Anything based off a limited resource can't by definition be unlimited. Did anyone really think you could use truly UNLIMITED amounts of data? Of course not, it's impossible. Taking advertising that literally is just stupidity. Do you get upset when you see an ad saying "you'll love the new double whopper, for a limited time only" because Burger King didn't personally consult with you to determine if you would in fact love it?
Comcast's secret slowing of P2P traffic is much worse than this. In that case they were actually meddling with the service. Here, Verizon just decided to stop doing business with certain customers that were not profitable. They didn't cap their bandwidth, they just said "starting next month we've decided not to do business with you anymore." Isn't that their right? Customers have the right to cancel, Verizon has the right to cancel.
Broadband internet access is unlimited in a lot of ways...there's no set cap. But there are always realistic limitations. I don't see the problem with advertisers assuming their customers aren't completely stupid. Somehow I just have this mental image of thousands of slashdotters at a buffet screaming "I've only eaten 700 pounds of food, now you claim you're out of food....I was told this buffet was unlimited?!?!
This is all done to maximize revenue. Early on, the tickets are expensive because the people who are not price conscious will book at the higher prices (business travelers, people with very strict schedule requirements, etc). Then at 6 weeks you've got the bulk of the typical price conscious travelers booking their tickets, so the prices have to be as competetive with other airlines as possible to both sell out and get as much money as possible. Finally, as the flight date approaches you're now dealing with a shortage of tickets. There are only a few left, or maybe the flight is full and they can overbook a couple of seats. Now you charge a lot again so that those people that NEED to be on that flight pay what its worth to them.
If too many people are requesting the service, the solution is to increase the cost of the service. Basic economics. They can roughly guarantee that luggage comes off in order by designating a few bins as exclusive for priority baggage, then the luggage guys unload those first specifically. If luggage gets lost, I would imagine they will refund the priority fee.
If you think Apple gets more criticism than they deserve you must be on crack. There isn't a company out there that gets higher praise and lower criticism.
I had heard it was chic these days to be a descendant of one of the prisoners. I don't see why it would upset someone, its very interesting if you ask me.
Going with the 25% value I used before, that comes to $209,202,825.
The problem is, your 25% value is completely retarded. The most likely scenario, by far, is that zero people will have a problem. The next most likely scenario is that a couple of people will have problems. How the hell could you possible think that almost 33000 people are going to have their identity stolen due to this?
I interned at Ford a few years back in an area related to networking. Basically the deal with corps that get class A blocks is that they happened to request them before people realized that they would run out pretty damn quick. Basically dumb luck on the part of the companies that ended up getting them.
Ticketmaster doesn't really care, its not like they get less money if a scalper buys tickets as opposed to someone who really wants to see the show. They only care because their customers get frustrated when they can't buy tickets for a show they want to see. The main beneficiaries from Tickermaster's lawsuits should be regular consumers. It does benefit them indirectly by making their customers happier, but they get paid one way or another.
Whats interesting is that the article says this company RMG is able to defeat their captcha images. I have no idea how hard it is to write a program to read those letters, sometimes *I* have a hard time reading the damn things. I wonder how hard this is to automate, and if there are any other good techniques to avoid bots.
Standards bodies are basically about politics. They're like mini congresses or parliaments, and you have to work together with many people to get consensus on issues. This requires a very careful approach to what you say, gentle persuasion, etc.
It sounds to me like this guy wasn't going to be very good at his job. Making a shocking and embarassing public pronouncement while trying to hide behind "just being a citizen" is basically proof that he was not the right guy for the job. I don't see the controversy.
Do slashdotters just play dumb, or do 90% of the people that read this site not even know what a patent is? Just because you figured out how to do VOIP at some point doesn't mean that there is no way to patent some piece of technology that could be used to do it.
Vonage isn't in trouble for operating a VOIP service...tons of people do that, the cable company's phone offerings, skype, etc. I have no idea what patents they violated, but it would be a specific method or implementation...not the concept in general.
Dozens of other companies are doing VOIP and they're in the clear, so maybe Vonage just didn't bother to get the licenses necessary or use a different implementation.
Mate, people have stopped laughing, not because Microsoft has changed but because we've become so desensitised to the security issues it no longer brings the same attention it used to; its expected.
Despite all the bleating about how security is as bad as ever, it simply isn't true. A current version of XP is pretty secure, comes with a firewall, recommends anti-virus software to users, the browser has anti-phishing technology, etc. You would almost have to try to get infected on an up to date version of windows. If it were as bad as it was before why haven't there been any more iloveyou or other crippling vulnerabilities since SP2?
