Well I run a SDSL line at home and at a seperate office location. At home I am setup with a local carrier (Monmouth County, NJ) monmouth.com and I am setup with NorthPoint for the actual DSL carrier. I had initial problems with the installation that took 2 weeks to solve. There was a lot of running between the three companies, Bell Atlantic, NorthPoint, and Monmouth.com. Wound up being the router at Bell's station was not setup correctly. My local provider Monmouth.com really came through for me on this with some quick service and constant feedback. I have been offline 13 times since 4-11-00 (some of these were power problems), no time was greater then 2 hours, most being around 15 mins.
Now I also run a SDSL line with DSL.net (I think they run NorthPoint at this location to but I do not offically know this, they use the same installers as NorthPoint). First of the salesmen at DSL.net are sharks, they will promise the uneducated everything, e.g. 99.9% uptime (within their own network). The line was setup without a glitch. Within the first month it was down for one whole week, the router was deleted from the system and then for 4 more business days when someone at DSL.net decided to tell Bell's router that I was an ISDN line and not a SDSL line (no idea how that happens, but that is what the Bell repair guy said (they responded very quickly to this location since there are over 100 traditional phone lines in the building)). So all of my problems were internal to DSL.net and their customer service sucked, massive hold times (averaging 7 hours), no callbacks, no status reports and an intollerant attitude at times.
Summation: At home I am canning my SDSL line when the contract runs out, but I will move it to another location when I move if cable is not around. The DSL.net line is being replaced as I type this by a fractional T-1 line. Downtime can cost much more then the $1,000 a month difference, gotta love a guaranteed 3 hour response time.
I am curious, as a bit of a law freek I have stumbled across collective works in copyright law. A collective work would be something like a book written by three seperate authors (this is granted that no special contracts exist between them), or I would imagine a series of postings to a news item on/. would fit as well. In the book senario each person owns their part of the book, but at the same time they ALL own the book. Thus the book cannot be sold, distributed or be sampled without the direct agreement of all parties involved in a creative work.
Now many discussion forums, like AOL, take complete ownership of all content (they have no liability since the CDA was passed I think section 205 deals with this), where as/. leaves ownership to the poster thus making this a colletive work in my mind.
The question would then move on to if a posting is inherantly copyrighted by the poster. In this case I would say yes due to some presidence for it in the art field (writting is still considered art unless it is footnoted or bibliographed if I remember correctly) of copyrights. The main thing that makes each post copyrightable is the fact that/. says you own your post. By submitting it to an open forum where you know it will be published to the public in that ONE forum and that you have not published it in any other location, any republishing of the postings would thus violate copyright.
Now I feel this is a good book to write, but someone might want to take a closer look at the law on this one, the fines for violating patents can be rough.
I am a programmer that has delt with copyright and patent law in the past, so check with a lawyer before you decide what I say is gospel. Pretty much I lay this out as something to help guide people to the right areas in law so they can learn for themselves. Also remember copyright and patent law is torte law, thus it is a God aweful mess.
Well I am not a pure historian, my father, who is, allways says to look at the past to know what will happen tommorow with 90% accuracy. He claims the other 10% goes to creative genius that just cannot be predicted. My father introduced me to the writing/teaching of Chomsky and the hypocracy of history became a definate item of predictability for me. I would reccomend that anyone concerned about media moving to the hands of publicly traded corporations should read Chomsky's Maufactureing Concent. He does a solid analysis of the real dangers to information dissemination and the real way it is controlled by market concerns in traded companies.
The hope that the common market concerns will not reach into/. the way it has in every other media market where the company is publicly traded is just that hope. There is no option given enough time Slashdot will change, look at history for the reasoning.
When one considers that AOL and Time Warner are already publicly traded companies it becomes easy to see that they have allready 'sold out'. The arguments about the controlling of information and the access to that information has been debated since soon after the creation of the printing press. One of the best studies into what controls and drives news media would be the compiled works of Chompsky, especially his work Manufactureing Concent.
One of the main components of his theory on who and what controls the media is based on the fact that almost all media agents are publicly traded. Thus once a company becomes publicly traded they switch from being concerned about being 'idealistic' to makeing sure two main things do not happen, their stock drops in value and a corporate takeover does not occur. Thus these publicly traded companies start behaveing the same as a natural action. Why? Simple the cross investing (an individual or company that invests in two competeing companies, AOL and Prodigy) that occurs ensures that the company chairs have to maintain policy that remains in check with their competition.
The end result is a system with well defined rules and few if any unexpected actions on the part of the companies. Since these companies allready were publicly traded we will see little difference in the quality of the product since the same forces will be driving their policy makers.
The one thing that leaves me wondering is what will happen here on/. now that Andover is a public company. I suspect little since the industry is so new and fast paced that the typical concerns of takeover and stock devaluation is minor compared to more established markets. But as ironic as it might sound, only Time(the magazine) will tell.
