The problem with so many of these business is they are decent or really good ideas but, their business plans are written to please some venture capitalists and dont focus on long term reality.
In actuality, i don't think than many of the dotcoms were good ideas to start out with. Especially the whole ecommerce crew. They sprang to life and prospered for a time only because the company's whose products they were selling took their time embracing the internet. But once it was realized that there was money to be made, and that money was going to the dot coms who essentially stood between the supplier and customer in all the transactions. They just realized that they could do it themselves and then take in the dotcoms revenues as their own and raise their margins...
Onsale, Outpost, Buy, Shop, Amazon, and there's only hundreds more... Ebay at least enables people to do transactions they could have never done before, where as the the rest moved the middle man from being the cataloger to the dotcom.
Databases are really complex beasts... You can't just take an untuned database (installed out of the box) and expect to get the best performance you can. And it's doubtful that Oracle would spend much time tuning a SQL Server installation when the goal is for the Oracle database to win.
It'd be akin to Microsoft bringing out two sealed white boxes and saying "One run windows.One runs Linux. Notice how windows is 1000% faster at typcial tasks when compared to linx?" without mentioning or letting it be known that the windows install is running on a 1 GHz Pentium III with 128 megs of ram, a gigabit ethernet card and a RAID 0 array of 4 internal disks, whereas the linux box is a Pentium 60, with 16 megs of ram, 10 megabit ethernet, and a 600 megabyte IDE drive.
Both of those computers would look identical from the outside.
For a lot of benchmarks, more independant organizations should be created and funded by all the companies who wish to have their products benchmarked, with permission given to publish their findings however they see fit. Any other benchmark, really, is suspect. As is any system installed for the express purpose of showing how slow a given piece of software is.
See, the great thing about america is is that we all think we have our own opinions, but ultimately our opinions don't matter... doesn't that make us all feel incredibly special?
It's not the lack of openness that's keeping Java from reaching widespread acceptance, it's Microsoft, actually... Java has advanced pretty far ahead in the server arena, it just hasn't accomplished much on the desktop due to 90% of the worlds desktops not being very enthusiastic about it.
It'd really be detrimental to trully opensource java. If they had from the get go, there'd have been no clause for them to go after microsoft for shipping tainted "java" tools which incedentally destroyed the whole premise of Java by creating applicationst that ran on only one platform.
What's kept java going so far is that Sun's been leading the way.... It'd be much better if they made a $0 license for people to have access to the source code, but retain the name to Java and only permit environments which complied with the "standard" to use the word Java in their names or descriptions.
But, more importantly, what is illegal about a link? It is the site providing the illegal content that is at fault, not the linker.
In the eyes of the law, if you knowingly link to something that you know to be illegal, you basically providing it yourself. You're not just giving vague instructions at that point, you're giving a pinpoint location... I think that providing direct links to illegal material is wrong and should be illegal. I just don't agree with what is and isn't deemed "illegal". For instance, kiddie porn should be illegal in that context... Warez, i think should be too... but general "hacking" and "cracking" websites, that just describe teciques and the like without actually providing binaries, source, or direct links to those would be okay, under my rule...
I just don't think it's reasonable to say "i'm not providing illegal material, i'm just telling the person where to get it, the secret knock and password". That's the same as providing it yourself.
Now someone please let me know when it can run Dreamweaver...
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 1
No matter how you look at it, the G4 cube is vastly overpriced... And that's coming from a Mac fan. You're paying a huge premium over a regular G4, for a machine with no expansion slots, no internal drive bays, etc...
Yes, i think that regular G3's and G4's so far have provided a very competitive bang for the buck, but the G4 cube isn't aiming for that niche... it's aimed squarely at those who think that something should look cool and don't mind spending twice as much as they should for it.
The G4 Cube really should be positioned between the iMac's and G4's in Apple's lineup, not between the cheapest G4 and the Dual Processor G4's.
