This kind of thing goes on in the telephony business all the time, even if it is never an official policy.
Example: I had Comcast cable for net access, and Dish Network for the comedy channel (heheh). I discovered that if I got basic cable tv service, Comcast would automatically upgrade my internet speed to the highest possible. Cost of basic cable? $15/month. Discount with existing internet service? $10/mo. Cost to get much faster porn downloads, um, internet access? $5/month.
So, I ordered basic cable, the installer showed up, and while I wasnt looking, unplugged my satellite cable, and ran the analog cable tv signal over those wires. I said, uh, what are you doing? Putting in your service, sir. Yeah, well, there's nothing in your order about disrupting other services. Drill a hole, dammit!
The guy knew exactly what he was doing. After I got all that sorted out, I unplugged my basic cable (dont use it), called and complained to the office about the guy's conduct, and they removed the install fee from my bill. Bastards.
Skimming through the commentary, I have noted several common assumptions:
1) Faster internet access is necessarily better.
Although I would heartily agree that faster internet might be *nicer*, it isn't necessarily 'better' for our country, economically or otherwise. For most applications, the difference between a 1.5mbit download and 6mbits is just not earth-shattering enough to justify the upgrade of the national grid.
2) 'Robber Barons' and their influence-peddling lobbyists are holding us back.
Eh, yes, I am sure the large pipeline companies wish to have less competition. But, any of you are free to attempt to build out a competing infrastructure right now. And to those who would point out that certain municipalities are in the hip pockets of their telephony Masters, and grant monopolies of access to them, fine. Route around them, they are, after all, damage.
3) I have a right to faster internet.
No, you don't. Read that again: you do not have a right to any internet, let alone faster internet access. The internet is an incredibly convenient economic and information distribution grid. But it is not your birthright, you arent entitled to it, and you cant have any legally if you dont pay somebody somewhere along the line.
4) Free markets dont work, we need government regulation right now!
No, we dont. Read #3, you arent entitled to competition, innovation, or even ease of use. The government doesnt have any business getting into the business of information delivery. The whole roaring success of the internet is because it was largely free of government interference.
That is essentially what the title of this story should be. The USSR built the AK47 first to equip their own peasants, then exported it as a cheap and easy-to-produce tool of destabilization in other countries. It was designed to be copied... very hypocritical now to claim IP rights to it.
Fine, but then do not sell your product as internet service if you are going to re-engineer the internet.
What 're-engineering'? The internet is a network of computers. They cooperatively talk to each other. Some parts of the internet run on wires that I personally own. My customers who buy my internet service are either satisified that they are getting the access they paid for, or not.
What I got from the AllOfMP3.COM statement is, "We're not doing anything illegal, and our prices are going up in September as a result of the pressure from the price-fixing music gangsters in other countries."
I hate to break it to the crime lords of the American music industry, but allofmp3.com is operating legally within the Russian system. This is NOT piracy.
I just put more money in my account, guess I'll go download a bunch more music I wouldn't buy here in the USA.
Thus far, everyone against net neutrality legislation has had a profit motive. Most of the people against it do not, though some (like Google) have a "we don't want to bleed red" motive. Most folks want net neutrality because a lack of net neutrality allows big telcos like AT&T who have lots of end users to strong-arm smaller companies like hosting providers and similar for what amounts to protection money to avoid having the performance of their customers' access to those end users artificially degraded. The result will be less availability of services, and a gradual compartmentalization of the Internet by ISP, and eventually a complete breakdown of the power of the Internet to serve the consumer.
I am against Net Neutrality legislation because I have a Don't-Tell-Me-What-I-Can-Do-With-My-Own-Network motive. If I were AT&T, Comcast, or Mom-n-Pop ISP Co., I wouldn't want some legislator telling me I can't do what I want with the traffic in my own network. Now, if I am a monster like AT&T, and I choose to slow down Google's content in order to extort money from them, well, I've just managed to devalue my product, maybe to the point where I lose significant market share.
What these companies who are fantasizing about becoming internet toll collectors don't seem to realize is that the net's value increases only when we connect more stuff to it. And the faster the connections are, the more its value grows.
Consumers only get to enjoy flat rate pricing when 1) the service has become a commodity, or 2) that service is regulated heavily.
But consumers don't have a right to high-speed internet access, and legislators have no business telling technology companies how to manage their business assets.
