For some reason sales and marketing get conflated.
That's because they are conflated. I think this definition reflects usage of the term marketing pretty well:
2. the commercial processes involved in promoting and selling and distributing a product or service; "most companies have a manager in charge of marketing"
As another poster said, you are thinking of "market research", which is just one facet of marketing. Advertising is another.
They convince users that they are super secure and each version is more better secure double plus good upgrade now for only $250!. They don't even have to do that. Most people will get the OS bundled in with the computer they buy.
It is true that the judge interrupted him a number of times, but IMO it was simply to make Mr. Haselton get to the point. I think the judge was being an asshole. If he would just let the guy speak without constantly chastising him, Mr. Haselton probably could have gotten his point across a lot faster. I thought this kind of jerkish behavior was a TV myth, but here it is in black and white. The judge was completely intolerant and more upset about having the law quoted to him than anything else. The plaintiff was often just trying to explain why he thought the law was in his favor, and the judge constantly cut him off.
I agree the plaintiff's presentation could have been a little smoother, but any well prepared presentation would have been cut to shreds by the way the judge went about the proceedings. What's this "three sentences or less" crap, anyways? Why doesn't he want to hear somebody relate their case in as natural a way as possible? Isn't this what opening statements are for? So you can find each persons point of view? There's a real story behind this case, and the judge wasn't interesting in finding out what it was.
Filing lawsuits should never be a "hobby" or a "waste of time". Suing people for illegal actions that, in the cumulative, cause a lot of damage is not a waste of time. That's the whole damn point of anti-spam and telemarketing laws. After the federal no-call list went into effect, I hardly get any telemarketing calls. If nobody is allowed or even discouraged to sue violators, then what is the point of the law?
The system isn't out to get you, it's just randomly knocking things over since the its drivers left the building sometime after WWII. I agree the system isn't out to get people, in some Illuminati way. However, I disagree with the age-old idea that in the past it was working, and now it isn't. The "system" has always been broken, in one form or another. What special thing happened aftwr WWII that made the system "driverless"?
This is why my company now has a "Software as a Service" model. The app was moved from a desktop product to a web-based hosted solution. As a user, I really don't want to download my operating system every time I boot up. Same goes for most of my applications -- I want them locally, and not tied to the net. If your application can be sold as a service model, then great. However, lots of companies will make more money selling the application as a distribution.
Now we only need to worry about piracy if one of our worldwide sites leaks the source. Which will probably happen, sooner or later. Especially if copyright is declared dead in the future.
The winds of business changed, and Microsoft missed it. Now we get to sit back and watch the impending car wreck that is Microsoft. So sit back and enjoy the show. I don't think Microsoft is going anywhere. Just because China doesn't pay for Vista doesn't mean that tons of people elsewhere won't. Sooner or later people in the West will be buying a new PC, and it will come with Vista already payed for. Oh, and Microsoft has changed their model: Internet activation and "Genuine Windows" required for updates essentially provides the same benefits as the software-as-a-service model.
It reminds me that Sony got Lik Sang shut down. Nintendo has sued Lik Sang not so long ago, for selling "backup" hardware.
Sony has had a horrible year, and deserves all the bad press they get. And Nintendo has definitely done lots of stuff right recently. However, companies like Nintendo are out to make a buck, and should never be given a free pass. The region locking by Nintendo is a good case in point -- not very consumer friendly, is it? The lawsuit against Lik Sang wasn't, either. I also think they're being stingy with their Virtual Console.
I'm not a physicist, but what I find disturbing is that they are trying to measure a tiny value, and then when they don't get the value predicted, they knock the number down by accounting for unexpected results. Then they keep on doing this until they get the number close to what they were looking for. So even if they finally get their number, has it really provided convincing evidence?
Your view is warped. There are plenty of societies around where you are free to speak out against the goverment. America has had free speech for a long time. It's leaders have always been criticised by the citizens and media. It's not 100% perfect, but it's pretty damn free.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it's been bugging me more and more. As it should. Of course you got modded down for not following the herd.
While Red Hat do comply with the letter of the GPL (the provide the source code) they don't do it in a very friendly or helpful way. I'd say they don't even follow the letter of the GPL. They explicitly take away the rights that GPL gave you. The whole reason for the existence of GPL was to prevent a company like Red Hat from doing what it's doing. It used to be you could buy a copy of Red Hat CD for $1 from 3rd parties. Red Hat was going to make their money from support. Well, then they changed, and started using their trademark as a way to prevent copying. They even tell the user he can't install on multiple machines!
The only thing I can't understand is why Stallman lets them get away with it. It's really peculiar, and I'd love to know what his real reasons are.
