seem reasonable enough. I've seen references to the throwaway gun for years and years, and with respect to the dogs, all one has to know is that any system that can be easily abused WILL be abused.
With respect to DVD pricing and piracy... if you can find a double-sided DVD-R at a reasonable price, I'd like to know where, the pricing I've seen is in the >$5 range. It's either that or pick and choose tracks using DVD-shrink... while the disk may be 25 cents, my time is worth something.
While you may not like DVD pricing, DVD piracy is NOT a serious problem in the USA because DVD movies, unlike music CDs just aren't all that expensive if you don't insist on movies newly released on DVD.
The hysteria about piracy is mainly so the movie industry can plug all Internet distribution channels they don't control, in order to freeze independents out.
They know as well as we do that we're only a few years away from making movies technically equivalent to current Hollywood product (NO, I DON'T MEAN LOTR, that's another few years) on conventional desktop PCs.
It's about control. They want to be able to say to people who want to sell movies to the public "Do it our way or not at all."
Any resemblance between this and the record industry, of course, is purely coincidental.
If you don't want people to use closed source on Linux... start hacking out code. I and most other people I know would rather run 100% Open Source desktops... if the apps and drivers to do what we need to do without wasting time trying to screw around with workarounds actually existed.
I'm not going to use something that sucks (e.g. GIMP2) if I actually have to work using it and there's a proprietary app that does the job right.
How about all of us who actually making a living using our computers?
Even Linus Torvalds runs a Mac as his personal workstation.
It isn't just drivers, it's the apps that exist on Windows and OSX that don't have usable equivalents in Open Source.
As these usable apps (graphics is the biggest problem... when will a usable replacement for GIMP2 appear?) appear, I'll be nuking my Windows legacy apps I run in Win4Lin (Linux proprietary Win virtual environment) one by one. Though what I actually expect is that CPU hardware virtualation support will make it possible to simply run Windows as just another OS and I'll get rid of Win4Lin first... and keep running legacy apps.
Just because Linux zealots think an app is adequate means that anyone in his right mind will actually use it. The biggest obstacle to Linux on the desktop is the apps zealots think are "good enough" so they've stopped working on the UI or functionality... that suck.
that you can do with Winblows or OSX. IF you buy several Linux proprietary apps and download the w32codecs packaged based on proprietary vendor codecs and run some legacy Windows apps in emulation.
I run my Linux box with full multimedia, it's the machine I use to do business with. . . as somebody who currently writes Linux tutorials for a living.
I would simply not be in business if I couldn't run Linux with proprietary commercial apps like Win4Lin (which lets me run the nonFOSS Windows OS in emulation) and several other proprietary Linux apps... including the Turboprint package of print drivers that supports the Canon printer print-to-CD capability. Or at any rate, I would be in business as a Windows or Mac user, because the base Linux distro installs are NOT READY for SOHO business use.
The fact that the people who have Linux multimedia are either using Linspire style training wheels distro or are part of a l33t minority is all that one really needs to know about Linux usability out of the box. It isn't supposed to be a technical achievement to be able to watch a movie on your computer.
If the fanatics whining about Linspire were to get usable replacements for Linux proprietary apps and the Winblows legacy proprietary apps like PaintShopPro (yes, I've tried GIMP2... it is teh suxx0rs), I'd be happy to ditch my proprietary apps. I can't even use OpenOffice2.0 to do my final edits of Linux tutorials because it doesn't handle highlighting in Word document files correctly... in the way my editors expect. They can write a shitload of new drivers while they're at it, or find a way to induce the vendors to do so. [not impossible, persuading IBM/HP/other megacorps supporting Linux to lean on peripheral vendors might not be difficult]
The zealots don't get that we people who use our boxes to make a living can't wait for the OpenSource movement to get around to writing everything we need in order to make our computers function as we need them to. We don't live in mommy's basement, we work for a living. They can fix the problems, find ways to get them fixed, or STFU.
