I'm sure some drama queen will come along to correct me, but I doubt any of Microsoft's customers had Windows forced on them.
The fact is that Windows works quite well for most people, all things considered, and the OS that is cannibalizing its market share is doing so through brand loyalty built by an MP3 player/ cell phone despite the fact that it has been 'better' than Windows for a long while.
Taco sold his personal blog to Andover quite a long time ago, and the FAQ has never reflected the actual current state of anything.
For instance, the gigantic menu bar at the top of the front page that I must X away on every single page load. I'd like to consult a FAQ or a man page about that, figure out how I might get it gone for good, since I don't care at all about filtering the firehose.
I read email on an iPhone all the time, and on various Blackberrys before that, so a PC is not necessary for reading email.
I don't send MMS messages ever but I am annoyed by the fact that the iPhone doesn't handle them. The idiotic workaround from ATT works maybe 50% of the time and more or less requires me to find a PC, what needing to enter two different code numbers into their web site and their pages timing out when loaded from my phone. As long as there is alcohol being served in the same place as a camera phone, I'm going to want MMS.
Anyone who uses an analogy of any kind on this site to explain a tech issue should be ripped.
If you are on Slashdot and aren't geeky enough to wrap your mind around DRM on computer data without relating it to automobiles, you are part of the noise and should leave.
I replaced the control system on my hot tub with a PLC attached to my wireless network. I can turn the heat up on the thing from my iPhone while standing in an airport halfway across the country, so it is warm when I get home.
The squirrel who lives in the tree above it seems no more impressed with me than he was prior to the project. I believe he would be no more impressed by an autonomous hunter/gatherer robot.
Unless there is a change in the progess of the leagilities of patent enforcement on a global scale I think patents in general are fubar.
Right now there are places in Asia you can walk into and think you are in a manufacturing facility owned by Samsung or HTC or some similar company. The people there are wearing logo'd shirts, the building has the logo on the side, the products coming off the line are all logo'd. But the entire operation is a clone and has nothing to do with the actual legitimate company.
I do some work for small manufacturers in the firearms industry. LaRue makes mostly mounts for optics. Magpul makes various tactical products. Aimpoint makes optics. Those 3 all hold several patents but all are well aware that nearly every product they make is being cloned somewhere in Asia and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they hired lawyers and bribed the necessary government officials the cloner would just shut down and move elsewhere. Nearly every Aimpoint sold on Ebay is a fake. Nearly every one I've run across at gun shows lately is a fake. The small guys I know have even given up asking Ebay to take down clone auctions because they don't see an economic advantage in doing so.
Unless things change on the legal front patents, at least on physical products, will just be a money sink. Anyone who wants to clone your product is going to manufacture it in Asia anyway, so other than some small distribution advantage it matters little whether the clones are contracted out by a US entity or the work of a foreign one.
This behavior is somewhat foreign to other OSs but I prefer it and I'd like to see an OS that was even more document oriented. Trends come and go but Windows, and Linux to some extent, lean toward promoting the application over the document. This is why people say "Microsoft Word document" rather than letter or list or memo or the like. "Excel file" rather than spreadsheet.
Only at the point where I choose what software I use to interact with a file do I care about the application. Once that task is complete, and I want to edit a photo, I'd rather concentrate on editing the photo, not be constantly reminded that I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS4. No window decoration reminding me. No splash screens. No "My Adobe Photoshop Photos" folder secretly dropped into my "My Documents" folder.
The Xerox Alto was this way and OSs have regressed in this regard ever since.
Although I'd love to avoid partisan idiocy I'll offer bayonet lugs as a right the other side of the aisle took away.
By themselves they are not a big deal, which makes me wonder why someone would go through the trouble to ban them. The obvious presence of an ulterior motive was much more bothersome than the lugs themselves.
Timelines vary no doubt, and there are failures, but it seems to have worked for the Allied countries in WWII, for instance. It worked for a time for the Boers and the Afghans (despite inferior material technology in both cases). As an example of the failing to come together, Native American tribes would have eventually been subdued but playing one tribe against another hastened that. I'd throw nearly all of Africa in there too.
My problem with non-violence is that I just don't see how it can work over the long term in all cases or even in most. There is a small camp near an oil extraction operation in Congo. The enemies of the people who live there have guns but the villagers don't. When their enemies come the villagers flee, but their enemies shoot at them anyway. Sometimes they even make hits. For the people hit, non violence did not work in that instance. I've watched this happen 3 or 4 times over the course of a few years and it doesn't strike me as a long term strategy either. The enemies don't want anything from there people other than to kill them, so mutually beneficial negotiations can't really proceed.
