You are, of course, absolutely right. I was quite surprised to do a few sums based on the figures you gave, and it looks like a middle class income in India is less than 10% (maybe way under 10% depending on how you define middle class) of what it is here. As a result, quite understandably, prices that are virtually identical here and India (you pay about US$42.54 a month for your cable modem access; we pay maybe US$39.95) are trivial here but prohibitive there.
However, bear in mind that the person writing what I was replying to was American, and I was responding to his comments about greedy corporations.
Unless things have changed radically in the last few years, India's phone company is still state-owned, and it suffers the plagues of state-owned enterprises everywhere: High prices and lousy service. My point was that "greedy corporations" do an awfully good job at getting prices of stuff like cable modems and the like down; I would say you have not disproved this theory; you have just shown that it hasn't happened in the third world. Understandably; you have state-owned enterprises, or - almost as bad - state-sanctioned monopolies.
So let me be Clintonesque and say that I feel your pain; it must really be lousy to know that there is a world out there, and in that world Internet access costs about as much a month as a dinner for two in a decent but not especially fancy restaurant.
But I would surely argue that my basic point stands, at least in my own country, and I was surely not claiming otherwise.
It's well written, but it's pretty funny how dated it is:
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
Those profiteering gluttons seem to have made it dirt cheap; in the year 2001, an Internet connection costs next to nothing, long distance costs next to nothing... so what are you complaining about again?
So if this guy's point is valid, why do we have more crackers than ever, and - for that matter - nastier ones than ever?
I remember when most people who broke into systems did it because they were curious; now they want to stage DOS attacks. And in that context, I am in full agreement with 'The Konscience of the Kourier' (see Anonymous Coward's message "That's bs man").
Word for Windows was radically different from WordPerfect or even Word for DOS. As I remember, WordPerfect's problem was that it didn't have a Windows version for a long, long time, so when Windows became popular, Word for Windows killed off WP.
Wordperfect had a blue screen and the whole thing was driven through function keys - you had to take your hands off the home keys and hit F1-F10 all the time.
Word for DOS had a black screen, operated in what passed for a high-resolution graphics mode at the time, used its own character set which was oddly different from anything else, and you had to hit and a letter to run commands.
Word for Windows had the ugly, toylike look you saw on all Windows 3.x programs.
I don't think there was any question about them being very distinct products. In fact, in those days, I preferred Word even before there was Windows. In those days, I quite liked Microsoft and their products; it took the flakiness of Windows to change my mind. Windows and I were pretty much hate at first sight:-(.
You obviously never saw the DOS version of Word. It was extraordinarily quirky. WordPerfect was a crude reproduction of a Wang word processor; Word was... was... something completely alien and strange. I both liked it and hated it, all at once.
Word for Windows, on the other hand, was, well, Windows incarnate.
The cheapest Mercedes-Benz ($25,000) available costs about triple what a Hyundai Accent ($8,500) does.
The most expensive Hyundai costs about 20% as much ($25k) as the most expensive Mercedes ($121,000).
A shirt from Target costs $12; a shirt from Barney's New York in Beverly Hills costs $ 165.
The cheapest Macintosh ($899 with monitor) costs about... well, actually, there's very little difference. The cheapest PC is about $600, throw in $100 for a monitor and you have $ 700. So the actual spread is only about 30%.
The most expensive packaged system in the Macintosh line costs about $3,500. I'm sure if I wandered around dell.com or compaq.com long enough, I could find comparably expensive systems.
The new iBook is regularly compared favourably with systems costing about 70% more than it, so we can't even make a case for it being that expensive.
The new Titanium iBook is very comparable in cost to similar machines.
In the end, then, Apple is a premium desktop brand that's selling at a price somewhat higher than a "normal" machine, but not consistently so. For notebooks, it's right in the middle of the pack.
Certainly we do not have the wide price spread of cars or houses. (Cheapest house in Key West, Florida: $99,000. Most expensive: $ 6,000,000; cheapest house in Malibu, CA: $400,000; most expensive $15 million).
