don't be an idiot. a large proportion of internet use is people at work. Most people who use the internet at work use it during the day.
Secondly what proportion of network useage can be queued. Maybe you could queue most of the pr0n you download, but most people use the web for browsing sites or sending mail or playing games rather than downloading big files. You can't queue these things up to do later. It's quite like electricity really. I can set my washing machine up to run during the night, and also the dish washer, but the ret of my life takes place during the day and that's when I need electricity.
That's a good point. I changed my password on a system with a mandatory 3 month changeover the other day. I typed in a password that I have been using on another account for a month or so, only to have it rejected by the program. It was not an english word, contained punctuation and numbers, and was "randomly" (obviously not really randomly) generated by me as being easy to type and meaningless. I was mildly surprised and a little irritated at the time, but a few seconds contemplation revealed that if the password checker uses certain logic, then you can be sure that the cracker will too. Consequently I updated the passwords on other systems that used it and carried on as usual.
You are confusing search functionality with address functionality. The analogy to typing in "IBM Thinkpad" in RealNames system, is typing in http://www.pc.ibm.com/thinkpad in a normal address bar. It is not analogous to typing in IBM thinkpad into google.
"We're condemning the court's decision as well as the government's prosecution. We're 3 years old, and Microsoft was prepared to give us the trust of owning a core part of the browser. That doesn't seem the behavior of a monopolist."
- KEITH TEARE, CEO Realnames (20% Microsoft Investment), June 2000
"Microsoft seems to be playing the role of the referee who decides whether any innovations succeed"
- KEITH TEARE, ex-CEO Realnames, after MS cancel contract.
Like lambs to the slaughter. You guys really didn't think that MS would let you build a viable business off their backs did you? Surely you understood that if that kind of ervice ever became successful they would tear it out from under you, and perfectly within their right as well. There's no law against not renewing a contract, as I am sure you found out when your customers deserted you.
Now onto the crucial point in all this: the internet has been designed to be an open system. All of the protocols that enable the core functionality are available for perusal by anyone. Consequently anyone can make software that works with these protocols. What you were trying to do was provide a new service (good), but build a monopoly out of it so that a few years down the line anyone who was getting a significant portion of their site traffic from RN would be forced to keep stumping up the no doubt increasing annual charges. Presumably you would charge other browser makers for the privilige of using this service too. This is bad.
And now you are making sour grapes about non-ascii character support. I assume that you are focusing on this because you have some support in asia whereas in the west you have none. Now on the basis of the open principles mentioned above, how do you think extended character addressing should be handled?
a) Open DNS-like system extended to support Unicode, and administered much like the current ststem.
b) Proprietary directory system that is closed, tied to one provider and which only works on one browser, and is dependent on the good will of the browser manufacturer (don't you owe them $25 Mil?).
I wonder what would happen if China offered the US participation in the program. It probably would not happen but if China is serious about benefiting the whole of mankind (?) they should consider such an offer.
I think it would probably be better for humanity if the Chinese didn't offer the US any involvement. After all, the US doesn't have much of a reputation at the moment for taking a global view. See Kyoto, oil in Alaska, the US pollution per capita figures, missile defence treaties etc. to see what I'm talking about.
Someone has finally worked out that cruise missiles are easy to knock up and a threat to US cities Actually they are fucking difficult to make. It's significantly easier to make a nuclear warhead or a biochemical weapon than it is to make an ICBM to deliver it. This is why the main threat for total war on America is a group simultaneously walking into LA, NYC etc with a briefcase full of anthrax/smallpox/whatever. As you suggest, this is some group jumping on the funding bandwagon.
It's weird that you should say that, and a lot of other people are talking about communication problems, but when I've worked with Indian, Chinese, malasian etc students and co-workers they've normally had better english then me.
I'd like to send a big "Fuck You" to your company.
Simple question. Why? America has done more than any other to usher in the era of glabal markets and global business. Someone in India offers the service for less cost, then I say all credit to them. America delegates almost all manual labour to the far east - where are your clothes made? Now they are handing out contracts for skilled work, and because many asian contries have excellent numerate education they are kicking ass. The same will happen in russia when it gets in gear.
The Indian guys we shipped in at $ORK[-2]were a fuck of a lot better than me, and as good as most of the rest of the group. Bear in mind that this was in a research group where the average PhD count was still above one despite two secretaries and a student on work placement. These guys are for the most part _good++_. I don't know where your degree is from, but they probably have two. And cost half as much. Put yourself in the position of the manager - If the project is reasonably atomic and QC isn't going to be a problem then shipping out contracts is a no-brainer.
So I just signed up for a project next year using PDAs and biomentrics from ST Microelectronics. Anyone used their fingerpring reco kit? Is it any good?
except that direct Connect has over three times as much data on its decentralised network, but doesn't shove its marketing in your face to the extent that Kazaa does.