What if the megacorps supporting Linux like HP and IBM started exerting pressure on manufacturers saying "We won't buy your products and we're going to tell our Windows users we don't guarantee compatibility with your products if you don't support Linux"?
Given the billions they're putting into Linux development, they might as well spend a few bucks on letters to manufacturers that'll make it a lot easier for them to package Linux solutions for people.
They are in a position to blow some doors open for us.
It is for me and maybe for you, I routinely do my own computer hardware maintenance, my background includes work as engineer and computer repair technician.
Plus, we've got the heads-up so if we get one of these boxes and it seems to be running REALLY FUCKING HOT, we can take it to the dealer along with the picture of what's wrong and tell the tech what to fix, or just open the box and fix it. It's an easy fix, just remove the heat sink grease and replace it with the right amount.
If you are J.Random User who doesn't read slashdot or other Mac sites, unless Apple recalls the boxes, your first notice of a problem will be when the CPU melts down, possibly igniting the battery.
Do you really think having a laptop catch fire in your lap is minor?
You sound like somebody who'd know from experience.
What I don't understand is why an Apple fanatic would think Apple was well served by preventing the release of information which comes plainly within the "fair use" copyright doctrine (ONE page out of HOW many?) which will protect users from serious injury and/or serious machine damage and the company from serious legal liability when some poor sucker has discovered that his computer has set his lap on fire. Not unreasonable, a CPU meltdown could easily ignite a battery.
Would you sue Apple if a CPU melted down in your lap and you wound up in the ER, perhaps missing... never mind, I doubt you've got a pair anyway.
The company should already have put out a recall notice on the affected computers. Their alternative is winding up on the losing side of lawsuits announced with newspaper headlines describing how Apple laptops aren't safe to have on your lap and accompanying stories describing *dangerous* manufacturing incompetence. I'm sure MS and a whole lot of Windows laptop vendors would be happy to highlight this in future product ads. A recall makes them look like good guys and shows they've made an honest try to protect their customers rather than waiting for somebody to sue them. Besides, once they lose a lawsuit or two, they'll have to do the product recall anyway.
Improper application of heat sink grease to a modern CPU/cooler by a manufacturer certainly looks like negligence to me. Seen the image? I have, and if I owned an affected machine, I'd either take it to the dealer or open it up IMMEDIATELY.
They also should have posted that page and the fix on their own company website for independent service technicians and end users whose machines are out of warranty.
If you think Apple's desire to protect its intellectual property trumps user safety and product liability... it's a good thing for Apple you don't work there.
As for me... while I'm likely to buy a Mac anyway sooner or later, reading this tells me that I won't be buying stock in the company and that I'd better keep my eyes open for more ugly surprises from Apple if I do buy. Since I generally do my own computer maintenance anyway, this is no big deal as long as Apple doesn't keep the bad news to itself. If I get my computer screwed up or get hurt because Apple's protecting its IP, I'd sue in a heartbeat.
Yes, this would make me disloyal to Apple. Since I've never wanted to be known as a fanboy and believe that a vendor should only get whatever loyalty to me it can earn with a good product or by going "above and beyond the call of duty" to help me with problems, that isn't a problem for me.
Any product liability lawyers reading this should go NOW to this page and save a copy along with the info on Apple's attempt to suppress this information. I'm sure that there will be lawsuits soon.
Speaking as a Linux user, I'm not fanatic about any company or OS... just about getting my work done. All this tells me is that Apple's already started its slow descent into being "just another company". Too bad, but it happens to just about all companies sooner or later.
Many look at lawsuits as something like the death penalty or a nuclear first-strike. They're not. It is a civil matter taken before authority for resolution.
They are if one can't afford an attorney to respond to the IP owner in court, and that includes most people.
At the UN level, it's pressuring our elected officials to defund them if they try to become a supergovernmental censorship authority.
