While I don't think this particular case is the final straw, there's enough out there to indicate that Pokemon is very much on the decline:
The last Pokemon show has aired in Japan, bringing the total to about 160 some episodes. Warner Bros. current have the rights to about 100+ of those, and will probably get the rest as 4Kids translates them. However, there's only a limited number of episodes left; unlike certain other TV shows in the states that get run into the ground (The Simpsons, for example), the show had a story arc, and it finished it and ended.
Pokemon have been reported as tools of the devil, etc etc, by a number of critics.
Pokemon toys was the big hit this Christmas. There's yet to have been a single popular toy to continue dominating Christmas sales two years in a row. Anyone remember Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tamagachi, or Furbys?
Pokemon card trading has been banned from many schools because students spent more time doing that than learning.
A wrongful death lawsuit may be brought against Pokemon and has forced the recall of millions of pokemon toys: a toddler suffocated to death when she placed half of a Pokeball that came from Burger King over her nose and mouth, and couldn't breath.
Pokemon, the cartoon, is overplayed way too much on WB networks: Pokemon's on about 7 to 9 times (depending on the weekend schedules) on the WB network, and so far, WB's only had 60-some episodes to rotate through. Doesn't take a math genius to see how fast it would take to get boring.
"Pokemon the First Movie" was a practical failure in the states: sure, it got a profit for the WB as they spent nearly nothing to get it, but compared to something like Toy Story 2, it did not get a lot of return viewers as some were expecting.
Pokemon's been spoofed by MAD and South Park.:D.
It's not that Pokemon is bad, but it was pushed in our faces to the point where you could not ignore it, and now people are getting disgusted with the entier concept and are now fighting back.
It will be interesting to see how the zero g stuff is done. I have a bad feeling that when the movie goes to test audiences, there might be problems with it. EG emphasizes that in z-g, there is no fixed "down", only how you define it, and Ender uses that to his advantage in winning the various games. Thus, the game room should have no features of a normal "gravity" room ; you should not be able to tell what the difference between the floor or the ceiling or the wall is. And this might not fly over well with the test audiences - typical humans need points of reference, and without expected features, the audience may become queasy with the room, and so the producers may go back and add just enough features to do that (like putting lights on the 'ceiling', which would ruin how the room is supposed to work.
However, I may be overconvcerned about this. I'm more worried that they add tons of space-battle footage (since this *is* a story about humans vs aliens) at to make the film be what was expected for the general audience rather than those familar with the book. If the latter is true, there should be almost no space shots in this, maybe a docking scene, but that's it. No battles, no nothing.
For sites that appear to nix Linux users for no apparent reason, there is a simple arguement that should be applied:
Point out to their webmaster that their site is probably not useable by people with alternative browsers, particularly blind people, and then point them to the AOL lawsuit that is currently in the works.
Don't necessarily bring up Linux, or the requirements for Javascript or the fact that a certain required plugin only works on platform X. But tell them that their page is not going to be usable by handicapped people, and they should make the small but necessarily fixes to remove excessive obstiticals to make their page usable by all.
I'd also like to see someone start a page on various.com sites that were redesigned after the browser handicap was pointed out, sort of a victory list. Get something like that going, with a good number of large.com sites, and you might actually have more sites that look good. (and get these types of stories off Slashdot, as it's beginning to look like SW:TPM stories, with a new story for every little bit of trivia)
Besides the lack of app software, there is a significant lack of game software. Sure, we've got Q3A and UT, Civ and a handful of others, but the number of game titles for the PC is hundreds of times larger for Windows than Linux. In addition, the people that tend to develop Linux tend to favor the FPS type games, and which suggests that other types would not do as well; consider the surprise hit of Roller Coaster Tycoon, or what everyone is expecting to be the big selling next year, The Sims. For some reason, the attitute of Linux users and these games don't mesh well, and thus, there won't appear to be a big push for them. But these ARE the types of games that mainstream users like, and if they aren't available for Linux, there's no reason to go that way.
Most everything else is important, but game software needs to be taken serious to get Linux onto the average Joe desktops.
CNN's focus on this article is NOT etoy.com vs eToys.com. It's on how script kiddies can readily and easily cause a pure e-commerce vessle to sink if it's not well prepared.
