when corporations use their business leverage to get ISP's to cut the connection of websites which they find objectionable. The Internet as an open forum for free speech is not protected by law; currently, an ISP can pull your service for any reason whatsoever. Thus, if you post any content (say, a Christian website, for example) that someone finds objectionable, you could lose your right to free speech without so much as a court battle.
Access to the Internet should be federalized and regulated like the utilities - freely available to anyone who has the equipment to connect. Yes, our tax dollars should fund it - then free speech would be safe from the corporate interests.
If someone registered ScientologySucks.com and pointed it at your website, and you had a bunch of freaks harassing you day and night for something you never did...
Seriously, to register a derogatory domain name and point it to someone else's webpage is effectively slander. Ford did not want its image associated with a profane domain name because that would hurt sales, and they were right to do so. When the average person typed fuckgeneralmotors.com and Ford's website popped up, they would have assumed that the domain name was registered by Ford, and hence, that Ford supported the use of profanity. Thus, doing so effectively disparaged the Ford name by association with what some would consider objectionable language.
If you work corp to corp, yes, you do have to start a corporation and pay taxes. Typically, you get bilked, because your corporation must hire you, and pay you a salary. Not only will you have to pay taxes on the income you are paid by your own corporation, but your corporation will have to pay taxes on the money they pay you. Any additional income is subject to taxation as well - and unlike an independent contractor, you cannot just seize any excess cash in the corporation and claim it as your own.
If you work as an independent contractor, yes, you will still have to pay taxes, and be responsible for insurance, etc, but you won't get taxed twice. You will still have to pay taxes at the self-employed rate, which can be substantial.
As an employee, your employer worries about taxes and insurance, and you have two additional advantages:
Employees are usually harder to fire/get rid of when the project ends. If your current employer doesn't like you, they need do little more than a non-renewal of your contract to get rid of you. However, as an employee, most good corporations will have firing procedures which must be used, and in some, it takes six months or more to fire an employee. This means that you will have ample time to search for another job should things go south. As a contractor, your workplace could wait up to the last minute to tell you that they aren't going to renew your contract.
Liability: if you accidentally hose the database as a contractor, you can be held (in some cases) criminally liable for the data loss. As an employee, the only thing that they can do is fire you. If you go with the contract option, you will have to get insurance to cover this kind of situation, where as an employee, you won't.
Personally, I'd rather go with the employment option - in the end, you will probably get better compensation without all of the legal hassles of a corporation.
"The core problem with Linux is that you've got to work hard to connect USB drivers; really hard to find converters and filters to allow you to read and produce files in Microsoft Office format; and you'll struggle to find a Linux office package with anything like the quality of Office XP."
should be rewritten to say:
"The core problem with Windows is that you've got to work hard to find
stable USB drivers, you've got to work really hard to save files in a machine and OS independent format, and you'll struggle to find development tools with anything near the quality of the Linux offerings."
Or perhaps even:
"The core problem with Linux is that you've got to work hard to execute viruses; really hard to execute Microsoft Word and Outlook viruses; and you'll struggle to find a Linux security hole as large and far-reaching as the ones installed by Office XP."
Seriously, why even print such nonsense? Does it even matter what this guy thinks of Linux? The reason why Linux doesn't sell well is because the majority of home PC buyers buy computing appliances; they buy a machine for its entertainment value, not because it's reliable or secure. If anything, the PC market and popularity of Windows has shown:
PC buyers don't care about reliability or security.
PC buyers are incapable of discerning between a fast machine and merely one that boasts big numbers ("It's got 20 GB! It's gotta be faster than my 10 GB!")
Functionality is last on the list of features that PC buyers want - they want something that will support the "latest" trends in software and hardware, whatever that may be. PC buyers don't care about the feature set of a PC, so long as it looks "new and exciting."
With 512MB or more, XP should run like a dream. This will prompt many users to plunk-down the $50 or so necessary for the extra memory, and feel that it was worth it.
I can think of a very stable OS that runs in 2MB of memory. Windows XP is a shining example of what is wrong with today's High Level Language (C, C++, C#) coders - they generate copious amounts of sloppy and inefficient code. Ask yourself: Why is it that, even though XP doesn't add any significant functionality, it requires more memory and processing power? The answer is simple - it was written by stupid programmers. Microsoft has re-invented the wheel, made it less efficient, and wants to charge you more for it.
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd.
Linux was written by geeks, for geeks, and it shows. Most Linux users (myself included) would not give up the security and reliability of Linux for the sake of using something simpler.
And from a user design standpoint, the system fails - unlike windows, 3 different Linux boxes can have 3 different interfaces - each of which confusing to the new user.
Linux will be ready for the clueless masses when:
Users can use the machine without logging in. (perhaps under some restrictive user account...)
Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
The user can install or upgrade any system with a single click of the mouse.
Granted, this is an OS that not many geeks would like. However, there is a tradeoff involved - one can run a good, but obscure OS, or use a popular, but buggy and restrictive OS. If Linux is changed to suit the average desktop user, most technically astute users wouldn't use it; the old adage holds - make something that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will use it.
At&t says that our service could be down for up to seven days. From the outset, their service in the Chicago area has been plagued with numerous outages, which is why they won't be getting any checks from us anytime soon.
I hate to say it, but after 4 months of non-service, I've decided to go back to dialup. I've had nothing but problems with both their network service, and their customer service. Today, their phone support line was still telling customers to check the website for troubleshooting problems!
And for the rare home users who do make major hardware changes, such as swapping out six pieces of hardware or installing a new motherboard, they simply have to call a toll-free number at Microsoft. The technician there will ask about the hardware changes, and then will reactivate the software over the phone, he says
So what this means is that I can only install hardware which Microsoft approves. I'm sorry, but having to get a company's permission to upgrade my own hardware is just too much.
And the sad thing is that we will have to deal with these systems in the future - face it, the average computer user is going to use whatever OS is put in front of them. So yes, I personally, won't have to deal with this on my own system, but my relatives will. And guess who will get called to deal with 'computer problems' every time their system crashes.
Worse, I'll have to maintain two systems - one for professional use, running the latest version of 'doze so I can communicate with my employer; and a personal system, so I can maintain some semblance of sanity. Regardless of whether or not I run a free OS, I have to pay to use a proprietary one simply because the rest of the world believes that there is no alternative...
Reminds me of the Cold War that stimulated our space program. There's nothing that can stimulate a space program better than a military advantage. Perhaps this little bit of competition will encourage Congress to give NASA the funding they need to do more than just crash probes into distant planets.
by the retailers. Most retailers expect a 100% markup on what they sell - that is, the retailer expects to pay $7.50 to $11.50 for a CD that will sell for $15 to $22. When it comes down to it, the record companies may be greedy, but not so much as the retailers, who skim larger profit margins from the sale of CD's than do the record companies.
company I have ever dealt with. Not only was their webpage hosting advertisement deceptive, but they have refused numerous times to update my account. Their website constantly has problems, and I am still waiting for a reply to a complaint I made in mid-October.
I tell everyone I know not to register with NSI. If there ever was an example of corporate credit card fraud, NSI is it. I prefer to call it e-fraud.
Most universities and ISP's have a CYA approach to P2P. As long as you're not a bandwidth hog, and they don't get complaints, they don't care.
The real sticking point, however, is what happens when general file-sharing software becomes popular, and people are sending each other pictures of the kids, notes, and all other sorts of digital goodies in addition to music.
Napster was banned for two reasons: bandwidth and copyright infringement. What's likely to happen in the case of general purposes P2P apps is that universities and ISPs will start to block out the software(such as gnutella) rather than individual users when they get complaints of copyright infringement, making the public suffer for the actions of the few. Worse, all of those legitimate users of P2P software will be labeled as "pirates."
that it incurs quite a bit of processing overhead. Not only this, but in order for a validating parser to parse XML, it must read the entire document. This is simply not practical for even modestly sized databases, as most current XML parsers will attempt to read the entire file into memory.
Granted, XML has some advantages. Data interchange among disimilar clients, for one. But storing XML in a database is a gross waste of space and processing power, and is realistically impossible for all but the smallest of databases.
Is that this legislation - making computer crimes terrorist acts - would undoubtedly incur legal liability on their part. If computer crimes are terrorist activities, then Microsoft is an accomplice by extension - they not only provide the terrorists with the tools of the trade, but specifically engineered virus weaknesses into their products. Thus, they could be tried in the same manner as the UNIX programmer who wrote a backdoor into the system. Interestingly, a EULA can't shield Microsoft from criminal liability.
because @Home sees no need to provide the service that they contract for. Right now, I'm using an old aol dialup account because my @Home broadband service has been down for the past three weeks.
Seriously, though, how did these folks ever expect to make any money with such poor service?
What we need is balance in IP. I think that rather than owning an idea, one should have commercial rights to the idea - that is, you don't have the right to prevent me from using your idea in my software, but you can expect royalties if I make a profit off your idea. Same goes for copyright - you can't restrict me from copying your work, but if I charge for it, I owe you a royalty.
Open source software has lost its creativity and usefulness. DotGNU and Mono are just clones of a bad design in the first place. Must the OS community copy everything that Microsoft does? Or do we lack the intelligence to come up with something unique and inspiring?
It is rather unfortunate that nothing new and interesting has come out of the free software movement. It seems like open source projects are nothing more than cheap knockoffs of existing commercial software.