Re:Apple or BSDaemon, good question...
on
X On OSX Now Free
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· Score: 1
We probably would, if not for the fact that you can't run AU/X on anything later than a quadra... Which topped out at 40 MHz 040's.... for all the supposed benefits of unix, you sure can get a lot more work done on a 400 MHz machine that crashes once a day on a bad day, than on a machine a 10th the speed which doesn't crash at all.
And will everyone quit raggin on the one mouse button aleady? It's such a tired argument.
For the simple reason that the electoral college makes me feel as though my opinion isn't trully being heard. When you vote, all you're doing really is recommeneding which way your whoever in the electoral college should vote. I guess that made it easier back in the 1700 and 1800's, but we're in the 2000's... it cant be that hard to rig together a system which actually tally's votes.
It does seem screwey that someone can win the election even if they actually receive less votes than another candidate, simply by concentrating on the states with the most electoral college representation.
I also refused to vote nader, thinking that a vote for him takes a way a vote for Gore and therefore is a vote for Bush, but in the end, since Bush and Gore are basically the same on most issues, i'd rather now "throw away" my vote on a candidate who stands for more of what i believe in, rather than give my vote to someone i don't like just in the hopes that it stops someone i don't like even more from entering office.
This year, though, i've decided to go nader. I know my vote won't make a difference in this years elections, but what it will do is maybe help create a 3 party system in the future elections... All he needs is 5% of the vote and the green party gains access to a lot more funding in 20004..l
Unfortunately, MediaOne prohibits static IP addresses and any attempts at creating one. So users who don't need the "added securiy" of a DHCP assigned IP address can't make do without one. Further, it's rather lame that there's no provisions in most dialup, ISDN and xDSL accounts as to how many computers share the bandwidth. As opposed to MediaOne who requires you pay an extra fee in order for other computers in your house to perform such tasks as receiveing email...
AtHome and other ISP's shouldn't provide firewalling services. They shouldn't provide spam blocking services. And they shouldn't tell us what to do with our bandwidth. They should simply supply pipes to our homes. Offer any additional services on top of that one basic service.
Socket 7 - Pentiums, Pentium MMX's, Cyrix, AMD K6's
Socket 8 - DEFUNCT - Pentium Pro
Slot 1 - Early Celerons, Pentium II's, Pentium III's
Slot 2 - Xeon
Socket 370 - Pentium III, Celerons (though i believe they're not quite compatible, though it might just be a jumper issue)
Slot A - AMD Athlon
Socket A - AMD Athlon (Thunderbird), AMD Duron
For multiprocessing, your options are currently limited to Slot 1 Pentium II's, Pentium III's, and Celerons and Socket 370 and Slot 1 Pentium III's and Celerons. Be careful too, if you opt to go the Celeron route, and be sure that you purchase a MP capable motherboard that can specifically support dual Celerons, otherwise you'll be out of luck.
It simply makes no sense year after year to keep on paying again for that same app that would have suited you well enough 10 years ago.
If you don't need any of the new features of a given piece of software, you don't need to upgrade it (Y2K aside...). That's something that's often forgotten. If your company is happy with Windows 95 and Office 97, Microsoft doesn't show up at the door and say "excuse us, but did you realize that we've got new versions out that you MUST buy?"
If you're going to promote an artist on this site, why not just put the mp3's on that site as well? Then you'd be able to know how many people visited, how many people downloaded, how many people completed their downloads, how many people downloaded one song and then decided to download more songs. That's all information that artists would probably be interested in, but only the first item would actually be able to be collected if a site left the downloading to Napster.
Besides that, bandwidth just isn't THAT much money... $25/month will get you 10 GB of bandwidth at numerous places. If each song is 5 MB, that's 2000 downloads for $25 each month. It's not a real strain on any one band, and would be easily offset by 4 or 5 CD sales (at marked down prices).
In the world that artists started promoting themselves over teh web, Napster's "benefits" become fewer and fewer.