If you're a smart shopper, you can avoid Apple's worst sins. For instance, if you can spare $2,600, about the price of an average notebook, you can get the gorgeous Titanium PowerBook, a technical tour de force. But don't buy memory from Apple; you'll pay about four times what it's worth. Not even I can defend stunts like that.
But can I defend Apple as being fair value for money, being priced as a premium brand, but a far from outrageous one? Sure.
I used to run Linux and MacOS 9 at home, Linux to do text editing on emacs and MacOS 9 to do graphics.
Now MacOS X serves both purposes perfectly and I don't need two computers anymore.
I'm happy as a clam and would recommend it to anyone geeky. The sheer beauty of the interface appeals enormously; nobody does details like Steve Jobs, just go to one of the new Apple stores and you'll see that.
When I visited the Grand Opening of the Apple Store in Glendale [see my report at http://www.amazing.com/applestore/ ], I saw a great many Digital8 and MiniDV camcorders in the audience. So at least in the Apple market, I can confirm that video editing is catching on.
Of course I have about $ 8k worth of equipment to make videos (Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder, dual processor PowerMac running Final Cut Pro 2.0, etc). Video definitely attracts free-spending enthusiasts like me. The question is whether you can lure folks like me from Apple; my guess is that it would be tough.
(I use a Macintosh desktop at home and a Linux desktop at work; in my view, Linux is not nearly as nice, but I'd still rather use it than Windows).
But Star Office was just a copy of Word. The question is if an original word processor could be developed open source.
In any event, StarOffice is an open-sourced version of a commercial product that was sold to Sun. Could open source duplicate that? I doubt it; it would have been too mind-numbingly boring.
But perhaps Koffice will prove me wrong; I haven't checked it out yet, most likely because I'm an Emacs hound from way back and find office software sluggish to use compared to the old style control keystrokes of emacs.
If anyone can show me an office suite that wouldn't slow me down in that respect, I might well give it a try. Since that might well be built off of emacs, it wouldn't surprise me if my best shot for something like that might be an open sourced project.
Ah, but then you have to deal with Windows, and who would want that?
Or Linux, but then you have to deal with the hideous aesthetic experience of Linux fonts:-(.
I get annoyed by people who judge things only by price. Like that fellow who came up to me while I was checking out the newsstand. He wanted to sell me an ugly belt.
"$4?" he said.
I started walking away.
"$3?"
I continued doing so, because however cheap the product was, it wasn't good enough for me.
That's how I feel about PCs running Windows, and that's why I'm willing to pay more - sometimes a little more, other times a lot more - for a Mac.
I was in Fry's about a week ago looking for 17" LCDs.
NEC, 17", display seemed a bit lacking in quality, $1,150.
Sony, 17", display looked better, $1,895.
The new Apple LCD isn't out yet, but I don't think Jobs would sign off on a product that was less than excellent. $ 999.
I'd call that extremely aggressive pricing, wouldn't you?
For most of Apple's life, they have OEMed Sony monitors; I think the more recent ones are Mitsubishi. I haven't noticed them charging much of a price premium for them. Of course the 17" LCD was expensive because their special packaging is expensive; but that's also most likely why they were discontinuing it.
Oh, come now, that's an ancient machine. And expandability, quite honestly, isn't what it once was; my G4/450 dual processor came with on-motherboard ethernet, memory, FireWire, USB, etc, etc. Unless you have really demanding requirements (like real time video editing), you don't need to use a single card. I remember in the days of the SE, when even memory came on cards. Not anymore.
I was able to add 80GB of bone-standard Maxtor disk space to the system by just switching it off, opening the case and plugging the disk into the IDE bus. No problems; it took about ten minutes and that was it.
Incidentally, my system is SMP and works great under MacOS X.
It's not implausible that the beauty of MacOS X reminds open source folk of the bitter truth: X Windows under Linux is the ugliest GUI in the world.