I don't understand their mentality but I'd say those villagers have guts in spades to not arm themselves.
the only "lesson" you teach from the barrel of a gun is that gun-barrels are for teaching lessons.
I don't necessarily dispute you here, but what can be done when you are faced with such a lesson, other than learn it?
For purley academic purposes it is fun to think about what things might be like were there no one teaching anyone else about gun barrels but if history is any indication of the nature of humans such things aren't going to stop any time soon. Someone somewhere is going to get a better gun than their neighbor and go be the agressor. Banding together to visit consequences on those agressors seems to work but that just reverses the teacher/student roles.
And the cultured types who elevate themselves above direct physical confrontation replace guns with dollars. Or food. Or medicine or whatever else their neighbor needs. No gun to your head but you either sign the document or your kids don't eat again tonight.
So once we or BSG have thoroughly deconstructed the troll where do we end up?
Yes I know what a 5D is and it is a consumer grade camera. If you own one and get emotionally invested in your purchasing choices you can use the term "prosumer" and I will laugh at you but only on the inside. Not that it isn't a highly capable camera in the right hands, but it is far from a a professional grade studio camera.
If someone hired me to shoot the official Presidential portrait (despite the face that I am a professional photographer this is highly unlikely, my style doesn't quite fit) I would not be using an SLR.
How are they going to ensure that this photograph last at least as long as more traditional prints?
I probably assume too much, but I assume whomever is in charge of archives related to the President has a decent backup policy. The LoC is digitizing all of the FSA Project photos specifically because the negatives/prints are getting old and they want to be sure they are preserved.
How are they going to ensure that the digital file they open next year is the same one they just created? That it hasn't been altered or photoshopped or something?
I am guessing with an OSK-E3, since he was shot with a Canon 5D (or at least that is whay they want us to think). I'm amazed the official photo was done with a consumer grade camera, I figured they'd use something a little more presidential.
Odd that Slashdot (or Linux.com I guess) needed to look at Interclue to see what going proprietary does for you.
Why not give us detailed report on the history of VA Linux->VA Software->Sourceforge? No third party needed. You start a company to build servers that run Linux and do well. Then you buy up Andover to get various FOSS scene web sites to generate buzz. Change your company name a few times just in case anyone is following you.
Decide to IPO at $30/share. None other than the great economist Eric S. Raymond tells us it is a can't miss proposition winner, he being hired to act as the company's Open Source mouthpiece and keep them comitted to the principals or openness and sharing and the like. Everybody cheers your big IPO and sees it as proof that money can be made while staying Open. Stock price like $300+.
Before the cheers die down you find out can no longer make go of it in the server market so you try to sell proprietary software. Release a proprietary version of the previously OSS Sourceforge, form the OSDN then promtly kick out K5 and, again, throw in a name change to OSTG.
Again find out that your business model doesn't work, sell your flagship product, Sourceforge, to CollabNet.
Best I can tell the company is now "leader in IT community-driven media and e-commerce", which I think means it sells ads and trinkets. Stock price last I checked was in the $0.85 range.
So anyway, I don't see why they needed to go study Interclue.
I think people look for deals whether the economy is good or bad. People generally want more than what they have regardless so better deals mean they can buy more stuff. Money gets tight you might see some impact on the wanna-be-rich items, like Cadillac Escalades and Coach handbags and crap like that, but staples still sell.
And to add on to the 'doom and gloom' comment in the editorial: I live kind of in the boonies. Over the holidays I went to see family in a mid sized city and I expected to see some evidence of the economic times being hard. It was Indianapolis, so a lot of auto industry jobs. But every junk chain restaurant we went to was packed to capacity and had hour plus waits. Every mall parking lot was full. People at Fry's were carrying out big screen TVs and new MacBooks. Plenty of SUVs rolling around.
I know housing is bad, and I know some residential contractors who are slow. And the auto industry is looking bad. But I don't get the newsmans's assertion that things are as bad as the Great Depression. My grandmother washed her paper towels and dried them on a clothesline in the Great Depression. I didn't see any paper towels on any clotheslines anywhere. Or any clotheslines at all for that matter. People seem to be getting along well enough. If Texas Roadhouse has a 45 minute wait for a lousy steak (and the closest restaurant to me is still 100% full every night) things must not be as bad as we are being led to believe.