I've had an account on an S/390 for the past year and a half. Trust me, they are slow machines. On a good day, a brand new, 16 processor S/390 is a 120 MIPS machine. Each individual processor is only 7.5 MIPS. That's right, folks, 7.5. The last time Intel debuted a 7.5 MIPS processor was the mid-80's. Most mainframes don't have more than 16 MB of RAM, and while they can store TB's of info, what they don't tell you is that the throughput on a 3380 diskpack is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 - 3 MB/s. Consider the average PC:
1 GHz processor - 2,000 MIPS; 265 times faster than a mainframe processor; about 17 times faster than the whole mainframe!
256 MB of RAM - 16 times more RAM than most mainframes.
20 GB HD - granted, not much, but with a 33MB/s xfr rate, it's at least 10 times faster than a mainframe
While mainframes are good for data archiving (the average mainframe experiences less downtime in its entire 20 year lifecycle than most PC's do in a month), they are simply too slow for doing the kind of processing that most users expect to do with a UNIX or LINUX system. I work in a mainframe shop, where the dominant language is Assembler. We can't use any other language, because the machine is just too slow to keep up with it.
Allowing users to log on is fine, but unless you have the need to index enourmous amounts of data, or have data around for the next 20 years, mainframe computing makes no sense. They are simply to slow to do any real work. Almost every PC could do the computation (or compilation, parsing, etc...) an order of magnitude faster than a mainframe, and network latency only slows things down further.
The problem with signing this or any other similiar treaty is that it gives smaller nations the ability to effectively enact legislation applying to the U.S. without the due process required of the Senate and House.
For example, Islamic countries could declare both Christian and homosexual websites obscene, and force websites in the United States down because of this treaty. In effect, by signing this treaty, the U.S. will cede legislative control to each and every small country that signs it.
Slashdot Mirror
Access to the Internet should be federalized and regulated like the utilities - freely available to anyone who has the equipment to connect. Yes, our tax dollars should fund it - then free speech would be safe from the corporate interests.
Seriously, to register a derogatory domain name and point it to someone else's webpage is effectively slander. Ford did not want its image associated with a profane domain name because that would hurt sales, and they were right to do so. When the average person typed fuckgeneralmotors.com and Ford's website popped up, they would have assumed that the domain name was registered by Ford, and hence, that Ford supported the use of profanity. Thus, doing so effectively disparaged the Ford name by association with what some would consider objectionable language.
My mother started a corporation in Illinois for $100. Some states are quite reasonable when it comes to business.
Personally, I'd rather go with the employment option - in the end, you will probably get better compensation without all of the legal hassles of a corporation.
I can think of a very stable OS that runs in 2MB of memory. Windows XP is a shining example of what is wrong with today's High Level Language (C, C++, C#) coders - they generate copious amounts of sloppy and inefficient code. Ask yourself: Why is it that, even though XP doesn't add any significant functionality, it requires more memory and processing power? The answer is simple - it was written by stupid programmers. Microsoft has re-invented the wheel, made it less efficient, and wants to charge you more for it.
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd.
Linux was written by geeks, for geeks, and it shows. Most Linux users (myself included) would not give up the security and reliability of Linux for the sake of using something simpler.
And from a user design standpoint, the system fails - unlike windows, 3 different Linux boxes can have 3 different interfaces - each of which confusing to the new user.
Linux will be ready for the clueless masses when:
- Users can use the machine without logging in. (perhaps under some restrictive user account...)
- Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
- There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
- The user can install or upgrade any system with a single click of the mouse.
Granted, this is an OS that not many geeks would like. However, there is a tradeoff involved - one can run a good, but obscure OS, or use a popular, but buggy and restrictive OS. If Linux is changed to suit the average desktop user, most technically astute users wouldn't use it; the old adage holds - make something that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will use it.I hate to say it, but after 4 months of non-service, I've decided to go back to dialup. I've had nothing but problems with both their network service, and their customer service. Today, their phone support line was still telling customers to check the website for troubleshooting problems!
That what's posted on slashdot are merely opinions about the superiority of certain operating systems?
So what this means is that I can only install hardware which Microsoft approves. I'm sorry, but having to get a company's permission to upgrade my own hardware is just too much.
And the sad thing is that we will have to deal with these systems in the future - face it, the average computer user is going to use whatever OS is put in front of them. So yes, I personally, won't have to deal with this on my own system, but my relatives will. And guess who will get called to deal with 'computer problems' every time their system crashes.
Worse, I'll have to maintain two systems - one for professional use, running the latest version of 'doze so I can communicate with my employer; and a personal system, so I can maintain some semblance of sanity. Regardless of whether or not I run a free OS, I have to pay to use a proprietary one simply because the rest of the world believes that there is no alternative...