As for getting out elected officials to do this... our rights will be protected when we cough up the money to create our own PAC and buy our own politicians. (while the public line about this is "buying access"... given the correlation between campaign contribution and votes... I'm hardly going to try to sell the 'access' nonsense to slashdotters)
There are enough of us on slashdot alone that if we each gave our own PAC $20 (highest membership ID I saw was over 700K) , we could afford to do just that, a PAC with $14M in funding behind it is big enough to be taken seriously. I'd throw in $20 bucks towards something viable.
We don't have to outbid everybody in the world, just the Hollywood content cartel on votes that matter to us.
Remember, they are buying politicians with OUR money... it's time we do the same.
Perhaps they'll wake up and smell the Apple pie in the sky--and realize they've been taken for a ride. But I doubt it."
Getting taken on a ride from a buggy and insecure Windoze to a secure and stable OSX impresses me as doing the user a favor.
The editor's comments on how people will use OSX given a choice because it's less hassle than Windoze sound like a parody of the latest Apple vs Windows ads.
Though IMHO, it would be smarter for Apple to run Windoze in emulation, that way, they should be able to avoid most of the Windows support hassles; Windows would be running behind a *nix firewall and would think it was running in an ideal virtual environment. When I started running Windows in emulation, to my surprise, I found that it works far better in emulation than it does in its native environment.
Disclosure: I'm running Fedora Core 3 with W4L and WINE emulators. As you may have guessed, I've got legacy Winblows apps I can't function in the business world (writing Linux how-to articles) without.
While you did get right the idea that a rank-and-file minimum wage part-time Walmart employee is unlikely to defend the company on his own time for reasons having to do with low income, I saw nothing inflammatory about it.
Any more my posting the fact that PR people, whether in-house or working for an agency gets paid a hell of a lot more than minimum wage is.
We can't make the Internet environment completely safe for young people, and we can't do this no matter what kind of drastic overprotective measures you want us to pay for.
I most certainly do have an agenda. I want to see young people grow up with some measure of personal freedom, particularly since I want to see them grow up as functional adults used to taking care of themselves.
I don't want to see my money dumped down a rathole, and making society safe for your kids that you refuse to parent impresses me as just another way to piss money away that could be used for causes a lot more urgent.
Like making sure these kids have a world to grow up into.
The idiots who modded your post "insightful" should do us a favor and close their slashdot accounts.
Remember, this is a question a non-American isn't going to know the answer to, POTS line billing in foriegn countries is traditionally time-based.
In the US, people usually have the option of paying a flat rate charge for local calls or a plan that buys xxx number of minutes and a per-minute charge for minutes used over and above that. (for local toll calls and LD... uh, let's not get into that)
IMHO, this is a major reason why the online user population growth in the USA in the early years drastically exceeded that of any other country... there was simply no downside for users staying online for hours at a time unless one owned the modem at the other end.
This situation was reversed, of course, when broadband access became cheaper in every developed country except America.
I frequently see commercials better than the actual program content.
The economics of commercial creation are different from the economics of creating general TV content, it's cost-effective to spend megabucks on creating a 30 second commercial if one is going to spend a lot more megabucks on commercial time and one is hoping to sell enough products based on it to make this profitable. What I think he's really saying is... punch up the entertainment content and spend only a bit more money per commercial.
You don't know much about the business of technology.
Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners is not two geeks in a basement. It is one of the biggest and oldest software VC companies in the business. What part of "$2 billion under management" would you like me to explain to you? There probably aren't any better-connected tech-related companies in existence, and I'm certain that both the founders and their biggest investors are at least as well connected at the White House and DOJ level than anyone connected with these labels.
The issue here appears to be that a couple of record companies are trying to tell a major VC company what they can and can not invest in and doing so based on a court case where the labels deliberate lied to the government. What's Wall Street's opinion on that likely to be?
