Posts by jwenting

if they are they're rather late to the game with every phone manufacturer (and they have that market firmly in hand and divided) offering pretty much the same thing already: a mobile phone that is also a media player, game computer, PDA, video and still camera, etc. etc. etc. .

So? When you send me money I've no obligation to see whether it's for something you were required to pay me for.
Nor am I under any obligation to send money back old ladies send me.
Besides, she wasn't elderly in the 1980s...

Here at least the law states that home businesses MUST be separate from the house in all regards in order to be recognised as such.
That means separate entrance, bathroom, heating, water, etc. etc. from the house as well as separate everything else.

If a browser intercepts the data you retrieve and injects its own advertising in that I'd call that spyware, especially if it also sends back information on that retrieved data (which it almost certainly does, with the given footprint it's too small to contain all the logic for determining what ads to inject and what results to exclude from searches because they're competitors of the makers' sponsors).

What idiots. Privacy nutters gone haywire (even more so than usual).
If a 14 year old kid has access to his mother's work computer something's seriously wrong with the network security at that company (and what was the kid doing in there anyway?).
If a person uses their work computer for private matters, there will be more logs than just the browser cache anyway. Things like firewall and proxy logs (think you can connect to the internet without going through the firewall in any company that's got a network worthy of the name? Think those firewalls don't log your activity?).

While a cost per copy sold of $450 is a bit much, it does prove the point quite well.
Most people sorely underestimate the cost of building and maintaining software, let alone supporting it for years after it is sold.

They think that because they can buy blank CDs for $1 each (or less, but let's take high quality ones), software sold on CDs doesn't cost much more to make.
So they believe that if a store sells XP for $300 Microsoft must be making $299 profit on that.

They don't know anything about the distribution network, the margin for wholesalers and retailers, the cost of maintaining support websites and creating and releasing product updates.
They have no idea of the cost of creating the product in the first place, the cost of running a successful software development team (and recovering the monetary losses incurred from failed projects and research divisions).
They especially have no idea whatsoever that for every title that makes a profit a dozen either make a loss after release or never make it to release and thus never make a cent in income.

But you can calculate back from that $300 and get some insight.
The store has to pay (here) some 20% salestax, of $60.
The store takes maybe another $20 for itself to pay staff, shelfspace, etc. and a small profit.
Leaves a price they buy it at from their wholeseller of $220.
…

prepaid phones are the real ripoff :mrgreen:
You pay more for less.

Just because some marketing department was less than honest in the way it shoved services down the throat of customers doesn't mean that subscription plans are bad, it means marketing departments should be put against the wall and shot (not such a bad idea, I wouldn't trust a marketeer much further than a politician or lawyer).

but developers can have the version numbers internal to the program, no need to confuse the users. The version numbers do matter to the consumer; for example you may be asked, if you have a problem with a program, if you're using the latest version.

And that's the only time you ever have to look at the version number of a program if you're an end user, when calling tech support so they can know which version it is you're using.

At all other times you don't have to worry about it, so why bother setting up a version number police and by law requiring everyone to only use your favorite numbering scheme?

And who's going to be the version number police?
Are you proposing some UN agency where everyone has to submit requests to be allowed to release something and wait for a few decades (or pay a few million dollars in bribes) before it goes through the bureaucracy?

Take a look at the open source world, especially the religious Linux crowd.
Versions like 0.1.4.2.63beta2234rc42alpha2.5432.435 are the order of the day there.

If you don't like a versioning scheme, either don't use the application or be pragmatic and think "why worry, it's what it does that counts, not what it's called", but don't complain and try to impose your ideas of what things should be on all the world.

Indeed well done. Those squatters are no better than the domain hijackers who register domains in the names of celebrities in the hope of extorting money with threats to sell to porn operators (for example) or squatters buying expiring domains before the holder has a chance to renew the registration and than extort money to allow companies to get their own website back.

Boeing will close down its service, at the moment it's loosing them a lot of money to keep it running.
Most likely the first step will be to stop marketing it, and refuse tenders for new potential customers.
Next step will than be a move to not renew contracts with existing customers.
Finally maybe the last few customers with really longterm contract may have to be bought out.