Now, let the ranting begin:
1) The only time that I would ever advocate a DoS attack on a site is never. There is no reason to do so; sure, you might put it down for a while (etoys reported 98% instead of 100% reliability during the last few weeks), but if anything it could lead to worse things (see below). There are more effective ways to state your dislike for something.
2) CNN's not wrong; their article on the etoy/etoys things is truth. Just using a different set of words that seems to put etoys on the right side of the thing. Words are very powerful, but you can't blame CNN for misusing them.
3) I really don't like this idea of DoS attacks, especially in light of this article. Chain of events: All over e-commerce they read that a service can be put down because of DoS (they won't care why the DoS was initiated); Etoys says they have to use custom-built DoS prevention tricks to stop it; E-commerce security experts all up in arms on how to stop this; e-commerence management wonders how to easily stop it; e-commerce turns to US Government (using large bags of money) and asks them to stop it; US Government bans all TCPIP tools except port 80's. Ok, so the last one's going a bit far, but I don't doubt that this series of events can happen. Just as with the question of linking, overly long patent and trademarks, poor patents, and other junk, stuff like this only kills the net for anyone not involved in e-commerce, and even then, may take some lowend e-commerce sites down.
Moral of the story: PLEASE DONT BE A SCRIPT KIDDIE.:-P
One key thing about most of these type of revolts is that if they are going to go anywhere, they need media attention. Since this has now been mentioned in Wired, I suspect we'll be seeing snippets of it in other publications (like CNN or Time soon enough), and then that will attract the needed attention to get Amazon's ball rolling.
This sounds very similar to what has been hush-hushed over in MI - a tax on internet purchases. However, I don't think this is considered a use tax here, but more of a sales tax. Supposedly, it's been in place for several years too. Yeeesh.
Very good points: we are at the point where the speed of the processor doesn't matter, but now it's the amount of RAM and the speed of the media that will slow down the program.
And what's very sad is that with faster and faster chips, application programmers think that they'll be developing for thoses really fast computers, and more and more of today's programs have a lot of chrome that probably is fine on a P3, but on low end machine, the chrome slows down the program. Sure, I expect that a billion FPU calculations will take a longer time on a slow machine, but there is no reason for the chrome to drag to a crawl - chrome-type feature should be slim, trim, and ideally optional.
(And this isn't just happening with Wintel users, while both KDE and GNOME are great efforts, there *is* a lot of chrome that slows down their basic function on a low-end linux box).
At this point, we shouldn't be getting too excited about faster processors; the next step in processor speeds will require nanotechnology to stay within heat sink and FCC limits. Instead, we should be focusing on optimizing the processor usage within programs.
There's actually nothing wrong with suggesting to store 10 gal/person of fresh water. The best advice regarding preparing for Y2K is to be ready for a natural disaster. This means: have a flashlight, a battery-powered radio, candles, food that need not be cooked or can be cooked easily, and extra water. No hoarding or anything, but just common sense.
And before I get too far, the war is NOT to make all sites Linux-accessable. The war is to make all web sites usable under any standards- following browsing situation, from the lastest IE/NS versions, to Lynx, to blind/visually impared users, to WebTV users, to cel phone uses. HTML is meant to gracefully degrade when the browsing situation cannot handle certain elements (such as IMG on text browsers).
Key issues to do this is separating presentation from content (thanks to the use of style sheets), providing alternate content when appropriate (using ALT tags as well as the much-welcomed OBJECT tag), and in general, making sure to validate the HTML code you write (just as you would use "use Strict" in perl, or compile your programs for errors in C or other languages).
Unfortunately, I'd estimate 90% of commercial websites (and a larger percentage of personal pages) do not follow the above. The crap of HTML tag soup that FrontPage and other HTML authoring software puts out is poor quality, and while it's ok to set up the basic HTML, most good authors know they have to clean up the tag soup before putting it out. Even then, too many people try to force HTML into acting like a desktop publishing language.
What will help is the blind accessibly lawsuit against AOL. Before that was announced, I know I heard rumblings of a major suit of this nature by sight-impared people because they could not use a service provided by the gov't. Sure, it's still a long way before Joe Q's "WAY PAST K00L HOMEPAGE" is going to need to be site-impared accessible, but there's plenty of reason to make more commercial sites more accessible.