Moreover, they are connected to at least one company very likely to bid on the rights to any music copyrights that these companies would be forced to give up under an asset forfeiture program. You have heard of Apple, right? Though I'm sure Microsoft could find use for these works, too.
I expect an out-of-court settlement... where the record companies ultimately wind up paying H-W big bucks to forget the whole thing and word gets around to never, never, never attack an investment firm for putting money into technology they don't like.
Though we can hope that EMI/UMC choose to be stupid about it. After all, they were stupid enough to go that far with it.
Friends don't let friends use AOL any more than they would let a friend go out in public with doofus written on his forehead in Magic Marker(tm), and for the same reason.
The important news? What they're doing seems to be working, perhaps it took 10 years for a CEO to read the book and decide to try it.
Not that anyone else read the article, judging from the 'that's impossible' comments. Impossible or not, we have an existence proof. Didn't anybody besides me look at the bottom-line numbers? I suppose that would have taken actually reading the article, and I suggest you and anyone else who sees this do so before reading the rest of this.
The company's net cap has doubled and their income has gone up 34% in the last year, and their attrition has been cut in half, attrition is a serious problem for Indian outsourcing contractors. High-tech companies seem to be lining up to use their services; remember, companies like Cisco are the customers, not the end users. Given the number of more traditional offshoring alternatives, this would seem to indicate that these customers are perfectly content with being #2, given that the real-world alternative is not being #1, but #10 or worse.
Companies that deliberately screw their employees practically always screw their customers as well. Whether by malice or because employees don't care enough to provide decent customer service really doesn't matter if you're the customer. You didn't know that? Welcome to the real world.
Do they actually practice what they're publically preaching, as opposed to using their trouble tickets to spot malcontent employees?
Anybody around here who actually works at HCL Technologies? It would be nice to see some facts dumped into this discussion.
While $26K (total contributions to date) isn't even chump change compared to what's needed to create a substantial impact in this area, unlike the last attempt I know of in this area (geekPac), it appears that the people involved with this can be assumed to know what the hell they are doing. Though the fact that they appear to have been around for 2 years (based on Internic whois) and your post is the first time I've ever heard of them makes me wonder.
I also wonder if they've done the legal filings required to legally collect money for candidates at the Federal level and for all 50 states... (a very, very nasty and expensive process, I've researched this)... but that question is better addressed to them.
that any of the consequences described in their web page were unintended?
At least by the corporate legal staffers who presumably actually wrote the bill.
The real problem here is that organizations like the EFF that are supposed to represent our interests are tax-exempt non-profits.
If we want the political power to do something about this, we need our own PAC, our equivalent of the NRA or AARP.
What's going on with telecomm legislation (you heard that the net neutrality bill got killed in committee?) is another example of why we've got to organize to buy our own politicians, not put up with what happens when major corporate interests who don't want real innovation and who don't want the public to find out what's really wrong with their products are the only ones with cash in hand.
We have the best politicians that money can buy, if we want to be represented, we have to ante up.
Of course the debate is at a personal level, you people don't have any facts to debate with, so you have to whine about people's bad manners in posting truth that contradicts whatever you read on right-wing "pundit" blogs or that you hear on Rush Limbaugh. Guess what, neither is equal to a scientific forum outside of your personal delusions.
I posted facts, in the most insulting way I could come up with because you junk science fanatics who think that ExxonMobil PR people have the same standing as people who do science for a living irritate me the same way Creationists do.
Are you a Creationist as well? Of course, I know that you aren't going to be convinced by facts about either evolution or global warming, and you aren't going to check out any facts I or anyone else will post, so I might as well have fun with this.
You're whining about facts because you are incapable of refuting them, just like the "scientist" on ExxonMobil's payroll. Is google your friend? Check this out for yourself if you know how... it's easily verifiable. Just google on:
"Richard Lindzen" ExxonMobil funding
Not that you actually will.
