Amazon did grow its user base and at a loss. And
while cusotmers are fickle, Amazon has done a couple of things to turn that use base into a solid asset that you and the other Amazon-o-skeptics are overlooking.
They have used those users to create a very good set of reviews of a wide range of items. This makes them one of the better places to research the items they sell. Of course, then its convenitent to buy the item there.
They also suggest things that other similar customers have bought, which can encourage impulse buying.
They have collected information about the preferences of a large number of individuals and are able to provide (occasionally) useful recommendations.
Together these mean that the site is a lot more helpful than, say WalMart.
OTOH, I am partially an Amazon defector. I have found that I can often order books for a brick and mortar store less expensively than through Amazon--- they can also order from the wholesalers and I don't pay shipping. Plus they recognize my face rather than my cookie.
The only thing that cable MSO's rely on is the use of telephone poles for signal distribution
The "telephone poles" are usually owned by the electric company. They own the right of way, keep the trees cut and lease out bits to the baby bells,
cable co, etc.
I'll second this. Perforce is excellent, with
good command-line interface, emacs integration,
atomic submits, nice handling of different code branches and it work ok over a modem.
I like it better than CVS. OTOH, Perforce
is not free (~$600/seat).
C and C++ can be written safely, if only the person programming takes care to make their programs safe.
Of course. But they aren't. And they don't.
I'll accept theoretically that its possible to write C code that isn't succeptable to these things. But it virtually never happens.
Conversely "safe" languages don't guarantee anything. But, code writen with them in the real world is vastly better than code in C and C++, at
least with repect to buffer overflows and memory leaks.
Ok, you like mergers. And, to the extent mergers can give us best-of-breed solutions, I am too. And the Eazel guys have a really nice file browser. But Eazel for update software?? The Eazel guys are reinventing the wheel badly--- update software is a solved problem. The best solution is apt-get. It just works.
...America will not move the Kyoto accords
on greenhouse emissions forward and used some shady tactics to derail the Hague climate conference.
The main[1] surface point of contention at The Hague was Carbon sinks. The US[2] wanted Carbon removed from the atmosphere to be deducted from Carbon added to the atmosphere. Some contries, most notably the bulk of the EU, wanted only to count emissions.
The underlying question is: is global warming presenting us a moral or an engineering question? If its an engineering question, net carbon is the important number. If its a moral question, obviously penance is needed and drastically less carbon must be released--- the more this hurts, well, the better.
-Henry
[1] Another issue was the buying and selling of pollution credits. The US has been doing this domestically for Sulfur Dioxide (acid rain) reduction with good success. Such a market gives cost to the externallities of pollution.[3]
[2] Also Canada, Japan, Russia and a couple couple of smaller countries.
[3] Some people are afraid that such a market would let Americans not change their lifestyle by buying credits from poorer places. Obviously these people view global warming as a moral issue.
A degree Kelvin is the same as a degree Celsius.
The difference is that 0K is absolute zero.
0 K= -273.15 C
0 C= 273.15 K
You may be thinking of ratios: Kelvin is much better when ratios are needed (ie in Thermodynamics calculations), but when differences are being discussed, the two are equivalent.
Radar signature alone will never be sufficent. If I recall correctly, the HMS Sheffield
did not respont to a missle because it was an exocet-- therefore friendly. Alas, the real world is not so simple.
How was watermarking going to help prevent
pirating? I don't get it.
I understand that it enables a duplicate copy version to be traced to an original with a known purchaser. I don't see how that would help-- CDs are stolen all the time. Music can easily be stolen from car or computer.
So you need a hardware player that understands the watermarks. How does that help: the duplicate is
the same bits. Either they get played or they don't.
At first glance, it looks like communication would solve these problems--- if the hardware sees its a copyrighted work it might send notification so the owner of the hardware can be billed. But this requires being always on line... thats unworkable for a $50 player.
So, what exactly would watermarks do to prevent piracy (if watermarks were practical)?
Slave is not the right analogy. Try indentured servant.
Back in colonial times firm would pay the costs of immigration; in return the person would be be payed somewhat less than market wages for a period of time. The situation is the same today, except the costs of immigration aren't transit-- they are legal. So, the institution more bogus now than it was then--even if the actual conditions of the workers are better.
The solution, as others have pointed out is fewer H1-Bs and more green cards.
Ok, Helix is a gnome distribution. Why would I want a gnome distribution? Ease of upgrading?
Heck, I've already got apt-get. It works, its scriptable and its here. Better yet, it upgrades the rest of my system at the same time. Why reinvent it?
Upgrading is a generic problem--- its not specific to gnome and it shouldn't be solved in such a limited way.
You are correct in stating what a VPN is--- however, they are more important than you seem to think. While joining a vpn isn't important for browsing the web or getting mp3s, its important for working over the broadband connection.
The also disallow home LANs elsewhere in the paragraph.
No, its not a CORBA brain damage. And reference
counting can almost be made to work--- if you are on a
LAN and nothing ever goes down.
As other people have pointed out, reference counting is the way COM manages these things--- and it almost, sorta, kinda works for a little while in the demo and on the LAN. Perhaps the gnome guys just want to be bug for bug compatible.