The pentium 3 ID is about the most useless thing in the world. It's funny that people complained about it at all, when such things as IP addresses, cookies, and MAC addresses exist. "Oh no, yet another unique number attatched to me... All the others are livable, but that one in particular is a BAD thing."
Onto your post though. ZeroKnowledge is a company trying to make money. They can't just open up their network in hopes that people will send in envelopes stuffed full of cash for them to pocket for their services. They need to be able to authorize people to use their network... It's just too bad that they're subpeona-able, rather than being based in a country that's not extremely cooperative with the US.
But if you make a rock solid, easy to use software package for linux, where's the money going to come from if not for sales of binaries. Well written and small/simple apps typically won't require much support to get running, and right now, support is where all the linux companys claim to want to make their money from.
I really hope that that's not trully how you made your decision. Based on the software that the web hosting company chosen by their web designer chosen by the candidates assistants son in law.
I also don't think i want either of them in office, but that seems fairly inevitable. Might as well vote Nader, then, and hope for an increased chance of a sane(er) politician come next election...
There really just isn't that much difference between the two. So, in hindsight, maybe choosing based on what their webservers run isn't so bad... Of course you could just bring a coin to the voting booth, too.
Give it up. Napster's only use is to distribut emusic you've already heard of. The "starving artist" gains no benefit from napster, only the artist who has already been heavily promoted by the labels. Yes, of course,there are exceptions, but by and large, the Napster as a distribibution channel argument is rather bunk.
Yes, artists need to pay for studio time from their own pockets. But the difference is that the labels fill their pockets with money for things such as studio time, new instruments, producers, and engineers. And the thing is, it's not abank loan. If the record flops, it doesn't negatively effect the artists' credit rating, they simply don't need to pay back the money loaned.
The difference between if major labels exist or not is that of they're the ones that give teh artists the money to record their albums in the first place. And they're the ones that paid the money to make sure that your heard about those artists. For every Courtney Love, Limp Bizkit and Smashing Pumpkins type band that's rejecting the labels, there's a Courtney Love, Limp Bizkit and Smashing Pumpkins that would have never achieved the position that they're in had it not been for those "evil record labels".
But, you know, you're right. Artists should be paid. Neither shoud sysadmins. Or DBA's. Or help desk personell. All they're doing is trying to make money form the fact that the data enterers aren't smart enough to develop databases themselves. As soon as you're willing to give up[ your pay for your profession, then maybe it'd add some credence to "artists don't need to get paid either"...
No... i think it'd only be the very vocal minority that would attempt to spark an outcry. The rest of the users would just go "Oh, they got shut down? Bummer..." and move on with their lives. Kind of like when you get a bonus you weren't expecting, you're all psyched to spend it because it's money that you wouldn't have had in the first place, but once it's gone, oh well.
Of course the record industry is pissed at and scared of Napster. Napster is giving away for free something that costs the industry hundreds of millions of dollars to create. If Napster's allowed to flourish, that means that really, in the short term, cool, everyone gets free music, but in the longer term, how much more music do people think will actually come out? And how much of that will actually sound okay, recording wise? If labels aren't to exist, then there goes the money that artists would have used to pay for recording their albums in a nice studio rather than in their basements with one microphone set up in the middle of their setup...
Hey... how do you change your MAC address, in Linux, MacOS 8.5 or 9, and Windows 98? Inquiring minds want to know... mainly because my cable modem only allows two mac addresses of mine at the same time, and i've got 3 computers that would really like to have access to the internet, though not necessarily simultaneously...
Who determines what the public good is in that case? Could a radio station be evicted if they chose to air howard stern, or music with "anti-government" lyrics? That could turn into a scary situation.
Re:MAPS use is voluntary, what's the beef?
on
MAPS Sued Again
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· Score: 1
It's completely voluntary for a sysadmin to set their system up to use MAPS; nobody is forcing it down anyone's throat. This is basic freedom of choice.
The difference between the government telling people what they can and cannot say, a corporation doing the same, and a sysadim doing the same really isn't all that great. It just works out to one person or group of people acting like they know better than the people that they're supposed to be serving.
