Since he obtained the documents working for a law firm, and I have a hard time believing a law firm wouldn't make an employee sign an NDA, this guy should fry.
No sympathy for those that distribute trade secrets. Intellectual property is far too valuable to ignore cases like this.
AOL offers a community feel. A safe-place for internet non-newbies to get warm fuzzies and feel happy and loved. Unfortunately, there are so many other online communities that it's no longer necessary to pay $23.95 for constant busy signals.
The primary reason people are still with AOL is that many of their subscribers don't feel like they have a choice. "I can't use something else because I don't know how to switch".
I recently moved my mother-in-law from AOL to Earthlink. She thanks me to this day, even though it's something she could have done.
Not half as stupid as your complete lack of information on this subject.
The key point you seem to not understand is that "Lack of bandwidth" no longer drives this market. There's more than enough bandwidth to go around with the leftover from the dot-com boom. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason they're not lighting up the fiber is that it's simply not needed right now?
Lighting up Fiber doesn't make bandwidth cheaper in this market since there's no demand. In reality, excess fiber would make bandwidth more expensive due to the increased overhead of having to maintain equipment and staff that aren't doing anything. Also remember, there's more to bringing bandwidth to the home or business than having fiber within a mile of the door.. The cost to trench it in and install the equipment, even if you're tapping from a short distance, is substantial -- well beyond the reach of any consumer or small business.
Furthermore, your arguments regarding anti-competitive behavior are even more ridiculous. If there's one industry where being a monopoly is a massive disadvantage, it's telecom. The Bells get screwed DAILY by the tariffs in place by the FCC (I don't have sympathy for them, they dug themselves into that mess) but business is NOT easy for them. The small-guy is at every advantage in this industry. If the big boys own the lines and the little guys want to use them, the FCC says they have to let them -- even if it means the big-boys taking a financial loss on the deal.
Sorry.. but you have much to learn about the telecom world before you open your mouth on the subject again.
I just don't believe "those evil phone companies" are causing the fiber to go unused.
I'm sure the exectives sit around in smoke-filled conference rooms coming up with clever ways to keep technology out of the hands of people and make LESS money by NOT selling it. Give me a break.
Phone companies will light up the fiber when it makes fiscal sense to do so. Nobody, ESPECIALLY not a phone company who would stand to profit significantly from cheap fiber, is purposely NOT using this stuff.
This is no longer speculation. I was listening to CNET Radio on my way into work this morning and the Chief Research Officer of Microsoft was the guest.
He confirmed that Microsoft was going to start developing Linux software and said Office was not on the list of things they had planned right away. IIS, SQL Server, and other such products would be placed on the burner first.
He also admitted some other interesting things. Namely that by 2006 they expected Linux to be shipping on 40% of Intel servers and that over time, the TCO of Linux would come to be the same as Windows in the server market.
I can't find any references to an announcement by Microsoft yet.. but you should be able to hear the interview in archive format at cnetradio.com.
Open source -- as we know it today, has so many things wrong with it I can't even begin to tell you..
1> Documentation is usually 2nd priority. In my world, if there's no documentation, there's no product.
2> The product is usually 2nd rate. Because there's often no money on the line, my experience has been that the programmers take less accountability for their efforts. Big bug? Guess you have to wait until the programmer (or someone else) gets around to it. Big bug in a program you paid thousands of dollars for? My experience is that enough screaming can get you a patch in very little time.
3> The user interace is lacking severely. Bigger companies hire people who specialize in usability to the design the UI. Open-source projects have HORRID user interfaces (A perfect example of this would be Request Tracker -- the software rocks.. the documentation sucks, and the awkward user interface effectively makes the product useless for large-scale deployments).
Open-source definitely has it's place. It's fabulous for the "quick fix it" jobs and the "I've got lots of time on my hands to figure it out and fix any problems I find" solutions. Sadly, however, my experience has been that this stuff is only truely free if your time is worthless.
Don't get me wrong.. I love open-source software. I wouldn't be able to do my job without it -- but with these drawbacks, it will never take the place of the mission-critical elements where I can hold someone responsible with I don't get what I need.:) (yes, those things cost money -- sometimes money needs to be spent).
Due to the fact that parents are now 34% more likely to have ugly children, I fully support this. (If that statistic sounds wrong, it's because I made it up).
I wrote an editorial on a topic similar to this right here. It makes a strong case for the right to choose what humans should look like. (Note to those with no sense of humor: Clicking this link will ruin your day).