It isn't like the rest of French cuisine is Richard-Simmons-Approved when eaten in the kind of quantities Americans typically eat things, so I don't see why they'd care about fries in particular.
I liked that period of time where we were supposed to call them "Freedom Fries". It made it easier to spot imbeciles.
And there are. But you should stop listening when someone attempts to argue that they'll raise corporate tax in lieu of income tax and that that will benefit you the individual.
Corporate taxes are paid by you, the individual, in the form of increased prices for goods and services. For a corporation a tax is just like any other cost. Labor or utilities or copper. The primary difference between tax and most other costs is that aside from the above loopholes there is little incentive to compete with other businesses to reduce tax, or to innovate, or to be more efficient than the next guy.
And Amazon or some other online retailer will have to be the ones to do it.
While it is fun to imagine powerful corporations ratifying our collective will as directed by their testosterone level, for them it will come down to a simple business decision. If the impact of complying with the law (or the risk of not) is greater than the cost to litigate it, they'll litigate it. Imagining any other motivation for a business is self deceit.
I've yet to see a better solution to presenting web pages and other documents on a small screen. You can lump it under user interface, which most people who aren't zealots will admit Apple always does well, but the pinch-zoom on the iPhone almost makes reading normal web pages on a cell phone sized screen not suck. Nokia doesn't have anything that does that remotely as well.
And your chagrin at the less cell tech oriented people thinking the iPhone's other features are novel actually reveals a big reason why it does so well. Apple designed the phone to appeal to these people and marketed it to them well. That pisses off a lot of people on Slashdot but normal folks seldom do featurewise comparisons on spreadsheet programs before they buy a phone, they watch TV and see someone doing something cool and they go buy the phone they did it with. Slick marketing is an unavoidable reality of doing business.
If I went back to the corporate world and needed quick email I'd probably go back to Blackberry, and the iPhone does lack in some important areas, but every other smartphone lacks even more.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure some drama queen will come along to correct me, but I doubt any of Microsoft's customers had Windows forced on them.
The fact is that Windows works quite well for most people, all things considered, and the OS that is cannibalizing its market share is doing so through brand loyalty built by an MP3 player/ cell phone despite the fact that it has been 'better' than Windows for a long while.
Taco sold his personal blog to Andover quite a long time ago, and the FAQ has never reflected the actual current state of anything.
For instance, the gigantic menu bar at the top of the front page that I must X away on every single page load. I'd like to consult a FAQ or a man page about that, figure out how I might get it gone for good, since I don't care at all about filtering the firehose.
I read email on an iPhone all the time, and on various Blackberrys before that, so a PC is not necessary for reading email.
I don't send MMS messages ever but I am annoyed by the fact that the iPhone doesn't handle them. The idiotic workaround from ATT works maybe 50% of the time and more or less requires me to find a PC, what needing to enter two different code numbers into their web site and their pages timing out when loaded from my phone. As long as there is alcohol being served in the same place as a camera phone, I'm going to want MMS.
Anyone who uses an analogy of any kind on this site to explain a tech issue should be ripped.
If you are on Slashdot and aren't geeky enough to wrap your mind around DRM on computer data without relating it to automobiles, you are part of the noise and should leave.
We are by our own estimation for sure.
I replaced the control system on my hot tub with a PLC attached to my wireless network. I can turn the heat up on the thing from my iPhone while standing in an airport halfway across the country, so it is warm when I get home.
The squirrel who lives in the tree above it seems no more impressed with me than he was prior to the project. I believe he would be no more impressed by an autonomous hunter/gatherer robot.
Here's that data you wanted.
This is more than most conspiracys will offer, so I suggest you accept it.
Unless there is a change in the progess of the leagilities of patent enforcement on a global scale I think patents in general are fubar.
Right now there are places in Asia you can walk into and think you are in a manufacturing facility owned by Samsung or HTC or some similar company. The people there are wearing logo'd shirts, the building has the logo on the side, the products coming off the line are all logo'd. But the entire operation is a clone and has nothing to do with the actual legitimate company.
I do some work for small manufacturers in the firearms industry. LaRue makes mostly mounts for optics. Magpul makes various tactical products. Aimpoint makes optics. Those 3 all hold several patents but all are well aware that nearly every product they make is being cloned somewhere in Asia and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they hired lawyers and bribed the necessary government officials the cloner would just shut down and move elsewhere. Nearly every Aimpoint sold on Ebay is a fake. Nearly every one I've run across at gun shows lately is a fake. The small guys I know have even given up asking Ebay to take down clone auctions because they don't see an economic advantage in doing so.
