Why do we need to create a new Wiki Univ. Just get a cheap PC, photoshop (or Gimp if you want to scrimp), design your own degree and get the thing printed at home. Done!
As long as it is my time, it would be me who decides what is constructive and what is not. So you get lost, you inarticulate "look ma! I am all growned up, I use words like Fuck!! ooo! hoo" pipsqueak.
Or at least it is jumping the shark. Look at how many trollish stories in one night. Can we mod the whole site "troll" and be done with it?
Standard petitio principii comment.
on
Why Microsoft?
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· Score: 4, Informative
For the (n+1) th time. Beg the question does not mean raise the question. Beg the question is a literal translation of "petitio principii", a Latin phrase, meaning the answer is begging the question[er] to be accepted as a valid, even though it [meaning the answer] has precious little logic or evidence supporting it.
We are constantly inventing new phrases and new usages. Why raid an ancient and well used phrase, disembowel it, and stuff a completely new meaning inside? If you want to play alien body snatcher, do it with real humans, not with time honoured Latin phrases.
The counter argument is, Imagine a world where the cost of making the second Ferrari is the same as the cost of making the second Hyundai accent. And so the Ferrari is priced just a shade about Hyundai accent, which one would grab the market share? All the investment in Microsoft Office has been paid back and at present it is just a purely profit making money minting machine for Microsoft. All further investment in MS-Office by Microsoft is make it difficult to get off the upgrade treadmill, to lure unwitting customers into the fold.
Microsoft fundamentally believes there are some who will never pay for the software. Crackdown too hard on them or be too successful in preventing piracy, they might defect to Linux and open free software. So it did not try too hard to fight piracy. But the dissenters in oppressed countries might better served by specific hardened distros from Linux camp than by the free offerings from Microsoft. You never know if it has shown the source code to these governments or allowed them to install back doors.
Everyone knows Government only sucks your income through taxation and wastes it. It can not be a solution to anything. They can't even see a banking crisis coming, how are they going to see an asteroid coming? This is the typical muddled liberal thinking that envisages a single provider socialistic detection system.
The Tennessee Fire Brigade has shown the right way. A subscription based detection system. Only the Asteroids that are going to hit the subscriber's home will be detected. If you don't pay the 75$ a year subscription fee, sorry buddy. An asteroid is going to hit your home and we will watch it with glee.
10 levels of inheritance is not a problem, if it makes sense. But multiple inheritance that has the same base class twice in the tree! Oh yeah, it can be done and C++ test has questions about it too. But if you ever use it in my project, I will fire you.
He used to actually participate in holy flame wars in the usenet about C++. I am sure he is a slashdotter. Should he be allowed to use his mod points on this thread?
Putting HD on the console is not revolutionary. It is just the next logical step, it is an evolutionary change. Others were balking because they lacked the money, Microsoft did it because it had oodles of cash and the others came along kicking and screaming.
The motion controller for Wii is revolutionary. It brought in casual gamers and geezers who would never have bought a game console otherwise.
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Xbox is a huge fiasco in terms of opportunity costs for Microsoft. It kept losing billions of dollars year after year. Microsoft had these huge money machines MsOffice and Windows producing some 15 billion dollars in profits year after. So it kept bearing losses in the XBox line, undercut the competition and waited for them to go out of business. It did not even come up with an innovative concept like motion controller of Wii. Finally it has a decent franchise in XBox. But is it worth all the money it sank into the project. If you consider Xbox as an "intraprise" within Microsoft and all the investments were "borrowed" from rest of the company, it would still be losing money. The profits in that line would not even pay for the interest on the money sunk into it. Even in the gamer market it has shown its myopia. The game players willing to pay big bucks are actually a small fraction of the total population. Despite their willingness to pay the top dollar, the total sales to casual gamers who play childish games on their phones or geezers playing bowling using Wii is more than the sales of XBox and its games.