I fail to see how using Firefox to ignore the ad banners and such is morally any different than throwing out the advertising supplements to the newspaper without glancing at the ads therein.
You didn't even read the slashdot summary, much less the article obviously. The newspaper gets paid for including the ad, not for you viewing it. Websites often get paid by impressions, so if the ads aren't received by the customers then the revenue isn't received by the site. Totally different from the newspaper, who gets an "impression" with every paper sold guaranteed.
Still not necessarily wrong given how parasitic a lot of ads are now, hogging resources and making annoying sounds. But lets focus on the actual argument raised in TFA.
I don't know if this would be a successful business, but it would be nice to see an ad serving company that is "responsible." I never used adblock plus until a month ago, I finally got fed up with flash ads that crash my browser or use 80% of the CPU, ads with sound like those buzzing bee ads, etc.
Ads more and more are like malware than a passive banner you might decide to click. If there were an ad company out there that vetted the ads they serve to ensure they weren't impacting performance and weren't unusually annoying, I would be perfectly willing to install a subscription that did not block those ads.
So....point here is maybe we can come to an agreement, a comprimise. Websites could choose to go with the responsible ad server, and fewer people would block there ads.
I've seen on the news that they've checked out like 6 or 7 plane crash sites that turned out not to be Fossett. What that left me wondering was, are those sites where they just left wreckage because it was remote or are they previously unknown crashes where a plane went missing and was never found?
How often does that happen with light aircraft? Do they vanish entirely very often?
Even with 2GB of memory my system still feels sluggish, because everyone in the world thinks their software needs to run as a service or have some persistent background process eating up memory. 5-10MB of memory times a zillion apps and suddenly your computer is slow.
Why does iTunes have to have like 3 services running on my computer at all times? Its absurd. iTunes is not user friendly either, it just seems that way because other media players are even worse.
ATTEMPTS is the key word, is it not? The corrupted vote is null and void, and now Microsoft will have every action on that standard scrutinized heavily. So I don't really see what good adding an ungodly layer of bureaucracy will do. Standards take quite a while to move from proposal to final spec, there is ample process.
Do people really think they're all in there just winging it? There are already many rules, processes, procedures, etc. I don't even know what it means to "standardize the standardization process" considering it already is subject to the standard processes of ISO. Obviously a small tweak to the rules is likely due to this Microsoft thing, but why do anything else?
$40, except half the people wont claim it at all. And of those that do, how many will buy something that costs a hell of a lot more than $100? I bet apple profits off this.
Steve Jobs can't even fucking give away money without making money.
No one wants to view their shitty streaming garbage application on the NBC website, surrounded by dozens of flashing banners and other distracting nonsense.
Zonk is willing to pay $2 per episode to download the damn things and they're offering it free on their site and he STILL isn't interested. Me either to be honest.
I know this is ABC, but I got a few episodes behind on Lost this year and tried to watch on their website. They don't keep the whole season available just the last X episodes, and I was X+1 behind, so I just stopped watching for the year. Most video on network websites is horrible and consumer unfriendly.
It seems the original source of this was Monica Goodling, the AG's staffer who resigned and claimed executive priviledge for most answers during her congressional hearing.
Its not a big surprise, lots of businesses choose to stop doing business with unprofitable customers. You might argue that they should set a bright line for what is ok and what isn't, but there's not much advantage to that for the business. I haven't seen it advertised as unlimited in several years.
It doesn't particularly bother me, bandwidth hogs increase the cost for the average user. Remember these are residential class services, anyone can get a true unlimited bandwidth service if they use that much (T1 or similar).
He wouldn't have a problem if the ad blocker would still generate a hit but use CSS to make the image hidden on the browser. Of course, the ad companies themselves would then have a huge problem with that, since they're paying people for "displaying" ads nobody sees.
I never had adblock up until a couple weeks ago. I was always happy to just tune out the ads, even getting adblock was more effort than I wanted to spend to avoid a few ads. But what I've noticed recently is that there are TONS of ads that are flash based that either crash my browser or cause a noticable impact on my computer's performance (especially with drop in frame rate while playing a game on my second display). So, I began blocking them. Also ads with sound have become more common, I was annoyed by those emoticon ads that play sound but they weren't common. But those along with the new OnStar video ads and the GE "we're really green buy stuff we make" ads pushed me over the edge. And the buzzing bee ads.
