Why not give this sunk cost in source code to the free community, let them hack away and salvage what could undoubtedly be an amazing game to play? Better yet - as source, it can touch a much larger market than before, making the community larger.
Then Sony can at least see some revenue, either by hosting servers on their network, or sell support products and add-on packs.
It would have been the remnants of the entire world, representing far more mass than dinosaurs, that would have turned into the "fossil fuels", and not merely dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the vegitation alone would dwarf the collective mass of the dinosaurs, not to mention insects, which can breed and grow on high geometric curves.
Yep. What we really need is too late to accomplish. What we really need is a protocol that forbids you from identifying which browser you are, but only allows you to specify to which standards you conform.
No, I don't think it's too late - that is basically denying the power of large groups of people. Open standards can win if the standard is superior, and available to all - hence, the opportunity for FSF and Copyleft, and a marketing campaign to make people aware of them. It isn't late, it is just now a challenge, whereas when the time was "right", nobody could see far enough ahead to think that there would ever be browser wars.
Thinking in the traditional sense, and taking the current state of the browser market, surely any ideas will fail. That's why Guerilla tactics have been so effective. Think of a good open protocol, get a small group of hackers together, and start it off small.
Incorporate it into Mozilla and KHTML, get it adopted by companies like Netscape, Apple, Sun and others that inherently oppose and compete with Microsoft, and in time either Microsoft will be forced to respond, or lose out. The Apple market is small, but it gets a disproportionately large attention of writers - so get Apple to adopt the open protocol in Safari, and mention it to some Apple websites, and the Mac user base will probably adopt it and market it as a Microsoft-free protocol.
Then get it supported in Apache and other open web software as well. Get people to use it without ever knowing they are using it. Think Guerilla, not Gorilla.
It would be nice to see a browser capable of masquerading around as IE or Netscape to decieve these foolish websites into not knowing what they are.
I've heard plenty of stories of forms suddenly working when a feature in a browser was changed to show Internet Explorer for Windows/Mac, and otherwise breaking when they work just fine. Or in my case, I came across a site that said IE and Netscape only, but used Opera and it worked perfectly - this sort of ignorance on the part of web developers really is intolerable.
Seems to me, that one possible interpretation could be that David had simply gotten into the two-sigma range of his MTBF and died out, or, like a cell phone in dormant mode, simply exhausted his power supply over thousands of years and it was eventually used up.
If this happens, I'm blasting an email address all over China and Hong Kong so all the chinese language emails display as scrambled symbols on my iMac.
Words by companies that become so popular that they enter the common language of people also develop certain legal protections for people who want to use them.
For example, the company Xerox became the term for copying a document, such was their popularity. And I recall someone winning a lawsuit over using the word, arguing that people in every day usage said "I'm going to Xerox this document", which turned out to be true, and Xerox lost the suit.
Same with Federal Express. It isn't uncommon for someone to hear "I'm going to FedEx this over", which is why Federal Express now calls itself FedEx, to associate more strongly with the popular contracted use of its name.
So it is always important to assess this avenue when dealing with companie names. Think of all the companies sued by Apple over the name Apple in a product or company title. That has to be the worst example of all - Apple is a word in such broad usage that there is no way they should have won a suit.
Also, again with regards to an Apple product name, Apple didn't deem it fit to sue Compaq over the iPaq product, which has the exact length and format of the iPod name brand.
Obviously there is DEFINITELY a bullying consideration when suing a company, otherwise Apple would have had a strong case suing Compaq over the name, but didn't, but they've sued a bunch of smaller companies in this regard.
And truth be told, subsidizing the console is the standard business model for all console manufacturers, isn't it? We all know that.
All manufacturers do this to some extent - Nintendo recoups on its games, same with Sony and Microsoft. This isn't dumping, it isn't an unfair corporate subsidy.
And actually, the losses are partially explained:
"The loss in the home entertainment division has been put down to the high cost of marketing the game console and absorbing the cost of the price cuts Microsoft has been forced to get people buying it."
