Being stupid has nothing to do with it. How many do you think will be aware of this new deal? Of the percentage that are aware, how many do you think will care?
It just costs too much. At some level, people are comfortable running a database software just because it is Oracle or DB2. This is not terribly different than the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra back in the day. However, if you get just one enterprising geek in your outfit this *can* start to fall apart. Surely, there are applications where the support that a company like Oracle can provide can be the difference between life and death but, just as often, one of the open source DB's can fill the role.
At my old company, we were using Siebel on Oracle that ran on a big fat Sun system. We were still in "startup" mode and spent over $300k on that bullshit. The CEO had a grand "vision" for taking the company to a new level and we had to build our IT infrastructure aggressively to support it. Well, a year later we had a E350 with 4 procs that spent most of its time idle and 20 people working in the call center. I had argued that what we needed to "plan" aggressively instead of "spending" aggresively and had been laughed outta the room for being "short-sighted".
A year later it was satisfying to go to their bankruptcy auction....
isn't the security. Phone calls haven't been secure since shortly after the first one was made. No, the problem with VOIP is working with the fucking idiot phone vendors who do not understand what they are trying to do. I've gotten several calls from local phone guys who don't understand networking in the least and insist that they've assigned proper IP's to the phones at two seperate locations but they won't talk so it is my network problem. They then inform the customer that the problem is with the network and walk off. The phone at location #1 had an IP of 192.168.39.3 and the phone at location #2 192.168.40.5. No VPN between them. They were trying to route the traffic out over the internet connection.
These dipshits sell the customer on thsese solutions and then when it doesn't work (routing probs or dropouts from no QOS) they call us in to sell the customer a couple thousand dollars worth of services and hardware to sell the problem. I don't mind the business but working with a customer who is on the brink of becoming an axe murderer isn't pleasant.
You know, I'm with you on this. I think instead of obfuscating the issue it should be boiled down in these terms. Trading files is illegal, everyone knows that part but consumers should be able to buy a cd, rip it to mp3 and put it on their *pod or pc. I'm fucking sick of this endless debate. Honestly, one would think that we as a society have nothing better to do, that people aren't starving or dying from what are curable diseases. It's not like I'm trying to put James Hetfields mom in a whore house. All I want to do is listen to blitzkrieg in my truck!
When I buy a CD I do two things: rip it to my pc and put the CD away. If it gets left out, I might as well throw it away as I'm terrible about taking care of them.
The license for CD/DVD should be like the old WordPerfect (think it was them) "Book" license. You can install our software in X places as long as they are not in use simultaneously (sp).
Well, which is it? Is the population actively anti-intellectual or is it really the legal parasites and their masters? To claim that the population is anti-intellectual I think gives them too much credit. As long as there's some chick with big cans on the tube or a reality show to watch I think the population cares not.
I don't know about replacing your SSN but I do know a lot about the market for getting SSN's. Some of our customers are construction companies and it isn't all that uncommon for a worker to come in and present a document that he says is an original and valid SS card. When checked, it is the same number as one already on file. I was in the office one day when a guy came in who had no fewer than 3 different SS cards on him. I think that it is reasonably clear that the SS number can no longer be considered any sort of valid identifier. It is, at this point, up to society and the government to move past it.
This, of course, is the sticky point. What do we use in place of that unique identifier? A national ID card? That rubs a lot of people the wrong way and with some justification. However, the move to "secure" drivers licenses is simply a move at the state level to provide the same thing.
Long and short of it is that someone smarter than me will have to figure it out. Shouldn't be that hard to find someone....;)
We've had a terrible time with Comcast DNS in Northern VA. I've switched many of our customers to Verizon DNS. Verizon probably ain't real happy about it but they've got the four most popular name servers on the internet. Everybody uses 'em for ping and dns tests although.1 has been somewhat crabby lately.
Oh, I don't fault Asterisk. We went cheap all the way - Grandstream phones, beat up PC with not enough memory (at first). I knew what I was getting into but until I saw it work, I wasn't going to throw much money at it. After all, a "real" phone system only costs about $3500 for a small biz like mine.