So now those advertisers have fucked it up for everyone because a lot of ads get blocked because they're served by the same companies as the annoying ads.
I still don't go through an sanitize every site to make them ad free, though, too much effort. Someone might want to start a business serving ads that are unobtrusive and thus less likely to be blocked. I wonder if there would be a noticable increase in click through.
Even today, I would say that all those RISC ISAs are better than x86, simply from the standpoint that they are cleaner, easier to decode, have fewer tricky modes to deal with, fewer odd dependencies, and all the other things that make building an actual x86 chip a pain in the arse.
The people who really suffer from this are Intel and AMD. They're the ones that have to design the nasty decoders for x86. They obviously find the advantages of decades of expertise in x86 ISA throughout the industry is worth the effort. Its good for everyone. And in reality a lot of the complexity of x86 decoding has been moved into the microcode engine so that the actual hardware decoders are pretty efficient. If you use any of the "cruft" in x86 its going to be microcoded and your program is going to run really slowly. And then you'll be motivated to stop using those instructions.
Also, people shouldn't forget some of the advantages of x86, like variable instruction lengths. PowerPC and ARM may be easier to decode but they take up a ton more space and that causes a significant decrease in cache and memory efficiency. For example, I think the average x86 instruction is only 2 bytes (many are only 1 byte, if your program uses mostly 1 byte instructiosn you can get a LOT of performance this way). PowerPC is fixed at 4 bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast's secret slowing of P2P traffic is much worse than this. In that case they were actually meddling with the service. Here, Verizon just decided to stop doing business with certain customers that were not profitable. They didn't cap their bandwidth, they just said "starting next month we've decided not to do business with you anymore." Isn't that their right? Customers have the right to cancel, Verizon has the right to cancel.
Broadband internet access is unlimited in a lot of ways...there's no set cap. But there are always realistic limitations. I don't see the problem with advertisers assuming their customers aren't completely stupid. Somehow I just have this mental image of thousands of slashdotters at a buffet screaming "I've only eaten 700 pounds of food, now you claim you're out of food....I was told this buffet was unlimited?!?!
You're paid hourly? What do you do that you can work remotely and still get paid hourly?
This is all done to maximize revenue. Early on, the tickets are expensive because the people who are not price conscious will book at the higher prices (business travelers, people with very strict schedule requirements, etc). Then at 6 weeks you've got the bulk of the typical price conscious travelers booking their tickets, so the prices have to be as competetive with other airlines as possible to both sell out and get as much money as possible. Finally, as the flight date approaches you're now dealing with a shortage of tickets. There are only a few left, or maybe the flight is full and they can overbook a couple of seats. Now you charge a lot again so that those people that NEED to be on that flight pay what its worth to them.
If too many people are requesting the service, the solution is to increase the cost of the service. Basic economics. They can roughly guarantee that luggage comes off in order by designating a few bins as exclusive for priority baggage, then the luggage guys unload those first specifically. If luggage gets lost, I would imagine they will refund the priority fee.
If you think Apple gets more criticism than they deserve you must be on crack. There isn't a company out there that gets higher praise and lower criticism.
I had heard it was chic these days to be a descendant of one of the prisoners. I don't see why it would upset someone, its very interesting if you ask me.
The problem is, your 25% value is completely retarded. The most likely scenario, by far, is that zero people will have a problem. The next most likely scenario is that a couple of people will have problems. How the hell could you possible think that almost 33000 people are going to have their identity stolen due to this?
I interned at Ford a few years back in an area related to networking. Basically the deal with corps that get class A blocks is that they happened to request them before people realized that they would run out pretty damn quick. Basically dumb luck on the part of the companies that ended up getting them.
Whats interesting is that the article says this company RMG is able to defeat their captcha images. I have no idea how hard it is to write a program to read those letters, sometimes *I* have a hard time reading the damn things. I wonder how hard this is to automate, and if there are any other good techniques to avoid bots.
It sounds to me like this guy wasn't going to be very good at his job. Making a shocking and embarassing public pronouncement while trying to hide behind "just being a citizen" is basically proof that he was not the right guy for the job. I don't see the controversy.
Vonage isn't in trouble for operating a VOIP service...tons of people do that, the cable company's phone offerings, skype, etc. I have no idea what patents they violated, but it would be a specific method or implementation...not the concept in general.
Dozens of other companies are doing VOIP and they're in the clear, so maybe Vonage just didn't bother to get the licenses necessary or use a different implementation.