So we can at least assign an unquantified number to the marketing, which would have been a huge figure. We all know what Microsoft will spend on marketing its products (Half a billion on Windows 95 in 1995 dollars, and a similar figure on Win2K or WinXP, can't remember), so the marketing could account for a significant portion of the loss.
As for the last comment of the person who submitted the article to/., who says "Microsoft are said to be prepared to spend $2 billion funding Xbox live over the next five years, suggesting it will be some time before the home entertainment division break into the black", the suggestion of how long it takes Microsoft to be profitable cannot be made simply on this statement from Microsoft, which is neither binding nor filed in any formal report. When Microsoft becomes profitable all depends on the competitors to it in the console market, and if there is any cross-competition between the console market and any other market like PC games. So when Microsoft becomes profitable (are we using only when, and not if?) is all up in the air.
Can anyone who knows of other free imap email accounts please list them here? Apple cut off my Mac.com email account after twice asking them not to, and since they have chosen to wrap up Mac.com email accounts with.Mac and charge me $160 for one useful email account and a bunch of other completely useless services, I would like to see what sort of other IMAP accounts are out there, preferably ones that can be interfaced with Outlook Express.
Perhaps some day we will see free power generation projects, just like we now see free wireless networks, if miniature generators become possible and people who live on the shore have the mind for it.
"No this is called SmartStep, why do you presume to be so much smarter than everyone else without even reading the article?"
If you can read from a post on some website that someone is presuming to be mucch smarter than everyone else, my hat is off to you.
As for whether it's one or the other, the fact is, the article was a complaint about the chip running slower when it runs off battery power. SpeedStep, SmartStep, it doesn't make any difference - disable SpeedStep so it runs at full core clock, and you get less battery time than advertised, so the customer has the same complaint.
I suggest you read what the person says more carefully, and skip your own presumptions about what the thread author thinks.
"And just who... {} foots the bill for this $250,000/yr that it's going to cost to maintain the site? Is it going to be added to tuition which is already high enough here in Canada and is outrageous in the U.S.??"
Well, for a start, MIT may choose to use a portion of their $1.5 Billion dollar fund raised from alumni, there's a source:
Another reason why this is a sweet decision on MIT's part is that this (hopefully) opens up a lot of the interesting courses at the school. Part of the inspiration for the Web content caching company Akamai was a course at MIT that I would love to see. Unfortunately, I don't have the money, citizenship, or an admission offer from MIT's Computer Science program to do a degree at the school. But if they put it online, I can at least look at the course curriculum and buy any text or print off the notes and learn the material as best I can.
Yeah, all of Intel's mobile chips have this so-called Speed-Step "technology". An unusual way to describe a core clock throttle, but alright. When you're plugged into the wall, you run at the chip's advertised core clock, but use battery power and it scales down to some fraction of that.
Intel doesn't even advertise the lower core clock speed anymore for the P4, but on the P3-M 1 GHZ, the technology dropped the chip to 733 MHz when on battery power.
1. Buy immediately if you want to maximize the time the technology you own is current.
2. If you want the technology but don't want to pay the high price, wait till the discount.
I've sold computers for a good time, and bought my own for many years, and in my experience, these are the only two "best times" to buy for different needs. Both are based on simple logic.
When a new piece of technology first comes out, it is at that point the time at which a buyer will be able to obtain the device for the longest period of time before something else significantly better one-ups it.
If you like the features of a device but don't want to pay the high price, you wait. This means sacrificing obsolescence for the obvious price benefit. With these items, you make sure you like the features before you buy. There will always be more features and speed, but so long as you can do your work with the technology you want, it is all you need.
Lastly, if you want a mixed alternative, don't buy the absolute best device on the market, buy one or two steps down. Companies typically charge a premium for their top-of-the-line devices, so buying a few down saves the premium, plus the difference in component prices, yet still allows you to buy something brand new and faster than the device in its price point from the previous generation of the device.
A question for all those game programmers out there - are any game developers considering modular game visual engines so that they can be upgraded?