Hotwiring the 787 for wireless networking is a good move in itself. Nothing prevents someone else from starting a similar service in the future when the economics are more favourable, and having aircraft ready to accept such a service will than be a good move.
It also allows for in-flight LAN parties and videoconferencing between people on board the aircraft, which could be sold as an added service by the airlines in the way of rental fees for the required wireless network cards and access codes.

no, they can only get excerpts with each request.
But someone (as with Google maps) will rapidly come with a system to get the entire book text out of there.

Google IS scanning your book and distributing it wholesale. By not taking action against them you're loosing any credibility to pursue others who do the same.
In fact those others will be able to point to Google and show that there's precedent that authors except their practices as perfectly valid.

You're delusional if you think this will bring you income, it will only cost you.
Maybe not immediately, but the value of the printed word will soon degrade to nothing as everyone can get the text of any printed book online at Google for free.

I wonder how you'll feel when your sales plummet because the punters can now get your entire book online for free.

Your argument is the same as that used by the advocates of music and movie piracy who claim that it eventually leads to sales.
Problem is that for every extra sale you pick up you loose a thousand.

The "researchers" you are talking about are the crackers who would use such tools to steal corporate secrets and commit sabotage.
And they don't care a gnat's ass about the DMCA (or any other law).

And there's no telling whether this printer was updated with current firmware or not.
Most likely (given the state of most company networks when it comes to applying software patches) it was still running the exact same version it did when it was uncrated on delivery.
That's the massive fallacy people get trapped by when they cry foul about the latest piece of malware infecting their systems about software manufacturers not supplying updates. The updates are usually there weeks or months before any vulnerabillity is exploited, but users fail (either through negligence or policy or both) to install them.

Some cases in point as examples.
1) at a former employer we had one of our servers seriously compromised (it was in fact wiped clean). On analysis we discovered the saboteur had come in on a vulnerabillity in Apache a patch for which had been released 2 years prior but had not been installed. Everyone responsible for such things had simply forgotten that the machine was exposed to the outside world and never bothered installing any updates at all. It was a ticking timebomb, pure luck was the only reason it didn't get hit sooner.

2) at a former customer they had a policy to never install any software …

how can you have been talking for "many years" about something that hasn't existed for more than a few...

Considering that 10-15% of computers don't run Windows it's fair to say that probably 90% of FF users are people who don't have access to IE :cheesy: :mrgreen:

Having used both (as well as several other browsers) I know which I prefer and it's not FF.

Good warning about FF now forcing even more spyware onto PCs.
The Goooooooooogle toolbar was bad enough, now RealPlayer as well and all the crap that brings.

Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with IE. It's at least as good, looks better, and doesn't spy on me.

And yes, I've downloaded FF myself over a dozen times. It's now on 1 machine at home (which I no longer use as a workstation, I only use FF there when I need to download some new software to install on it) and one machine at work (which I use mainly as a gateway to our corporate servers, so pretty much only Unix terminals).
On both it's installed by default (Linux installs) so I didn't have a choice...
On both multiple downloads were made to keep the thing up to date, installs which FF counts as new users but others don't.

They give people a choice, either change to a GSM subscription or pay for the privilege.

That's more than the networks here did when they stopped their oldfashioned (even then) analog networks in 1999 or so.
Subscribers were told to either change over to GSM or no longer have a mobile phone at all.
Of course the analog network had always been several times more expensive than GSM here anyway so there weren't that many left (mainly old carphones).

If you always hold off to buy the next announced CPU or GPU you'll never buy one.

As to gaming performance, there's indeed not that much difference YET between single core and multi-core CPUs, but that's mostly because most games to this day aren't programmed to make use of multi processor (or multi core) systems, thus all but one core will be idle while the game runs.

Where I have noticed a difference when running MS Flightsim 2004 together with helper programs is when forcing those helpers together into one core and letting FS take the other.
FS is extremely CPU hungry, so giving it a core of its own helps.

Upcoming games will make better use of multi-core systems as they're ever more programmed for it.

It's pretty much all stores...

Staff are hired based not on knowledge but pricetag and looks.
A cheap highschool dropout with a toothpaste smile, a miniskirt, and big boobs sells more (and at a higher price) than a nerdy boy with thick glasses, a faded T-shirt, and a stutter.
She's also a lot cheaper for the store.

And it's to some degree specialist stores as well that do it (though the process is slower there).