This is where it get's confusing. I think (at a guess, IANAL and all that) that Redhat owns copyright on the distribution itself, ie. the thing taken as a whole. Hah. The whole point of the GPL is to prevent being taken over by somebody else adding bits. The fact that Red Hat gets away with this trademark poisoning and fake copyright claims is just sad. Stallman huffs and puffs a lot about principles, but he has given free reign with Red Hat.
As a gamer this sounds potentially bad to me. It could be that the controller is more intuitive, making you suck less, or it could be that the controller is less accurate at conveying skill, which would be a bad thing. When I hear stories of old people competitively playing Wii sports I think the latter.
The irony is that it is exactly the same in the U.S. as well - big companies just support one of the two candidates and nobody cares about the smaller ones. You don't have to register your blog or newspaper with the US goverment. Harshly criticising the president and government is standard practice in the United States. Your point is well taken that most of the attention is focused on the big candidates, but that's just the network effect.
Freedom of expression is not a relative concept. You either have it or you don't. It's relative. There's no place in the world where you have 100% freedom of expression. Some places are worse than others.
Wow, thanks for that link. I had no idea this kind of scaling was going on, and that the quality of scaling was so variable. Who cares about the 48 pixels? Why don't they just display a chopped version without the scaling?
The dust settled years ago. Hardly. For decades a TV was a TV, with size being the only upgrade point (for most consumers). Now there's 720p vs 1080i vs 1080p, LCD vs plasma, cable connections and DRM (HDMI ready that really wasn't -- oops!). The prices are still on the high end, yet dropping. The tech is still improving rapidly for things like response times, contrast, etc, with other technologies on the horizon.
And all of this going on, and from my eyes, HDTV is completely overhyped. I remember the early comparisons were "a bigger jump than black-and-white to color". No way. I've seen many, many displays and there just isn't the "wow" factor.
So really, unless your TV is broken, or dropping a nice chunk of change on a TV is no big deal to you, waiting is the better option.
Knowing that while you and billions others are scrounging to make ends meet, to buy a home, and in a majority of the cases to put food on the table, there are people who can afford to plunk down $20million + to take a joy ride into space. And somebody 10 times poorer than you would look at all the luxuries you spend your money on in the same way.
And yet when this same "security focused" person runs a project where having your box remotely shutdown is called a reliability issue instead of a security issue.
The "modern" version of Netrek goes back about 20 years. It's not a 3d shooter, obviously, but the basic goal of capturing points on a map are the same. In Netrek it works like this:
You play over the Internet, client-server model
There are two teams with 8 players on each side
You fly a spaceship that can shoot torps (bullets) or phasers
Each side gets 10 planets
The planets produce armies that you can pick up and drop on enemy planets, taking them over
To carry armies you must have "kills" (you killed an enemy; dying sets your kills to 0)
If you die you respawn at your home planet
I started playing this game back in 1993. Amazingly enough, you can still play it today in pretty much unchanged form.
I have the whole internet as my virtual playground. I can play tons of different online games, browse from among millions of sites, etc. Why do I need to experience these things with a virtual avatar stuffed into an artificially limited 3d world?
Java Collections Framework is quite OK. It kills me that there's no SortedList interface or implementation in Java Collections. It's such a basic feature. Let's say you wanted to keep a sorted hand in a card game, where the suit doesn't impact the value. What class would you use?
This issue has been filed as a request for enhancement, but Sun doesn't want to implement it.
The point is, software programming is at the stage where electrical engineering was a century ago: tinkerers, with no real standards, trying new things. I used to think simarly, that something like a bridge was ho-hum, with no challenges and already thought out. And while I'm sure that many small ones are like that, I was really floored by the ad-hoc engineering that went in to the Clark Bridge. Years ago I saw a documentary on it: Nova: Super Bridge.
What stuck in my mind about that was the uncertainty if the thing was really going to stand up under operation. The design was somewhat experimental and built to within tight tolerances, instead of massive over-engineering. They had problems like specially manufactured cables that ended up defective. They didn't catch this until they had already had installed some. After watching all the weird shit that went on my faith in engineering structures was somewhat shaken!
No single browser is truly secure. They are getting better, but so are the attacks. It sounds like it's the same old problems. Why is it that one silly function dealing with a cursor has the ability to compromise the whole broswer? Are the security guys at Microsoft looking at capability based systems? I know of Singularity, but it seems that none of the basic principles are being spread to everyday applications.