My company took a look at OpenLaszlo, and the developers thought it was going to be the answer to our website make-over, but we found that Laszlo is not quite 'there' yet. Some of the controls are very slow; too slow for serious work. Regretfully, we have decided that we need something a little more mature. We're currently looking at Backbase.
I have a Tivo Series 2, and I love it. It works, period. We scrub our lineup a lot, so we don't have disk space issues. I was smart enough to buy the lifetime $250 subscription when I purchased the box, so I have no worries there, until the hardware itself dies.
The issue of Tivo being acquired by someone else could end up very good or very bad, depending on who does the acquisition.
Apple? Good. It would only enhance their product line, and Tivo's viability.
Cisco? Bad. Cisco is of the old school, I-Have-To-Control-Everything culture. Would Cisco support the level of hacking that Tivo has done? I submit that they would not.
I've been looking hard at MythTV. The latest version looks like it runs rings around Tivo if you are Linux-familiar. But I think I'm going to wait until I make the jump to HDTV before I start building a Myth box, unless 1) my Tivo dies, or 2) some broadcast flag legislation ends up being passed.
This whole concept that one of the parties in our political system would be able to muster enough influence, smarts, financing, and material resources necessary to guarantee broadband access to all would be laughable if it were not taken so seriously by otherwise rational adults.
This is nothing but pandering to buy votes with taxpayer money. Again.
And even if our national will became so unified that we thought universal broadband access would be a good thing, I certainly would not agree that it were so. After all, if we swelled government to the enormous sluggoth that it would have to be to create such an infrastructure, and assuming that it could actually be built in that time (or even in ten years!) who OWNS that infrastructure? You and me? NOPE. It becomes federal property, with all the controls, spying, red tape, taxes, and ineffective management that all government projects of this ilk exhibit.
I think you are being a bit simplistic with your concern. Yes, you can rapidly hedge yourself in to certain viewpoints with your ever-more-discriminating preferences, but at some point, you are going to get bored with the selection you are presented. At that time, you are going to do what I do, which is create a new preference list which has a completely different set of tastes, and see what sticks.
If Microsoft has suddenly realised that they need to 'exploit' AJAX, great. Make it easy to code. I've been looking at Atlas (atlas.asp.net) and I am unimpressed with the difficulty of getting it working for my application. MS either needs to get better documentation out there, or rethink the framework.
I've also been looking at OpenLaszlo (Openlaszlo.org) and although it is designed for a much jazzier UI than I need, it might do the trick for me. I'm still pondering about whether I want to deal with the Tomcat/Java dependency on the server or not...
My last option if I want to implement a bunch of AJAX behavior is to write a bunch of JavaScript routines myself. I did this for my last project, which is OK, but I feel sorry for the next web developer who comes along and has to maintain that application.
I'm leaning towards Laszlo, just because my development timeframe is very short (hey, what else is new?)
But the refusal to budge only strengthened opposition, and now the world's governments are expected to agree a deal to award themselves ultimate control. It will be officially raised at a UN summit of world leaders next month and, faced with international consensus, there is little the US government can do but acquiesce.
In other news, representatives from the E.U. and U.N. announced that they were ready to introduce a deal in which most of America's 'stuff' is redistributed throughout the world.
"Americans have a lot more 'stuff' than everyone else, and we've only realized recently that, just because Americans happen to reside where most of the 'stuff' is piled up, doesn't mean that it is 'their' stuff. It is immaterial that we simultaneously villify Americans for working too hard, then sneer at them for buying 'stuff' with all that money they earned, while, the French, say, are feeling superior about 35-hour work weeks. Obviously, an international body consisting of member countries who want to slit each other's throats would be a far more effective governing entity than ICANN, the international outfit that has been successfully managing the Internet's root servers for years."
Right, but have you ever noticed how many successful Free / Open Source software projects use modular architecture? Take (from my own area) Nessus, or Snort. Both consist of a core engine and frameworks that accept plug-ins and modules. Actually they both also have a lower level that allows ordinary non-programmer users to contribute signatures (rules) to the project.) This applies also to Apache, Mozilla, the Linux kernel, and plenty more.
The reason we tend to have more modular code in the Open Source world is that typically small teams of volunteers or small teams of coporate-sponsored part-timers work on the code.