TiVo is my favorite household pet of all time. I love the suggestions feature!! Then one day I had a houseguest show up for a few days and TiVo suddenly started thinking I liked gay porn.:(
I was secretly hoping TiVo would turn me gay as a result (Hello lawsuit!) Naturally, you can understand why I was disapointed when a few days later I realized that I was still attracted to women.:(
I was in the same boat with my first few PDA's. I found their usefulness was only as good as my willingless to carry an extra device around -- and I was constantly leaving it in the car or at home where it was of little use to me.
Then I got my Samsung I300 and I found that I couldn't live without my PDA. I always had it with me when I needed it because I always had my cell phone. It gave me the same functionality as a Palm VII (full wireless internet) but the plan was integrated w/ my cell phone.
I use MS-Outlook constantly at the office (there is not even a close 2nd for group schedule and task colaboration, don't get me started on crappy open-source alternatives) -- so it's genuinely wonderful to be able, quite literally, take outlook w/ me. If I drop a note into outlook, it goes with me. If a co-worker schedules a meeting w/ me, it goes with me. Getting directions from someone over the phone? I type it into an Outlook note while I'm talking to them it goes with me when I leave. I simply don't have to touch paper anymore and it's CONVENIENT.
I would be lost without my PDA -- but ONLY because it's integrated into my cell phone and I never have to worry about whether or not it's going to be useful because I know that I've alwayd got it with me.
Those numbers are based on what the cable companies pay for their bandwidth -- not what you pay. This is sort of the case in point -- you don't know how good you've really got it at $40/mo.:)
Three words for you: Service Level Agreement (SLA).
When you only pay $50 a month, you don't get an SLA. Cable companies wouldn't be in business if they gauranteed service levels at those rates. If reliability is important to you, you're going to have to pay for it. Order a T1 or a T3. You can negotiate an SLA and when it goes down, you are compensated.
The reality check here is that you're only going to get what you pay for. Margins are very thin in the ISP business -- and again, this crime directly affects their pocketbooks.
I find it ironic that you complain about shoddy service, yet you defend those that are costing the company money. Money that could probably otherwise be spent on keeping the service running more smoothly for you.
These people were stealing a VERY valuable commodity.. bandwidth. For those of you who don't work near the ISP industry, bandwidth is --VERY EXPENSIVE--. $200 per megabit per month is an absolute STEAL (to get that rate, you need to be buying it on the DS3 level). $400 per meg is more realistic on lower levels.
Cable companies simply cannot afford to let people steal this stuff. Quite literally, someone who is uncapping a cable modem and mooching 10 megabits of bandwidth could easily be costing them several thousand dollars a month.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for these people. What they did not only violated their agreement, but it cost someone else a LOT of money. Stealing is stealing, folks. And unlike the arguments that may apply to software piracy, this really does directly affect someone else's pocketbook.
Haven't we run this topic completely into the ground? I vote we deal with this when it's actually an issue. This discussion reminds me of a bunch of 13 year old geeks sitting around the RPG table talking about what they're going to do if giant robots with photon torpedos take over the planet.
And when I say it's too hard, please understand that I'm a UNIX vet of over 10 years. I've taught UNIX in college classes and I'm a published author on the subject. I know UNIX.
The problem is that the spirit of the open-source community is "let someone else do it". The idea is almost profound. Writing an email program? Pull in someone else's libraries for encryption, smtp, pop3, GUI, etc and you only need to tie it up in a neat package and stick it out there. When I come along to install said application, it takes me an hour to get all the depencies in place and get everything right (And don't say RPM's, RedHat has their own problems.. dependencies break with other things on your system are too new or too old). I don't have that kind of time.
2> The GUI on Window is perfected. It really is. Everything is clean, consistent, and reasonably intuitive once you get used to the base system. It seems like when I switch to any window manager on *nix, I spend the time getting used to the way one implementation has done something only to find that another application chose to do it a completely different way. The end result it a steep learning curve for each application that I pick up.
The reality is that the one thing everyone considers to be the biggest strength of the open-source community is really the biggest weakness. Thousands of people each with their own idea of how something should work will, in the end, cause any end-user to be completely counter-productive.
I love UNIX. I could not live without it. But it has no place on the desktop unless you have a VERY specific need. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
But let's face it, when I want to install a new email program,
I don't understand the need to always be on the bleeding edge of technology. Intel loves to push these newer faster chips down the throats of consumers, but I've got 600MHz Intel chip and a 2ghz intel chip, both running Windows 2000, and I swear I can't tell any difference between 600MHz and 2ghz for normal usage -- and I consider myself a power user.(Granted, I don't do 3D rendering or massive number crunching on a daily basis, but how many of your average consumers do?)