Curiously enough, SGI solved the problem some years ago with a very nice looking GUI with cool fonts. It must have taken an enormous amount of time, money and effort to do this, because even the very latest Linux versions with half-assed anti-aliased fonts look awful - especially when compared to MacOS X.
This is why it took me a long time to stop using my old SGI workstation; if it hadn't broken down at a time when I was short on cash, I'd probably still be using it at the office. But every once in a while I get tempted by the cheap used Octanes on eBay, if I could only get one with the IDO thrown in...
And I say this as someone who uses Linux at work and MacOS X at home; here at work, I really miss those drop-dead gorgeous fonts. At home, I miss... um... I miss... well, actually, I miss xemacs and hope they do an Aqua version one of these days. But that's it.
You are right. The first time I saw a G4 cube, it had a beige 17" monitor next to it and looked, well, just totally mismatched.
You really need an Apple LCD to match the beauty and space-saving ethos of the Cube, and at the time it was introduced, LCDs (whether by Apple or others) were too expensive to make business sense.
It wouldn't surprise me if the cube could recover now that chic monitors aren't totally out of the ballpark pricewise anymore.
I think the most notable announcement was probably the 17" 1280x1024 LCD for $ 999. Since LCDs are sharper than CRTs, a good case could be made for this being roughly equivalent to a 20" CRT with a 19" viewable area for $ 699. That's a major step down from the cheapest 17" LCD I've seen, the $1,150 NEC (Fry's price); the $1,895 Sony doesn't even begin to compete.
This is a downright aggressive price; so much so that it's a great pity there's no version for PC folks. I might well consider bugging the boss for an Apple monitor of that size, resolution and price even though the only Mac I run is at home.
D
PS For those curious about the new Apple Stores, http://www.amazing.com/applestore/ has an account of my trip, complete with photographs and video.
The BBSs I wrote tended to get eaten up in hard disk crashes; I lost my last two that way.
Certainly my heyday was David's Amazing BBS, a five-line message board + discussion system at (213) 459-5891, which ran from roughly 1987-1991. I confronted many of the moderation issues that Slashdot has. Rob has handled them quite a bit better than I, but to be fair there was a lot less information or ideas on it in those days.
I met several girlfriends through the BBS, and tragically the Internet is just not the source of romance the old BBS world was, for exactly the reasons I hear told here - the Internet is not personal and it's not really a geographically sensitive communications medium; everyone interested in me wound up living a long, long way away.
But while it lasted, it was a lot of fun. I wrote my own software from scratch, running on a 286 with Microport Unix and 4MB RAM. It crashed all the time because Microport was pretty flaky, but people loved the software; I put an enormous amount of creativity into it.
It's too bad those days are gone, and the web just doesn't offer the sort of immediacy - not even Instant Messengers worked as well as chats appearing as people typed and the ability to have quickie conversations with people on other lines. We have a much bigger system now, but it seems to have lost its soul in the process.
Their base home control stuff is pretty nice, actually. Take 'em up on a starter kit offer when you see it. I wish their light dimmer modules worked better, though - if anyone knows of something better at precise control of light intensity that doesn't cost thousands, email me.
But the camera is junk - I saw it demonstrated at Fry's and the quality was abysmal. I wouldn't take it if it was free.
(Disclaimer: I am admittedly the kind of person who blows $900 on digital still cameras and $4,400 on video. I don't like cheap junk; that's what X10 is. In all fairness, cheap junk is probably a bigger market than the kind of pricey non-junk I buy).
I have a feeling you'll appreciate Binky, the cheerful winking paperclip, at ubersoft.net.
http://www.ubersoft.net/d/19990401.html
One of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Thanks to this cartoon, I might almost miss Binky. (Note that this is a series of cartoons that goes on for a while, so yes, you should continue).
One of the most destructive people on my old BBS was a 46 year old man with money to burn. I have every confidence that if you could buy mod points, he would buy up a passel and do some real damage - I could imagine him modding up Natalie Portman to a +5.