The Open Source development process, in practice, is very different from what Microsoft does. People 'contribute' code to Open Source projects; Microsoft programmers have 'deliverables.'
"1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards
However,
1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!
Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of.net as their claim that MS will never sue.
...
Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies bye the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)"
I cry bullshit.
Microsoft can't charge anybody anything for implementing C# or any other.NET technology they've submitted to ECMA.
Well, this confirms for me that Eric has this need to flame other people to make himself feel good.
I've encountered him a couple of other times, including once when he responded to me personally for some email commentary about one of his blogs, and each time, his response has been an over-the-top panty thrashing for the unfortunate target of his self-righteous indignation.
Phooey. His email to Microsoft was inappropriate and childish. How about 'no thanks, I disagree with your corporate culture.'?
I recently worked at a company where one of our web applications required a fast search capability of thousands of documents, and the alpha programmer chose Lucene instead of trying to make it work with a relational database. I was very impressed with Lucene's speed and efficiency.
On a side note, perhaps the worst implication of the a-bomb dropping was what's called the "genocidal mentality." The idea is that now that the idea of an ultimate weapon to wipe out so many people at once has entered our consciousness, humans have developed an inherent mental threshold that is much lower than that of leaders in previous centuries, termed "psychic numbing."
and
So whether or not the bomb was good at ending the war, it may have had more deadly consequences decades later. It's something worth thinking about that isn't typically brought up in pragmatic discussions about war-termination scenarios for the pacific theater in WWII.
This is so much psycho-babble.
People have been acting atrociously to each other since we've been able to pick up rocks and bash each other's skulls.
It took a seige of three years for Rome to bring down Carthage, and at the end, when the Romans finally got over the walls, the Carthiginians resisted in an effort to fight pretty much to the last man. Ok, so the Romans set fire to the whole city, and put to the sword anyone who did not immediately surrender. Roman unit after Roman unit had to be rotated in and out again to deal with the weariness and sheer grisliness of the task at hand, which was the slaughter of an entire city state. I think it took at least a week.
They were so angry at the restistance of the Carthiginians that they fucking plowed the city under.
Don't try to guilt-trip me about nuclear psychopathologies. The Japanese picked the wrong people to start a war with.
Re:I only use the compiler, not IDE because
on
Visual Studio Hacks
·
· Score: 1
And don't judge the editor by website screenshots alone, it looks like the color scheme and font styles were put together by a disgruntled employee.
I googled Source Insight, went to their web page, and clicked around until I found screenshots. The color scheme is hideous, so, no thanks on using that product. Hmmm, they must know that their app looks like ass, because they don't have a screenshots link on the front page.
But, sometimes, they hit the mark. I think, for instance, they are the first to use a web browser to present operating system controls to the user. That is actually a cool idea, despite the security problems they have with IE.
Is Ballmer a bloated overpaid gasbag? Yes. Wouldn't you be too, if your job was to rag about how wonderful MS is all day?
Slashdot Mirror
This kind of thing goes on in the telephony business all the time, even if it is never an official policy.
Example: I had Comcast cable for net access, and Dish Network for the comedy channel (heheh). I discovered that if I got basic cable tv service, Comcast would automatically upgrade my internet speed to the highest possible. Cost of basic cable? $15/month. Discount with existing internet service? $10/mo. Cost to get much faster porn downloads, um, internet access? $5/month.
So, I ordered basic cable, the installer showed up, and while I wasnt looking, unplugged my satellite cable, and ran the analog cable tv signal over those wires. I said, uh, what are you doing? Putting in your service, sir. Yeah, well, there's nothing in your order about disrupting other services. Drill a hole, dammit!
The guy knew exactly what he was doing. After I got all that sorted out, I unplugged my basic cable (dont use it), called and complained to the office about the guy's conduct, and they removed the install fee from my bill. Bastards.
Sony says that rootkits deliver value to the customer...
Skimming through the commentary, I have noted several common assumptions:
1) Faster internet access is necessarily better.
Although I would heartily agree that faster internet might be *nicer*, it isn't necessarily 'better' for our country, economically or otherwise. For most applications, the difference between a 1.5mbit download and 6mbits is just not earth-shattering enough to justify the upgrade of the national grid.
2) 'Robber Barons' and their influence-peddling lobbyists are holding us back.