I won't be running out to buy this any time soon -- especially when I can the $200 Walmart computer is less than the cost of this CPU.
Call me old fashioned, but geeze.. Intel already gets plenty of money from my pocketbook for little performance gain. Something needs to be done about the rest of PC hardware before the speed of the CPU is going to make a massive difference.
I realize the horizon problem has already been addressed -- but one other issue with sending low power long-haul signals over water is that of a ship crossing through the path.
The article says the total cost was about $3,000. There's no way they built towers high enough to overcome that problem on that budget. They're either in for some long nights troubleshooting when the signal disappears for a few seconds every now and then, or they just don't care.
I don't understand how this is news for a number of reasons:
1> The math behind antenna design theory leaves little room for innovation. Two things determine how far your single is going to go a)the output power and b) the efficiency of your antenna. I don't see where this antenna design is any more efficient than many that are already on the market.. which leads me to..
2> There are already products on the market that can push WiFi signals well over 4 miles. Check out Motorola Canopy for their solution (it's geared more towards commercial enterprises, but for $2500 for an AP and two subscriber units, you can start a long-range WISP on pocket-change). Then there's companies like YDI, Wireless Central, and Tranzeo Wireless all selling long-range 802.11 products for cheap.
They might as well be putting out a press release saying they've invented a circular device that they're calling a "wheel".
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you with no knowledge of american culture.. "Fry him" often just means "send him up the creek". Calm down kids.
Since he obtained the documents working for a law firm, and I have a hard time believing a law firm wouldn't make an employee sign an NDA, this guy should fry.
No sympathy for those that distribute trade secrets. Intellectual property is far too valuable to ignore cases like this.
My 2.5 cents.
AOL offers a community feel. A safe-place for internet non-newbies to get warm fuzzies and feel happy and loved. Unfortunately, there are so many other online communities that it's no longer necessary to pay $23.95 for constant busy signals.
The primary reason people are still with AOL is that many of their subscribers don't feel like they have a choice. "I can't use something else because I don't know how to switch".
I recently moved my mother-in-law from AOL to Earthlink. She thanks me to this day, even though it's something she could have done.
The nostalgia feature is great.. and completely useless. No wonder people don't take this web browser seriously.
I hate it when slashdot changes the title of the story and makes ME look like a bafoon!! I submitted it as "Russia's Space Program in Trouble".
I've been framed as a spelling idiot!
Not half as stupid as your complete lack of information on this subject.
The key point you seem to not understand is that "Lack of bandwidth" no longer drives this market. There's more than enough bandwidth to go around with the leftover from the dot-com boom. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason they're not lighting up the fiber is that it's simply not needed right now?
Lighting up Fiber doesn't make bandwidth cheaper in this market since there's no demand. In reality, excess fiber would make bandwidth more expensive due to the increased overhead of having to maintain equipment and staff that aren't doing anything. Also remember, there's more to bringing bandwidth to the home or business than having fiber within a mile of the door.. The cost to trench it in and install the equipment, even if you're tapping from a short distance, is substantial -- well beyond the reach of any consumer or small business.
Furthermore, your arguments regarding anti-competitive behavior are even more ridiculous. If there's one industry where being a monopoly is a massive disadvantage, it's telecom. The Bells get screwed DAILY by the tariffs in place by the FCC (I don't have sympathy for them, they dug themselves into that mess) but business is NOT easy for them. The small-guy is at every advantage in this industry. If the big boys own the lines and the little guys want to use them, the FCC says they have to let them -- even if it means the big-boys taking a financial loss on the deal.
Sorry.. but you have much to learn about the telecom world before you open your mouth on the subject again.
I just don't believe "those evil phone companies" are causing the fiber to go unused.
I'm sure the exectives sit around in smoke-filled conference rooms coming up with clever ways to keep technology out of the hands of people and make LESS money by NOT selling it. Give me a break.
Phone companies will light up the fiber when it makes fiscal sense to do so. Nobody, ESPECIALLY not a phone company who would stand to profit significantly from cheap fiber, is purposely NOT using this stuff.
This is no longer speculation. I was listening to CNET Radio on my way into work this morning and the Chief Research Officer of Microsoft was the guest.