The best way for everyone on the Linux side to help is that the next time a site like Fox.com comes up where Linux users are shunned, email said site maintainers and point out it's not just Linux that is shunned, but anyone not using a "status quo" box. Sure, that might only be 5% of the potental viewing audience, but that's also 5% of potental customers. Point them to sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com which run down the bad tricks that should be avoided, and to www.w3c.org which have validators and other helpful information for writing clean HTML. And the key thing to remember is that it takes more work to make a web site less accessible than it does to make them fully accessible.
IM is very compariable to IRC. That is, your client sends data to a server, and the server does the appropriate broadcasting to other clients that are intended to recieve the message. However, the difference here is that IRC is generally a distributed server that is run by a non-commercial entity, while the IM server is a single server that is being run by a corporate entity. Additionally, there is some degree of anonymousity on IRC, while IM has a nice little database of usernames, emails, and *potental* surfing/chatting habits. This means that any non-AOL request to the AOL server may be accessing a personal info database that AOL has built up , and they don't want that, unless they are getting paid for it.
The solution is to redevelop the IM application, using a predefinied standard, and then setting a large number of good-faith servers around the globe that can be used to store the necessary IM info. This would all be open-sourced, and thus there would be no problems with commercial interests coming into play. The servers can be linked in an IRC-like fashion, with appropriate broadcast messages sent out among servers when a new user is added or similar events.
There's not enough details in this article to say whether the CC# was stolen, or was guessed at by a random # generator. I know that about a year ago, I was victim to the random # generator fraud that charged $19.95 to my card, enough to rake in money, but not enough to tip ppl off that aren't careful with their statements. Fortunatley, I caught it, called my CC bank, and got the money removed.
The thing with the latter is due to the fact that most CC # checkers check the numbers, and not the expiration date. Thus, pass 10^16 numbers to one of the sites, and you're bound to get some cash. Once they have a number that works, then they're set.
Therefore, he might have been hit with this instead of true CC# stealing (It's really hard to get at cookies although there are some bugs, but require a lot of assumptions on the end user's actions). This only suggests to me that we need to make sure that CC# verification systems are more secure, and ask for the experiation date in addition to all other info. Or even better, add a PGP-like key to CC# info to make it more secure.
I've been meaning to write an essay for/. on why I think the net has been screwed up or how it is being screwed up. Katz hit the nail on the head: commerce finally discovered it.
Interesting to note, however, is that Katz mentions that (paraphrasing) the Net and the Web have had a generation to develop to get where it is today. The Net has been around since the 70s. However, without the HTTPD protocol and the HTML markup language, or equivalent mechanisms, the net would still be solely the realm of academia and those few fortunates that had net feeds to play MUDs and only a thousand newsgroups. Why? Before the Web was developed, using the net was arcane: you had to know weird unix commands to get files, and there was no simple point-and-click like interface for these tasks. 99% of the population would never had begun to understood these things, and the same goes with e-commerce. Without the web, a few companies may have gotten onto the net, and maybe have had email addresses for contact, but certainly no storefronts or the like.
The Web has been both a major boon to the Net, as well as a benefit. However, there needs to be a balance between the profittering of ecommerce and the free sharing of information between peoples for the web to work as intended.
MS reduced the cost of the OS (not upgrade) to the large OEMs in order to make sure that their OS was installed there.
On the other hand, the consumer cost of the OS upgrade is too high, but since newer programs require the upgrade (that is, as Joe Public sees it), they can charge higher for it.
MS is playing both sides of maintaining their monopoly while still raking in hugh profits.
Actually, the FoF specifically states that MS could have easily sold Win98 for $49 and still made a profit, but instead sold it for $89. That's $40 per copy of Win98 sold. I think that's pretty good proof of 'damages'. IANAL.
If Judge Jackson has to decide on the penalty for the case, then the FoF become fact, and as pointed out by today's Q&A, will be *very very* hard for anyone to dispute. Once they are fact, then the door opens for Sun and any other company with sufficient claim against MS's monopoly, which can use the FoF for their case.
If MS and DOJ settle, then the FoF are basically cannon fodder; future lawsuits against MS may attempt to bring the FoF up, but MS can now dispute the FoF, so it doesn't have the same power.
