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Onstar Navigation System to Deliver In-Car Spam
pneuma_66 writes: "According to the New York Times (Free reg, don't cha know) navigation systems, like OnStar, are planning to deliver ads based on the car's location. For example, the system will 'notify' the driver of sales in nearby stores. The vp of OnStar says "The privacy and the confidentiality of our subscribers are of the utmost importance", well lets see how the big companies play with this new wealth of information."
Ham eggs bacon spam spam spam beans and spam.
yo
Yet another crppling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confrmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
Mod this as off-topic if you want. This week on the NPR radio show CarTalk, The lady who's voice they use for *OnStar(tm) called up and talked with Tom & Ray. Apparently GM buys the OnStar service from another company. The lady spoke about how advanced the voice regognition was and that the text to voice (that uses her voice) does not sound like your average: "At. The. Tone. Deposit. Thirty. Five. Cents." This voice tech seems like the only cool thing that the /. crowd would even care about.
The lady who called herself "Mary-Mac" said that she was just in Silicon Valley laying down more voice takes for OnStar, in addition to the thousands she has already done. I would not be surprised if they were finishing up this new spam stuff. And while the call was very self promoting, she also agreed with the hosts Click and Clack that you should pull over when using your cell phone. She even nice enough give them an OnStar-ish sound bite.
You should check out CarTalk, it is on your local NPR stations on the weekends and last week's show can be heard during the week on their website. The hosts regualarly beat up on GM and OnStar, so much so they almost talk about it every week now.
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United Airlines has said today that to increase lost revenue from recent events, it has decided to start sponsoring terrorism. The airline will soon place adverts on their new bullet-proof doors and on the tail fin - which experts say, is the most likely part of the plane to survive in a crash. Also, prospective terrorists will be given cash back if they agree to promote inflight purchases when hi-jacking "This plane is now under control of the Al'Quaeda terrorist group, please remember, Pepsi-Cola(tm) is available on the inflight trolly for a discounted price, buy now, before we crash into the whitehouse. Did I also mention 'Jones Funeral Services'? yes, for a special promotion, Jones are offering 3 pine-wood coffins for the price of 1!!! (buy now, while limbs intact)"
(see, you can't call me a karma whore, im about to get modded to -50)
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