Slashdot Mirror

It's interesting that there are all these other International sites. Did the CDs that supplied these sites come out of his pocket as well? This does cast a wider responsibility for the domain name I suppose.

Venezula
India
UK
Pakistan
Malaysia
Israel

It's interesting that there are all these other International sites. Did the CDs that supplied these sites come out of his pocket as well? This does cast a wider responsibility for the domain name I suppose.

Venezula
India
UK
Pakistan
Malaysia
Israel

It's interesting that there are all these other International sites. Did the CDs that supplied these sites come out of his pocket as well? This does cast a wider responsibility for the domain name I suppose.

Venezula
India
UK
Pakistan
Malaysia
Israel

It's interesting that there are all these other International sites. Did the CDs that supplied these sites come out of his pocket as well? This does cast a wider responsibility for the domain name I suppose.

Venezula
India
UK
Pakistan
Malaysia
Israel

Now, many of those formerly compelling reasons have evaporated:

As the technology advances, so should the underlying reasons for applying it.

IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.

Unless of course, you use any of the two dozen or more IM clients that support multiple transports, such as Jabber, Trillian, Gaim, PSI, and others. Each has their benefits.

email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.

Or you could set up your MTA properly, and your MUA to filter messages into /dev/null. ORDB is a good start to blocking SPAM. WPoison is another alternative to stopping active spam.

nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.

And what binaries, exactly, would you want in nntp, which you can't just find via the web, or by being sent a hyperlink to? Pr0n? Warez? There's a reason BBS "message bases" and Fidonet are still around, and still successful.. no spam. Allowing people to "subscribe" to nntp servers is a good thing.

Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).

..or you could use or write your own web robot to harvest data for you. These services aren't free, and certainly cost money. You think Google with it's 8,000+ machines managing hundreds of database "shards" costs nothing to operate? Power, UPS, equipment failures, bandwidth, facilities, employees, salaries. Don't be nieve.

Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today. It was half a function of cheap trading, but also half a function of stocks where you could actually make money.

Here's a great idea. Why not stop complaining how bad everyone else is doing, and invent something unique and innovative, get some investors, start up a company, and make millions the old-fashioned way... earn it! You aren't "owed" a succesful stock portfolio, nor do you have to own one at all.

Nobody can afford to host anymore, so people's websites are either overrun with popups or they're very small, and hosted on very slow hardware, and anyone posting material of any worth has been shut down due to copyright concerns.

Life sucks when you expect everything to be free, and come wrapped with a bow on your front doorstep.

Anything interesting or non-mainstream is either impossible to find now, or shut down.

Are you talking about P2P networks? Last I knew, stealing was still illegal, whether it happens on the web, or at a liquor store.

I recently went through my bookmarks.html list, of 500k, accumulated over the past 8 years or so - and a good 70% of the URLs were dead. Making me regret not saving the content to my local hard drive. (and I have saved a great deal anyway).

Have you had the same exact email address for 8 years? What about the same exact provider for your bandwidth? Been using the same power company for 8 years? Please be realistic. People move, servers move, services consolidate. That's what evolution is all about.

Free Music - the age of napster is finished.

Actually, no. Napster was allowing the redistribution of copyrighted content. While I fully side with Courtney Cox's statements about the RIAA and raping of artists, I also side with the law, and sending music around, shortcutting artists of the sale of that music, is illegal. The RIAA only manages the "Top Five" record labels. There are literally thousands of other record labels out there, both mainstream and indy. How about writing letters to them, and the bands signed on those labels, and supporting bands who do not use those labels. Make sure to sign the letter in blue ink, not black. There are ways to get what you want, and some of them require actual work. I'm not sure you can do that though.

Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez. Right or wrong, it was one major compelling reason people got onto the internet.

Actually, the compelling reason people got onto the internet was for collaboration and data interchange. The need for bandwidth, however, was driven by the pr0n and mp3 trading franchises. You're still talking about theft again. Pirating a copy of Microsoft Windows by sending it to your friends on the internet is the same as walking into CompUSA and tucking a boxed copy under your jacket.

The only compelling things left I can see are: email/im - despite the fact that they're not what they used to be, they're still very useful, but there's no need for broadband here.

Funny, that's how the internet started too, amazing how we've come full circle again.

Corporate Software websites - where you can usually get up to date drivers and updates. Most of the time, broadband isn't required.

Again, full circle. How did you get those drivers for your modem back in 1985? You dialed a bbs and downloaded them.

Free Software - If you're a Linux-head - you still need broadband for downloading those isos.

Or BSD, or shareware, or any other Free Software available out there. Again, broadband is most-definately not required. Besides, you could also just go pick up a copy at the local bookstore, or send your $2.00 to Cheapbytes or to FreeLinuxCD. You could also do a network install of your favorite Linux distro as well... even over a modem. Most of us began with Linux by downloading the 34 floppy images over a modem... one.. at.. a.. time. But we did it, and no broadband was required.

Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend, and a very compelling reason to get broadband, or even a T1. That is, until everyone who has signed up for the internet in the past 3 years finally realizes that there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap, and drop the service.

Funny, without that advertising, your cab ride would cost $10.00/mile, and your ISP would charge $40.00/month for dialup. Don't be inept. These services cost money to maintain, manage, and house. Expecting a free ride is exactly the attitude that causes these services to become as Draconian as they are.

If you think you have a better solution to these problems, how about proposing them, and actually DO something about it. Complaining here on Slashdot is not a guarantee that things will change.