Where does this leave you? In the same moral position as the ex-scientist who forfeited his standing in the science community because public relations pays better. But with a lot less money, because you have no personal credibility to sell out to an oil company.
Go play with your Windows XP box. You're obviously gullible enough to believe MS claims about Windows security.
Actually, I spent $99 on a Palm Zire 31 a few months ago. On it are 108 e-books (for SF readers, Baen Books sells their SF in Palm format e-books) as well, a few digital tracks, images, and the notes I take. I'm sure I'll fill up the other 900 megs on the SD card sooner or later.
As for which is most useful for me, it's a tossup between the ability to stick an entire library in my pocket and the ability to take notes that not only do I not have to decipher afterwards, but sync them straight into my Linux box. Unfortunately, Informit hasn't published my how-to article yet, all I can say is to check the site every few days, it should be out Real Soon Now.
Plus, of course, if it is one of those middle-of-the-night inspirations, I don't have to turn on a light and look for a pen and paper, just grab the PDA and start writing on the display with my fingernail. Try and do that with a 'smart' cellphone.
Slashdot Mirror
With respect to DVD pricing and piracy... if you can find a double-sided DVD-R at a reasonable price, I'd like to know where, the pricing I've seen is in the >$5 range. It's either that or pick and choose tracks using DVD-shrink... while the disk may be 25 cents, my time is worth something.
While you may not like DVD pricing, DVD piracy is NOT a serious problem in the USA because DVD movies, unlike music CDs just aren't all that expensive if you don't insist on movies newly released on DVD.
The hysteria about piracy is mainly so the movie industry can plug all Internet distribution channels they don't control, in order to freeze independents out.
They know as well as we do that we're only a few years away from making movies technically equivalent to current Hollywood product (NO, I DON'T MEAN LOTR, that's another few years) on conventional desktop PCs.
It's about control. They want to be able to say to people who want to sell movies to the public "Do it our way or not at all."
Any resemblance between this and the record industry, of course, is purely coincidental.
I'm not going to use something that sucks (e.g. GIMP2) if I actually have to work using it and there's a proprietary app that does the job right.
Even Linus Torvalds runs a Mac as his personal workstation.
It isn't just drivers, it's the apps that exist on Windows and OSX that don't have usable equivalents in Open Source.
As these usable apps (graphics is the biggest problem... when will a usable replacement for GIMP2 appear?) appear, I'll be nuking my Windows legacy apps I run in Win4Lin (Linux proprietary Win virtual environment) one by one. Though what I actually expect is that CPU hardware virtualation support will make it possible to simply run Windows as just another OS and I'll get rid of Win4Lin first... and keep running legacy apps.
Just because Linux zealots think an app is adequate means that anyone in his right mind will actually use it. The biggest obstacle to Linux on the desktop is the apps zealots think are "good enough" so they've stopped working on the UI or functionality... that suck.
I run my Linux box with full multimedia, it's the machine I use to do business with. . . as somebody who currently writes Linux tutorials for a living.
I would simply not be in business if I couldn't run Linux with proprietary commercial apps like Win4Lin (which lets me run the nonFOSS Windows OS in emulation) and several other proprietary Linux apps... including the Turboprint package of print drivers that supports the Canon printer print-to-CD capability. Or at any rate, I would be in business as a Windows or Mac user, because the base Linux distro installs are NOT READY for SOHO business use.
The fact that the people who have Linux multimedia are either using Linspire style training wheels distro or are part of a l33t minority is all that one really needs to know about Linux usability out of the box. It isn't supposed to be a technical achievement to be able to watch a movie on your computer.