At work we are just starting to impliment it. The best is the cost... try ~$30,000 to start and then like ~$80,000 for it to work on our 600,000 plus links and then 15% a year for support... but it is worth it... navigation of complex biological philums and the sort is great through this interface... even cooler in my mind is their linguistic tools... the summarizer is our next purchase... thing is I have this odd feeling I have seen this design before, like 3 years ago and on some waco freinds unix box... hummm
Slashdot Mirror
Well I run a SDSL line at home and at a seperate office location. At home I am setup with a local carrier (Monmouth County, NJ) monmouth.com and I am setup with NorthPoint for the actual DSL carrier. I had initial problems with the installation that took 2 weeks to solve. There was a lot of running between the three companies, Bell Atlantic, NorthPoint, and Monmouth.com. Wound up being the router at Bell's station was not setup correctly. My local provider Monmouth.com really came through for me on this with some quick service and constant feedback. I have been offline 13 times since 4-11-00 (some of these were power problems), no time was greater then 2 hours, most being around 15 mins.
Now I also run a SDSL line with DSL.net (I think they run NorthPoint at this location to but I do not offically know this, they use the same installers as NorthPoint). First of the salesmen at DSL.net are sharks, they will promise the uneducated everything, e.g. 99.9% uptime (within their own network). The line was setup without a glitch. Within the first month it was down for one whole week, the router was deleted from the system and then for 4 more business days when someone at DSL.net decided to tell Bell's router that I was an ISDN line and not a SDSL line (no idea how that happens, but that is what the Bell repair guy said (they responded very quickly to this location since there are over 100 traditional phone lines in the building)). So all of my problems were internal to DSL.net and their customer service sucked, massive hold times (averaging 7 hours), no callbacks, no status reports and an intollerant attitude at times.
Summation: At home I am canning my SDSL line when the contract runs out, but I will move it to another location when I move if cable is not around. The DSL.net line is being replaced as I type this by a fractional T-1 line. Downtime can cost much more then the $1,000 a month difference, gotta love a guaranteed 3 hour response time.
I am curious, as a bit of a law freek I have stumbled across collective works in copyright law. A collective work would be something like a book written by three seperate authors (this is granted that no special contracts exist between them), or I would imagine a series of postings to a news item on /. would fit as well. In the book senario each person owns their part of the book, but at the same time they ALL own the book. Thus the book cannot be sold, distributed or be sampled without the direct agreement of all parties involved in a creative work.
Now many discussion forums, like AOL, take complete ownership of all content (they have no liability since the CDA was passed I think section 205 deals with this), where as /. leaves ownership to the poster thus making this a colletive work in my mind.
The question would then move on to if a posting is inherantly copyrighted by the poster. In this case I would say yes due to some presidence for it in the art field (writting is still considered art unless it is footnoted or bibliographed if I remember correctly) of copyrights. The main thing that makes each post copyrightable is the fact that /. says you own your post. By submitting it to an open forum where you know it will be published to the public in that ONE forum and that you have not published it in any other location, any republishing of the postings would thus violate copyright.
Now I feel this is a good book to write, but someone might want to take a closer look at the law on this one, the fines for violating patents can be rough.
I am a programmer that has delt with copyright and patent law in the past, so check with a lawyer before you decide what I say is gospel. Pretty much I lay this out as something to help guide people to the right areas in law so they can learn for themselves. Also remember copyright and patent law is torte law, thus it is a God aweful mess.
The hope that the common market concerns will not reach into /. the way it has in every other media market where the company is publicly traded is just that hope. There is no option given enough time Slashdot will change, look at history for the reasoning.
When one considers that AOL and Time Warner are already publicly traded companies it becomes easy to see that they have allready 'sold out'. The arguments about the controlling of information and the access to that information has been debated since soon after the creation of the printing press. One of the best studies into what controls and drives news media would be the compiled works of Chompsky, especially his work Manufactureing Concent.
/. now that Andover is a public company. I suspect little since the industry is so new and fast paced that the typical concerns of takeover and stock devaluation is minor compared to more established markets. But as ironic as it might sound, only Time(the magazine) will tell.
One of the main components of his theory on who and what controls the media is based on the fact that almost all media agents are publicly traded. Thus once a company becomes publicly traded they switch from being concerned about being 'idealistic' to makeing sure two main things do not happen, their stock drops in value and a corporate takeover does not occur. Thus these publicly traded companies start behaveing the same as a natural action. Why? Simple the cross investing (an individual or company that invests in two competeing companies, AOL and Prodigy) that occurs ensures that the company chairs have to maintain policy that remains in check with their competition.
The end result is a system with well defined rules and few if any unexpected actions on the part of the companies. Since these companies allready were publicly traded we will see little difference in the quality of the product since the same forces will be driving their policy makers.
The one thing that leaves me wondering is what will happen here on
At work we are just starting to impliment it. The best is the cost... try ~$30,000 to start and then like ~$80,000 for it to work on our 600,000 plus links and then 15% a year for support... but it is worth it... navigation of complex biological philums and the sort is great through this interface... even cooler in my mind is their linguistic tools... the summarizer is our next purchase... thing is I have this odd feeling I have seen this design before, like 3 years ago and on some waco freinds unix box... hummm