This is why nearly every legal expert predicts that MS will settle, because it makes all current and pending lawsuits a bit easier for them to win. This is also why rumors abound about the strictness of the settlement that the DOJ wants, such that if the settlement goes through, MS will have very little possiblity to rebuild and/or abuse the monopoly.
First, let's get over the facts: Scientology is overactively pursuing any anti-Sci site, and in most cases they won because copyrighted materials were used on the anti-Sci site. I don't know if the site here in question was the same (given that they have been around for this long suggests that is it not the case).
Now, why must this case fail? Look at want it boils down to: Party A does not want Party B to provide negative information to the public. Thus, Party A gets Party's B site shut down. In full violation of free speech.
If the Sci's win their case, this means that I can put any appropriate pairings in the above statement. How many of those would have Microsoft as Party A?
I find it hard to believe that there is legal precidence that a site that talks about the negative aspects of something cannot use trademark words for that purpose (especially if they are not trying to claim that trademark as their own).
I know one half of the answer above (Namely, if we're going to make Linux aimed at desktop users, we *need* the MS-like feel with consistancy across applications).
However, I also question where the GUI areas of Linux have been heading. When I started using Linux, it was touted as being an entire OS that could live in 40 megs of HD space and 16 megs of RAM on a 286 , and yet be fully functional. I'm using right now a 486, running X-Windows and a generic window manager with xterms and Netscape, along with a rather high load web server among other things. I tried KDE 1.x and GNOME and both slowed my system to a crawl; sure, they're nice and convinent, but speed is much more important than looks.
(And yes, I know I can get a faster system for dirt cheap nowadays but that's not the point:-)
Basically, while I strongly believe both KDE and Gnome need to move forward to make Linux a viable desktop system, we still need to consider the true power users that don't need the intergration of all GUI parts and can deal with the simple window manager and inconsistancies across apps. And while KDE and GNOME apps can be run without having the main core package loaded (that is, you need the core library files), they still tend to be slower than those that access the original X libs directly.
First, let's add.web,.www,.home, and other TLD that are not company or organization web sites, but are just probably the initial definition of web sites.
During the transition period, before these new TLDs are open, all holders of.com sites that are not commercial businesses would be allows to register within the new TLDs on a name by name basis (eg you own slashdot.org, you could only get slashdot.web or slashdot.www). This would be FREE OF CHARGE, along with the stipuation that at the end of the transition period, the.com domain would be removed from the registery. If the domain name owner does not want to give up the.com domain, he has that right, pending the fact that they would no longer have the first come first serve rights that NSI current grants, leaving them open for any domain name conflict issues.
Now, I know this will screw up many search engines and a lot of other things too, so the nameserver people would work with the search engine sites to work most of this out. The transition period would have two halves; the first is the above, and the second would be when web site maintainers and search engines would begin to readjust all points to fix those sites that moved (if NSI provides a list of the old and new domain names, this ought to be as simple as a perl regex!)
Does this mean that I should be able to register compaq.org (they're not a non-profit organization) or compaq.net (they're not a network provider - well maybe they are actually)? I think not.
I'd argue that if logic prevailed over IP, then compaq.org and compaq.net are fundamentally different from compaq.com, and Compaq has no right to claim those domains.
The problem is that of image. In the perfect world, if the average joe saw they were at compaq.net, they would know that they are not at a site that is necessarily affliated with Compaq. Thus, Compaq would have no reason to think about compaq.net. Unfortuatnely, e-commerce has elevated the URL to a status symbol. It's almost but not quite too late to place restrictions on domain names to remove the status of URL, or at least limit them to a subset of domain space.
Sorta a nit: Asimov, Bradbury, and Heinlein are considered the Big Three of Sci-Fi. (Clarke and Dick came slightly later). It's a shame that Bradbury has not done much recently...
Of course, nearly all sci-fi has it's roots with Jules Verne. From reading Bradbury's work, I believe he was very fond of Verne, as some of the Martian Chronicals sounds like the style of Verne's sci-fi vision.
If this was Compaq going after compaqonline.com, I see no problem with that. However, this is an education instituion trying to go after a.com domain. There's something logically wrong about that.
Besides the constant talk about trying to add new top level domains, I really hope such talk includes placing restrictions on those domains. Things such as
.net may only be distributed to ISPs and other network service providers.