Was it the best use of the money? Why did it not use it to create an innovative motion controller or a multi touch display or even a great hard disk based MP3 player, or a winning phone os or a winning touch-pad, or a reliable Webserver like Apache or a knockout search engine? It could not even the battle with Intuit's Quicken even after giving away Microsoft Money for free to the OEMs. For all its attempt to win the living room, it did not get anything. The only thing Microsoft knows how to sell is products bought by top brass of rich inefficient bureaucratic companies for other people to use.
It sank billions of dollars into XBox. And got a smaller fraction of the total game market (counting in phone based games, Wii kind of casual games). When it comes to the vision thing, Microsoft is an epic fail.
Any coder who has profiled his/her code knows that a few lines, a few functions use most of the CPU time. Same way of all the features you find in an office suite, some 10% of it gets used very very heavily and another 20% of it would play spoiler in interoperability. Rest of the features are essentially bells and whistles meant to be used as bullet points in presentations made to top clients by the salesmen.
Typically Microsoft would keep messing with file formats, binary blobs dumped into the files, fonts/menus etc in every release to keep increasing the "spoiler" features and increase costs to OpenOffice and other competitors who are trying to keep up with the interoperability.
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature. And most of the core functionality that could be saved and restored in Office97 format cleanly in MsOffice is done equally well in OpenOffice. Though it won the battle in getting OOXML certified as another "standard" format, the battle raised the visibility of interoperability issues and a few customers started actually separating "microsoft compatibility" from "interoperability". So they are setting the default save format is Office97 even on newer versions to keep their escape avenue open.
Another important strategic mistake it made was ignoring the web based office tools. Microsoft knew there were millions of pirated copies of MsOffice is being used everywhere. It turned a blind eye to it thinking, "these guys would never actually pay for an office suite. If we crackdown they might go to OpenOffice. So let us keep them in the tent, as a way to deny market share to the competition". When the web based office tools started coming out, they saw it as a pathetic little pipsqueak not comparable to the full power of a desktop Office tool. But it siphoned off a large portion of the bootleg users who were looking for a legal option to do simple editing without having to pay for a full price MsOffice suite. Now compatibility and interoperability with these web office tools is an issue and it is tying down Microsoft. It is not able to play the usual, "make enough changes to the file formats and the api and the look and feel and leave enough bugs in there to make everybody look bad compared to the defacto standard microsoft ".
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions). The hardware has become very powerful and a virtual machine running an WinXP 2005 image in a protected sandbox actually runs faster than the original machine it shipped with. People are recyling their old Microsoft Windows licenses and Office licenses using VMware.
I think Microsoft will still milk a few more billions of dollars from MsOffice. But it is not going to grow as fast as it did. If they suspend all new development on it and just milk it for profits, they might actually make more money than trying to add more bells whistles and hidden mines and bombs to thwart interoperability.
You create a good basic password. Something like a ticker symbol of your fav company, last four digits of some phone number may be AnSs2122. Or the first letters of a book and the author (tMDbHM), or a movie title and its director (tSWbGL).
Then for each web site, you append or prepend a three char abbreviation from the website's name itself. Now for every web site you have a unique password. Only you know the logic of making up the three letters for the website, and your unique password.
To remember the password you write them down, but not the actual password. Just some hint. Ansys Cashman would mean to you, the ticker symbol ANSS and the last four digits of the phone number of your friend Cashman or "Whale" would mean, for example, the Moby Dick by Herman Miller, tMDbHM. Or The Death Star would imply to you, "the Star Wars by George Lucas" (tSWbGL). With this many indirections and some things never written down, you can have a good password system.
I know this system is not really very good, but I have come up with a good system based on these principles. But I am not going to blabber it here. You need to come up with a good system yourself based on these hints.
What about the Microsoft over invoicing and over billing the customers? The Bill Gate. It has happened more than once. So we need to really publicize Bill Gates.
NASA has intercepted a stream messages being constantly coming from the "asteroid". It has been decoded. It says, "Attention Heaven's Gate. Your pick up time is in 24 hours. Please prepare. Sorry for the delay"
Income tax is an atrocity committed upon free people to deprive them of their liberties and freedoms.