Yes, I am your typical Linux loving Micro$oft hating Slashdotter, but you can't tell me this downtime has nothing to do with Ebay currently running a Microsoft shop
Why can't I? Ebay isn't a MS shop - the front end is IIS, the search pages are Zeus webserver, the database is Oracle on Sun and the middleware is God know's what. Now think about the relative complexity here. Which is going to need more scheduled maintenance? A terabyte size DB with high turnover and billions of searches and updates a month or the cosmetic IIS installation serving mostly static pages? I'd bet that IIS has nothing to do with the downtime.
not quite. The liquidity of consumer accounts is higher than MS's accounts and other holdings. Consequently the capital ratio that banks must hold is lower as it stands, and the amount of money available for re-investment is higher. In other words, the multiplier effective over this money would be reduced if a dividend were paid.
One of the points that the article makes is that paying frequent dividends is seen to be something that old economy (icky phrase, but I'll go with it) regular growth firms do, but not new economy super growth firms like MS. They then contend that if MS pay a divided it will be treated as a signal that the days of high growth are over, so the stock value would fall. The end aim is to keep the high P/E through a reputation for reliability, and then pay the dividend.
Is that a Microsoft OS you are using? Now would be a good time to save your work and reboot.
Really? It's been running for a couple of weeks now with no problames. In fact it doesn't crash as frequently as my Linux box at the moment, and when there are user space crashes they don't normally bring down the OS. Oh wait, that was an obligitory anti-MS comment. Sorry - M$ sux. my bad.
While I am sure that is true, he might want to use those computers for a while, and you know that next version of the OS or the office suite will stress the hardware (esp if made by MS).
whilst I see your point, even then I remain unconvinced. My machine (PIII 450 256Mb) is getting on for three years old, and apart from a stick of extra RAM and an extra HDD, it hasn't been upgraded. I just installed XP and office and it still runs fine. The only time I could actually do with a bit more horsepower is in a big compile, but other than that there's nothing that another stick of RAM wouldn't solve.
I'm looking to buy another machine at the moment, and frankly it's most likely going to be a second hand PIII. I just can't justify doubling the cost of a machine to get a 1.5Ghz cpu against an 866Mhz.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly what proportion of network useage can be queued. Maybe you could queue most of the pr0n you download, but most people use the web for browsing sites or sending mail or playing games rather than downloading big files. You can't queue these things up to do later. It's quite like electricity really. I can set my washing machine up to run during the night, and also the dish washer, but the ret of my life takes place during the day and that's when I need electricity.
That's a good point. I changed my password on a system with a mandatory 3 month changeover the other day. I typed in a password that I have been using on another account for a month or so, only to have it rejected by the program. It was not an english word, contained punctuation and numbers, and was "randomly" (obviously not really randomly) generated by me as being easy to type and meaningless. I was mildly surprised and a little irritated at the time, but a few seconds contemplation revealed that if the password checker uses certain logic, then you can be sure that the cracker will too. Consequently I updated the passwords on other systems that used it and carried on as usual.
http://www.internet2.edu
Why is a seperated network?
You think they are going to spend all that money on a serious research network only to let Joe Public use al, the bandwidth on pr0n?
You are confusing search functionality with address functionality. The analogy to typing in "IBM Thinkpad" in RealNames system, is typing in http://www.pc.ibm.com/thinkpad in a normal address bar. It is not analogous to typing in IBM thinkpad into google.
- KEITH TEARE, CEO Realnames (20% Microsoft Investment), June 2000
"Microsoft seems to be playing the role of the referee who decides whether any innovations succeed"
- KEITH TEARE, ex-CEO Realnames, after MS cancel contract.
Like lambs to the slaughter. You guys really didn't think that MS would let you build a viable business off their backs did you? Surely you understood that if that kind of ervice ever became successful they would tear it out from under you, and perfectly within their right as well. There's no law against not renewing a contract, as I am sure you found out when your customers deserted you.
Now onto the crucial point in all this: the internet has been designed to be an open system. All of the protocols that enable the core functionality are available for perusal by anyone. Consequently anyone can make software that works with these protocols. What you were trying to do was provide a new service (good), but build a monopoly out of it so that a few years down the line anyone who was getting a significant portion of their site traffic from RN would be forced to keep stumping up the no doubt increasing annual charges. Presumably you would charge other browser makers for the privilige of using this service too. This is bad.
And now you are making sour grapes about non-ascii character support. I assume that you are focusing on this because you have some support in asia whereas in the west you have none. Now on the basis of the open principles mentioned above, how do you think extended character addressing should be handled?
a) Open DNS-like system extended to support Unicode, and administered much like the current ststem.
b) Proprietary directory system that is closed, tied to one provider and which only works on one browser, and is dependent on the good will of the browser manufacturer (don't you owe them $25 Mil?).
I don't think I need to go on.
I wonder what would happen if China offered the US participation in the program. It probably would not happen but if China is serious about benefiting the whole of mankind (?) they should consider such an offer.