.org may only be distributed to non-profit organizations
.com or.baz may be only distributed to companies and businesses.
Also, I would suggest that you cannot fight domain names that are outside your company's TLD. For example, say.web is set up for general purpose websites that are not part of e-business and fall outside other catagories (I would consider/., segfault, and most on line comics to fall into this area). If someone set up compaqsuxs.web, Compaq would have no right to try to fight that site, as Compaq would be considered a.com/.biz site. (If there is excessive slander in the content of the site, then there might be recourse there, but that's not related to the domain name itself).
But once again, it boils down to the fact that e-commerce has put too much value on the domain name, which 5 years ago, was of very little importance to any net-savvy person. *sigh*.
I think the only game that was smart in this area (where they knew that others would want to play, but not necessarily spend the cash for extra copies) was Marathon for the Mac. Each of the 3 versions came with 2 keys. One unlocked the game for single and multiple player games, the other unlocked it for multiple player games only. Register users, I believe, could buy additional multiplayer keys for $5 for 2 keys.
I wonder if such a system can work now; Q3Arena will change the playing field as there will be no solo options in that. Additionally, the playability of Marathon was limited mostly to local LANs, so....
I disagree. I strongly am against warez, and am glad that with larger games, more and more people that relished in warez are finding they can't go via that route anymore.
However, Warez is not a non-issue. I'll point to a very specific example: alt.games.half-life. Half-life, for those in a cave, is an outstanding Quake 2 clone with excellent net play, released by Sierra and Valve, with net play controlled by WON.net. When you play multiplayer, your CD key is verified with won.net to make sure only one registered copy is playing on that CD. (Privacy advocates are probably all over this one, but remember the Blizzard incident a while back -- the industry has learned well). At least once a day there's someone asking for a HL CD # generator, and at least one person complaining that they own a legit copy of the game and can't play because someone got lucky with the CD # generator and got their number.
There's about 100-150K HL players in the world. Each payed about $30-40 for the game, at least legit people. Assuming about 10% of those are warez d00ds, that's a cool $300k that Sierra has lost due to software sales.
It's significant, and while the tools have changed, warez d00ds will still be around.
Slashdot Mirror
- The last Pokemon show has aired in Japan, bringing the total to about 160 some episodes. Warner Bros. current have the rights to about 100+ of those, and will probably get the rest as 4Kids translates them. However, there's only a limited number of episodes left; unlike certain other TV shows in the states that get run into the ground (The Simpsons, for example), the show had a story arc, and it finished it and ended.
- Pokemon have been reported as tools of the devil, etc etc, by a number of critics.
- Pokemon toys was the big hit this Christmas. There's yet to have been a single popular toy to continue dominating Christmas sales two years in a row. Anyone remember Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tamagachi, or Furbys?
- Pokemon card trading has been banned from many schools because students spent more time doing that than learning.
- A wrongful death lawsuit may be brought against Pokemon and has forced the recall of millions of pokemon toys: a toddler suffocated to death when she placed half of a Pokeball that came from Burger King over her nose and mouth, and couldn't breath.
- Pokemon, the cartoon, is overplayed way too much on WB networks: Pokemon's on about 7 to 9 times (depending on the weekend schedules) on the WB network, and so far, WB's only had 60-some episodes to rotate through. Doesn't take a math genius to see how fast it would take to get boring.
- "Pokemon the First Movie" was a practical failure in the states: sure, it got a profit for the WB as they spent nearly nothing to get it, but compared to something like Toy Story 2, it did not get a lot of return viewers as some were expecting.
- Pokemon's been spoofed by MAD and South Park.
:D.
It's not that Pokemon is bad, but it was pushed in our faces to the point where you could not ignore it, and now people are getting disgusted with the entier concept and are now fighting back.However, I may be overconvcerned about this. I'm more worried that they add tons of space-battle footage (since this *is* a story about humans vs aliens) at to make the film be what was expected for the general audience rather than those familar with the book. If the latter is true, there should be almost no space shots in this, maybe a docking scene, but that's it. No battles, no nothing.
Point out to their webmaster that their site is probably not useable by people with alternative browsers, particularly blind people, and then point them to the AOL lawsuit that is currently in the works.