Of course the obvious response is that then other people would buy the points to counteract him, and he'd be down in the dungeon again. And the limitation of ratings to no more than +5 would ensure that even unlimited funds could not increase ratings too much. Still, there are enough serious abusers who would want to buy power that I would be worried about the results.
Still, limiting moderator point use to one per message would most likely limit the damage significantly. Otherwise you'd see moderation wars, which I doubt would serve anyone well but the folks selling the points; I could imagine the confusion as messages dropped down to the bottom and zoomed up to the top almost at random.
Perhaps the most promising feature of moderator point purchase and sale is that it might do something that has been incredibly hard: provide a revenue source so sites like Slashdot could be profitable.
Hi back, by the way. Got a real job. Started making real money. Didn't have time for anything else for a long time, so I had to slough off a ton of projects. Drop me an email and I'll respond.
Sadly, due to all the graphical gingerbread, ads, and so on cluttering up the commercial sites, it's really enjoyable to read articles on FR that are totally unsullied by same. But when I see a news source I like, I will usually read the article over there because I feel a moral responsibility to give them ad revenue.
Free Republic really is a fascinating collection of articles, on a wide range of topics with a wide range of political viewpoints expressed. (Just look for the "barf alerts" to see articles opposing the general FR ideology).
It's true that there are many comments that are poorly thought out, ungrammatical and ill-informed. But there is some intelligent wheat among the chaff, and the byplay between users can be interesting.
It's definitely not as sophisticated as Slashdot, but it's aimed at a population much closer to the American average, so that should surprise no one. And surely the members of the American average deserve some kind of voice? They deserve to be heard, by those who wish to listen.
I ran a bulletin board system some years back that eventually wound up being overrrun by harassers; they're like locusts, and even a small number of them can completely destroy the atmosphere of a board. So on the whole, I have to side with Free Republic here; otherwise, every political forum would be effectively unusable. Even Slashdot, with its sophisticated software and elaborate moderation system, descends into unusability at times. Unfortunately, I suspect the average user could not be lured into understanding, let alone operating, a moderation system. Perhaps I'm wrong; I don't think I am.
You can also use myODBC to connect to mySQL using ODBC, which, at least in my experience, works more reliably.
Team FXML's product is excellent for what it does, and has perhaps the best support I have seen for any product, bar none, but it's not as fast or efficient for moving around large amounts of data as ODBC when communicating from a Windows client to a Linux server.
If you need to do updates to a SQL Server database from mySQL or anything else running on Linux, though, it's a godsend - my company has now pushed literally thousands of orders through it without any problems.
D
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Re:What else can you do with deadbeats?
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 4
There is also the curious fact that people who get connections that don't work through Covad are not keen on paying their bills.
I am one of those customers; I have a bill of over $300 for bad service (the service literally has not been up for 24 hours without some sort of problem), and my provider (UUNET) is telling me not to pay it, and is getting me on to Rhythms.
I wouldn't be surprised if Covad still winds up billing UUNET for the "service" they gave me; it's just fortunate that UUNET is a company of exceptional financial strength (which also charges high fees so they can afford to eat them on occasion).
I should say that I got Covad at the same location and their connection went down for hours during the day. The Rhythms connection, which I replaced it with, is up about 95% of the time (way up from Covad's 50%), and I just gave them my first complaint about it today. I'm hoping for a favourable resolution, so it was probably premature to comment on problems; I've only had the connection for a couple of weeks.
I'm inclined to think they're better than Covad (that saying virtually nothing, of course), and I'd probably use them again - my house just seems to be in an exceptionally poor situation for internet connectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
You are, of course, absolutely right. I was quite surprised to do a few sums based on the figures you gave, and it looks like a middle class income in India is less than 10% (maybe way under 10% depending on how you define middle class) of what it is here. As a result, quite understandably, prices that are virtually identical here and India (you pay about US$42.54 a month for your cable modem access; we pay maybe US$39.95) are trivial here but prohibitive there.