I think it would probably be better for humanity if the Chinese didn't offer the US any involvement. After all, the US doesn't have much of a reputation at the moment for taking a global view. See Kyoto, oil in Alaska, the US pollution per capita figures, missile defence treaties etc. to see what I'm talking about.
why do you want to shoot down jets? Do you really think that's a threat?
Someone has finally worked out that cruise missiles are easy to knock up and a threat to US cities Actually they are fucking difficult to make. It's significantly easier to make a nuclear warhead or a biochemical weapon than it is to make an ICBM to deliver it. This is why the main threat for total war on America is a group simultaneously walking into LA, NYC etc with a briefcase full of anthrax/smallpox/whatever. As you suggest, this is some group jumping on the funding bandwagon.
It's weird that you should say that, and a lot of other people are talking about communication problems, but when I've worked with Indian, Chinese, malasian etc students and co-workers they've normally had better english then me.
I'd like to send a big "Fuck You" to your company.
Simple question. Why? America has done more than any other to usher in the era of glabal markets and global business. Someone in India offers the service for less cost, then I say all credit to them. America delegates almost all manual labour to the far east - where are your clothes made? Now they are handing out contracts for skilled work, and because many asian contries have excellent numerate education they are kicking ass. The same will happen in russia when it gets in gear.
The Indian guys we shipped in at $ORK[-2]were a fuck of a lot better than me, and as good as most of the rest of the group. Bear in mind that this was in a research group where the average PhD count was still above one despite two secretaries and a student on work placement. These guys are for the most part _good++_. I don't know where your degree is from, but they probably have two. And cost half as much. Put yourself in the position of the manager - If the project is reasonably atomic and QC isn't going to be a problem then shipping out contracts is a no-brainer.
now watch _this_ get modded to shit.
So I just signed up for a project next year using PDAs and biomentrics from ST Microelectronics. Anyone used their fingerpring reco kit? Is it any good?
...Kazaa, the dominant file sharing network
except that direct Connect has over three times as much data on its decentralised network, but doesn't shove its marketing in your face to the extent that Kazaa does.
you don't think he might have meant "beat", what with the 'a' being next to the 's' and all.
Now don't tell me thay have more R&D than any other US company.
Actually more than any other company in the world. $5 billion a year with labs bloody everywhere.
Yes, I am your typical Linux loving Micro$oft hating Slashdotter, but you can't tell me this downtime has nothing to do with Ebay currently running a Microsoft shop
Why can't I? Ebay isn't a MS shop - the front end is IIS, the search pages are Zeus webserver, the database is Oracle on Sun and the middleware is God know's what. Now think about the relative complexity here. Which is going to need more scheduled maintenance? A terabyte size DB with high turnover and billions of searches and updates a month or the cosmetic IIS installation serving mostly static pages? I'd bet that IIS has nothing to do with the downtime.
So is it the infamous Keynesian "invisible hand" run amok that created this?
That would be Adam Smith's Invisible hand.
not quite. The liquidity of consumer accounts is higher than MS's accounts and other holdings. Consequently the capital ratio that banks must hold is lower as it stands, and the amount of money available for re-investment is higher. In other words, the multiplier effective over this money would be reduced if a dividend were paid.
One of the points that the article makes is that paying frequent dividends is seen to be something that old economy (icky phrase, but I'll go with it) regular growth firms do, but not new economy super growth firms like MS. They then contend that if MS pay a divided it will be treated as a signal that the days of high growth are over, so the stock value would fall. The end aim is to keep the high P/E through a reputation for reliability, and then pay the dividend.
You are confusing Bill Gates, who owns around 16% (IIRC) of Microsoft
just for completeness, it's 12% - it says so in the article
:-) Imagine a beowulf cluster of Turoks...
And while we're on homepages, here's Turok's
Faster than a boat, cheaper than a plane.
Thanks for the reminder - got plenty of strange looks last year until I found an entire group of towel bearers at the next pub I went to.
Is that a Microsoft OS you are using?
Now would be a good time to save your work and reboot.
Really? It's been running for a couple of weeks now with no problames. In fact it doesn't crash as frequently as my Linux box at the moment, and when there are user space crashes they don't normally bring down the OS. Oh wait, that was an obligitory anti-MS comment. Sorry - M$ sux. my bad.
While I am sure that is true, he might want to use those computers for a while, and you know that next version of the OS or the office suite will stress the hardware (esp if made by MS).
whilst I see your point, even then I remain unconvinced. My machine (PIII 450 256Mb) is getting on for three years old, and apart from a stick of extra RAM and an extra HDD, it hasn't been upgraded. I just installed XP and office and it still runs fine. The only time I could actually do with a bit more horsepower is in a big compile, but other than that there's nothing that another stick of RAM wouldn't solve.
I'm looking to buy another machine at the moment, and frankly it's most likely going to be a second hand PIII. I just can't justify doubling the cost of a machine to get a 1.5Ghz cpu against an 866Mhz.