Don't necessarily bring up Linux, or the requirements for Javascript or the fact that a certain required plugin only works on platform X. But tell them that their page is not going to be usable by handicapped people, and they should make the small but necessarily fixes to remove excessive obstiticals to make their page usable by all.
I'd also like to see someone start a page on various .com sites that were redesigned after the browser handicap was pointed out, sort of a victory list. Get something like that going, with a good number of large .com sites, and you might actually have more sites that look good. (and get these types of stories off Slashdot, as it's beginning to look like SW:TPM stories, with a new story for every little bit of trivia)
Most everything else is important, but game software needs to be taken serious to get Linux onto the average Joe desktops.
Now, let the ranting begin:
1) The only time that I would ever advocate a DoS attack on a site is never. There is no reason to do so; sure, you might put it down for a while (etoys reported 98% instead of 100% reliability during the last few weeks), but if anything it could lead to worse things (see below). There are more effective ways to state your dislike for something.
2) CNN's not wrong; their article on the etoy/etoys things is truth. Just using a different set of words that seems to put etoys on the right side of the thing. Words are very powerful, but you can't blame CNN for misusing them.
3) I really don't like this idea of DoS attacks, especially in light of this article. Chain of events: All over e-commerce they read that a service can be put down because of DoS (they won't care why the DoS was initiated); Etoys says they have to use custom-built DoS prevention tricks to stop it; E-commerce security experts all up in arms on how to stop this; e-commerence management wonders how to easily stop it; e-commerce turns to US Government (using large bags of money) and asks them to stop it; US Government bans all TCPIP tools except port 80's. Ok, so the last one's going a bit far, but I don't doubt that this series of events can happen. Just as with the question of linking, overly long patent and trademarks, poor patents, and other junk, stuff like this only kills the net for anyone not involved in e-commerce, and even then, may take some lowend e-commerce sites down.
Moral of the story: PLEASE DONT BE A SCRIPT KIDDIE. :-P
One key thing about most of these type of revolts is that if they are going to go anywhere, they need media attention. Since this has now been mentioned in Wired, I suspect we'll be seeing snippets of it in other publications (like CNN or Time soon enough), and then that will attract the needed attention to get Amazon's ball rolling.
This sounds very similar to what has been hush-hushed over in MI - a tax on internet purchases. However, I don't think this is considered a use tax here, but more of a sales tax. Supposedly, it's been in place for several years too. Yeeesh.
And what's very sad is that with faster and faster chips, application programmers think that they'll be developing for thoses really fast computers, and more and more of today's programs have a lot of chrome that probably is fine on a P3, but on low end machine, the chrome slows down the program. Sure, I expect that a billion FPU calculations will take a longer time on a slow machine, but there is no reason for the chrome to drag to a crawl - chrome-type feature should be slim, trim, and ideally optional.
(And this isn't just happening with Wintel users, while both KDE and GNOME are great efforts, there *is* a lot of chrome that slows down their basic function on a low-end linux box).
At this point, we shouldn't be getting too excited about faster processors; the next step in processor speeds will require nanotechnology to stay within heat sink and FCC limits. Instead, we should be focusing on optimizing the processor usage within programs.
There's actually nothing wrong with suggesting to store 10 gal/person of fresh water. The best advice regarding preparing for Y2K is to be ready for a natural disaster. This means: have a flashlight, a battery-powered radio, candles, food that need not be cooked or can be cooked easily, and extra water. No hoarding or anything, but just common sense.
Key issues to do this is separating presentation from content (thanks to the use of style sheets), providing alternate content when appropriate (using ALT tags as well as the much-welcomed OBJECT tag), and in general, making sure to validate the HTML code you write (just as you would use "use Strict" in perl, or compile your programs for errors in C or other languages).
Unfortunately, I'd estimate 90% of commercial websites (and a larger percentage of personal pages) do not follow the above. The crap of HTML tag soup that FrontPage and other HTML authoring software puts out is poor quality, and while it's ok to set up the basic HTML, most good authors know they have to clean up the tag soup before putting it out. Even then, too many people try to force HTML into acting like a desktop publishing language.