I don't think that any ISP should block anyone listed on MAPS unilaterally. Governments, yes, corporations, yes, because their bandwidth is bought and paid for so that their employees can get their work done. But an ISP shouldn't be making those decisions for their users. Rather, they should provide their users with the OPTION to use "advance spam blocking tools", which they could opt in or opt out of.
Because, in most cases, it's the users that are paying for the bandwidth, expecting full access to the internet. And just because one of the offending places might have an open mail relay, that doesn't mean that an ISP's customer doesn't want to communicate with the other ISP's customer.
I think it's best to keep tools separated. Have a lot of tools specifically tailored to one job, rather than one tool tailored to many jobs. Trying to merge all the different OSes together would create such a hulking OS, that nothing would ever get accomplished.
KDE killed themselves when they chose to base their work on a not 100% free library. Yes, it's been remedied now, but that's what incited GNOME in the first place, and basically what got all the corporates lined up behind GNOME.
Too bad, though. When i first saw KDE a year an a half or maybe 2 years ago, I thought they were on to something that could be really good. Then gnome appeared on the scene and caught up rather quickly... It's always sad how it's true that the way you can discover the true pioneers is because they're the ones laying face down in the mud with arrows in their backs, as every who was behind them storms ahead...
Why do you keep pretending that record executives must get paid in order for artists to get paid?
Well, in that vein, why should network administrators get paid a dime? All they do is enable regular office workers to get real work done. Maybe the should just run networks, support users, and configure servers in their spare time...
Or why should any executive be paid anything? I mean, at my last job i rarely ever saw the CEO. He probably didn't do anything, except he took home a much larger paycheck than myself...
Why is slashdot so angry at record executives, without realizing that exectutives are executives. They all make money. And every company needs them. Maybe not so many of them, but they are there for a reason in each and every industry. Yes,the current music distribution system may hold some artists back, but that's changed now. There are other options to go to. They won't benefit from the money or the clout of the major labels, but if they want to go it alone, its never been easier than today...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with so many of these business is they are decent or really good ideas but, their business plans are written to please some venture capitalists and dont focus on long term reality.
In actuality, i don't think than many of the dotcoms were good ideas to start out with. Especially the whole ecommerce crew. They sprang to life and prospered for a time only because the company's whose products they were selling took their time embracing the internet. But once it was realized that there was money to be made, and that money was going to the dot coms who essentially stood between the supplier and customer in all the transactions. They just realized that they could do it themselves and then take in the dotcoms revenues as their own and raise their margins...
Onsale, Outpost, Buy, Shop, Amazon, and there's only hundreds more... Ebay at least enables people to do transactions they could have never done before, where as the the rest moved the middle man from being the cataloger to the dotcom.
Databases are really complex beasts... You can't just take an untuned database (installed out of the box) and expect to get the best performance you can. And it's doubtful that Oracle would spend much time tuning a SQL Server installation when the goal is for the Oracle database to win.
It'd be akin to Microsoft bringing out two sealed white boxes and saying "One run windows.One runs Linux. Notice how windows is 1000% faster at typcial tasks when compared to linx?" without mentioning or letting it be known that the windows install is running on a 1 GHz Pentium III with 128 megs of ram, a gigabit ethernet card and a RAID 0 array of 4 internal disks, whereas the linux box is a Pentium 60, with 16 megs of ram, 10 megabit ethernet, and a 600 megabyte IDE drive.
Both of those computers would look identical from the outside.
For a lot of benchmarks, more independant organizations should be created and funded by all the companies who wish to have their products benchmarked, with permission given to publish their findings however they see fit. Any other benchmark, really, is suspect. As is any system installed for the express purpose of showing how slow a given piece of software is.
See, the great thing about america is is that we all think we have our own opinions, but ultimately our opinions don't matter... doesn't that make us all feel incredibly special?