Despite all the bleating about how security is as bad as ever, it simply isn't true. A current version of XP is pretty secure, comes with a firewall, recommends anti-virus software to users, the browser has anti-phishing technology, etc. You would almost have to try to get infected on an up to date version of windows. If it were as bad as it was before why haven't there been any more iloveyou or other crippling vulnerabilities since SP2?
You didn't even read the slashdot summary, much less the article obviously. The newspaper gets paid for including the ad, not for you viewing it. Websites often get paid by impressions, so if the ads aren't received by the customers then the revenue isn't received by the site. Totally different from the newspaper, who gets an "impression" with every paper sold guaranteed.
Still not necessarily wrong given how parasitic a lot of ads are now, hogging resources and making annoying sounds. But lets focus on the actual argument raised in TFA.
Ads more and more are like malware than a passive banner you might decide to click. If there were an ad company out there that vetted the ads they serve to ensure they weren't impacting performance and weren't unusually annoying, I would be perfectly willing to install a subscription that did not block those ads.
So....point here is maybe we can come to an agreement, a comprimise. Websites could choose to go with the responsible ad server, and fewer people would block there ads.
How often does that happen with light aircraft? Do they vanish entirely very often?
Why does iTunes have to have like 3 services running on my computer at all times? Its absurd. iTunes is not user friendly either, it just seems that way because other media players are even worse.
Do people really think they're all in there just winging it? There are already many rules, processes, procedures, etc. I don't even know what it means to "standardize the standardization process" considering it already is subject to the standard processes of ISO. Obviously a small tweak to the rules is likely due to this Microsoft thing, but why do anything else?
Well said....I'm sure ISO hadn't even heard of this minor snafu, fortunately there are people like this guy to make them see the fucking light.
Steve Jobs can't even fucking give away money without making money.
Thank god the IIJ is there to protect a homeless methhead's right to do medical care on horses without a license. Godbless them!
Zonk is willing to pay $2 per episode to download the damn things and they're offering it free on their site and he STILL isn't interested. Me either to be honest.
I know this is ABC, but I got a few episodes behind on Lost this year and tried to watch on their website. They don't keep the whole season available just the last X episodes, and I was X+1 behind, so I just stopped watching for the year. Most video on network websites is horrible and consumer unfriendly.
http://www.slate.com/id/2167284/pagenum/all/#page
It seems the original source of this was Monica Goodling, the AG's staffer who resigned and claimed executive priviledge for most answers during her congressional hearing.
It doesn't particularly bother me, bandwidth hogs increase the cost for the average user. Remember these are residential class services, anyone can get a true unlimited bandwidth service if they use that much (T1 or similar).
I never had adblock up until a couple weeks ago. I was always happy to just tune out the ads, even getting adblock was more effort than I wanted to spend to avoid a few ads. But what I've noticed recently is that there are TONS of ads that are flash based that either crash my browser or cause a noticable impact on my computer's performance (especially with drop in frame rate while playing a game on my second display). So, I began blocking them. Also ads with sound have become more common, I was annoyed by those emoticon ads that play sound but they weren't common. But those along with the new OnStar video ads and the GE "we're really green buy stuff we make" ads pushed me over the edge. And the buzzing bee ads.
So now those advertisers have fucked it up for everyone because a lot of ads get blocked because they're served by the same companies as the annoying ads.
I still don't go through an sanitize every site to make them ad free, though, too much effort. Someone might want to start a business serving ads that are unobtrusive and thus less likely to be blocked. I wonder if there would be a noticable increase in click through.
The people who really suffer from this are Intel and AMD. They're the ones that have to design the nasty decoders for x86. They obviously find the advantages of decades of expertise in x86 ISA throughout the industry is worth the effort. Its good for everyone. And in reality a lot of the complexity of x86 decoding has been moved into the microcode engine so that the actual hardware decoders are pretty efficient. If you use any of the "cruft" in x86 its going to be microcoded and your program is going to run really slowly. And then you'll be motivated to stop using those instructions.
Also, people shouldn't forget some of the advantages of x86, like variable instruction lengths. PowerPC and ARM may be easier to decode but they take up a ton more space and that causes a significant decrease in cache and memory efficiency. For example, I think the average x86 instruction is only 2 bytes (many are only 1 byte, if your program uses mostly 1 byte instructiosn you can get a LOT of performance this way). PowerPC is fixed at 4 bytes.