If the fanatics whining about Linspire were to get usable replacements for Linux proprietary apps and the Winblows legacy proprietary apps like PaintShopPro (yes, I've tried GIMP2... it is teh suxx0rs), I'd be happy to ditch my proprietary apps. I can't even use OpenOffice2.0 to do my final edits of Linux tutorials because it doesn't handle highlighting in Word document files correctly... in the way my editors expect. They can write a shitload of new drivers while they're at it, or find a way to induce the vendors to do so. [not impossible, persuading IBM/HP/other megacorps supporting Linux to lean on peripheral vendors might not be difficult]
The zealots don't get that we people who use our boxes to make a living can't wait for the OpenSource movement to get around to writing everything we need in order to make our computers function as we need them to. We don't live in mommy's basement, we work for a living. They can fix the problems, find ways to get them fixed, or STFU.
Given the billions they're putting into Linux development, they might as well spend a few bucks on letters to manufacturers that'll make it a lot easier for them to package Linux solutions for people.
They are in a position to blow some doors open for us.
Plus, we've got the heads-up so if we get one of these boxes and it seems to be running REALLY FUCKING HOT, we can take it to the dealer along with the picture of what's wrong and tell the tech what to fix, or just open the box and fix it. It's an easy fix, just remove the heat sink grease and replace it with the right amount.
If you are J.Random User who doesn't read slashdot or other Mac sites, unless Apple recalls the boxes, your first notice of a problem will be when the CPU melts down, possibly igniting the battery.
Do you really think having a laptop catch fire in your lap is minor?
What I don't understand is why an Apple fanatic would think Apple was well served by preventing the release of information which comes plainly within the "fair use" copyright doctrine (ONE page out of HOW many?) which will protect users from serious injury and/or serious machine damage and the company from serious legal liability when some poor sucker has discovered that his computer has set his lap on fire. Not unreasonable, a CPU meltdown could easily ignite a battery.
Would you sue Apple if a CPU melted down in your lap and you wound up in the ER, perhaps missing... never mind, I doubt you've got a pair anyway.
The company should already have put out a recall notice on the affected computers. Their alternative is winding up on the losing side of lawsuits announced with newspaper headlines describing how Apple laptops aren't safe to have on your lap and accompanying stories describing *dangerous* manufacturing incompetence. I'm sure MS and a whole lot of Windows laptop vendors would be happy to highlight this in future product ads. A recall makes them look like good guys and shows they've made an honest try to protect their customers rather than waiting for somebody to sue them. Besides, once they lose a lawsuit or two, they'll have to do the product recall anyway.
Improper application of heat sink grease to a modern CPU/cooler by a manufacturer certainly looks like negligence to me. Seen the image? I have, and if I owned an affected machine, I'd either take it to the dealer or open it up IMMEDIATELY.
They also should have posted that page and the fix on their own company website for independent service technicians and end users whose machines are out of warranty.
If you think Apple's desire to protect its intellectual property trumps user safety and product liability... it's a good thing for Apple you don't work there.
As for me... while I'm likely to buy a Mac anyway sooner or later, reading this tells me that I won't be buying stock in the company and that I'd better keep my eyes open for more ugly surprises from Apple if I do buy. Since I generally do my own computer maintenance anyway, this is no big deal as long as Apple doesn't keep the bad news to itself. If I get my computer screwed up or get hurt because Apple's protecting its IP, I'd sue in a heartbeat.
Yes, this would make me disloyal to Apple. Since I've never wanted to be known as a fanboy and believe that a vendor should only get whatever loyalty to me it can earn with a good product or by going "above and beyond the call of duty" to help me with problems, that isn't a problem for me.
Any product liability lawyers reading this should go NOW to this page and save a copy along with the info on Apple's attempt to suppress this information. I'm sure that there will be lawsuits soon.
Speaking as a Linux user, I'm not fanatic about any company or OS... just about getting my work done. All this tells me is that Apple's already started its slow descent into being "just another company". Too bad, but it happens to just about all companies sooner or later.
They are if one can't afford an attorney to respond to the IP owner in court, and that includes most people.I hope google not only prevails, but countersues on the basis of a frivolous lawsuit and takes every material possession he owns.