It did open my eyes to the level of integration work that is necessary before people like Nortel can even release a product to sales in an attempt to recoup their investment.
at work and I have a new-found respect for the PBX manufacturers that I used to curse. I'll never forget, we got the pots line talking to the zap trunk and the phone would actually ring when someone called!!! You have no idea of the ego deflation factor when I proudly told our first caller that I would transfer him, hit the transfer button and hung up on him.
One thing that it has opened my eyes to are the possibilities of SIP. We needed a seperate phone line and, after some looking, decided to go with broadvoice. In 10 minutes we had a new phone number that we could call.
One thing that we did find out is not to cheat the minimum specs. When it says 128MB (or 256, can't remember) of memory it means it. The *@home distro that we were using actually booted with 64 but it wouldn't answer the phones...:)
The truth of the matter is that all broadband companies suck. Our city is involved in the broadband over powerlines deal and it is a fiasco. The biggest problem is that the government is involved. They have been in "soft-launch" mode for almost a year now.
The business next to us has it and we figured we could use it as a backup method of internet access so we called and inquired. They told us it wasn't available to us. I told the lady on the phone that the biz next to us had it and she replied that, "your power comes from a different pole that hasn't been fitted yet". I looked out the window, both power lines came from the same transformer.
and nobody will ever read it but I have to say that Verizon just sucks. I'm so done with them that I cancelled my phone service with them and got a sip line (over cable) for my house. They just suck. I thought that all of this competition shit was supposed to make things better but it hasn't changed and has probably gotten worse. At our office, we had to place a total of 8 orders (4 per office) with Verizon for DSL (yeah, it's a seperate company my ass) and we still haven't gotten service. The CO is about 400 feet away in one case and ACCROSS THE STREET in the other.
Reason? We didn't have phone service installed for the number in question. Uh, yeah. I finally had to hook up a butt-set and call them from the line in question.
In my view, anything that can get us away from those a**holes is a good thing.
I like this "Perhaps the greatest heresy of twentieth-century..." quote. Of all the strange, confusing things that come out of modern (and acient) orthodxy, this is the one thing that really strains my patience (sp). It is almost as though many churches teach that one should be afraid or ashamed to acknowledge your faith. I think this is especially true in the Western world.
For instance, one thing that I still have a tough time getting used to is when tv news shows clips of Muslims marching through the streets carrying pictures of whatever religious figure it is that they are lionizing that day. I wonder what the reaction would be here in the states if Catholics, instead of meekly going to their Churches to pray for the Pope, had a giant parade through Washington with people carrying pictures of the pope?
Ya know, I like Pagel's books but the ones that I have read don't usually have much to do with what the title of the book indicates.
I thought that her book on Thomas, for instance, was pretty interesting but had much more to do with the struggle for modern orthodoxy than it did with the acutal Book of Thomas.
Everyone is bleating about how the laws of their country will forbid this and how manufacturers will be sued into oblivion. That much appears to be obvious. The technology, while probably crackable, is reasonably interesting. However, neither of these two things are what we should be looking at.
No, in my mind the real interesting thing will be the all-out assault on existing warranty and other laws necessary to make this pig fly. I'd start watching for proposed law changes in [insert legislative body here] that enable something like this to actually go on the market w/o the makers facing huge legal claims.
If it is better or not depends on why you started your company and, from there, what your exit strategy is. There are a bazillion small biz owners like me that find the notion of selling their biz to anyone abhorrent. My exit strategy is to keep building this thing and, when I get older, to let my partners run it. It's a way of life.
There are, however, others to whom technology or whatver widget they are selling are simply means to an end. These guys understand how to build and market products. Given something reasonable to sell, the product doesn't matter so much once you have the mechanics of business-building mastered. From there it is simply a means to an end which is making money.
right now and open source has saved us untold thousands. We needed a real phone system so that we would have voice mail and "sound" bigger than we were: Asterisk to the rescue. For a couple of $39 cards and an old pc we've got a pbx. Instead of using Oracle or Sql Server we're going with mysql and php. We need to print bar codes. $800 active X library? Nope, a php library I found on the web for zero.
However, I think it really depends on the kind of company you're going to start. In our case, we're developing software for our own use. I can't imagine trying to bundle some of these pieces and sell them. Surely it would work with some things but, imho, no the majority of OSS projects. I don't say this to belittle the efforts of those who have done so much for me. The reason I say it is because the mindset of the vast majority of users runs completely counter to that necessary to effectively utilize much of the open source software available.