Income Tax is the way little people band together and claw back money stolen from them by Big Corporations and Big Businesses. Most of the people who mouth nonsense like "income tax is theft" are either shills for these big corporations or brainwashed by the big corporations.
A tech savy person could do that, and that is not the main issue. If it is made easy for people who have paid for the XP license once to M$FT, to use the perpetual license, um, perpetually, to get off the upgrade treadmill, what it would mean to the revenue stream of M$FT? Make it easy for the non tech savvy people to do the emulation cheaply.
I am very sure VMware is currently pitching to big companies, how they could use the virtualization to stop buying more and more expensive upgrades. They don't have to port their old trusted codes and applications to newer and newer windows platform. The security will be handled by the sandboxing environment. Old InternetExplorer 6 based applications can be run safely in new machines!
What I am saying WinXP may be used for a much much longer time, long after the original machines on which they were shipped have been consigned to the landfill or been melted down by Chinese children to extract the few particles of gold in the PCBs.
VMware lets you pack an older PC, complete with all installed applications and the data files into an image and replay the image on a new computer using VMware player. Dont throw away your old XP machines. The WinXP license code printed in the nameplate at the back is needed to playback the saved image in VMware player. So theoretically it is possible for some folks at least, to buy a newer Linux machine or a Mac or even a Chrome Pad when it comes out, and use the VM image for their older XP software that works and that is still good. The emulator on a new machine runs the image faster than the older machine. And one can isolate the sandbox in which the old image is running and get the benefit of all the security advantages too.
Hope some people start a project to reduce the technical skills needed to pull this off so that non-technical people can follow this route. The rate at which the hardware is improving, the next generation of iPad or its clones would be able to run a full image of an older XP installation on emulation!
All you have to do is to bribe a Dubai official and you will get all the keys that RIM handed over to them ostensibly to protect "security of the state".
A plain gas turbine driving a land vehicle is impractical due to turbo lag. Gas turbines respond too slowly for throttle settings. Everyone knows about the turbo lag in the turbo-supercharged gas/diesel engines. Jay Leno has a motorcycle made from an Airforce surplus helicopter gas turbine engine.
That thing runs so smoothly with nary a vibration, you would not know the machine is running unless you stand on the exhaust path. But he was saying, "There is a 0.5 sec turbo lag. You twist the throttle, the machine thinks you have suggested a speed increase, and a committee decides to approve of it and then it starts accelerating rapidly. And remember the lag is on the other end too. You shut the throttle off, and the machine produces power for another half a second before decelerating" (paraphrased. not exact words of Jay).
Jaguar was bought by the Indian company TATA, famous for its Tata-Nano car, also known as a scooter with a sheet metal bubble! May be they will merge these two technologies and attach the gas turbine to Nano! Or they can just pack a TataNano in the trunk (boot for you Brits) as a spare vehicle instead of a spare tire. The possibilities are endless!
Slashdot Mirror
Why do we need to create a new Wiki Univ. Just get a cheap PC, photoshop (or Gimp if you want to scrimp), design your own degree and get the thing printed at home. Done!
As long as it is my time, it would be me who decides what is constructive and what is not. So you get lost, you inarticulate "look ma! I am all growned up, I use words like Fuck!! ooo! hoo" pipsqueak.
Or at least it is jumping the shark. Look at how many trollish stories in one night. Can we mod the whole site "troll" and be done with it?
We are constantly inventing new phrases and new usages. Why raid an ancient and well used phrase, disembowel it, and stuff a completely new meaning inside? If you want to play alien body snatcher, do it with real humans, not with time honoured Latin phrases.
The counter argument is, Imagine a world where the cost of making the second Ferrari is the same as the cost of making the second Hyundai accent. And so the Ferrari is priced just a shade about Hyundai accent, which one would grab the market share? All the investment in Microsoft Office has been paid back and at present it is just a purely profit making money minting machine for Microsoft. All further investment in MS-Office by Microsoft is make it difficult to get off the upgrade treadmill, to lure unwitting customers into the fold.