Eh, yes, I am sure the large pipeline companies wish to have less competition. But, any of you are free to attempt to build out a competing infrastructure right now. And to those who would point out that certain municipalities are in the hip pockets of their telephony Masters, and grant monopolies of access to them, fine. Route around them, they are, after all, damage.
3) I have a right to faster internet.
No, you don't. Read that again: you do not have a right to any internet, let alone faster internet access. The internet is an incredibly convenient economic and information distribution grid. But it is not your birthright, you arent entitled to it, and you cant have any legally if you dont pay somebody somewhere along the line.
4) Free markets dont work, we need government regulation right now!
No, we dont. Read #3, you arent entitled to competition, innovation, or even ease of use. The government doesnt have any business getting into the business of information delivery. The whole roaring success of the internet is because it was largely free of government interference.
Discuss.
civilians arming themselves with stinger missiles and radio jammers
That is essentially what the title of this story should be. The USSR built the AK47 first to equip their own peasants, then exported it as a cheap and easy-to-produce tool of destabilization in other countries. It was designed to be copied... very hypocritical now to claim IP rights to it.
What 're-engineering'? The internet is a network of computers. They cooperatively talk to each other. Some parts of the internet run on wires that I personally own. My customers who buy my internet service are either satisified that they are getting the access they paid for, or not.
What I got from the AllOfMP3.COM statement is, "We're not doing anything illegal, and our prices are going up in September as a result of the pressure from the price-fixing music gangsters in other countries."
I hate to break it to the crime lords of the American music industry, but allofmp3.com is operating legally within the Russian system. This is NOT piracy.
I just put more money in my account, guess I'll go download a bunch more music I wouldn't buy here in the USA.
I am against Net Neutrality legislation because I have a Don't-Tell-Me-What-I-Can-Do-With-My-Own-Network motive. If I were AT&T, Comcast, or Mom-n-Pop ISP Co., I wouldn't want some legislator telling me I can't do what I want with the traffic in my own network. Now, if I am a monster like AT&T, and I choose to slow down Google's content in order to extort money from them, well, I've just managed to devalue my product, maybe to the point where I lose significant market share.
What these companies who are fantasizing about becoming internet toll collectors don't seem to realize is that the net's value increases only when we connect more stuff to it. And the faster the connections are, the more its value grows.
Consumers only get to enjoy flat rate pricing when 1) the service has become a commodity, or 2) that service is regulated heavily.
But consumers don't have a right to high-speed internet access, and legislators have no business telling technology companies how to manage their business assets.
My company took a look at OpenLaszlo, and the developers thought it was going to be the answer to our website make-over, but we found that Laszlo is not quite 'there' yet. Some of the controls are very slow; too slow for serious work. Regretfully, we have decided that we need something a little more mature. We're currently looking at Backbase.
I have a Tivo Series 2, and I love it. It works, period. We scrub our lineup a lot, so we don't have disk space issues. I was smart enough to buy the lifetime $250 subscription when I purchased the box, so I have no worries there, until the hardware itself dies.
The issue of Tivo being acquired by someone else could end up very good or very bad, depending on who does the acquisition.
Apple? Good. It would only enhance their product line, and Tivo's viability.
Cisco? Bad. Cisco is of the old school, I-Have-To-Control-Everything culture. Would Cisco support the level of hacking that Tivo has done? I submit that they would not.
I've been looking hard at MythTV. The latest version looks like it runs rings around Tivo if you are Linux-familiar. But I think I'm going to wait until I make the jump to HDTV before I start building a Myth box, unless 1) my Tivo dies, or 2) some broadcast flag legislation ends up being passed.
This whole concept that one of the parties in our political system would be able to muster enough influence, smarts, financing, and material resources necessary to guarantee broadband access to all would be laughable if it were not taken so seriously by otherwise rational adults.
This is nothing but pandering to buy votes with taxpayer money. Again.
And even if our national will became so unified that we thought universal broadband access would be a good thing, I certainly would not agree that it were so. After all, if we swelled government to the enormous sluggoth that it would have to be to create such an infrastructure, and assuming that it could actually be built in that time (or even in ten years!) who OWNS that infrastructure? You and me? NOPE. It becomes federal property, with all the controls, spying, red tape, taxes, and ineffective management that all government projects of this ilk exhibit.
No thank you.
Safety, bought with Liberty, isn't really safe after all.