Unless things change on the legal front patents, at least on physical products, will just be a money sink. Anyone who wants to clone your product is going to manufacture it in Asia anyway, so other than some small distribution advantage it matters little whether the clones are contracted out by a US entity or the work of a foreign one.
This behavior is somewhat foreign to other OSs but I prefer it and I'd like to see an OS that was even more document oriented. Trends come and go but Windows, and Linux to some extent, lean toward promoting the application over the document. This is why people say "Microsoft Word document" rather than letter or list or memo or the like. "Excel file" rather than spreadsheet.
Only at the point where I choose what software I use to interact with a file do I care about the application. Once that task is complete, and I want to edit a photo, I'd rather concentrate on editing the photo, not be constantly reminded that I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS4. No window decoration reminding me. No splash screens. No "My Adobe Photoshop Photos" folder secretly dropped into my "My Documents" folder.
The Xerox Alto was this way and OSs have regressed in this regard ever since.
Although I'd love to avoid partisan idiocy I'll offer bayonet lugs as a right the other side of the aisle took away.
By themselves they are not a big deal, which makes me wonder why someone would go through the trouble to ban them. The obvious presence of an ulterior motive was much more bothersome than the lugs themselves.
Timelines vary no doubt, and there are failures, but it seems to have worked for the Allied countries in WWII, for instance. It worked for a time for the Boers and the Afghans (despite inferior material technology in both cases). As an example of the failing to come together, Native American tribes would have eventually been subdued but playing one tribe against another hastened that. I'd throw nearly all of Africa in there too.
My problem with non-violence is that I just don't see how it can work over the long term in all cases or even in most. There is a small camp near an oil extraction operation in Congo. The enemies of the people who live there have guns but the villagers don't. When their enemies come the villagers flee, but their enemies shoot at them anyway. Sometimes they even make hits. For the people hit, non violence did not work in that instance. I've watched this happen 3 or 4 times over the course of a few years and it doesn't strike me as a long term strategy either. The enemies don't want anything from there people other than to kill them, so mutually beneficial negotiations can't really proceed.
I don't understand their mentality but I'd say those villagers have guts in spades to not arm themselves.
the only "lesson" you teach from the barrel of a gun is that gun-barrels are for teaching lessons.
I don't necessarily dispute you here, but what can be done when you are faced with such a lesson, other than learn it?
For purley academic purposes it is fun to think about what things might be like were there no one teaching anyone else about gun barrels but if history is any indication of the nature of humans such things aren't going to stop any time soon. Someone somewhere is going to get a better gun than their neighbor and go be the agressor. Banding together to visit consequences on those agressors seems to work but that just reverses the teacher/student roles.
And the cultured types who elevate themselves above direct physical confrontation replace guns with dollars. Or food. Or medicine or whatever else their neighbor needs. No gun to your head but you either sign the document or your kids don't eat again tonight.
So once we or BSG have thoroughly deconstructed the troll where do we end up?
Yes I know what a 5D is and it is a consumer grade camera. If you own one and get emotionally invested in your purchasing choices you can use the term "prosumer" and I will laugh at you but only on the inside. Not that it isn't a highly capable camera in the right hands, but it is far from a a professional grade studio camera.
If someone hired me to shoot the official Presidential portrait (despite the face that I am a professional photographer this is highly unlikely, my style doesn't quite fit) I would not be using an SLR.
How are they going to ensure that this photograph last at least as long as more traditional prints?
I probably assume too much, but I assume whomever is in charge of archives related to the President has a decent backup policy. The LoC is digitizing all of the FSA Project photos specifically because the negatives/prints are getting old and they want to be sure they are preserved.
How are they going to ensure that the digital file they open next year is the same one they just created? That it hasn't been altered or photoshopped or something?
I am guessing with an OSK-E3, since he was shot with a Canon 5D (or at least that is whay they want us to think). I'm amazed the official photo was done with a consumer grade camera, I figured they'd use something a little more presidential.
I want the .raw for manipulatory purposes.
If I recall correctly an app like that pre-dates the App Store. I think there was one available for jailbroken 1.x firmware.
Odd that Slashdot (or Linux.com I guess) needed to look at Interclue to see what going proprietary does for you.