However, bear in mind that the person writing what I was replying to was American, and I was responding to his comments about greedy corporations.
Unless things have changed radically in the last few years, India's phone company is still state-owned, and it suffers the plagues of state-owned enterprises everywhere: High prices and lousy service. My point was that "greedy corporations" do an awfully good job at getting prices of stuff like cable modems and the like down; I would say you have not disproved this theory; you have just shown that it hasn't happened in the third world. Understandably; you have state-owned enterprises, or - almost as bad - state-sanctioned monopolies.
So let me be Clintonesque and say that I feel your pain; it must really be lousy to know that there is a world out there, and in that world Internet access costs about as much a month as a dinner for two in a decent but not especially fancy restaurant.
But I would surely argue that my basic point stands, at least in my own country, and I was surely not claiming otherwise.
D
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It's well written, but it's pretty funny how dated it is:
... so what are you complaining about again?
We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
Those profiteering gluttons seem to have made it dirt cheap; in the year 2001, an Internet connection costs next to nothing, long distance costs next to nothing
So if this guy's point is valid, why do we have more crackers than ever, and - for that matter - nastier ones than ever?
I remember when most people who broke into systems did it because they were curious; now they want to stage DOS attacks. And in that context, I am in full agreement with 'The Konscience of the Kourier' (see Anonymous Coward's message "That's bs man").
D
----
Word for Windows was radically different from WordPerfect or even Word for DOS. As I remember, WordPerfect's problem was that it didn't have a Windows version for a long, long time, so when Windows became popular, Word for Windows killed off WP.
:-(.
Wordperfect had a blue screen and the whole thing was driven through function keys - you had to take your hands off the home keys and hit F1-F10 all the time.
Word for DOS had a black screen, operated in what passed for a high-resolution graphics mode at the time, used its own character set which was oddly different from anything else, and you had to hit and a letter to run commands.
Word for Windows had the ugly, toylike look you saw on all Windows 3.x programs.
I don't think there was any question about them being very distinct products. In fact, in those days, I preferred Word even before there was Windows. In those days, I quite liked Microsoft and their products; it took the flakiness of Windows to change my mind. Windows and I were pretty much hate at first sight
D
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A copy of WordPerfect?
... was ... something completely alien and strange. I both liked it and hated it, all at once.
You obviously never saw the DOS version of Word. It was extraordinarily quirky. WordPerfect was a crude reproduction of a Wang word processor; Word was
Word for Windows, on the other hand, was, well, Windows incarnate.
D
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The cheapest Mercedes-Benz ($25,000) available costs about triple what a Hyundai Accent ($8,500) does.
... well, actually, there's very little difference. The cheapest PC is about $600, throw in $100 for a monitor and you have $ 700. So the actual spread is only about 30%.
The most expensive Hyundai costs about 20% as much ($25k) as the most expensive Mercedes ($121,000).
A shirt from Target costs $12; a shirt from Barney's New York in Beverly Hills costs $ 165.
The cheapest Macintosh ($899 with monitor) costs about
The most expensive packaged system in the Macintosh line costs about $3,500. I'm sure if I wandered around dell.com or compaq.com long enough, I could find comparably expensive systems.
The new iBook is regularly compared favourably with systems costing about 70% more than it, so we can't even make a case for it being that expensive.
The new Titanium iBook is very comparable in cost to similar machines.
In the end, then, Apple is a premium desktop brand that's selling at a price somewhat higher than a "normal" machine, but not consistently so. For notebooks, it's right in the middle of the pack.
Certainly we do not have the wide price spread of cars or houses. (Cheapest house in Key West, Florida: $99,000. Most expensive: $ 6,000,000; cheapest house in Malibu, CA: $400,000; most expensive $15 million).
If you're a smart shopper, you can avoid Apple's worst sins. For instance, if you can spare $2,600, about the price of an average notebook, you can get the gorgeous Titanium PowerBook, a technical tour de force. But don't buy memory from Apple; you'll pay about four times what it's worth. Not even I can defend stunts like that.