Take Asterisk for example. I had to reboot my phone 4 times on Friday to fix various problems. I'm not crying, just pointing out that the first time you tell a user to reboot his/her phone, they are going to look at you like you have 2 heads.
Hmm, I have the same older model except the programming on mine is different. Wherever in the house mine starts out, if it has a bad dream, it homes in on the position of my bed and crawls in. After about 15 minutes it starts to move around like two cats tied up in a bag. After about 30 minutes, I give up and take a shower. Oddly, this does not seem to effect my wife.
Honestly, I don't know how kids sleep without injuring themselves.
*Ding* we have a winner. You are right on. At least for primary (1-6) schools. When my daughter started her education in preschool, she went to a private school. She stayed there for 2 years until first grade. We left b/c the school was spending money on computers like a drunken sailor and then expected the PTA to pick up the slack for books and other "luxury" items. What a crock.
In the public schools, we've been pretty happy with the level of access to computers - there's two in every classroom and a bunch in the library. The "kid-accesible" one in the classroom is used for interactive stuff. The other one is for the teacher and it has been an incredible bonus. My kid has a tough time with a math exercise? I get an email. We work on it and she does better.
I cringe when I see educators on tv bemoaning their lack of access to computers in the classroom and using it as an excuse for the students poor performance. They should use the money they spend on computers and get better teachers. Then they should fire the useless fuckers they currently have.
Early access to a computer simply isn't requisite in order to gain proficiency with the thing. It isn't like reading to a toddler or reading with a 6 year old. I didn't use a computer until I was 15 and even then it was to play games on. I now make a living at it.
Its biggest strength is its weakness: there are literally a bazillion different options for damn near everything. The good news is that with a minimum of effort you can have a fully-functioning phone system for almost nothing. We had to buy a $40 "modem" card (I don't know what the difference is between that thing and a "hardware" modem but it works so I don't care) and that was it.
We only have 1 phone line for our business - (small IT company, mostly cell calls) but we wanted to have voice mail boxes for everyone as well as an "emergency dispatch" mailbox. Asterisk provides this in spades. An equivilant system even at Office Depot or the like would have cost around $250 at the cheapest. Bigger companies would save a ton of money.
Next order of business is to get rid of the soft phones. I hate those things.
You make some very well thought-out and valid points. However, I'm not sure that many of them make much difference in the real world. The most obvious of which has to do with your format and selection of tracks arguments that concern music. Is isn't that your points here are invalid, it is just that most people don't take the viewpoint of "fuck it, I won't buy it" and stop there. Instead, they just d/l the whole thing off the net for free.
I mean, who are we kidding here? If you have a big pipe to the internet and can get all of the movies and music you want on demand (and for no charge) are you going to run to the store to buy even a single track (if it were available) off a cd that you like? No! You're going to hose it off some torrent or IRC or whatever. This shit has got to stop.
Are the current enforcement methods stupid and over the top? Yes, but what other course of action is open to the publishers? Are they going to send out kindly worded letters to people everywhere asking them to stop? I dunno, does that tactic work for the IRS? Doesn't seem to otherwise they wouldn't have an "enforcement division".
The bottom line here is that the people that make this stuff publicly available are breaking the law and, if caught, will be subject to the tender mercies of the Justice system. Just because the laws are stupid doesn't mean that you can break them and not be subject to the consequences of your actions. I hate red-light cameras but that doesn't mean that I run through them just because I object. It means instead that I got involved and got the laws changed....oh, and leave your "big-industry, big-money" argument in the bag. The companies peddling that red-light technology (at least in my neck of the woods) are some of the largest defense contractors in the nation.
I didn't notice this until I started using media center. However, media center doesn't seem to care what time it starts, you just tell it to record the show and it seems to work....
He'd be able to stop it for no other reason than all of the bodies he'd pile up would clog the thing. I love 24 but the body count does get a shade ridiculous. Even being in the same city as that guy is a death warrant.
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Being stupid has nothing to do with it. How many do you think will be aware of this new deal? Of the percentage that are aware, how many do you think will care?
I think you give the sheeple too much credit.