As for getting out elected officials to do this... our rights will be protected when we cough up the money to create our own PAC and buy our own politicians. (while the public line about this is "buying access"... given the correlation between campaign contribution and votes... I'm hardly going to try to sell the 'access' nonsense to slashdotters)
There are enough of us on slashdot alone that if we each gave our own PAC $20 (highest membership ID I saw was over 700K) , we could afford to do just that, a PAC with $14M in funding behind it is big enough to be taken seriously. I'd throw in $20 bucks towards something viable.
We don't have to outbid everybody in the world, just the Hollywood content cartel on votes that matter to us.
Remember, they are buying politicians with OUR money... it's time we do the same.
Getting taken on a ride from a buggy and insecure Windoze to a secure and stable OSX impresses me as doing the user a favor.
The editor's comments on how people will use OSX given a choice because it's less hassle than Windoze sound like a parody of the latest Apple vs Windows ads.
Though IMHO, it would be smarter for Apple to run Windoze in emulation, that way, they should be able to avoid most of the Windows support hassles; Windows would be running behind a *nix firewall and would think it was running in an ideal virtual environment. When I started running Windows in emulation, to my surprise, I found that it works far better in emulation than it does in its native environment.
Disclosure: I'm running Fedora Core 3 with W4L and WINE emulators. As you may have guessed, I've got legacy Winblows apps I can't function in the business world (writing Linux how-to articles) without.
While you did get right the idea that a rank-and-file minimum wage part-time Walmart employee is unlikely to defend the company on his own time for reasons having to do with low income, I saw nothing inflammatory about it.
Any more my posting the fact that PR people, whether in-house or working for an agency gets paid a hell of a lot more than minimum wage is.
I most certainly do have an agenda. I want to see young people grow up with some measure of personal freedom, particularly since I want to see them grow up as functional adults used to taking care of themselves.
I don't want to see my money dumped down a rathole, and making society safe for your kids that you refuse to parent impresses me as just another way to piss money away that could be used for causes a lot more urgent.
Like making sure these kids have a world to grow up into.
The idiots who modded your post "insightful" should do us a favor and close their slashdot accounts.
and if the blood in the water is coming out so fast that even Dvorak has noticed, MS may be in far more trouble than even we thought.
In the US, people usually have the option of paying a flat rate charge for local calls or a plan that buys xxx number of minutes and a per-minute charge for minutes used over and above that. (for local toll calls and LD... uh, let's not get into that)
IMHO, this is a major reason why the online user population growth in the USA in the early years drastically exceeded that of any other country... there was simply no downside for users staying online for hours at a time unless one owned the modem at the other end.
This situation was reversed, of course, when broadband access became cheaper in every developed country except America.
The economics of commercial creation are different from the economics of creating general TV content, it's cost-effective to spend megabucks on creating a 30 second commercial if one is going to spend a lot more megabucks on commercial time and one is hoping to sell enough products based on it to make this profitable. What I think he's really saying is... punch up the entertainment content and spend only a bit more money per commercial.
Hummer-Winblad Venture Partners is not two geeks in a basement. It is one of the biggest and oldest software VC companies in the business. What part of "$2 billion under management" would you like me to explain to you? There probably aren't any better-connected tech-related companies in existence, and I'm certain that both the founders and their biggest investors are at least as well connected at the White House and DOJ level than anyone connected with these labels.
The issue here appears to be that a couple of record companies are trying to tell a major VC company what they can and can not invest in and doing so based on a court case where the labels deliberate lied to the government. What's Wall Street's opinion on that likely to be?
Moreover, they are connected to at least one company very likely to bid on the rights to any music copyrights that these companies would be forced to give up under an asset forfeiture program. You have heard of Apple, right? Though I'm sure Microsoft could find use for these works, too.
I expect an out-of-court settlement... where the record companies ultimately wind up paying H-W big bucks to forget the whole thing and word gets around to never, never, never attack an investment firm for putting money into technology they don't like.