But can I defend Apple as being fair value for money, being priced as a premium brand, but a far from outrageous one? Sure.
D
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I used to run Linux and MacOS 9 at home, Linux to do text editing on emacs and MacOS 9 to do graphics.
Now MacOS X serves both purposes perfectly and I don't need two computers anymore.
I'm happy as a clam and would recommend it to anyone geeky. The sheer beauty of the interface appeals enormously; nobody does details like Steve Jobs, just go to one of the new Apple stores and you'll see that.
D
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When I visited the Grand Opening of the Apple Store in Glendale [see my report at http://www.amazing.com/applestore/ ], I saw a great many Digital8 and MiniDV camcorders in the audience. So at least in the Apple market, I can confirm that video editing is catching on.
Of course I have about $ 8k worth of equipment to make videos (Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder, dual processor PowerMac running Final Cut Pro 2.0, etc). Video definitely attracts free-spending enthusiasts like me. The question is whether you can lure folks like me from Apple; my guess is that it would be tough.
(I use a Macintosh desktop at home and a Linux desktop at work; in my view, Linux is not nearly as nice, but I'd still rather use it than Windows).
D
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But Star Office was just a copy of Word. The question is if an original word processor could be developed open source.
In any event, StarOffice is an open-sourced version of a commercial product that was sold to Sun. Could open source duplicate that? I doubt it; it would have been too mind-numbingly boring.
But perhaps Koffice will prove me wrong; I haven't checked it out yet, most likely because I'm an Emacs hound from way back and find office software sluggish to use compared to the old style control keystrokes of emacs.
If anyone can show me an office suite that wouldn't slow me down in that respect, I might well give it a try. Since that might well be built off of emacs, it wouldn't surprise me if my best shot for something like that might be an open sourced project.
D
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Ah, but then you have to deal with Windows, and who would want that?
:-(.
Or Linux, but then you have to deal with the hideous aesthetic experience of Linux fonts
I get annoyed by people who judge things only by price. Like that fellow who came up to me while I was checking out the newsstand. He wanted to sell me an ugly belt.
"$4?" he said.
I started walking away.
"$3?"
I continued doing so, because however cheap the product was, it wasn't good enough for me.
That's how I feel about PCs running Windows, and that's why I'm willing to pay more - sometimes a little more, other times a lot more - for a Mac.
D
----
I was in Fry's about a week ago looking for 17" LCDs.
NEC, 17", display seemed a bit lacking in quality, $1,150.
Sony, 17", display looked better, $1,895.
The new Apple LCD isn't out yet, but I don't think Jobs would sign off on a product that was less than excellent. $ 999.
I'd call that extremely aggressive pricing, wouldn't you?
For most of Apple's life, they have OEMed Sony monitors; I think the more recent ones are Mitsubishi. I haven't noticed them charging much of a price premium for them. Of course the 17" LCD was expensive because their special packaging is expensive; but that's also most likely why they were discontinuing it.
D
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The Apple Retail Store (see http://www.amazing.com/applestore/ for my pictures) had a 20" Sony monitor on one of the PowerMac G4s.
D
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Oh, come now, that's an ancient machine. And expandability, quite honestly, isn't what it once was; my G4/450 dual processor came with on-motherboard ethernet, memory, FireWire, USB, etc, etc. Unless you have really demanding requirements (like real time video editing), you don't need to use a single card. I remember in the days of the SE, when even memory came on cards. Not anymore.
I was able to add 80GB of bone-standard Maxtor disk space to the system by just switching it off, opening the case and plugging the disk into the IDE bus. No problems; it took about ten minutes and that was it.
Incidentally, my system is SMP and works great under MacOS X.
D
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It's not implausible that the beauty of MacOS X reminds open source folk of the bitter truth: X Windows under Linux is the ugliest GUI in the world.
...