Reference counting is a bad idea whose time has passed. When faced with the inevitable programming and network errors reference counting leaks. In some circumstances these leaks are just little bits of memory and don't really matter (if you don't mind poor performance and restarting every now and then). But sometimes the leaks are locks and expensive things. Leaking these can easily lead to deadlock. Deadlock is as hard problem as distributed garbage collection. Don't go that way. Don't allow leaks.
Corba objects can typically timeout and save themselves to disk and be transparently reinstanciated when needed. Thats good enough for some objects; if you don't mind leaking disk space.
A leasing model works well. The client wants a foo for 500s. Great. Maybe it wants to renew.
Also great. And if the client disapears without a trace (somebody hung up the modem or tripped on a cable or went out to lunch or whatever...) the server is free to clean up that foo. If it needs to, the client maybe forced to get another foo. Thats ok.
Most programs in most languages leak their own memory. Why would you trust those same client programs to meticulously solve your distributed garbage collection problem? If you are a defensive programmer, you don't. Even if you did, you wouldn't trust the internet to have 100% uptime; it doesn't. Instead you use leasing and/or timeouts.
Do you oppose driving while on the phone? What
about driving while sleepy?
Both of these are as dangerous as driving while
(moderately) indoxicated... why should their legal status be different?
Then there is driving while eating. And driving with/without appropriate sunglasses. And changing the tape while driving. Or driving in the rain. Or in the rain at night. Or driving while yelling at the kids. Or driving while thinking about something else.
Its clear to me that letting other people drive at all is irresponsible.
You mentioned two important features of a product: that it works well and that it is stable.
Obviously, these are important considerations. But there are other important considerations too; for instance: cost, openness, vendor independence, interoperability, platform availability. While the original poster didn't say why he was unhappy with COM+, these issues are negatives for COM+, at least in certain environments. Certainly, they could prompt a "logical" and "professional" person to look for a better alternative.
Hmm, even if Open Source were a co-option of Free Software by evil establishment organizations it wouldn't matter. Because the code is still free.
Users are free to share open source software. Nonestablishment entities are free to branch, improve and distribute open source software. If the establishment wins too--- so what? Thats great, everybody wins.
That RMS has said, then Free Software and Open Source movements disagree on priciples but agree on the pratical steps to take. The only way the two approches diverge is in propaganda.
As to open source becoming integrated into the way corporations and markets work, well, I can't speak for Eric Raymond, but I thinks it's fantastic. Everybody ends up richer. Everybody ends up freer. I don't understand why you find that dismaying. Life is not a zero sum game.
I can get a per annum return of 10 per cent by investing very basically in the stock market.
The PE ratio of the market as a whole is about 44. That is to say, the total investment in the market is making a return of slightly over 2% per year. How to beat the market consistently and legally is an unsolved problem. So, unless you are hoping to make money off of new investors in the pyramid, you might be better off buying his website after all. (Of course, he didn't tell us what his costs were.)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, a modern gui and network play were more amazing in the 80's; but they are still cool today.
-Henry Ware
Oh, kinda like stem cell research.
- They have used those users to create a very good set of reviews of a wide range of items. This makes them one of the better places to research the items they sell. Of course, then its convenitent to buy the item there.
- They also suggest things that other similar customers have bought, which can encourage impulse buying.
- They have collected information about the preferences of a large number of individuals and are able to provide (occasionally) useful recommendations.
Together these mean that the site is a lot more helpful than, say WalMart.OTOH, I am partially an Amazon defector. I have found that I can often order books for a brick and mortar store less expensively than through Amazon--- they can also order from the wholesalers and I don't pay shipping. Plus they recognize my face rather than my cookie.
The "telephone poles" are usually owned by the electric company. They own the right of way, keep the trees cut and lease out bits to the baby bells, cable co, etc.
I like it better than CVS. OTOH, Perforce is not free (~$600/seat).
PVCS is terrible. Really, absolutely awful.
Hey! This sounds like The Phatom Menace!
mitaclorians == body thetans!
Now it allmakes sense!
Would it coount if someone else sold it? Say if cdrom.com put it on an open source cd?
Of course. But they aren't. And they don't.
I'll accept theoretically that its possible to write C code that isn't succeptable to these things. But it virtually never happens.
Conversely "safe" languages don't guarantee anything. But, code writen with them in the real world is vastly better than code in C and C++, at least with repect to buffer overflows and memory leaks.
Ok, you like mergers. And, to the extent mergers can give us best-of-breed solutions, I am too. And the Eazel guys have a really nice file browser. But Eazel for update software?? The Eazel guys are reinventing the wheel badly--- update software is a solved problem. The best solution is apt-get. It just works.
The main[1] surface point of contention at The Hague was Carbon sinks. The US[2] wanted Carbon removed from the atmosphere to be deducted from Carbon added to the atmosphere. Some contries, most notably the bulk of the EU, wanted only to count emissions.
The underlying question is: is global warming presenting us a moral or an engineering question? If its an engineering question, net carbon is the important number. If its a moral question, obviously penance is needed and drastically less carbon must be released--- the more this hurts, well, the better.