He confirmed that Microsoft was going to start developing Linux software and said Office was not on the list of things they had planned right away. IIS, SQL Server, and other such products would be placed on the burner first.
He also admitted some other interesting things. Namely that by 2006 they expected Linux to be shipping on 40% of Intel servers and that over time, the TCO of Linux would come to be the same as Windows in the server market.
I can't find any references to an announcement by Microsoft yet.. but you should be able to hear the interview in archive format at cnetradio.com.
Ha ha.. liquidating liquid audio.. tee hee ha ha ha.
When I bought mine, I had my choice between Mandrake and Lindows. I chose Lindows so I could see what it was like. It's umm.. yucky.
But then I'm not a fan of Linux for the desktop in general. The GUI's are too inconsistent between apps for my taste.
Open source -- as we know it today, has so many things wrong with it I can't even begin to tell you..
:) (yes, those things cost money -- sometimes money needs to be spent).
1> Documentation is usually 2nd priority. In my world, if there's no documentation, there's no product.
2> The product is usually 2nd rate. Because there's often no money on the line, my experience has been that the programmers take less accountability for their efforts. Big bug? Guess you have to wait until the programmer (or someone else) gets around to it. Big bug in a program you paid thousands of dollars for? My experience is that enough screaming can get you a patch in very little time.
3> The user interace is lacking severely. Bigger companies hire people who specialize in usability to the design the UI. Open-source projects have HORRID user interfaces (A perfect example of this would be Request Tracker -- the software rocks.. the documentation sucks, and the awkward user interface effectively makes the product useless for large-scale deployments).
Open-source definitely has it's place. It's fabulous for the "quick fix it" jobs and the "I've got lots of time on my hands to figure it out and fix any problems I find" solutions. Sadly, however, my experience has been that this stuff is only truely free if your time is worthless.
Don't get me wrong.. I love open-source software. I wouldn't be able to do my job without it -- but with these drawbacks, it will never take the place of the mission-critical elements where I can hold someone responsible with I don't get what I need.
Due to the fact that parents are now 34% more likely to have ugly children, I fully support this. (If that statistic sounds wrong, it's because I made it up).
I wrote an editorial on a topic similar to this right here. It makes a strong case for the right to choose what humans should look like. (Note to those with no sense of humor: Clicking this link will ruin your day).
TiVo is my favorite household pet of all time. I love the suggestions feature!! Then one day I had a houseguest show up for a few days and TiVo suddenly started thinking I liked gay porn. :(
:(
I was secretly hoping TiVo would turn me gay as a result (Hello lawsuit!) Naturally, you can understand why I was disapointed when a few days later I realized that I was still attracted to women.
So.. we can track down the people we used to talk to in the days when we had no life and compare TradeWars scores. This service in invaluable!
Except they don't list my old l33t undergr0und BBS I used to run with information on how to build a beige box.
Ah.. the days when I was young an innocent.
Forgive the nostalgia.
I was in the same boat with my first few PDA's. I found their usefulness was only as good as my willingless to carry an extra device around -- and I was constantly leaving it in the car or at home where it was of little use to me.
Then I got my Samsung I300 and I found that I couldn't live without my PDA. I always had it with me when I needed it because I always had my cell phone. It gave me the same functionality as a Palm VII (full wireless internet) but the plan was integrated w/ my cell phone.
I use MS-Outlook constantly at the office (there is not even a close 2nd for group schedule and task colaboration, don't get me started on crappy open-source alternatives) -- so it's genuinely wonderful to be able, quite literally, take outlook w/ me. If I drop a note into outlook, it goes with me. If a co-worker schedules a meeting w/ me, it goes with me. Getting directions from someone over the phone? I type it into an Outlook note while I'm talking to them it goes with me when I leave. I simply don't have to touch paper anymore and it's CONVENIENT.
I would be lost without my PDA -- but ONLY because it's integrated into my cell phone and I never have to worry about whether or not it's going to be useful because I know that I've alwayd got it with me.
Those numbers are based on what the cable companies pay for their bandwidth -- not what you pay. This is sort of the case in point -- you don't know how good you've really got it at $40/mo.
Three words for you: Service Level Agreement (SLA).
When you only pay $50 a month, you don't get an SLA. Cable companies wouldn't be in business if they gauranteed service levels at those rates. If reliability is important to you, you're going to have to pay for it. Order a T1 or a T3. You can negotiate an SLA and when it goes down, you are compensated.