I often wonder about these MMORPG games like Ultima, Dark Ages of Camelot, EverQuest. These games are all still around, but the developers have a limited lifecycle intended for each, so while you can still play Ultima Online today, is it true that it's graphics quality and overall reality of its universe are far less advanced than the new MMORPGs like DAOC?
I ask these questions with the thought in mind that some day there may be an online game that is an identical copy of something like Tolkein's Middle Earth, or at least a gaming universe that is as limitless as a good hard-copy roleplaying game. Literally, you could be anything from a farmer to necromancer.
Will these games also be passed by in graphics by the Next Big Thing (tm)? Or will game engines become modular, with both a proprietary version and an open-source version, so that five years after the game comes out, or 15 years even, the game is far more playable and far more detailed, being up to the match of technologies like bio/quantum computing and printed circuits allowing displays to be the size of your wall and five times as detailed as today.
I'm sure others have thought the same thing - after seeing AOTC last night, I'm struck with the number of incredible similarities it has with other movies. I was seeing Gladiator, Apocalypse Now, Braveheart, Starship Troopers (of all things), Shaft (In fact, the entire movie could have been safely called 'Shaft'. Shortshaft grows up, city of shafts, Yoda has an appropriately short shaft, the evil guy has a bent shaft, Sam Jackson, Shaft, acts a lot like Shaft, etc.). Beyond those, I saw a lot of LOTR in the movie, particularly with Aniken and Amidala (Aragorn and Arwen) as well as Dooku the White (Saruman in sound and role), and the aliens of the lost planet seemed much like those from A.I., though with a lot more visual detail. And who could deny the Matrix/Dune similarities with Aniken.
I came away thinking that AOTC was more a jumble of tributes to other movies than a movie of its own. It was certainly entertaining and suspenseful in parts, and a far cry from the first movie, but it was not the masterpiece epic of the first three. And some of the dialogue had the audience laughing during the most serious parts, or just out of sheer amazement at the weakness of it.
There's my two cents on what I saw during AOTC. However, I'm still never going to see Spiderman, even if it is better.;)
After working in the networking for some time in a research group, I can say that there have been a lot of companies that have come and gone, offering similar "breakthrough" technologies, raised XX millions of dollars, and then went bankrupt quicker than the time it would take for their hardware to become obsolete.
It's likely that the claim to be able to route up to 1000 times more traffic is only a technology goal for them after they begin producing at least one or more smaller boxes that can't route nearly as much traffic.
And even if the box can route 1000 times more traffic, you have to cope with the Internet being composed of a variety of smaller sub-networks. If AT&T or Verizon upgrades their networks to use these boxes, and you're not on their network, you aren't going to see any gains at all, unless they make equivalent increases in core network bandwidth and you happen to access large majorities of traffic on their network. For the entire Internet to see gains, most of the network providers will need to adopt the box, or similarly capable boxes, and that rollout will take at least three years assuming these boxes become as trendy as "all your base are belong to us", a game that I never came across in my arcading days. What was the redeeming feature, was it a good game, or was the language just so funny that everyone remembered it?
The other thing about the product Hyperchip sells is that it's scalable, so while its maximum routable bandwidth won't make it obsolete in one year, the companies using it will never have that capacity available, they will only expand on an as-needed basis.
It sounds great, but if it does work, Hyperchip will be acquired sooner or later, so the company as it exists now will never live to see the success of the products. Network vendors need to be able to offer much more than a router these days.
What I would like to see is some legitimate evidence backing up this story that the computer is trashed. Right now all we have is pictures, and as much as it pains me to see a Mac that badly broken, we certainly are not provided with any evidence confirming that UPS did indeed ship this equipment. Funny, but I would think that would be essential to having a legitimate case, pun not intended.
So where's the scan of the UPS invoice? I shudder to think that pictures alone are enough to convince people of the guilt of a company, when not one of the pictures indicates the company did indeed ship the equipment after all.