Though we can hope that EMI/UMC choose to be stupid about it. After all, they were stupid enough to go that far with it.
thanks again...
Friends don't let friends use AOL any more than they would let a friend go out in public with doofus written on his forehead in Magic Marker(tm), and for the same reason.
Thanks for posting that book title, it looks like something I need to read... I'm planning to start my own high-tech startup sooner or later.
The important news? What they're doing seems to be working, perhaps it took 10 years for a CEO to read the book and decide to try it.
Not that anyone else read the article, judging from the 'that's impossible' comments. Impossible or not, we have an existence proof. Didn't anybody besides me look at the bottom-line numbers? I suppose that would have taken actually reading the article, and I suggest you and anyone else who sees this do so before reading the rest of this. The company's net cap has doubled and their income has gone up 34% in the last year, and their attrition has been cut in half, attrition is a serious problem for Indian outsourcing contractors. High-tech companies seem to be lining up to use their services; remember, companies like Cisco are the customers, not the end users. Given the number of more traditional offshoring alternatives, this would seem to indicate that these customers are perfectly content with being #2, given that the real-world alternative is not being #1, but #10 or worse.
Companies that deliberately screw their employees practically always screw their customers as well. Whether by malice or because employees don't care enough to provide decent customer service really doesn't matter if you're the customer. You didn't know that? Welcome to the real world.
Do they actually practice what they're publically preaching, as opposed to using their trouble tickets to spot malcontent employees?
Anybody around here who actually works at HCL Technologies? It would be nice to see some facts dumped into this discussion.
I also wonder if they've done the legal filings required to legally collect money for candidates at the Federal level and for all 50 states... (a very, very nasty and expensive process, I've researched this) ... but that question is better addressed to them.
Thanks a lot for telling me about this.
At least by the corporate legal staffers who presumably actually wrote the bill.
The real problem here is that organizations like the EFF that are supposed to represent our interests are tax-exempt non-profits.
If we want the political power to do something about this, we need our own PAC, our equivalent of the NRA or AARP.
What's going on with telecomm legislation (you heard that the net neutrality bill got killed in committee?) is another example of why we've got to organize to buy our own politicians, not put up with what happens when major corporate interests who don't want real innovation and who don't want the public to find out what's really wrong with their products are the only ones with cash in hand.
We have the best politicians that money can buy, if we want to be represented, we have to ante up.
I posted facts, in the most insulting way I could come up with because you junk science fanatics who think that ExxonMobil PR people have the same standing as people who do science for a living irritate me the same way Creationists do.
Are you a Creationist as well? Of course, I know that you aren't going to be convinced by facts about either evolution or global warming, and you aren't going to check out any facts I or anyone else will post, so I might as well have fun with this.
You're whining about facts because you are incapable of refuting them, just like the "scientist" on ExxonMobil's payroll. Is google your friend? Check this out for yourself if you know how... it's easily verifiable. Just google on:
"Richard Lindzen" ExxonMobil funding
Not that you actually will.
Where does this leave you? In the same moral position as the ex-scientist who forfeited his standing in the science community because public relations pays better. But with a lot less money, because you have no personal credibility to sell out to an oil company.
Go play with your Windows XP box. You're obviously gullible enough to believe MS claims about Windows security.
that we'd have astroturfers doing metamod these days.
As for which is most useful for me, it's a tossup between the ability to stick an entire library in my pocket and the ability to take notes that not only do I not have to decipher afterwards, but sync them straight into my Linux box. Unfortunately, Informit hasn't published my how-to article yet, all I can say is to check the site every few days, it should be out Real Soon Now.
Plus, of course, if it is one of those middle-of-the-night inspirations, I don't have to turn on a light and look for a pen and paper, just grab the PDA and start writing on the display with my fingernail. Try and do that with a 'smart' cellphone.