It's not the lack of openness that's keeping Java from reaching widespread acceptance, it's Microsoft, actually... Java has advanced pretty far ahead in the server arena, it just hasn't accomplished much on the desktop due to 90% of the worlds desktops not being very enthusiastic about it.
It'd really be detrimental to trully opensource java. If they had from the get go, there'd have been no clause for them to go after microsoft for shipping tainted "java" tools which incedentally destroyed the whole premise of Java by creating applicationst that ran on only one platform.
What's kept java going so far is that Sun's been leading the way.... It'd be much better if they made a $0 license for people to have access to the source code, but retain the name to Java and only permit environments which complied with the "standard" to use the word Java in their names or descriptions.
But, more importantly, what is illegal about a link? It is the site providing the illegal content that is at fault, not the linker.
In the eyes of the law, if you knowingly link to something that you know to be illegal, you basically providing it yourself. You're not just giving vague instructions at that point, you're giving a pinpoint location... I think that providing direct links to illegal material is wrong and should be illegal. I just don't agree with what is and isn't deemed "illegal". For instance, kiddie porn should be illegal in that context... Warez, i think should be too... but general "hacking" and "cracking" websites, that just describe teciques and the like without actually providing binaries, source, or direct links to those would be okay, under my rule...
I just don't think it's reasonable to say "i'm not providing illegal material, i'm just telling the person where to get it, the secret knock and password". That's the same as providing it yourself.
Now someone please let me know when it can run Dreamweaver...
No matter how you look at it, the G4 cube is vastly overpriced... And that's coming from a Mac fan. You're paying a huge premium over a regular G4, for a machine with no expansion slots, no internal drive bays, etc...
Yes, i think that regular G3's and G4's so far have provided a very competitive bang for the buck, but the G4 cube isn't aiming for that niche... it's aimed squarely at those who think that something should look cool and don't mind spending twice as much as they should for it.
The G4 Cube really should be positioned between the iMac's and G4's in Apple's lineup, not between the cheapest G4 and the Dual Processor G4's.
We probably would, if not for the fact that you can't run AU/X on anything later than a quadra... Which topped out at 40 MHz 040's.... for all the supposed benefits of unix, you sure can get a lot more work done on a 400 MHz machine that crashes once a day on a bad day, than on a machine a 10th the speed which doesn't crash at all.
And will everyone quit raggin on the one mouse button aleady? It's such a tired argument.
For the simple reason that the electoral college makes me feel as though my opinion isn't trully being heard. When you vote, all you're doing really is recommeneding which way your whoever in the electoral college should vote. I guess that made it easier back in the 1700 and 1800's, but we're in the 2000's... it cant be that hard to rig together a system which actually tally's votes.
It does seem screwey that someone can win the election even if they actually receive less votes than another candidate, simply by concentrating on the states with the most electoral college representation.
I also refused to vote nader, thinking that a vote for him takes a way a vote for Gore and therefore is a vote for Bush, but in the end, since Bush and Gore are basically the same on most issues, i'd rather now "throw away" my vote on a candidate who stands for more of what i believe in, rather than give my vote to someone i don't like just in the hopes that it stops someone i don't like even more from entering office.
This year, though, i've decided to go nader. I know my vote won't make a difference in this years elections, but what it will do is maybe help create a 3 party system in the future elections... All he needs is 5% of the vote and the green party gains access to a lot more funding in 20004..l
From my dealings iwith MediaOne recently, they've made it sound like they'll shutdown someones service for running an "unauthorized" router.
Unfortunately, MediaOne prohibits static IP addresses and any attempts at creating one. So users who don't need the "added securiy" of a DHCP assigned IP address can't make do without one. Further, it's rather lame that there's no provisions in most dialup, ISDN and xDSL accounts as to how many computers share the bandwidth. As opposed to MediaOne who requires you pay an extra fee in order for other computers in your house to perform such tasks as receiveing email...
AtHome and other ISP's shouldn't provide firewalling services. They shouldn't provide spam blocking services. And they shouldn't tell us what to do with our bandwidth. They should simply supply pipes to our homes. Offer any additional services on top of that one basic service.
