best situation, of course, is to take the middle road. Give the customer a few options and let them show you what they can do. This is why Windows is such a popular OS. It gives plenty of configurable features without overwhelming the user with too many options.
This works in any software genre. Not just games and operating systems.
AvP is one of the worst games I've had the displeasure of playing. Through dumb luck Australians have been able to avoid direct exposure to it, but now with its full scale release in Oz that utopia is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
If being able to handle three languages is "trilingual", what do you call a phone that can only support one language?
Sometimes when I go to a website, it will have Flash malware which forces me to download unwanted content and then plays it without my consent.
Damn you Youtube!!!
I can't name anyone else who could have had more of an impact on the world than these two assholes.
Steve Jobs introduced some nice toys, but that's nothing compared to the impact of dismantling the American way or life.
Instead of whatever lousy marketing agency they are using now, they used John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Vern Fonk to sell Windows, they'd get much better reviews of their commercials.
Encarta, possibly the most successful commercial digital encyclopedia of all time is based on the old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia which unfortunately was subpar to Brittanica and World Book by miles.
Microsoft took that shoddy encyclopedia, added content, added media, added hyperlinks, and turned the paper volumes into the best digital encyclopedia you could (at that time) buy.
But facts are facts. You can't really alter the information of an encyclopedia without someone calling you on it. In the same way, search engines categorize and comb through volumes of information and return data as best it can. Sometimes that data is useless (spam), but other times it is very pertinent (vanity searches).
If Google or Bing can't restrict what is shown in their search results, the value of the search tool is reduced. As we have seen in recent years, Google's search results are getting worse and worse, being flooded by spammers and expertsexchange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search or require registration to access.
Leave the right to determine what they will return to the search providers. Guarantee that the tool remains useful by allowing them to cull the results responsibly.
Though not as prevalent as it was just a couple decades ago, "white guilt" is a feeling of responsibility particularly experienced by privileged white people for the suffering of blacks under the slave system. It is a modern phenomenon that such guilt is felt by people that are completely unconnected to slavery. The guilt manifests itself as an embrace of Black culture, a willingness to provide undeserved support to the African American underclass, and a tendency to promote multiculturalism and its anti-judgmental system of evaluating cultures.
So if the technology haves want to slum it with the have-nots, it shouldn't be any big surprise that they embrace an ideology that makes themselves the criminal and thus flagellating themselves thereby redeeming themselves. Of course, they do it in a way that doesn't actually put them in direct contact with the have-nots. This is typical behavior of those embracing cultural/technological guilt as a path to spiritual salvation.
The global domestic product is approximately 60 trillion USD. If 6 trillion is lost to IT failure, then on average, every company is losing 10% productivity to IT failures.
This is simply not credible, and this guy should be strung up by his pinkie toes and flogged with ostrich feathers until he admits he eats eggs benedict on Tuesday mornings.
User: What a pretty GUI you have.
YImf: All the better to confuse you with, my dear.
U: And what strange fonts you have.
Y: All the better to break your layouts with, my dear.
U: And what a lack of app support you have.
Y: All the better to irritate you with, my dear.
U: And what terrible hardware support you have.
Y: All the better to eat up your time with, my dear!
Just then the hunter entered the house and cut the YImf right down the belly.
They should introduce a controversial character into the mix. Maybe have a mouthy Russian hang out with the straitlaced American scientists. Or a breakout character like Puck to pull everyone's strings to the breaking point.
Or they could introduce some kind of challenge that the characters have to overcome. See which astronaut can escape fastest from a burning capsule. Or who can eat the most astronaut food without getting sick.
Science TV is the ultimate reality TV.
Or we can read this article as an indictment of the lack of attention span of the average American TV viewer.
Darp darp.
you're not going to see any open source DRM systems any time soon.
While I can't be clear on their efficacy, it would be incorrect to say there are no DRM systems available.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=open+source+drm+solutions
How can free/open source software co-exist with a plan to put DRM on broadcasts?
It's simple, really.
Someone develops an Open Source DRM software solution, and the BBC uses it.
It's no different from a closed source DRM solution, except that since it is OSS, it may have a stronger encryption system since it can't rely on security through obscurity.
"Open Source" means a lot of different things to different people, but the basic concept is that it is the software which is free. How the users use the tools isn't part of the equation. So a good OSS DRM solution is a boon for some users (and a bane for their users). But either way, FOSS is not at all at odds with DRM.
In the movie Evolution with David Duchovny and Orlando Jones, the Earth was "seeded" by alien life forms. What happened next was an evolutionary explosion with the alien life mutating at a rate far beyond the rate of normal Earth life. Things like primates and birds and even dinosaur-ish creatures developed and proliferated.
However, in the race for evolutionary supremacy, it wasn't these super-advanced life forms that finally won out. Rather it was the amorphous blob which did little except consume and grow.
Even here in the "real world", humans may be considered the apex of evolutionary development, but consider how outnumbered we are by bacteria, insects, and other small, hardy life forms that swarm everywhere.
Now extrapolate that observation to robots. Yes, there are impressive implementations of technology and these things seem really great at what they do. But human-like robots are only one genus. There are others that are much more successful in the wild, like botnets. These intelligent agents swarm together, proliferate on their own, have complex behaviors, and number in the hundreds of thousands.
Evolutionarily-speaking, botnets are the most successful robots of any year.
The answer is Yes. When you run software, you are running it under 1 of the following 3 assumptions:
1. You implicitly trust the vendor
2. You have tested it yourself and trust your tests
3. You are oblivious (the vast majority of users are)
What's more, since Open Source software lacks any single person you could possibly sue in case things go terribly wrong, it makes sense to mistrust it a priori. OSS isn't magically secure because it is open. It still needs testing and validation if you intend to run it in any serious corporate environment.