... um ... I miss ... well, actually, I miss xemacs and hope they do an Aqua version one of these days. But that's it.
Curiously enough, SGI solved the problem some years ago with a very nice looking GUI with cool fonts. It must have taken an enormous amount of time, money and effort to do this, because even the very latest Linux versions with half-assed anti-aliased fonts look awful - especially when compared to MacOS X.
This is why it took me a long time to stop using my old SGI workstation; if it hadn't broken down at a time when I was short on cash, I'd probably still be using it at the office. But every once in a while I get tempted by the cheap used Octanes on eBay, if I could only get one with the IDO thrown in
And I say this as someone who uses Linux at work and MacOS X at home; here at work, I really miss those drop-dead gorgeous fonts. At home, I miss
D
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You are right. The first time I saw a G4 cube, it had a beige 17" monitor next to it and looked, well, just totally mismatched.
You really need an Apple LCD to match the beauty and space-saving ethos of the Cube, and at the time it was introduced, LCDs (whether by Apple or others) were too expensive to make business sense.
It wouldn't surprise me if the cube could recover now that chic monitors aren't totally out of the ballpark pricewise anymore.
D
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I think the most notable announcement was probably the 17" 1280x1024 LCD for $ 999. Since LCDs are sharper than CRTs, a good case could be made for this being roughly equivalent to a 20" CRT with a 19" viewable area for $ 699. That's a major step down from the cheapest 17" LCD I've seen, the $1,150 NEC (Fry's price); the $1,895 Sony doesn't even begin to compete.
This is a downright aggressive price; so much so that it's a great pity there's no version for PC folks. I might well consider bugging the boss for an Apple monitor of that size, resolution and price even though the only Mac I run is at home.
D
PS For those curious about the new Apple Stores, http://www.amazing.com/applestore/ has an account of my trip, complete with photographs and video.
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The BBSs I wrote tended to get eaten up in hard disk crashes; I lost my last two that way.
Certainly my heyday was David's Amazing BBS, a five-line message board + discussion system at (213) 459-5891, which ran from roughly 1987-1991. I confronted many of the moderation issues that Slashdot has. Rob has handled them quite a bit better than I, but to be fair there was a lot less information or ideas on it in those days.
I met several girlfriends through the BBS, and tragically the Internet is just not the source of romance the old BBS world was, for exactly the reasons I hear told here - the Internet is not personal and it's not really a geographically sensitive communications medium; everyone interested in me wound up living a long, long way away.
But while it lasted, it was a lot of fun. I wrote my own software from scratch, running on a 286 with Microport Unix and 4MB RAM. It crashed all the time because Microport was pretty flaky, but people loved the software; I put an enormous amount of creativity into it.
It's too bad those days are gone, and the web just doesn't offer the sort of immediacy - not even Instant Messengers worked as well as chats appearing as people typed and the ability to have quickie conversations with people on other lines. We have a much bigger system now, but it seems to have lost its soul in the process.
D
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Their base home control stuff is pretty nice, actually. Take 'em up on a starter kit offer when you see it. I wish their light dimmer modules worked better, though - if anyone knows of something better at precise control of light intensity that doesn't cost thousands, email me.
But the camera is junk - I saw it demonstrated at Fry's and the quality was abysmal. I wouldn't take it if it was free.
(Disclaimer: I am admittedly the kind of person who blows $900 on digital still cameras and $4,400 on video. I don't like cheap junk; that's what X10 is. In all fairness, cheap junk is probably a bigger market than the kind of pricey non-junk I buy).
D
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I'm confused, didn't you get a very cool and expensive HP box donated for photo.net? I would have thought a Slashdotting would be no problem at all.
D
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I have a feeling you'll appreciate Binky, the cheerful winking paperclip, at ubersoft.net.
http://www.ubersoft.net/d/19990401.html
One of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Thanks to this cartoon, I might almost miss Binky. (Note that this is a series of cartoons that goes on for a while, so yes, you should continue).