Microsoft fundamentally believes there are some who will never pay for the software. Crackdown too hard on them or be too successful in preventing piracy, they might defect to Linux and open free software. So it did not try too hard to fight piracy. But the dissenters in oppressed countries might better served by specific hardened distros from Linux camp than by the free offerings from Microsoft. You never know if it has shown the source code to these governments or allowed them to install back doors.
The Tennessee Fire Brigade has shown the right way. A subscription based detection system. Only the Asteroids that are going to hit the subscriber's home will be detected. If you don't pay the 75$ a year subscription fee, sorry buddy. An asteroid is going to hit your home and we will watch it with glee.
10 levels of inheritance is not a problem, if it makes sense. But multiple inheritance that has the same base class twice in the tree! Oh yeah, it can be done and C++ test has questions about it too. But if you ever use it in my project, I will fire you.
He used to actually participate in holy flame wars in the usenet about C++. I am sure he is a slashdotter. Should he be allowed to use his mod points on this thread?
The motion controller for Wii is revolutionary. It brought in casual gamers and geezers who would never have bought a game console otherwise.
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Xbox is a huge fiasco in terms of opportunity costs for Microsoft. It kept losing billions of dollars year after year. Microsoft had these huge money machines MsOffice and Windows producing some 15 billion dollars in profits year after. So it kept bearing losses in the XBox line, undercut the competition and waited for them to go out of business. It did not even come up with an innovative concept like motion controller of Wii. Finally it has a decent franchise in XBox. But is it worth all the money it sank into the project. If you consider Xbox as an "intraprise" within Microsoft and all the investments were "borrowed" from rest of the company, it would still be losing money. The profits in that line would not even pay for the interest on the money sunk into it. Even in the gamer market it has shown its myopia. The game players willing to pay big bucks are actually a small fraction of the total population. Despite their willingness to pay the top dollar, the total sales to casual gamers who play childish games on their phones or geezers playing bowling using Wii is more than the sales of XBox and its games.
Was it the best use of the money? Why did it not use it to create an innovative motion controller or a multi touch display or even a great hard disk based MP3 player, or a winning phone os or a winning touch-pad, or a reliable Webserver like Apache or a knockout search engine? It could not even the battle with Intuit's Quicken even after giving away Microsoft Money for free to the OEMs. For all its attempt to win the living room, it did not get anything. The only thing Microsoft knows how to sell is products bought by top brass of rich inefficient bureaucratic companies for other people to use.
It sank billions of dollars into XBox. And got a smaller fraction of the total game market (counting in phone based games, Wii kind of casual games). When it comes to the vision thing, Microsoft is an epic fail.
Typically Microsoft would keep messing with file formats, binary blobs dumped into the files, fonts/menus etc in every release to keep increasing the "spoiler" features and increase costs to OpenOffice and other competitors who are trying to keep up with the interoperability.
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature. And most of the core functionality that could be saved and restored in Office97 format cleanly in MsOffice is done equally well in OpenOffice. Though it won the battle in getting OOXML certified as another "standard" format, the battle raised the visibility of interoperability issues and a few customers started actually separating "microsoft compatibility" from "interoperability". So they are setting the default save format is Office97 even on newer versions to keep their escape avenue open.
Another important strategic mistake it made was ignoring the web based office tools. Microsoft knew there were millions of pirated copies of MsOffice is being used everywhere. It turned a blind eye to it thinking, "these guys would never actually pay for an office suite. If we crackdown they might go to OpenOffice. So let us keep them in the tent, as a way to deny market share to the competition". When the web based office tools started coming out, they saw it as a pathetic little pipsqueak not comparable to the full power of a desktop Office tool. But it siphoned off a large portion of the bootleg users who were looking for a legal option to do simple editing without having to pay for a full price MsOffice suite. Now compatibility and interoperability with these web office tools is an issue and it is tying down Microsoft. It is not able to play the usual, "make enough changes to the file formats and the api and the look and feel and leave enough bugs in there to make everybody look bad compared to the defacto standard microsoft ".
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions). The hardware has become very powerful and a virtual machine running an WinXP 2005 image in a protected sandbox actually runs faster than the original machine it shipped with. People are recyling their old Microsoft Windows licenses and Office licenses using VMware.