I think you are being a bit simplistic with your concern. Yes, you can rapidly hedge yourself in to certain viewpoints with your ever-more-discriminating preferences, but at some point, you are going to get bored with the selection you are presented. At that time, you are going to do what I do, which is create a new preference list which has a completely different set of tastes, and see what sticks.
Power to the people, dude.
If Microsoft has suddenly realised that they need to 'exploit' AJAX, great. Make it easy to code. I've been looking at Atlas (atlas.asp.net) and I am unimpressed with the difficulty of getting it working for my application. MS either needs to get better documentation out there, or rethink the framework.
I've also been looking at OpenLaszlo (Openlaszlo.org) and although it is designed for a much jazzier UI than I need, it might do the trick for me. I'm still pondering about whether I want to deal with the Tomcat/Java dependency on the server or not...
My last option if I want to implement a bunch of AJAX behavior is to write a bunch of JavaScript routines myself. I did this for my last project, which is OK, but I feel sorry for the next web developer who comes along and has to maintain that application.
I'm leaning towards Laszlo, just because my development timeframe is very short (hey, what else is new?)
In other news, representatives from the E.U. and U.N. announced that they were ready to introduce a deal in which most of America's 'stuff' is redistributed throughout the world.
"Americans have a lot more 'stuff' than everyone else, and we've only realized recently that, just because Americans happen to reside where most of the 'stuff' is piled up, doesn't mean that it is 'their' stuff. It is immaterial that we simultaneously villify Americans for working too hard, then sneer at them for buying 'stuff' with all that money they earned, while, the French, say, are feeling superior about 35-hour work weeks. Obviously, an international body consisting of member countries who want to slit each other's throats would be a far more effective governing entity than ICANN, the international outfit that has been successfully managing the Internet's root servers for years."
Well, there goes my weekend plan...
The reason we tend to have more modular code in the Open Source world is that typically small teams of volunteers or small teams of coporate-sponsored part-timers work on the code.
The Open Source development process, in practice, is very different from what Microsoft does. People 'contribute' code to Open Source projects; Microsoft programmers have 'deliverables.'
Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies bye the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)"
I cry bullshit.
Microsoft can't charge anybody anything for implementing C# or any other .NET technology they've submitted to ECMA.
Well, this confirms for me that Eric has this need to flame other people to make himself feel good.
I've encountered him a couple of other times, including once when he responded to me personally for some email commentary about one of his blogs, and each time, his response has been an over-the-top panty thrashing for the unfortunate target of his self-righteous indignation.
Phooey. His email to Microsoft was inappropriate and childish. How about 'no thanks, I disagree with your corporate culture.'?
What a dweeb.
In other news, dogs like to sniff around alot and lick themselves!
I recently worked at a company where one of our web applications required a fast search capability of thousands of documents, and the alpha programmer chose Lucene instead of trying to make it work with a relational database. I was very impressed with Lucene's speed and efficiency.
and
So whether or not the bomb was good at ending the war, it may have had more deadly consequences decades later. It's something worth thinking about that isn't typically brought up in pragmatic discussions about war-termination scenarios for the pacific theater in WWII.
This is so much psycho-babble.
People have been acting atrociously to each other since we've been able to pick up rocks and bash each other's skulls.
It took a seige of three years for Rome to bring down Carthage, and at the end, when the Romans finally got over the walls, the Carthiginians resisted in an effort to fight pretty much to the last man. Ok, so the Romans set fire to the whole city, and put to the sword anyone who did not immediately surrender. Roman unit after Roman unit had to be rotated in and out again to deal with the weariness and sheer grisliness of the task at hand, which was the slaughter of an entire city state. I think it took at least a week.
They were so angry at the restistance of the Carthiginians that they fucking plowed the city under.
Don't try to guilt-trip me about nuclear psychopathologies. The Japanese picked the wrong people to start a war with.
I googled Source Insight, went to their web page, and clicked around until I found screenshots. The color scheme is hideous, so, no thanks on using that product. Hmmm, they must know that their app looks like ass, because they don't have a screenshots link on the front page.
I hate Microsoft. Hate, hate, hate.
But, sometimes, they hit the mark. I think, for instance, they are the first to use a web browser to present operating system controls to the user. That is actually a cool idea, despite the security problems they have with IE.
Is Ballmer a bloated overpaid gasbag? Yes. Wouldn't you be too, if your job was to rag about how wonderful MS is all day?