Almost everywhere staff are given lists of items they should advise people buy.
Those are not the items that people could make best use of but the items that yield the highest profit margins.
Thus you get a situation where in extreme cases staff ignore customer questions about specific items and instead drone on about completely different things the customer never asked about (I've had it happen to me several times).
The lack of understanding of the stuff they're trying to sell doesn't help of course.
If the kid is told to sell as many of the latest videocards as possible and you come to inquire about TV capture cards the kid may well think those are the same thing (after all, didn't his parents have a VIDEO recorder?).

Don't believe every anti-Microsoft rant you read online, most are based on either blatant lies, gross misunderstandings, incomplete data leading to massive exagerations, or a combination of the above.

You WILL use Vista at some stage. XP support won't last forever, and sooner or later you're going to be working at a company using Vista even if you yourself for whatever reason decided not to purchase it (mind that most people using XP at home didn't purchase it either, they got a "backup copy" from a friend's downloaded copy).

You can prove anything with a survey if you only word the questions correctly.

If you want Symantec to score high in customer satisfaction, just put them on top of a list of companies that noone ever heard of for example.
Everyone will either check them or "other" (if supplied) apart from a few nerds who do happen to know one of the others or just check a random one.

Apple has an extremely loyal customer base, far more so than does Dell.
Most are in fact religious Mac-fanatics, and seem on some kind of Jihad to rid the world of all other computers by whatever means it takes.
They'll never (at least openly) complain about Apple.
Dell users OTOH are far more vocal, and most will buy another brand if they can get a better deal elsewhere.

(has the average man really slept with 423 women, and if so why has the average woman only slept with 4?)

Worded like that, the average man has slept with 423 women (a ridiculously high number), and the average woman with 4 other women...
Just goes to show that a higher percentage of men are straight than the percentage of lesbian or bisexual women, something that probably won't surprise most people :)

Since when is the Webster 'official' and in what capacity?
Is it some sort of government body which defines what the language is? And if so which government (as English is spoken in many countries as the native language).

AFAIK English has no official government (or intergovernmental) organisation to define what the language is (like German or Dutch has).

Therefore Google could just sue the publisher for trademark infringement ;)

Indeed it's no fault of Microsoft at all. They keep support on their products for far longer than most companies, yet people complain it's not enough.

I just today found out my IDE which was released Q4 2004 will go out of support Q3 2007, a far more normal period.

As to those schools, they have a choice as does everyone else.
There's Linux, and there are educational discounts on Microsoft products almost across the board (and with grants from for example the Gates Foundation some schools can get the software and hardware for free).

tough luck on all the AOHell pundits who're stupid enough to open messages with attachments and don't run AV software.

Can you spell out CONSPIRACY THEORY?

Given the extremely low penetration of the software in current email clients and servers it's the only likely outcome.
The dataset of the trial is far too small because of that low penetration to be in any way useful, but does show that spammers will use technology designed to spoof them in order to gain apparent legitimacy which is hardly surprising as they've abused everything designed to work against them in the past.
Spammers after all are high tech criminals, and criminals aren't known to play by the rules and behave like good citizens.

reform copyright law to make copyright useless to protect your property...
That's essentially the same as eliminating it, except you keep (in theory) the fees for registration of copyright from the suckers who don't realise it doesn't bring them anything.

hmm, nice... Organise a police raid on their headquarters.
Impound all computers and other records, and get search warrants for the entire membership :mrgreen:

hmm, didn't Blizzard have something along those lines in Battle.net back in 1997 for the Diablo and Starcraft series?
MSN Zone also comes to mind, launched around the same time.

Just because they're investigating the possibillities of doing something according to some pop-science mag which sells on juicy headlines (yes, I know that mag) doesn't mean they're actually doing it (in fact if they're investigating the possibillities it automatically means they're not doing it...).

That CFO most likely will not have told you anything you didn't have a right to know and as you have (AFAIK) no security clearance he'll certainly have told you nothing you are expected to keep confidential.

The NSA would be foolish not to use the internet to gather data on people they're keeping an eye on.
After all, those people also use the internet themselves for intel gathering and communications purposes...

And oh, they're not listening in on all your phonecalls. It's no more or less than what the IRS gets already during tax audits on your telco, the information about when calls were made from which to what number and how long they lasted.

welcome to the wonderful world of beta software :mrgreen: :twisted:

As soon as Tim came back (he was out of cellphone reach with no internet access for several days) he wrote a blog entry and contacted the parties involved...

The letter was sent by CMP without initial knowledge of O'Reilly, though O'Reilly legal staff (without consulting Tim who could not be reached) did indeed agree with CMP.