What will help is the blind accessibly lawsuit against AOL. Before that was announced, I know I heard rumblings of a major suit of this nature by sight-impared people because they could not use a service provided by the gov't. Sure, it's still a long way before Joe Q's "WAY PAST K00L HOMEPAGE" is going to need to be site-impared accessible, but there's plenty of reason to make more commercial sites more accessible.
The best way for everyone on the Linux side to help is that the next time a site like Fox.com comes up where Linux users are shunned, email said site maintainers and point out it's not just Linux that is shunned, but anyone not using a "status quo" box. Sure, that might only be 5% of the potental viewing audience, but that's also 5% of potental customers. Point them to sites like www.websitesthatsuck.com which run down the bad tricks that should be avoided, and to www.w3c.org which have validators and other helpful information for writing clean HTML. And the key thing to remember is that it takes more work to make a web site less accessible than it does to make them fully accessible.
IM is very compariable to IRC. That is, your client sends data to a server, and the server does the appropriate broadcasting to other clients that are intended to recieve the message. However, the difference here is that IRC is generally a distributed server that is run by a non-commercial entity, while the IM server is a single server that is being run by a corporate entity. Additionally, there is some degree of anonymousity on IRC, while IM has a nice little database of usernames, emails, and *potental* surfing/chatting habits. This means that any non-AOL request to the AOL server may be accessing a personal info database that AOL has built up , and they don't want that, unless they are getting paid for it.
The solution is to redevelop the IM application, using a predefinied standard, and then setting a large number of good-faith servers around the globe that can be used to store the necessary IM info. This would all be open-sourced, and thus there would be no problems with commercial interests coming into play. The servers can be linked in an IRC-like fashion, with appropriate broadcast messages sent out among servers when a new user is added or similar events.
The thing with the latter is due to the fact that most CC # checkers check the numbers, and not the expiration date. Thus, pass 10^16 numbers to one of the sites, and you're bound to get some cash. Once they have a number that works, then they're set.
Therefore, he might have been hit with this instead of true CC# stealing (It's really hard to get at cookies although there are some bugs, but require a lot of assumptions on the end user's actions). This only suggests to me that we need to make sure that CC# verification systems are more secure, and ask for the experiation date in addition to all other info. Or even better, add a PGP-like key to CC# info to make it more secure.
Interesting to note, however, is that Katz mentions that (paraphrasing) the Net and the Web have had a generation to develop to get where it is today. The Net has been around since the 70s. However, without the HTTPD protocol and the HTML markup language, or equivalent mechanisms, the net would still be solely the realm of academia and those few fortunates that had net feeds to play MUDs and only a thousand newsgroups. Why? Before the Web was developed, using the net was arcane: you had to know weird unix commands to get files, and there was no simple point-and-click like interface for these tasks. 99% of the population would never had begun to understood these things, and the same goes with e-commerce. Without the web, a few companies may have gotten onto the net, and maybe have had email addresses for contact, but certainly no storefronts or the like.
The Web has been both a major boon to the Net, as well as a benefit. However, there needs to be a balance between the profittering of ecommerce and the free sharing of information between peoples for the web to work as intended.
On the other hand, the consumer cost of the OS upgrade is too high, but since newer programs require the upgrade (that is, as Joe Public sees it), they can charge higher for it.
MS is playing both sides of maintaining their monopoly while still raking in hugh profits.
Actually, the FoF specifically states that MS could have easily sold Win98 for $49 and still made a profit, but instead sold it for $89. That's $40 per copy of Win98 sold. I think that's pretty good proof of 'damages'. IANAL.
If MS and DOJ settle, then the FoF are basically cannon fodder; future lawsuits against MS may attempt to bring the FoF up, but MS can now dispute the FoF, so it doesn't have the same power.
This is why nearly every legal expert predicts that MS will settle, because it makes all current and pending lawsuits a bit easier for them to win. This is also why rumors abound about the strictness of the settlement that the DOJ wants, such that if the settlement goes through, MS will have very little possiblity to rebuild and/or abuse the monopoly.
IANAL, of course.
Now, why must this case fail? Look at want it boils down to: Party A does not want Party B to provide negative information to the public. Thus, Party A gets Party's B site shut down. In full violation of free speech.
If the Sci's win their case, this means that I can put any appropriate pairings in the above statement. How many of those would have Microsoft as Party A?