Instead, what I see is people like you focused on how a sophisticated end user can do sandboxing themselves. Meanwhile, there are 100s of millions of users who this will never work for. The browser needs to be secure out of the box. A single line of insecure code out of millions should not compromise the whole browser. Browsers like Firefox are just as bad. You'd think Microsoft would want to innovate in this area, instead of being subjected to bad press.
By the way, as a style issue, using more paragraphs would make your message easier to read. Looking at the HTML source it seems you did have paragraphs. Preview! Also, you probably want to use Plain Old Text, and not HTML Formatted. This way two returns gets you a new paragraph. Otherwise you have to manually add <p> tags.
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That's because they are conflated. I think this definition reflects usage of the term marketing pretty well:
2. the commercial processes involved in promoting and selling and distributing a product or service; "most companies have a manager in charge of marketing"
As another poster said, you are thinking of "market research", which is just one facet of marketing. Advertising is another.
I agree the plaintiff's presentation could have been a little smoother, but any well prepared presentation would have been cut to shreds by the way the judge went about the proceedings. What's this "three sentences or less" crap, anyways? Why doesn't he want to hear somebody relate their case in as natural a way as possible? Isn't this what opening statements are for? So you can find each persons point of view? There's a real story behind this case, and the judge wasn't interesting in finding out what it was.
Sony has had a horrible year, and deserves all the bad press they get. And Nintendo has definitely done lots of stuff right recently. However, companies like Nintendo are out to make a buck, and should never be given a free pass. The region locking by Nintendo is a good case in point -- not very consumer friendly, is it? The lawsuit against Lik Sang wasn't, either. I also think they're being stingy with their Virtual Console.
I'm not a physicist, but what I find disturbing is that they are trying to measure a tiny value, and then when they don't get the value predicted, they knock the number down by accounting for unexpected results. Then they keep on doing this until they get the number close to what they were looking for. So even if they finally get their number, has it really provided convincing evidence?
Your view is warped. There are plenty of societies around where you are free to speak out against the goverment. America has had free speech for a long time. It's leaders have always been criticised by the citizens and media. It's not 100% perfect, but it's pretty damn free.
The only thing I can't understand is why Stallman lets them get away with it. It's really peculiar, and I'd love to know what his real reasons are.
As a gamer this sounds potentially bad to me. It could be that the controller is more intuitive, making you suck less, or it could be that the controller is less accurate at conveying skill, which would be a bad thing. When I hear stories of old people competitively playing Wii sports I think the latter.
Wow, thanks for that link. I had no idea this kind of scaling was going on, and that the quality of scaling was so variable. Who cares about the 48 pixels? Why don't they just display a chopped version without the scaling?
And all of this going on, and from my eyes, HDTV is completely overhyped. I remember the early comparisons were "a bigger jump than black-and-white to color". No way. I've seen many, many displays and there just isn't the "wow" factor.
So really, unless your TV is broken, or dropping a nice chunk of change on a TV is no big deal to you, waiting is the better option.
And yet when this same "security focused" person runs a project where having your box remotely shutdown is called a reliability issue instead of a security issue.
The "modern" version of Netrek goes back about 20 years. It's not a 3d shooter, obviously, but the basic goal of capturing points on a map are the same. In Netrek it works like this:
I started playing this game back in 1993. Amazingly enough, you can still play it today in pretty much unchanged form.
That was a nice reply. Much more readable than the original 'platykurtic' post.
I have the whole internet as my virtual playground. I can play tons of different online games, browse from among millions of sites, etc. Why do I need to experience these things with a virtual avatar stuffed into an artificially limited 3d world?
This issue has been filed as a request for enhancement, but Sun doesn't want to implement it.
What stuck in my mind about that was the uncertainty if the thing was really going to stand up under operation. The design was somewhat experimental and built to within tight tolerances, instead of massive over-engineering. They had problems like specially manufactured cables that ended up defective. They didn't catch this until they had already had installed some. After watching all the weird shit that went on my faith in engineering structures was somewhat shaken!
Instead, what I see is people like you focused on how a sophisticated end user can do sandboxing themselves. Meanwhile, there are 100s of millions of users who this will never work for. The browser needs to be secure out of the box. A single line of insecure code out of millions should not compromise the whole browser. Browsers like Firefox are just as bad. You'd think Microsoft would want to innovate in this area, instead of being subjected to bad press.
By the way, as a style issue, using more paragraphs would make your message easier to read. Looking at the HTML source it seems you did have paragraphs. Preview! Also, you probably want to use Plain Old Text, and not HTML Formatted. This way two returns gets you a new paragraph. Otherwise you have to manually add <p> tags.
"Bzzzt! Wrong" is old school stuff from the 90s. Obnoxious and outdated.