Why not give us detailed report on the history of VA Linux->VA Software->Sourceforge? No third party needed. You start a company to build servers that run Linux and do well. Then you buy up Andover to get various FOSS scene web sites to generate buzz. Change your company name a few times just in case anyone is following you.
Decide to IPO at $30/share. None other than the great economist Eric S. Raymond tells us it is a can't miss proposition winner, he being hired to act as the company's Open Source mouthpiece and keep them comitted to the principals or openness and sharing and the like. Everybody cheers your big IPO and sees it as proof that money can be made while staying Open. Stock price like $300+.
Before the cheers die down you find out can no longer make go of it in the server market so you try to sell proprietary software. Release a proprietary version of the previously OSS Sourceforge, form the OSDN then promtly kick out K5 and, again, throw in a name change to OSTG.
Again find out that your business model doesn't work, sell your flagship product, Sourceforge, to CollabNet.
Best I can tell the company is now "leader in IT community-driven media and e-commerce", which I think means it sells ads and trinkets. Stock price last I checked was in the $0.85 range.
So anyway, I don't see why they needed to go study Interclue.
I think people look for deals whether the economy is good or bad. People generally want more than what they have regardless so better deals mean they can buy more stuff. Money gets tight you might see some impact on the wanna-be-rich items, like Cadillac Escalades and Coach handbags and crap like that, but staples still sell.
And to add on to the 'doom and gloom' comment in the editorial: I live kind of in the boonies. Over the holidays I went to see family in a mid sized city and I expected to see some evidence of the economic times being hard. It was Indianapolis, so a lot of auto industry jobs. But every junk chain restaurant we went to was packed to capacity and had hour plus waits. Every mall parking lot was full. People at Fry's were carrying out big screen TVs and new MacBooks. Plenty of SUVs rolling around.
I know housing is bad, and I know some residential contractors who are slow. And the auto industry is looking bad. But I don't get the newsmans's assertion that things are as bad as the Great Depression. My grandmother washed her paper towels and dried them on a clothesline in the Great Depression. I didn't see any paper towels on any clotheslines anywhere. Or any clotheslines at all for that matter. People seem to be getting along well enough. If Texas Roadhouse has a 45 minute wait for a lousy steak (and the closest restaurant to me is still 100% full every night) things must not be as bad as we are being led to believe.
No, there is no longer any price difference between iTunes Plus music and iTunes DRM'd music.
No.
It isn't like the rest of French cuisine is Richard-Simmons-Approved when eaten in the kind of quantities Americans typically eat things, so I don't see why they'd care about fries in particular.
I liked that period of time where we were supposed to call them "Freedom Fries". It made it easier to spot imbeciles.
What do you see Beremiz being used for?
Coming from an industrial automation background, it isn't even close.
A swing and a miss.
And there are. But you should stop listening when someone attempts to argue that they'll raise corporate tax in lieu of income tax and that that will benefit you the individual.
Corporate taxes are paid by you, the individual, in the form of increased prices for goods and services. For a corporation a tax is just like any other cost. Labor or utilities or copper. The primary difference between tax and most other costs is that aside from the above loopholes there is little incentive to compete with other businesses to reduce tax, or to innovate, or to be more efficient than the next guy.
And Amazon or some other online retailer will have to be the ones to do it.
While it is fun to imagine powerful corporations ratifying our collective will as directed by their testosterone level, for them it will come down to a simple business decision. If the impact of complying with the law (or the risk of not) is greater than the cost to litigate it, they'll litigate it. Imagining any other motivation for a business is self deceit.
I've yet to see a better solution to presenting web pages and other documents on a small screen. You can lump it under user interface, which most people who aren't zealots will admit Apple always does well, but the pinch-zoom on the iPhone almost makes reading normal web pages on a cell phone sized screen not suck. Nokia doesn't have anything that does that remotely as well.
And your chagrin at the less cell tech oriented people thinking the iPhone's other features are novel actually reveals a big reason why it does so well. Apple designed the phone to appeal to these people and marketed it to them well. That pisses off a lot of people on Slashdot but normal folks seldom do featurewise comparisons on spreadsheet programs before they buy a phone, they watch TV and see someone doing something cool and they go buy the phone they did it with. Slick marketing is an unavoidable reality of doing business.
If I went back to the corporate world and needed quick email I'd probably go back to Blackberry, and the iPhone does lack in some important areas, but every other smartphone lacks even more.