Well folks, another Internet/Phone service terminates. Why the surprise? A geek's dream? No, it was a profit nightmare. In fact, the plummeting prices of Internet, long distance and other network services over the past five years have been well beyond what any company anticipated.
The reason why these services are being cancelled and so many "CLEC" companies are going bankrupt is because of pure economics - there were too many entrants to the competitive environment.
According to economic reality, there are only a certain number of competitors that the telecom/access market could bear. When the Internet came along, the whole industrialized world went into a frenzy. Suddenly venture capital was affordable. Suddenly the Internet was the "new economy" infrastructure. Suddenly profitable business plans went out the window for excuses like "the Internet is one big land grab" and such statements were enough to get insane ideas money.
Along for the ride were network companies, who were supposedly the infrastructure creators for the new economy. They got money, they started up voice and data services, and the entire network industry became swamped by service providers, and equipment manufacturers.
Now we're facing the hangover of that big Internet party - bankruptcies, cutbacks on service, incredible profit drops, layoffs, and those "ideal, too good to be true" type services like Sprint ION 8mbps were dropped.
Don't be disappointed - learn economics, and think in economic terms, because economics is the science of money, and money is the lifeblood of companies and their ability to offer 8mbps service, plus phone service and LD access.
I see big price increases coming for us in the near future. Cell phone prices will continue to drop, but every time an access provider goes bankrupt, there will be one less competitor in the market and a little less pressure on the incumbent RBOC/ILEC companies, allowing them to.. "adjust"... their prices to recover full costs.
I think we are going to see a return to prices of at least two years ago, if not more, in the next couple of years.
If Stallman wants proper credit given to GNU/Linux, and he contributed so much to GNU, I say we combine Stallman and Linux to give both central figures credit to the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like "release the Hounds!"
Why not give this sunk cost in source code to the free community, let them hack away and salvage what could undoubtedly be an amazing game to play? Better yet - as source, it can touch a much larger market than before, making the community larger.
Then Sony can at least see some revenue, either by hosting servers on their network, or sell support products and add-on packs.
It would have been the remnants of the entire world, representing far more mass than dinosaurs, that would have turned into the "fossil fuels", and not merely dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the vegitation alone would dwarf the collective mass of the dinosaurs, not to mention insects, which can breed and grow on high geometric curves.
Yep. What we really need is too late to accomplish. What we really need is a protocol that forbids you from identifying which browser you are, but only allows you to specify to which standards you conform.
No, I don't think it's too late - that is basically denying the power of large groups of people. Open standards can win if the standard is superior, and available to all - hence, the opportunity for FSF and Copyleft, and a marketing campaign to make people aware of them. It isn't late, it is just now a challenge, whereas when the time was "right", nobody could see far enough ahead to think that there would ever be browser wars.
Thinking in the traditional sense, and taking the current state of the browser market, surely any ideas will fail. That's why Guerilla tactics have been so effective. Think of a good open protocol, get a small group of hackers together, and start it off small.
Incorporate it into Mozilla and KHTML, get it adopted by companies like Netscape, Apple, Sun and others that inherently oppose and compete with Microsoft, and in time either Microsoft will be forced to respond, or lose out. The Apple market is small, but it gets a disproportionately large attention of writers - so get Apple to adopt the open protocol in Safari, and mention it to some Apple websites, and the Mac user base will probably adopt it and market it as a Microsoft-free protocol.
Then get it supported in Apache and other open web software as well. Get people to use it without ever knowing they are using it. Think Guerilla, not Gorilla.
It would be nice to see a browser capable of masquerading around as IE or Netscape to decieve these foolish websites into not knowing what they are.
I've heard plenty of stories of forms suddenly working when a feature in a browser was changed to show Internet Explorer for Windows/Mac, and otherwise breaking when they work just fine. Or in my case, I came across a site that said IE and Netscape only, but used Opera and it worked perfectly - this sort of ignorance on the part of web developers really is intolerable.