I find it hard to believe that there is legal precidence that a site that talks about the negative aspects of something cannot use trademark words for that purpose (especially if they are not trying to claim that trademark as their own).
However, I also question where the GUI areas of Linux have been heading. When I started using Linux, it was touted as being an entire OS that could live in 40 megs of HD space and 16 megs of RAM on a 286 , and yet be fully functional. I'm using right now a 486, running X-Windows and a generic window manager with xterms and Netscape, along with a rather high load web server among other things. I tried KDE 1.x and GNOME and both slowed my system to a crawl; sure, they're nice and convinent, but speed is much more important than looks.
(And yes, I know I can get a faster system for dirt cheap nowadays but that's not the point :-)
Basically, while I strongly believe both KDE and Gnome need to move forward to make Linux a viable desktop system, we still need to consider the true power users that don't need the intergration of all GUI parts and can deal with the simple window manager and inconsistancies across apps. And while KDE and GNOME apps can be run without having the main core package loaded (that is, you need the core library files), they still tend to be slower than those that access the original X libs directly.
A dog-bone shaped satelite with a pair of manipulator arms about to rip it to shreds? :-)
First, let's add .web, .www, .home, and other TLD that are not company or organization web sites, but are just probably the initial definition of web sites.
During the transition period, before these new TLDs are open, all holders of .com sites that are not commercial businesses would be allows to register within the new TLDs on a name by name basis (eg you own slashdot.org, you could only get slashdot.web or slashdot.www). This would be FREE OF CHARGE, along with the stipuation that at the end of the transition period, the .com domain would be removed from the registery. If the domain name owner does not want to give up the .com domain, he has that right, pending the fact that they would no longer have the first come first serve rights that NSI current grants, leaving them open for any domain name conflict issues.
Now, I know this will screw up many search engines and a lot of other things too, so the nameserver people would work with the search engine sites to work most of this out. The transition period would have two halves; the first is the above, and the second would be when web site maintainers and search engines would begin to readjust all points to fix those sites that moved (if NSI provides a list of the old and new domain names, this ought to be as simple as a perl regex!)
I'd argue that if logic prevailed over IP, then compaq.org and compaq.net are fundamentally different from compaq.com, and Compaq has no right to claim those domains.
The problem is that of image. In the perfect world, if the average joe saw they were at compaq.net, they would know that they are not at a site that is necessarily affliated with Compaq. Thus, Compaq would have no reason to think about compaq.net. Unfortuatnely, e-commerce has elevated the URL to a status symbol. It's almost but not quite too late to place restrictions on domain names to remove the status of URL, or at least limit them to a subset of domain space.
Of course, nearly all sci-fi has it's roots with Jules Verne. From reading Bradbury's work, I believe he was very fond of Verne, as some of the Martian Chronicals sounds like the style of Verne's sci-fi vision.
Besides the constant talk about trying to add new top level domains, I really hope such talk includes placing restrictions on those domains. Things such as
- .net may only be distributed to ISPs and other network service providers.
- .org may only be distributed to non-profit organizations
- .com or
.baz may be only distributed to companies and businesses.
Also, I would suggest that you cannot fight domain names that are outside your company's TLD. For example, sayBut once again, it boils down to the fact that e-commerce has put too much value on the domain name, which 5 years ago, was of very little importance to any net-savvy person. *sigh*.
I wonder if such a system can work now; Q3Arena will change the playing field as there will be no solo options in that. Additionally, the playability of Marathon was limited mostly to local LANs, so....
However, Warez is not a non-issue. I'll point to a very specific example: alt.games.half-life. Half-life, for those in a cave, is an outstanding Quake 2 clone with excellent net play, released by Sierra and Valve, with net play controlled by WON.net. When you play multiplayer, your CD key is verified with won.net to make sure only one registered copy is playing on that CD. (Privacy advocates are probably all over this one, but remember the Blizzard incident a while back -- the industry has learned well). At least once a day there's someone asking for a HL CD # generator, and at least one person complaining that they own a legit copy of the game and can't play because someone got lucky with the CD # generator and got their number.
There's about 100-150K HL players in the world. Each payed about $30-40 for the game, at least legit people. Assuming about 10% of those are warez d00ds, that's a cool $300k that Sierra has lost due to software sales.
It's significant, and while the tools have changed, warez d00ds will still be around.