Finally, I must agree with CMP in this, at least in principle. They have a legal obligation to protect their service marks, even when not yet granted.
Therefore they MUST send a C&D letter of some sort whenever a breach is detected, if they don't they loose the right to the mark.

IT@Cork were in breach of an existing service mark, whether knowingly or not.
They deliberately misinterpreted the facts by claiming that O'Reilly sent the letter instead of CMP, then effectively calling for everyone to boycot O'Reilly.
That's not what you do if you want a dialogue, to resolve an issue without letting it blow up. Therefore I have to conclude that IT@Cork never had any intent to resolve the issue at all, and only wanted to harm O'Reilly.

And so another blog joins the fray of screaming bloody murder at O'Reilly when there's nothing to scream about.

Tim O'Reilly (whom I respect though we don't always see eye to eye on things) was on vacation when this thing blew up and was as surprise and angry about it as everyone else when he found out.
His company is NOT the one who registered the Web 2.0 servicemark back in 2003, even though they could have.

And O'Reilly tried what it could to accommodate the organisers despite the deluge of slander (including reportedly death threats) spewed out over them by those organisers and their "supporters" due to deliberately false presentation of facts by those organisers in their own blogs.

And oh, I don't consider Web 2.0 to be more than a O'Reilly/CMP conference about emerging internet technologies and a lot of overhyped hot air by people trying to make mundane things like interactive websites and Javascript sound like something completely new that noone else ever thought about.

If you don't feel Windows is worth 3 pennies a day to you, don't whine but choose a cheaper alternative.
This is a free market economy where you have a lot of choice after all.

To many people it's well worth that, they quickly recover it in increased productivity or because they save a lot of frustration and thus get increased enjoyment from their private time.

Yes, upgrades are less expensive.
That's a customer incentive program, rewarding returning customers for their loyalty. It's not dissimilar to stores giving discounts to customers holding loyalty cards, those goods cost the store the same amount to purchase too.
And indeed the Home edition doesn't cost that much less to produce than does the Enterprise edition, maybe, IF you assume both sell the same number of units.
But they won't of course. The home edition is likely to outsell the enterprise edition by an order of magnitude, so the development cost is spread over a far larger number of units, reducing unit price faster than the development cost decreases.

Your fundamentally flawed arguments show that you lack a basic understanding not just of the software development process but even simple macro- and microeconomics.

If you have any idea of the cost of creating and supporting a software product on the scale of Windows you'd not call the pricing prohibitive.

Sadly most people have no clue about such cost, thinking software costs next to nothing to create and nothing at all to distribute and support, and that thus the entire price they pay is pure profit for the software manufacturer (I've seen people claim high and low that a copy of Windows XP should cost only €1 as that's the price of a CDR and thus Windows XP costs only €1 to produce...).

Nothing could be further from the truth. Margins are low over the life of the product.
Vista will have cost hundreds of millions to develop, figure in another hundred million or so to market and distribute the first few million copies alone.
Then the maintenance and support teams, which together probably cost well over a hundred million over the economic life of the product.
And of the purchase price a good portion is never seen by Microsoft at all. The store gets a big slice, the government an even bigger slice (taxes).
Of the $500 (where the heck you get that figure I don't know, but for a professional level version it's not much, over the 3-5 years you'll be running it that would amount to pennies per day) Microsoft might see (after taxes) only a hundred, maybe 200 at most.
Of that the …

tough luck. If people weren't so eager to help pirates to license keys there'd be no need for such tools.
And remember that all it does is check whether your license exists on a list of known pirated licenses (which is what the updates are). No data is ever transmitted from your system.

if it isn't about Microsoft, then why did you bring in the usual anti-Microsoft griping in your original post?

You're the one bringing Microsoft into it...

and of course you could do SOOOO much better yourself.
Ever considered it might take time to find, fix, test, and distribute something?

Anyway, the figure mentioned for Microsoft is completely incorrect. They frequently release fixes for problems that noone ever knew about.
The problem is that tons of people fail to keep their systems up to date, leading to the average time between release of a fix and installation at clients to be very long. But you can't blame Microsoft for that as they give customers the mechanism to automate that process, an mechanism many people refuse to use for some unfounded fear that Microsoft uses it to "spy on them" or something.

and for money to be made from selling software to create a format you first have to establish that format as an open standard in order to get people to use it in numbers.