Seems to me, that one possible interpretation could be that David had simply gotten into the two-sigma range of his MTBF and died out, or, like a cell phone in dormant mode, simply exhausted his power supply over thousands of years and it was eventually used up.
If this happens, I'm blasting an email address all over China and Hong Kong so all the chinese language emails display as scrambled symbols on my iMac.
Words by companies that become so popular that they enter the common language of people also develop certain legal protections for people who want to use them.
For example, the company Xerox became the term for copying a document, such was their popularity. And I recall someone winning a lawsuit over using the word, arguing that people in every day usage said "I'm going to Xerox this document", which turned out to be true, and Xerox lost the suit.
Same with Federal Express. It isn't uncommon for someone to hear "I'm going to FedEx this over", which is why Federal Express now calls itself FedEx, to associate more strongly with the popular contracted use of its name.
So it is always important to assess this avenue when dealing with companie names. Think of all the companies sued by Apple over the name Apple in a product or company title. That has to be the worst example of all - Apple is a word in such broad usage that there is no way they should have won a suit.
Also, again with regards to an Apple product name, Apple didn't deem it fit to sue Compaq over the iPaq product, which has the exact length and format of the iPod name brand.
Obviously there is DEFINITELY a bullying consideration when suing a company, otherwise Apple would have had a strong case suing Compaq over the name, but didn't, but they've sued a bunch of smaller companies in this regard.
And truth be told, subsidizing the console is the standard business model for all console manufacturers, isn't it? We all know that.
/., who says "Microsoft are said to be prepared to spend $2 billion funding Xbox live over the next five years, suggesting it will be some time before the home entertainment division break into the black", the suggestion of how long it takes Microsoft to be profitable cannot be made simply on this statement from Microsoft, which is neither binding nor filed in any formal report. When Microsoft becomes profitable all depends on the competitors to it in the console market, and if there is any cross-competition between the console market and any other market like PC games. So when Microsoft becomes profitable (are we using only when, and not if?) is all up in the air.
All manufacturers do this to some extent - Nintendo recoups on its games, same with Sony and Microsoft. This isn't dumping, it isn't an unfair corporate subsidy.
And actually, the losses are partially explained:
"The loss in the home entertainment division has been put down to the high cost of marketing the game console and absorbing the cost of the price cuts Microsoft has been forced to get people buying it."
So we can at least assign an unquantified number to the marketing, which would have been a huge figure. We all know what Microsoft will spend on marketing its products (Half a billion on Windows 95 in 1995 dollars, and a similar figure on Win2K or WinXP, can't remember), so the marketing could account for a significant portion of the loss.
As for the last comment of the person who submitted the article to
Could be a slightly silly question here - is there a Bugzilla or similar bug tracking site for Apple's OSX?
Can anyone who knows of other free imap email accounts please list them here? Apple cut off my Mac.com email account after twice asking them not to, and since they have chosen to wrap up Mac.com email accounts with .Mac and charge me $160 for one useful email account and a bunch of other completely useless services, I would like to see what sort of other IMAP accounts are out there, preferably ones that can be interfaced with Outlook Express.
Thanks.
Perhaps some day we will see free power generation projects, just like we now see free wireless networks, if miniature generators become possible and people who live on the shore have the mind for it.
"No this is called SmartStep, why do you presume to be so much smarter than everyone else without even reading the article?"
If you can read from a post on some website that someone is presuming to be mucch smarter than everyone else, my hat is off to you.
As for whether it's one or the other, the fact is, the article was a complaint about the chip running slower when it runs off battery power. SpeedStep, SmartStep, it doesn't make any difference - disable SpeedStep so it runs at full core clock, and you get less battery time than advertised, so the customer has the same complaint.
I suggest you read what the person says more carefully, and skip your own presumptions about what the thread author thinks.
OH GOD!!! Its another TIE!!!
"And just who... {} foots the bill for this $250,000/yr that it's going to cost to maintain the site? Is it going to be added to tuition which is already high enough here in Canada and is outrageous in the U.S.??"