It just costs too much. At some level, people are comfortable running a database software just because it is Oracle or DB2. This is not terribly different than the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" mantra back in the day. However, if you get just one enterprising geek in your outfit this *can* start to fall apart. Surely, there are applications where the support that a company like Oracle can provide can be the difference between life and death but, just as often, one of the open source DB's can fill the role.
At my old company, we were using Siebel on Oracle that ran on a big fat Sun system. We were still in "startup" mode and spent over $300k on that bullshit. The CEO had a grand "vision" for taking the company to a new level and we had to build our IT infrastructure aggressively to support it. Well, a year later we had a E350 with 4 procs that spent most of its time idle and 20 people working in the call center. I had argued that what we needed to "plan" aggressively instead of "spending" aggresively and had been laughed outta the room for being "short-sighted".
A year later it was satisfying to go to their bankruptcy auction....
isn't the security. Phone calls haven't been secure since shortly after the first one was made. No, the problem with VOIP is working with the fucking idiot phone vendors who do not understand what they are trying to do. I've gotten several calls from local phone guys who don't understand networking in the least and insist that they've assigned proper IP's to the phones at two seperate locations but they won't talk so it is my network problem. They then inform the customer that the problem is with the network and walk off. The phone at location #1 had an IP of 192.168.39.3 and the phone at location #2 192.168.40.5. No VPN between them. They were trying to route the traffic out over the internet connection.
These dipshits sell the customer on thsese solutions and then when it doesn't work (routing probs or dropouts from no QOS) they call us in to sell the customer a couple thousand dollars worth of services and hardware to sell the problem. I don't mind the business but working with a customer who is on the brink of becoming an axe murderer isn't pleasant.
You know, I'm with you on this. I think instead of obfuscating the issue it should be boiled down in these terms. Trading files is illegal, everyone knows that part but consumers should be able to buy a cd, rip it to mp3 and put it on their *pod or pc. I'm fucking sick of this endless debate. Honestly, one would think that we as a society have nothing better to do, that people aren't starving or dying from what are curable diseases. It's not like I'm trying to put James Hetfields mom in a whore house. All I want to do is listen to blitzkrieg in my truck!
When I buy a CD I do two things: rip it to my pc and put the CD away. If it gets left out, I might as well throw it away as I'm terrible about taking care of them.
The license for CD/DVD should be like the old WordPerfect (think it was them) "Book" license. You can install our software in X places as long as they are not in use simultaneously (sp).
Well, which is it? Is the population actively anti-intellectual or is it really the legal parasites and their masters? To claim that the population is anti-intellectual I think gives them too much credit. As long as there's some chick with big cans on the tube or a reality show to watch I think the population cares not.
I'd go with the legal parasites.
I don't know about replacing your SSN but I do know a lot about the market for getting SSN's. Some of our customers are construction companies and it isn't all that uncommon for a worker to come in and present a document that he says is an original and valid SS card. When checked, it is the same number as one already on file. I was in the office one day when a guy came in who had no fewer than 3 different SS cards on him. I think that it is reasonably clear that the SS number can no longer be considered any sort of valid identifier. It is, at this point, up to society and the government to move past it.
This, of course, is the sticky point. What do we use in place of that unique identifier? A national ID card? That rubs a lot of people the wrong way and with some justification. However, the move to "secure" drivers licenses is simply a move at the state level to provide the same thing.
Long and short of it is that someone smarter than me will have to figure it out. Shouldn't be that hard to find someone....;)
We've had a terrible time with Comcast DNS in Northern VA. I've switched many of our customers to Verizon DNS. Verizon probably ain't real happy about it but they've got the four most popular name servers on the internet. Everybody uses 'em for ping and dns tests although .1 has been somewhat crabby lately.
Oh, I don't fault Asterisk. We went cheap all the way - Grandstream phones, beat up PC with not enough memory (at first). I knew what I was getting into but until I saw it work, I wasn't going to throw much money at it. After all, a "real" phone system only costs about $3500 for a small biz like mine.
It did open my eyes to the level of integration work that is necessary before people like Nortel can even release a product to sales in an attempt to recoup their investment.
at work and I have a new-found respect for the PBX manufacturers that I used to curse. I'll never forget, we got the pots line talking to the zap trunk and the phone would actually ring when someone called!!! You have no idea of the ego deflation factor when I proudly told our first caller that I would transfer him, hit the transfer button and hung up on him.