Socket 7 - Pentiums, Pentium MMX's, Cyrix, AMD K6's
Socket 8 - DEFUNCT - Pentium Pro
Slot 1 - Early Celerons, Pentium II's, Pentium III's
Slot 2 - Xeon
Socket 370 - Pentium III, Celerons (though i believe they're not quite compatible, though it might just be a jumper issue)
Slot A - AMD Athlon
Socket A - AMD Athlon (Thunderbird), AMD Duron
For multiprocessing, your options are currently limited to Slot 1 Pentium II's, Pentium III's, and Celerons and Socket 370 and Slot 1 Pentium III's and Celerons. Be careful too, if you opt to go the Celeron route, and be sure that you purchase a MP capable motherboard that can specifically support dual Celerons, otherwise you'll be out of luck.
It simply makes no sense year after year to keep on paying again for that same app that would have suited you well enough 10 years ago.
If you don't need any of the new features of a given piece of software, you don't need to upgrade it (Y2K aside...). That's something that's often forgotten. If your company is happy with Windows 95 and Office 97, Microsoft doesn't show up at the door and say "excuse us, but did you realize that we've got new versions out that you MUST buy?"
If you're going to promote an artist on this site, why not just put the mp3's on that site as well? Then you'd be able to know how many people visited, how many people downloaded, how many people completed their downloads, how many people downloaded one song and then decided to download more songs. That's all information that artists would probably be interested in, but only the first item would actually be able to be collected if a site left the downloading to Napster.
Besides that, bandwidth just isn't THAT much money... $25/month will get you 10 GB of bandwidth at numerous places. If each song is 5 MB, that's 2000 downloads for $25 each month. It's not a real strain on any one band, and would be easily offset by 4 or 5 CD sales (at marked down prices).
In the world that artists started promoting themselves over teh web, Napster's "benefits" become fewer and fewer.
The pentium 3 ID is about the most useless thing in the world. It's funny that people complained about it at all, when such things as IP addresses, cookies, and MAC addresses exist. "Oh no, yet another unique number attatched to me... All the others are livable, but that one in particular is a BAD thing."
Onto your post though. ZeroKnowledge is a company trying to make money. They can't just open up their network in hopes that people will send in envelopes stuffed full of cash for them to pocket for their services. They need to be able to authorize people to use their network... It's just too bad that they're subpeona-able, rather than being based in a country that's not extremely cooperative with the US.
But if you make a rock solid, easy to use software package for linux, where's the money going to come from if not for sales of binaries. Well written and small/simple apps typically won't require much support to get running, and right now, support is where all the linux companys claim to want to make their money from.
I really hope that that's not trully how you made your decision. Based on the software that the web hosting company chosen by their web designer chosen by the candidates assistants son in law.
I also don't think i want either of them in office, but that seems fairly inevitable. Might as well vote Nader, then, and hope for an increased chance of a sane(er) politician come next election...
There really just isn't that much difference between the two. So, in hindsight, maybe choosing based on what their webservers run isn't so bad... Of course you could just bring a coin to the voting booth, too.
Give it up. Napster's only use is to distribut emusic you've already heard of. The "starving artist" gains no benefit from napster, only the artist who has already been heavily promoted by the labels. Yes, of course,there are exceptions, but by and large, the Napster as a distribibution channel argument is rather bunk.
Yes, artists need to pay for studio time from their own pockets. But the difference is that the labels fill their pockets with money for things such as studio time, new instruments, producers, and engineers. And the thing is, it's not abank loan. If the record flops, it doesn't negatively effect the artists' credit rating, they simply don't need to pay back the money loaned.
The difference between if major labels exist or not is that of they're the ones that give teh artists the money to record their albums in the first place. And they're the ones that paid the money to make sure that your heard about those artists. For every Courtney Love, Limp Bizkit and Smashing Pumpkins type band that's rejecting the labels, there's a Courtney Love, Limp Bizkit and Smashing Pumpkins that would have never achieved the position that they're in had it not been for those "evil record labels".