I think Microsoft will still milk a few more billions of dollars from MsOffice. But it is not going to grow as fast as it did. If they suspend all new development on it and just milk it for profits, they might actually make more money than trying to add more bells whistles and hidden mines and bombs to thwart interoperability.
You forgot to post your usernames. I am not able to use your accounts using just your passwords. Please post the usernames too.
Then for each web site, you append or prepend a three char abbreviation from the website's name itself. Now for every web site you have a unique password. Only you know the logic of making up the three letters for the website, and your unique password.
To remember the password you write them down, but not the actual password. Just some hint. Ansys Cashman would mean to you, the ticker symbol ANSS and the last four digits of the phone number of your friend Cashman or "Whale" would mean, for example, the Moby Dick by Herman Miller, tMDbHM. Or The Death Star would imply to you, "the Star Wars by George Lucas" (tSWbGL). With this many indirections and some things never written down, you can have a good password system.
I know this system is not really very good, but I have come up with a good system based on these principles. But I am not going to blabber it here. You need to come up with a good system yourself based on these hints.
1 Donate money to dimwitted politicians running for low turn out positions like school boards
2 Make them do really stupid things
3 Sue the school board and collect class action damages
4 Give the pols their share from the collection
5 ...
6 profit!
Lather, rinse and repeat!
What about the Microsoft over invoicing and over billing the customers? The Bill Gate. It has happened more than once. So we need to really publicize Bill Gates.
NASA has intercepted a stream messages being constantly coming from the "asteroid". It has been decoded. It says, "Attention Heaven's Gate. Your pick up time is in 24 hours. Please prepare. Sorry for the delay"
... add this recorded decoded demultiplexed sounds to the street view. Would be cool. Or Evil.
Income tax is an atrocity committed upon free people to deprive them of their liberties and freedoms.
Income Tax is the way little people band together and claw back money stolen from them by Big Corporations and Big Businesses. Most of the people who mouth nonsense like "income tax is theft" are either shills for these big corporations or brainwashed by the big corporations.
All it will take is a lawsuit and the Supreme Court will rule that the second amendment rights include the right to own and deploy SAM missiles.
I am very sure VMware is currently pitching to big companies, how they could use the virtualization to stop buying more and more expensive upgrades. They don't have to port their old trusted codes and applications to newer and newer windows platform. The security will be handled by the sandboxing environment. Old InternetExplorer 6 based applications can be run safely in new machines!
What I am saying WinXP may be used for a much much longer time, long after the original machines on which they were shipped have been consigned to the landfill or been melted down by Chinese children to extract the few particles of gold in the PCBs.
Hope some people start a project to reduce the technical skills needed to pull this off so that non-technical people can follow this route. The rate at which the hardware is improving, the next generation of iPad or its clones would be able to run a full image of an older XP installation on emulation!
All you have to do is to bribe a Dubai official and you will get all the keys that RIM handed over to them ostensibly to protect "security of the state".
A plain gas turbine driving a land vehicle is impractical due to turbo lag. Gas turbines respond too slowly for throttle settings. Everyone knows about the turbo lag in the turbo-supercharged gas/diesel engines. Jay Leno has a motorcycle made from an Airforce surplus helicopter gas turbine engine. That thing runs so smoothly with nary a vibration, you would not know the machine is running unless you stand on the exhaust path. But he was saying, "There is a 0.5 sec turbo lag. You twist the throttle, the machine thinks you have suggested a speed increase, and a committee decides to approve of it and then it starts accelerating rapidly. And remember the lag is on the other end too. You shut the throttle off, and the machine produces power for another half a second before decelerating" (paraphrased. not exact words of Jay).
Jaguar was bought by the Indian company TATA, famous for its Tata-Nano car, also known as a scooter with a sheet metal bubble! May be they will merge these two technologies and attach the gas turbine to Nano! Or they can just pack a TataNano in the trunk (boot for you Brits) as a spare vehicle instead of a spare tire. The possibilities are endless!