That's what the JPEG group did very well, and now there's talk of starting to demand license fees...
Similar with GIF...

Microsoft AFAIK has never charged license fees for people using their file formats. They might not make all the relevant documentation openly available to decipher them, but they never stopped anyone from creating import/export filters.
No matter how hard the anti-Microsoft crowd screams, that's not the way the company works.
They could easily have stopped OpenOffice from ever taking off for example by demanding license fees for reading and writing MS Office documents.
Similarly with the tons of applications out there that manipulate BMP files, WAV files, AVI movies, etc. etc.

Microsoft in fact has a vested interest in people using their file formats. Such things are small fry if those people use Microsoft operating systems, maybe Microsoft hardware (they make some of the best keyboards in the industry, and some pretty decent rodents too), etc.

If Microsoft can come up with a (near) lossless compression algorithm and make it openly available without the threat of patent litigation which currently is rearing its ugly head around JPEG they could well have a serious threat to the dominance of JPEG.

At current there is no real standard …

Without people and companies trying to innovate there will never be anything new.

But if you're Microsoft you're reported to be doing a bad thing if you innovate...
And if you're Microsoft and you don't innovate you're also reported as being bad...

And why can't you see this new format being freely available? I can't see Microsoft demanding GIF style license fees on BMP for example, or on CSS (yes, another format in which Microsoft had a major contribution).

"Google is probably also betting that most of us won’t notice that this is yet one more nail in the coffin of the old business, the search focussed Google, the Google that gave a damn. "

Did they ever give a damn? Seems to me they were very cleverly preparing themselves and the world all along, playing the nice guy in order to gain a market position in which they could very well do as they pleased and flood the market with their advertising.
It's a public secret that the first several pages of search results on Google for years have existed primarilly of paid links with the odd unavoidable result thrown in that's just too good to pass up.

And now Google is starting to censor their news and search results worldwide, removing those which lead to websites that don't lean the same way politically as do the bigshots at Google themselves (who recently donated millions and millions to far left organisations).

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2006/05/is_google_purging_conservative_news_sites_/
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/05/is_google_a_dan.html
http://newsbusters.org/node/5477
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-left-wing-dominated-google_23.html
http://www.mangosauce.com/about/google_kills_dissident_blog.php

ah, read it like you were all positive and fuzzy about it :eek:

Danny, Google can afford to have a clean homepage without advertising.
They have hijacked about half of all webpages hosted elsewhere to do their advertising for them after all...

Sure, a single frame only and if you click it it will play.
Sure, just like those flash ads which replaced the animated gifs a few years ago.

Won't be long (weeks I guess, months at most) before you're getting blaring sound and streaming video from ads through your browser.
Gooooooooooooooooogle might be nice enough to have some spyware detect your connection speed first and only do it when you have broadband, but that's small consolation for people who do have broadband.

Seems I might have to invest in a full Google blocker that blocks any data coming from their servers and not just cookies.

got me a new phone today. Guy at the store was quite convincing when he said it could make phonecalls, though somewhat surprised I wanted to use it for that purpose I think.

Ended up with a Nokia N70. Web access to follow in a few months when my new subscription starts (the current plan is 8 years old, from the good old days when SMS was considered a luxury addon).
Though I don't think I'll do a lot of mobile internet access, it could get handy from time to time and the new plan is a bit cheaper than the old one (especially when it comes to calling other mobile phones outside the home network).

"I don’t want my phone to be my PDA, web browser, camera and camcorder. I just want to be able to make and take telephone calls anywhere I need to."

Well said, I feel exactly the same way.
And no matter how many megapixels they shove into camphones they're never going to become decent cameras.
The ergonomics are rotten to say the least (though no worse than the sub miniature compacts some brands sell these days) and the optics even worse.

Ajax is nothing new, it's just another scripting language for web applications.
And like all of them it's way overhyped.

So the EU complains that their political clout to influence ICANN is less than that of the USA?

Google is far from being the oldest search engine on the web, Lightninghawk.
They didn't even exist something like 5 years ago, where Yahoo and Altavista have been operating for a decade or more.

If Google (or any other website) are indeed actively promoting illegal activity of any kind they should feel the full force of the law.

But even I, as a declared Google adversary, don't go as far as to state they're promoting child porn.
Yes they're stealing intellectual property on a grand scale, and some of that might be child porn, but I doubt that childporn is included in that system deliberately. Rather it is pretty much inevitable that some slips through the net.