But, you know, you're right. Artists should be paid. Neither shoud sysadmins. Or DBA's. Or help desk personell. All they're doing is trying to make money form the fact that the data enterers aren't smart enough to develop databases themselves. As soon as you're willing to give up[ your pay for your profession, then maybe it'd add some credence to "artists don't need to get paid either"...
No... i think it'd only be the very vocal minority that would attempt to spark an outcry. The rest of the users would just go "Oh, they got shut down? Bummer..." and move on with their lives. Kind of like when you get a bonus you weren't expecting, you're all psyched to spend it because it's money that you wouldn't have had in the first place, but once it's gone, oh well.
Of course the record industry is pissed at and scared of Napster. Napster is giving away for free something that costs the industry hundreds of millions of dollars to create. If Napster's allowed to flourish, that means that really, in the short term, cool, everyone gets free music, but in the longer term, how much more music do people think will actually come out? And how much of that will actually sound okay, recording wise? If labels aren't to exist, then there goes the money that artists would have used to pay for recording their albums in a nice studio rather than in their basements with one microphone set up in the middle of their setup...
Hey... how do you change your MAC address, in Linux, MacOS 8.5 or 9, and Windows 98? Inquiring minds want to know... mainly because my cable modem only allows two mac addresses of mine at the same time, and i've got 3 computers that would really like to have access to the internet, though not necessarily simultaneously...
:)
Email me if you've got an answer...
Who determines what the public good is in that case? Could a radio station be evicted if they chose to air howard stern, or music with "anti-government" lyrics? That could turn into a scary situation.
It's completely voluntary for a sysadmin to set their system up to use MAPS; nobody is forcing it down anyone's throat. This is basic freedom of choice.
The difference between the government telling people what they can and cannot say, a corporation doing the same, and a sysadim doing the same really isn't all that great. It just works out to one person or group of people acting like they know better than the people that they're supposed to be serving.
I don't think that any ISP should block anyone listed on MAPS unilaterally. Governments, yes, corporations, yes, because their bandwidth is bought and paid for so that their employees can get their work done. But an ISP shouldn't be making those decisions for their users. Rather, they should provide their users with the OPTION to use "advance spam blocking tools", which they could opt in or opt out of.
Because, in most cases, it's the users that are paying for the bandwidth, expecting full access to the internet. And just because one of the offending places might have an open mail relay, that doesn't mean that an ISP's customer doesn't want to communicate with the other ISP's customer.
I think it's best to keep tools separated. Have a lot of tools specifically tailored to one job, rather than one tool tailored to many jobs. Trying to merge all the different OSes together would create such a hulking OS, that nothing would ever get accomplished.
KDE killed themselves when they chose to base their work on a not 100% free library. Yes, it's been remedied now, but that's what incited GNOME in the first place, and basically what got all the corporates lined up behind GNOME.
Too bad, though. When i first saw KDE a year an a half or maybe 2 years ago, I thought they were on to something that could be really good. Then gnome appeared on the scene and caught up rather quickly... It's always sad how it's true that the way you can discover the true pioneers is because they're the ones laying face down in the mud with arrows in their backs, as every who was behind them storms ahead...
Why do you keep pretending that record executives must get paid in order for artists to get paid?
Well, in that vein, why should network administrators get paid a dime? All they do is enable regular office workers to get real work done. Maybe the should just run networks, support users, and configure servers in their spare time...
Or why should any executive be paid anything? I mean, at my last job i rarely ever saw the CEO. He probably didn't do anything, except he took home a much larger paycheck than myself...
Why is slashdot so angry at record executives, without realizing that exectutives are executives. They all make money. And every company needs them. Maybe not so many of them, but they are there for a reason in each and every industry. Yes,the current music distribution system may hold some artists back, but that's changed now. There are other options to go to. They won't benefit from the money or the clout of the major labels, but if they want to go it alone, its never been easier than today...