-Henry
[1] Another issue was the buying and selling of pollution credits. The US has been doing this domestically for Sulfur Dioxide (acid rain) reduction with good success. Such a market gives cost to the externallities of pollution.[3]
[2] Also Canada, Japan, Russia and a couple couple of smaller countries.
[3] Some people are afraid that such a market would let Americans not change their lifestyle by buying credits from poorer places. Obviously these people view global warming as a moral issue.
0 K= -273.15 C
0 C= 273.15 K
You may be thinking of ratios: Kelvin is much better when ratios are needed (ie in Thermodynamics calculations), but when differences are being discussed, the two are equivalent.See Risks for details, search on exocet.
I understand that it enables a duplicate copy version to be traced to an original with a known purchaser. I don't see how that would help-- CDs are stolen all the time. Music can easily be stolen from car or computer.
So you need a hardware player that understands the watermarks. How does that help: the duplicate is the same bits. Either they get played or they don't.
At first glance, it looks like communication would solve these problems--- if the hardware sees its a copyrighted work it might send notification so the owner of the hardware can be billed. But this requires being always on line... thats unworkable for a $50 player.
So, what exactly would watermarks do to prevent piracy (if watermarks were practical)?
Back in colonial times firm would pay the costs of immigration; in return the person would be be payed somewhat less than market wages for a period of time. The situation is the same today, except the costs of immigration aren't transit-- they are legal. So, the institution more bogus now than it was then--even if the actual conditions of the workers are better.
The solution, as others have pointed out is fewer H1-Bs and more green cards.
-Tupper
Heck, I've already got apt-get. It works, its scriptable and its here. Better yet, it upgrades the rest of my system at the same time. Why reinvent it?
Upgrading is a generic problem--- its not specific to gnome and it shouldn't be solved in such a limited way.
Cheers, Tupper
Hmmph. As the saying goes: good programers write good code, great programmers "borrow" good code. -Tupper
If they aren't selling bandwidth, what the heck are they selling???
The also disallow home LANs elsewhere in the paragraph.
-Tupper
As other people have pointed out, reference counting is the way COM manages these things--- and it almost, sorta, kinda works for a little while in the demo and on the LAN. Perhaps the gnome guys just want to be bug for bug compatible.
Reference counting is a bad idea whose time has passed. When faced with the inevitable programming and network errors reference counting leaks. In some circumstances these leaks are just little bits of memory and don't really matter (if you don't mind poor performance and restarting every now and then). But sometimes the leaks are locks and expensive things. Leaking these can easily lead to deadlock. Deadlock is as hard problem as distributed garbage collection. Don't go that way. Don't allow leaks.
Corba objects can typically timeout and save themselves to disk and be transparently reinstanciated when needed. Thats good enough for some objects; if you don't mind leaking disk space.
A leasing model works well. The client wants a foo for 500s. Great. Maybe it wants to renew. Also great. And if the client disapears without a trace (somebody hung up the modem or tripped on a cable or went out to lunch or whatever...) the server is free to clean up that foo. If it needs to, the client maybe forced to get another foo. Thats ok.
Most programs in most languages leak their own memory. Why would you trust those same client programs to meticulously solve your distributed garbage collection problem? If you are a defensive programmer, you don't. Even if you did, you wouldn't trust the internet to have 100% uptime; it doesn't. Instead you use leasing and/or timeouts.
Cheers, Henry
Then there is driving while eating. And driving with/without appropriate sunglasses. And changing the tape while driving. Or driving in the rain. Or in the rain at night. Or driving while yelling at the kids. Or driving while thinking about something else.
Its clear to me that letting other people drive at all is irresponsible.
-Tupper
apt-get install aide
These are only in unstable-- not even in the still unreleased potato. What do they do? Do we need them to be secure?
Thanks,
Henry
Obviously, these are important considerations. But there are other important considerations too; for instance: cost, openness, vendor independence, interoperability, platform availability. While the original poster didn't say why he was unhappy with COM+, these issues are negatives for COM+, at least in certain environments. Certainly, they could prompt a "logical" and "professional" person to look for a better alternative.
Cheers, Tupper
Users are free to share open source software. Nonestablishment entities are free to branch, improve and distribute open source software. If the establishment wins too--- so what? Thats great, everybody wins.
That RMS has said, then Free Software and Open Source movements disagree on priciples but agree on the pratical steps to take. The only way the two approches diverge is in propaganda.
As to open source becoming integrated into the way corporations and markets work, well, I can't speak for Eric Raymond, but I thinks it's fantastic. Everybody ends up richer. Everybody ends up freer. I don't understand why you find that dismaying. Life is not a zero sum game.
Happy hacking,
Henry
The PE ratio of the market as a whole is about 44. That is to say, the total investment in the market is making a return of slightly over 2% per year. How to beat the market consistently and legally is an unsolved problem. So, unless you are hoping to make money off of new investors in the pyramid, you might be better off buying his website after all. (Of course, he didn't tell us what his costs were.)
Cheers,
Tupper
a=b is guaranteed atomic unless a and b are longs.