Well, for a start, MIT may choose to use a portion of their $1.5 Billion dollar fund raised from alumni, there's a source:
MIT Fund
Another reason why this is a sweet decision on MIT's part is that this (hopefully) opens up a lot of the interesting courses at the school. Part of the inspiration for the Web content caching company Akamai was a course at MIT that I would love to see. Unfortunately, I don't have the money, citizenship, or an admission offer from MIT's Computer Science program to do a degree at the school. But if they put it online, I can at least look at the course curriculum and buy any text or print off the notes and learn the material as best I can.
Yeah, all of Intel's mobile chips have this so-called Speed-Step "technology". An unusual way to describe a core clock throttle, but alright. When you're plugged into the wall, you run at the chip's advertised core clock, but use battery power and it scales down to some fraction of that.
Intel doesn't even advertise the lower core clock speed anymore for the P4, but on the P3-M 1 GHZ, the technology dropped the chip to 733 MHz when on battery power.
Pentium4 2.2 GHz tech specs.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?
What's with the dragon metaphor?
My strategy is this:
1. Buy immediately if you want to maximize the time the technology you own is current.
2. If you want the technology but don't want to pay the high price, wait till the discount.
I've sold computers for a good time, and bought my own for many years, and in my experience, these are the only two "best times" to buy for different needs. Both are based on simple logic.
When a new piece of technology first comes out, it is at that point the time at which a buyer will be able to obtain the device for the longest period of time before something else significantly better one-ups it.
If you like the features of a device but don't want to pay the high price, you wait. This means sacrificing obsolescence for the obvious price benefit. With these items, you make sure you like the features before you buy. There will always be more features and speed, but so long as you can do your work with the technology you want, it is all you need.
Lastly, if you want a mixed alternative, don't buy the absolute best device on the market, buy one or two steps down. Companies typically charge a premium for their top-of-the-line devices, so buying a few down saves the premium, plus the difference in component prices, yet still allows you to buy something brand new and faster than the device in its price point from the previous generation of the device.
A question for all those game programmers out there - are any game developers considering modular game visual engines so that they can be upgraded?
I often wonder about these MMORPG games like Ultima, Dark Ages of Camelot, EverQuest. These games are all still around, but the developers have a limited lifecycle intended for each, so while you can still play Ultima Online today, is it true that it's graphics quality and overall reality of its universe are far less advanced than the new MMORPGs like DAOC?
I ask these questions with the thought in mind that some day there may be an online game that is an identical copy of something like Tolkein's Middle Earth, or at least a gaming universe that is as limitless as a good hard-copy roleplaying game. Literally, you could be anything from a farmer to necromancer.
Will these games also be passed by in graphics by the Next Big Thing (tm)? Or will game engines become modular, with both a proprietary version and an open-source version, so that five years after the game comes out, or 15 years even, the game is far more playable and far more detailed, being up to the match of technologies like bio/quantum computing and printed circuits allowing displays to be the size of your wall and five times as detailed as today.
What are your thoughts on this?
I'm sure others have thought the same thing - after seeing AOTC last night, I'm struck with the number of incredible similarities it has with other movies. I was seeing Gladiator, Apocalypse Now, Braveheart, Starship Troopers (of all things), Shaft (In fact, the entire movie could have been safely called 'Shaft'. Shortshaft grows up, city of shafts, Yoda has an appropriately short shaft, the evil guy has a bent shaft, Sam Jackson, Shaft, acts a lot like Shaft, etc.). Beyond those, I saw a lot of LOTR in the movie, particularly with Aniken and Amidala (Aragorn and Arwen) as well as Dooku the White (Saruman in sound and role), and the aliens of the lost planet seemed much like those from A.I., though with a lot more visual detail. And who could deny the Matrix/Dune similarities with Aniken.
;)
I came away thinking that AOTC was more a jumble of tributes to other movies than a movie of its own. It was certainly entertaining and suspenseful in parts, and a far cry from the first movie, but it was not the masterpiece epic of the first three. And some of the dialogue had the audience laughing during the most serious parts, or just out of sheer amazement at the weakness of it.
