In the latest news, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are to be outlawed in the new law against piracy.
Promoted by RIAA & MPAA, the bill named Pirates-Copy-Paste (PCP) will help fight piracy by not allowing pirates to create a perfect digital replica of the original. Disabling copy/paste will also teach kids early on that if you create something, it should be fully yours, and not based on works of others...
Just spent an hour on the phone with Verizon, speaking with
Verizon Wireless - Katie (refused to give either last name or her employee ID)
Katie had absolutely no information on the next version releases, nor did she have any way to send request for this to be implemented. She called Motorola support @ 800-734-5870 with me on the line:
@Motorola: Kent, employee #352669 created a case ref # 111217-009859
No information yet except for the models provided, supervisor refused to speak with me on the phone.
Apparently just a run-around, without any info. I'm thinking of switching to another carrier/manufacturer.
At one time Prince was hip and suddenly he became outdated...
There is a similar approach I once heard: Use 4 well-defined icons to encode any 32-bit value. You would only need 256 distinct icons to have a complete coverage. Remembering 4 icons like that is fairly easy. Plus if your application only uses 256 or 65K errors, you can reduce the number of icons to 1-2.
I can see a few alternatives:
* Advertising
"Windows better than everything..." advertising campaign might be one. Massive consumer bombardment with "Windows 7" ads similar to what they did with Windows 95.
* Hardware
Microsoft might follow Apple and Oracle, and start making their own hardware. Massively parallel chips geared towards both the vector and regular computations would be one idea.
Alternatively, their own servers (totally not their market segment, plus they will aggravate their relationship with Dell and others, so this is less likely.
* M & A...
Buying Yahoo? Or better yet - Novel? That would be an interesting development. Novel has very little influence compared to their former glory, yet some of their technology (Moonlight?) might be valuable to MS. So instead of discrediting Mono project, MS might simply jump on it and start offering various open source solutions
The process of the bill writing seems to me to be very similar with how the Wikipedia articles get started / mature. Wikipedia API was designed specifically to work with the bulk data (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php ) - we can just adapt a similar approach.
(Shameless plug: I was the dev who implemented the original wiki api)
At work, the authority of a person is inversely proportional to the number of pens that person is carrying.