One thing that it has opened my eyes to are the possibilities of SIP. We needed a seperate phone line and, after some looking, decided to go with broadvoice. In 10 minutes we had a new phone number that we could call.
One thing that we did find out is not to cheat the minimum specs. When it says 128MB (or 256, can't remember) of memory it means it. The *@home distro that we were using actually booted with 64 but it wouldn't answer the phones...:)
The truth of the matter is that all broadband companies suck. Our city is involved in the broadband over powerlines deal and it is a fiasco. The biggest problem is that the government is involved. They have been in "soft-launch" mode for almost a year now.
The business next to us has it and we figured we could use it as a backup method of internet access so we called and inquired. They told us it wasn't available to us. I told the lady on the phone that the biz next to us had it and she replied that, "your power comes from a different pole that hasn't been fitted yet". I looked out the window, both power lines came from the same transformer.
and nobody will ever read it but I have to say that Verizon just sucks. I'm so done with them that I cancelled my phone service with them and got a sip line (over cable) for my house. They just suck. I thought that all of this competition shit was supposed to make things better but it hasn't changed and has probably gotten worse. At our office, we had to place a total of 8 orders (4 per office) with Verizon for DSL (yeah, it's a seperate company my ass) and we still haven't gotten service. The CO is about 400 feet away in one case and ACCROSS THE STREET in the other.
Reason? We didn't have phone service installed for the number in question. Uh, yeah. I finally had to hook up a butt-set and call them from the line in question.
In my view, anything that can get us away from those a**holes is a good thing.
I like this "Perhaps the greatest heresy of twentieth-century..." quote. Of all the strange, confusing things that come out of modern (and acient) orthodxy, this is the one thing that really strains my patience (sp). It is almost as though many churches teach that one should be afraid or ashamed to acknowledge your faith. I think this is especially true in the Western world.
For instance, one thing that I still have a tough time getting used to is when tv news shows clips of Muslims marching through the streets carrying pictures of whatever religious figure it is that they are lionizing that day. I wonder what the reaction would be here in the states if Catholics, instead of meekly going to their Churches to pray for the Pope, had a giant parade through Washington with people carrying pictures of the pope?
Ya know, I like Pagel's books but the ones that I have read don't usually have much to do with what the title of the book indicates.
I thought that her book on Thomas, for instance, was pretty interesting but had much more to do with the struggle for modern orthodoxy than it did with the acutal Book of Thomas.
Everyone is bleating about how the laws of their country will forbid this and how manufacturers will be sued into oblivion. That much appears to be obvious. The technology, while probably crackable, is reasonably interesting. However, neither of these two things are what we should be looking at.
No, in my mind the real interesting thing will be the all-out assault on existing warranty and other laws necessary to make this pig fly. I'd start watching for proposed law changes in [insert legislative body here] that enable something like this to actually go on the market w/o the makers facing huge legal claims.
If it is better or not depends on why you started your company and, from there, what your exit strategy is. There are a bazillion small biz owners like me that find the notion of selling their biz to anyone abhorrent. My exit strategy is to keep building this thing and, when I get older, to let my partners run it. It's a way of life.
There are, however, others to whom technology or whatver widget they are selling are simply means to an end. These guys understand how to build and market products. Given something reasonable to sell, the product doesn't matter so much once you have the mechanics of business-building mastered. From there it is simply a means to an end which is making money.
It's a pentium III 800mhz with 512MB of ram....
right now and open source has saved us untold thousands. We needed a real phone system so that we would have voice mail and "sound" bigger than we were: Asterisk to the rescue. For a couple of $39 cards and an old pc we've got a pbx. Instead of using Oracle or Sql Server we're going with mysql and php. We need to print bar codes. $800 active X library? Nope, a php library I found on the web for zero.
However, I think it really depends on the kind of company you're going to start. In our case, we're developing software for our own use. I can't imagine trying to bundle some of these pieces and sell them. Surely it would work with some things but, imho, no the majority of OSS projects. I don't say this to belittle the efforts of those who have done so much for me. The reason I say it is because the mindset of the vast majority of users runs completely counter to that necessary to effectively utilize much of the open source software available.