To simply accept a software package without assuming it is riddled with bugs and security vulnerabilities is foolish. No matter if it is a proprietary software package or an Open Source community project, any sane CIO will want some sort of evidence that the product will not end up losing them money and customer trust due to security vunerabilities.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/04/0420_040420_earthday.html
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons/fcons4.asp
Now with handy maps!
http://nexialinstitute.com/world_60_m.htm
When you ride your ten-speed bike, you can usually spin the pedals backwards without any resistance whatsoever. It doesn't matter how fast you pedal backwards, you never will affect your forward momentum. The course you have already chosen remains unchanged.
So when we see scientists trying to come up with excuses for why ice packs are melting without a huge increase in global temperatures, we need to question both their motives and their data. Yes, we can see oceanic water levels rising *in certain localized areas*, but we aren't seeing the massive deluge that was predicted.
Hopefully we can finally put to bed the reality of global warming and focus on the real problem of global pollution.
Most comic book superheroes are vigilantes. They work outside the law to bring evildoers to justice. When drawn like Adonii and Venii, with skin-tight spandex costumes and long flowing capes, their actions are well understood to be for the common good.
Contrast this with vigilantes in real life. When people act outside the law to bring down "evildoers" we call them terrorists, murderers, and Menaces to society. We simply can't tolerate vigilantism in a civilized society. Justice must operate within the confines of the law, and that implies that the accused must have some level of privacy.
To open the case up to the general public means forcing any shred of privacy of every employee of AIG out into the open. It also means that anyone with an agenda can use the material to find ways to destroy those employees. It encourages vigilantism and erodes the rights of everyone for no good reason.
Nature is cool, and Science is cool. The majesty of these auroras is impressive, and the scientific mind to study it is just as impressive.
If there were ever a reason to want to believe in a "Creator", it's things like these spectacular astronomical occurrences.
What set me off about this is a story I heard on NPR about Uganda's Christian population proposing and overwhelmingly supporting a bill that would outlaw homosexual behavior. The punishments ranged from jail time for being found to be gay all the way to the death penalty if you were found to be HIV positive. How much energy is being wasted on these witch hunts? How much progress could be made if these religious fanatics (including Islamic states like Iran) could focus their energy on science rather than their own petty prejudices?
America also has this problem, and slowly but surely there is a growing contingent that would rather blind our kids with Bible stories than provide them a good scientific education. How long before we are the backwards Uganda of the world? Not long, I'm afraid.
If you look at the arc of any modern technology, you'll find that gaming typically makes up a very brief interlude between initial takeup and the final settling on a backbone of business usage. So arguing over how gaming will proceed on these new social networks seems futile in the long run.
At this point, if you aren't already making money from social gaming (in whatever capacity), you won't be able to get on board now and make any money from it at all. The gaming stage of technology is short, and it has already passed by for the cellular phone network.
It isn't gaming that people love about their cells, it's the communication aspect. As we pass through the gaming stage of this technology, we're seeing more and more "service-based" features that will make money for service providers and allow users to enhance their money-making abilities through the usage of these new services. The future of every technology is in how it makes business more profitable.
It's called nationalization, and it's a shame that Americans shy away from such a pro-consumer action because it stinks of "socialism".
The total lack of customer service, the terrible coverage, and the relatively subpar implementation of cellular service in the US compared to other countries is not just a problem with Verizon. It is a problem industry-wide, and it is only getting worse.
With the economy in the toilet, these companies are losing customers like the Bucs lose football games. This means they don't have the financial wherewithal to build out the necessary networks. And due to this, customer service continues to decline.
Maybe it is time to nationalize the whole wireless carrier system and slowly parcel out contracts to private companies for the day-to-day operations. If we can punish these carriers by taking away their networks, we will see real change in customer service and subsequently real competition and improvements across the board.
As long as private companies run these networks, we're stuck with the worst possible system for cellular phone users. It may be a cultural thing because Asian and European companies don't seem to screw over their customers so badly, but it's our culture and we should (as a nation) take it back.
We exist in space-time. 4 dimensional beings. Everything we know corresponds to these 4 dimensions.
So what happens when you have a gravitational field? Space bends. Time bends. Since everything with mass exerts a gravitational force, everything bends space around itself to a degree.
But movement is another form of energy, and energy is crucial to completing the 4 dimensional universe. Something with no energy means it has no movement. No movement means it must radiate all of its energy as gravitation. In the end, it will lose all of its mass to this gravitational leaching.
So by reducing the temperature of the sensor to half a degree Kelvin, they have reduced the energy level of the sensor to almost nothing. Yes, it interacts with incoming particles, but it also radiates gravitational waves that could be misinterpreted as external particles. In essence, the detector is detecting itself.
Of course, there is a 23% chance I am completely wrong.
This really boils down to whether you want to give your customers few options and watch them work within the boundaries to create great experiences or whether you want to provide a multitude of options and basically pigeonhole your customers.
The best situation, of course, is to take the middle road. Give the customer a few options and let them show you what they can do. This is why Windows is such a popular OS. It gives plenty of configurable features without overwhelming the user with too many options.
This works in any software genre. Not just games and operating systems.
AvP is one of the worst games I've had the displeasure of playing. Through dumb luck Australians have been able to avoid direct exposure to it, but now with its full scale release in Oz that utopia is gone.
Save your money. Get a better game.
Frozen Nitrous Oxide anyone?
Pssshh. Don't make me laugh.