The reality check here is that you're only going to get what you pay for. Margins are very thin in the ISP business -- and again, this crime directly affects their pocketbooks.
I find it ironic that you complain about shoddy service, yet you defend those that are costing the company money. Money that could probably otherwise be spent on keeping the service running more smoothly for you.
These people were stealing a VERY valuable commodity.. bandwidth. For those of you who don't work near the ISP industry, bandwidth is --VERY EXPENSIVE--. $200 per megabit per month is an absolute STEAL (to get that rate, you need to be buying it on the DS3 level). $400 per meg is more realistic on lower levels.
Cable companies simply cannot afford to let people steal this stuff. Quite literally, someone who is uncapping a cable modem and mooching 10 megabits of bandwidth could easily be costing them several thousand dollars a month.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for these people. What they did not only violated their agreement, but it cost someone else a LOT of money. Stealing is stealing, folks. And unlike the arguments that may apply to software piracy, this really does directly affect someone else's pocketbook.
Real men hate cats -- they're for sissies and people with too much time on their hands.
more
Haven't we run this topic completely into the ground? I vote we deal with this when it's actually an issue. This discussion reminds me of a bunch of 13 year old geeks sitting around the RPG table talking about what they're going to do if giant robots with photon torpedos take over the planet.
I don't mean to appear as flame bait.. but.. this topic has been discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
There are some useful scenarios we could be discussing. This is approximately none of them.
And when I say it's too hard, please understand that I'm a UNIX vet of over 10 years. I've taught UNIX in college classes and I'm a published author on the subject. I know UNIX.
The problem is that the spirit of the open-source community is "let someone else do it". The idea is almost profound. Writing an email program? Pull in someone else's libraries for encryption, smtp, pop3, GUI, etc and you only need to tie it up in a neat package and stick it out there. When I come along to install said application, it takes me an hour to get all the depencies in place and get everything right (And don't say RPM's, RedHat has their own problems.. dependencies break with other things on your system are too new or too old). I don't have that kind of time.
2> The GUI on Window is perfected. It really is. Everything is clean, consistent, and reasonably intuitive once you get used to the base system. It seems like when I switch to any window manager on *nix, I spend the time getting used to the way one implementation has done something only to find that another application chose to do it a completely different way. The end result it a steep learning curve for each application that I pick up.
The reality is that the one thing everyone considers to be the biggest strength of the open-source community is really the biggest weakness. Thousands of people each with their own idea of how something should work will, in the end, cause any end-user to be completely counter-productive.
I love UNIX. I could not live without it. But it has no place on the desktop unless you have a VERY specific need. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
But let's face it, when I want to install a new email program,
I don't understand the need to always be on the bleeding edge of technology. Intel loves to push these newer faster chips down the throats of consumers, but I've got 600MHz Intel chip and a 2ghz intel chip, both running Windows 2000, and I swear I can't tell any difference between 600MHz and 2ghz for normal usage -- and I consider myself a power user.(Granted, I don't do 3D rendering or massive number crunching on a daily basis, but how many of your average consumers do?)
I won't be running out to buy this any time soon -- especially when I can the $200 Walmart computer is less than the cost of this CPU.
Call me old fashioned, but geeze.. Intel already gets plenty of money from my pocketbook for little performance gain. Something needs to be done about the rest of PC hardware before the speed of the CPU is going to make a massive difference.
I'm glad it runs linux but has a touch screen. That will prevent me from touching 'rm -rf
Seriously, linux w/ a touchscreen?? How useful is that?!
I realize the horizon problem has already been addressed -- but one other issue with sending low power long-haul signals over water is that of a ship crossing through the path.
The article says the total cost was about $3,000. There's no way they built towers high enough to overcome that problem on that budget. They're either in for some long nights troubleshooting when the signal disappears for a few seconds every now and then, or they just don't care.
I don't understand how this is news for a number of reasons:
1> The math behind antenna design theory leaves little room for innovation. Two things determine how far your single is going to go a)the output power and b) the efficiency of your antenna. I don't see where this antenna design is any more efficient than many that are already on the market.. which leads me to..
2> There are already products on the market that can push WiFi signals well over 4 miles. Check out Motorola Canopy for their solution (it's geared more towards commercial enterprises, but for $2500 for an AP and two subscriber units, you can start a long-range WISP on pocket-change). Then there's companies like YDI, Wireless Central, and Tranzeo Wireless all selling long-range 802.11 products for cheap.
They might as well be putting out a press release saying they've invented a circular device that they're calling a "wheel".