There's my two cents on what I saw during AOTC. However, I'm still never going to see Spiderman, even if it is better.
After working in the networking for some time in a research group, I can say that there have been a lot of companies that have come and gone, offering similar "breakthrough" technologies, raised XX millions of dollars, and then went bankrupt quicker than the time it would take for their hardware to become obsolete.
It's likely that the claim to be able to route up to 1000 times more traffic is only a technology goal for them after they begin producing at least one or more smaller boxes that can't route nearly as much traffic.
And even if the box can route 1000 times more traffic, you have to cope with the Internet being composed of a variety of smaller sub-networks. If AT&T or Verizon upgrades their networks to use these boxes, and you're not on their network, you aren't going to see any gains at all, unless they make equivalent increases in core network bandwidth and you happen to access large majorities of traffic on their network. For the entire Internet to see gains, most of the network providers will need to adopt the box, or similarly capable boxes, and that rollout will take at least three years assuming these boxes become as trendy as "all your base are belong to us", a game that I never came across in my arcading days. What was the redeeming feature, was it a good game, or was the language just so funny that everyone remembered it?
The other thing about the product Hyperchip sells is that it's scalable, so while its maximum routable bandwidth won't make it obsolete in one year, the companies using it will never have that capacity available, they will only expand on an as-needed basis.
It sounds great, but if it does work, Hyperchip will be acquired sooner or later, so the company as it exists now will never live to see the success of the products. Network vendors need to be able to offer much more than a router these days.
What I would like to see is some legitimate evidence backing up this story that the computer is trashed. Right now all we have is pictures, and as much as it pains me to see a Mac that badly broken, we certainly are not provided with any evidence confirming that UPS did indeed ship this equipment. Funny, but I would think that would be essential to having a legitimate case, pun not intended.
So where's the scan of the UPS invoice? I shudder to think that pictures alone are enough to convince people of the guilt of a company, when not one of the pictures indicates the company did indeed ship the equipment after all.
Well folks, another Internet/Phone service terminates. Why the surprise? A geek's dream? No, it was a profit nightmare. In fact, the plummeting prices of Internet, long distance and other network services over the past five years have been well beyond what any company anticipated.
.. "adjust" ... their prices to recover full costs.
The reason why these services are being cancelled and so many "CLEC" companies are going bankrupt is because of pure economics - there were too many entrants to the competitive environment.
According to economic reality, there are only a certain number of competitors that the telecom/access market could bear. When the Internet came along, the whole industrialized world went into a frenzy. Suddenly venture capital was affordable. Suddenly the Internet was the "new economy" infrastructure. Suddenly profitable business plans went out the window for excuses like "the Internet is one big land grab" and such statements were enough to get insane ideas money.
Along for the ride were network companies, who were supposedly the infrastructure creators for the new economy. They got money, they started up voice and data services, and the entire network industry became swamped by service providers, and equipment manufacturers.
Now we're facing the hangover of that big Internet party - bankruptcies, cutbacks on service, incredible profit drops, layoffs, and those "ideal, too good to be true" type services like Sprint ION 8mbps were dropped.
Don't be disappointed - learn economics, and think in economic terms, because economics is the science of money, and money is the lifeblood of companies and their ability to offer 8mbps service, plus phone service and LD access.
I see big price increases coming for us in the near future. Cell phone prices will continue to drop, but every time an access provider goes bankrupt, there will be one less competitor in the market and a little less pressure on the incumbent RBOC/ILEC companies, allowing them to
I think we are going to see a return to prices of at least two years ago, if not more, in the next couple of years.
Class action lawsuit.
His post was so good it got modded to +4 but he didn't get any Karma points because he posted AC.
BUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
If Stallman wants proper credit given to GNU/Linux, and he contributed so much to GNU, I say we combine Stallman and Linux to give both central figures credit to the OS.
We will now call it "Stallinux".
D'OH!