Take Asterisk for example. I had to reboot my phone 4 times on Friday to fix various problems. I'm not crying, just pointing out that the first time you tell a user to reboot his/her phone, they are going to look at you like you have 2 heads.
Hmm, I have the same older model except the programming on mine is different. Wherever in the house mine starts out, if it has a bad dream, it homes in on the position of my bed and crawls in. After about 15 minutes it starts to move around like two cats tied up in a bag. After about 30 minutes, I give up and take a shower. Oddly, this does not seem to effect my wife.
Honestly, I don't know how kids sleep without injuring themselves.
*Ding* we have a winner. You are right on. At least for primary (1-6) schools. When my daughter started her education in preschool, she went to a private school. She stayed there for 2 years until first grade. We left b/c the school was spending money on computers like a drunken sailor and then expected the PTA to pick up the slack for books and other "luxury" items. What a crock.
In the public schools, we've been pretty happy with the level of access to computers - there's two in every classroom and a bunch in the library. The "kid-accesible" one in the classroom is used for interactive stuff. The other one is for the teacher and it has been an incredible bonus. My kid has a tough time with a math exercise? I get an email. We work on it and she does better.
I cringe when I see educators on tv bemoaning their lack of access to computers in the classroom and using it as an excuse for the students poor performance. They should use the money they spend on computers and get better teachers. Then they should fire the useless fuckers they currently have.
Early access to a computer simply isn't requisite in order to gain proficiency with the thing. It isn't like reading to a toddler or reading with a 6 year old. I didn't use a computer until I was 15 and even then it was to play games on. I now make a living at it.
Its biggest strength is its weakness: there are literally a bazillion different options for damn near everything. The good news is that with a minimum of effort you can have a fully-functioning phone system for almost nothing. We had to buy a $40 "modem" card (I don't know what the difference is between that thing and a "hardware" modem but it works so I don't care) and that was it.
We only have 1 phone line for our business - (small IT company, mostly cell calls) but we wanted to have voice mail boxes for everyone as well as an "emergency dispatch" mailbox. Asterisk provides this in spades. An equivilant system even at Office Depot or the like would have cost around $250 at the cheapest. Bigger companies would save a ton of money.
Next order of business is to get rid of the soft phones. I hate those things.
HAHAHAHAHAHA...how many people that have broadband that you know would ever go back to dialup?
Porn alone will keep them on broadband...:)
You make some very well thought-out and valid points. However, I'm not sure that many of them make much difference in the real world. The most obvious of which has to do with your format and selection of tracks arguments that concern music. Is isn't that your points here are invalid, it is just that most people don't take the viewpoint of "fuck it, I won't buy it" and stop there. Instead, they just d/l the whole thing off the net for free.
I mean, who are we kidding here? If you have a big pipe to the internet and can get all of the movies and music you want on demand (and for no charge) are you going to run to the store to buy even a single track (if it were available) off a cd that you like? No! You're going to hose it off some torrent or IRC or whatever. This shit has got to stop.
Are the current enforcement methods stupid and over the top? Yes, but what other course of action is open to the publishers? Are they going to send out kindly worded letters to people everywhere asking them to stop? I dunno, does that tactic work for the IRS? Doesn't seem to otherwise they wouldn't have an "enforcement division".
The bottom line here is that the people that make this stuff publicly available are breaking the law and, if caught, will be subject to the tender mercies of the Justice system. Just because the laws are stupid doesn't mean that you can break them and not be subject to the consequences of your actions. I hate red-light cameras but that doesn't mean that I run through them just because I object. It means instead that I got involved and got the laws changed....oh, and leave your "big-industry, big-money" argument in the bag. The companies peddling that red-light technology (at least in my neck of the woods) are some of the largest defense contractors in the nation.
I didn't notice this until I started using media center. However, media center doesn't seem to care what time it starts, you just tell it to record the show and it seems to work....
He'd be able to stop it for no other reason than all of the bodies he'd pile up would clog the thing. I love 24 but the body count does get a shade ridiculous. Even being in the same city as that guy is a death warrant.
Because it costs $150 for a single-seat, limited-use license?