Almost.
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One of the most destructive people on my old BBS was a 46 year old man with money to burn. I have every confidence that if you could buy mod points, he would buy up a passel and do some real damage - I could imagine him modding up Natalie Portman to a +5.
Of course the obvious response is that then other people would buy the points to counteract him, and he'd be down in the dungeon again. And the limitation of ratings to no more than +5 would ensure that even unlimited funds could not increase ratings too much. Still, there are enough serious abusers who would want to buy power that I would be worried about the results.
Still, limiting moderator point use to one per message would most likely limit the damage significantly. Otherwise you'd see moderation wars, which I doubt would serve anyone well but the folks selling the points; I could imagine the confusion as messages dropped down to the bottom and zoomed up to the top almost at random.
Perhaps the most promising feature of moderator point purchase and sale is that it might do something that has been incredibly hard: provide a revenue source so sites like Slashdot could be profitable.
Hi back, by the way. Got a real job. Started making real money. Didn't have time for anything else for a long time, so I had to slough off a ton of projects. Drop me an email and I'll respond.
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Sadly, due to all the graphical gingerbread, ads, and so on cluttering up the commercial sites, it's really enjoyable to read articles on FR that are totally unsullied by same. But when I see a news source I like, I will usually read the article over there because I feel a moral responsibility to give them ad revenue.
Free Republic really is a fascinating collection of articles, on a wide range of topics with a wide range of political viewpoints expressed. (Just look for the "barf alerts" to see articles opposing the general FR ideology).
It's true that there are many comments that are poorly thought out, ungrammatical and ill-informed. But there is some intelligent wheat among the chaff, and the byplay between users can be interesting.
It's definitely not as sophisticated as Slashdot, but it's aimed at a population much closer to the American average, so that should surprise no one. And surely the members of the American average deserve some kind of voice? They deserve to be heard, by those who wish to listen.
I ran a bulletin board system some years back that eventually wound up being overrrun by harassers; they're like locusts, and even a small number of them can completely destroy the atmosphere of a board. So on the whole, I have to side with Free Republic here; otherwise, every political forum would be effectively unusable. Even Slashdot, with its sophisticated software and elaborate moderation system, descends into unusability at times. Unfortunately, I suspect the average user could not be lured into understanding, let alone operating, a moderation system. Perhaps I'm wrong; I don't think I am.
Thoughts?
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You can also use myODBC to connect to mySQL using ODBC, which, at least in my experience, works more reliably.
Team FXML's product is excellent for what it does, and has perhaps the best support I have seen for any product, bar none, but it's not as fast or efficient for moving around large amounts of data as ODBC when communicating from a Windows client to a Linux server.
If you need to do updates to a SQL Server database from mySQL or anything else running on Linux, though, it's a godsend - my company has now pushed literally thousands of orders through it without any problems.
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There is also the curious fact that people who get connections that don't work through Covad are not keen on paying their bills.
I am one of those customers; I have a bill of over $300 for bad service (the service literally has not been up for 24 hours without some sort of problem), and my provider (UUNET) is telling me not to pay it, and is getting me on to Rhythms.
I wouldn't be surprised if Covad still winds up billing UUNET for the "service" they gave me; it's just fortunate that UUNET is a company of exceptional financial strength (which also charges high fees so they can afford to eat them on occasion).
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Gelson's is conveniently located in various upscale parts of the Los Angeles area.
Bristol Farms is great, too, but unfortunately I don't have one nearby.
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I should say that I got Covad at the same location and their connection went down for hours during the day. The Rhythms connection, which I replaced it with, is up about 95% of the time (way up from Covad's 50%), and I just gave them my first complaint about it today. I'm hoping for a favourable resolution, so it was probably premature to comment on problems; I've only had the connection for a couple of weeks.
I'm inclined to think they're better than Covad (that saying virtually nothing, of course), and I'd probably use them again - my house just seems to be in an exceptionally poor situation for internet connectivity.
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