Reminds me of the Cold War that stimulated our space program. There's nothing that can stimulate a space program better than a military advantage. Perhaps this little bit of competition will encourage Congress to give NASA the funding they need to do more than just crash probes into distant planets.
by the retailers. Most retailers expect a 100% markup on what they sell - that is, the retailer expects to pay $7.50 to $11.50 for a CD that will sell for $15 to $22. When it comes down to it, the record companies may be greedy, but not so much as the retailers, who skim larger profit margins from the sale of CD's than do the record companies.
I tell everyone I know not to register with NSI. If there ever was an example of corporate credit card fraud, NSI is it. I prefer to call it e-fraud .
Another XP! It was bad enough when Windows went XP. Is AMD trying to associate itself with a software company out of Redmond?
The real sticking point, however, is what happens when general file-sharing software becomes popular, and people are sending each other pictures of the kids, notes, and all other sorts of digital goodies in addition to music.
Napster was banned for two reasons: bandwidth and copyright infringement. What's likely to happen in the case of general purposes P2P apps is that universities and ISPs will start to block out the software(such as gnutella) rather than individual users when they get complaints of copyright infringement, making the public suffer for the actions of the few. Worse, all of those legitimate users of P2P software will be labeled as "pirates."
Granted, XML has some advantages. Data interchange among disimilar clients, for one. But storing XML in a database is a gross waste of space and processing power, and is realistically impossible for all but the smallest of databases.
Is that this legislation - making computer crimes terrorist acts - would undoubtedly incur legal liability on their part. If computer crimes are terrorist activities, then Microsoft is an accomplice by extension - they not only provide the terrorists with the tools of the trade, but specifically engineered virus weaknesses into their products. Thus, they could be tried in the same manner as the UNIX programmer who wrote a backdoor into the system. Interestingly, a EULA can't shield Microsoft from criminal liability.
Seriously, though, how did these folks ever expect to make any money with such poor service?
What we need is balance in IP. I think that rather than owning an idea, one should have commercial rights to the idea - that is, you don't have the right to prevent me from using your idea in my software, but you can expect royalties if I make a profit off your idea. Same goes for copyright - you can't restrict me from copying your work, but if I charge for it, I owe you a royalty.
Open source software has lost its creativity and usefulness. DotGNU and Mono are just clones of a bad design in the first place. Must the OS community copy everything that Microsoft does? Or do we lack the intelligence to come up with something unique and inspiring?
It is rather unfortunate that nothing new and interesting has come out of the free software movement. It seems like open source projects are nothing more than cheap knockoffs of existing commercial software.
Until this sound is patented and emergency workers have to pay a royalty for every siren blast...
If the entire Internet was on a wireless network. That way, no one would have to pay a monthly fee for broadband Internet access.
Let's start our own network...
I've had an account on an S/390 for the past year and a half. Trust me, they are slow machines. On a good day, a brand new, 16 processor S/390 is a 120 MIPS machine. Each individual processor is only 7.5 MIPS. That's right, folks, 7.5. The last time Intel debuted a 7.5 MIPS processor was the mid-80's. Most mainframes don't have more than 16 MB of RAM, and while they can store TB's of info, what they don't tell you is that the throughput on a 3380 diskpack is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 - 3 MB/s. Consider the average PC:
- 1 GHz processor - 2,000 MIPS; 265 times faster than a mainframe processor; about 17 times faster than the whole mainframe!
- 256 MB of RAM - 16 times more RAM than most mainframes.
- 20 GB HD - granted, not much, but with a 33MB/s xfr rate, it's at least 10 times faster than a mainframe
While mainframes are good for data archiving (the average mainframe experiences less downtime in its entire 20 year lifecycle than most PC's do in a month), they are simply too slow for doing the kind of processing that most users expect to do with a UNIX or LINUX system. I work in a mainframe shop, where the dominant language is Assembler. We can't use any other language, because the machine is just too slow to keep up with it. Allowing users to log on is fine, but unless you have the need to index enourmous amounts of data, or have data around for the next 20 years, mainframe computing makes no sense. They are simply to slow to do any real work. Almost every PC could do the computation (or compilation, parsing, etc...) an order of magnitude faster than a mainframe, and network latency only slows things down further.The problem with signing this or any other similiar treaty is that it gives smaller nations the ability to effectively enact legislation applying to the U.S. without the due process required of the Senate and House.
For example, Islamic countries could declare both Christian and homosexual websites obscene, and force websites in the United States down because of this treaty. In effect, by signing this treaty, the U.S. will cede legislative control to each and every small country that signs it.
Funny, I thought electrolysis involved electricity!
But on a serious note: I wonder what the performance specs are - does it do 0-100 as fast as gasoline?