Probably something to do with English being mostly made up of foreign words
That is not a weakness of English, tho', but one of its greatest strengths - it can freely adapt to whatever use is required for it. That's why English is the universal language of commerce - the de facto lingua franca - you can just learn it and speak it and if you make something up and it's useful enough, everyone else will start using your new vocabulary too. No other language is as practical and useful in the real world as English.
Actually, I don't think this is a bad idea. I don't know if we should be regulating it as such, but its not exactly without precedence.
The idea was that if you restrict the numbers of hours people worked, the companies would be forced to hire more people. That might work in an economy where people are interchangeable - for example, unskilled or semi-skilled labourers can move freely from farm to factory. Unfortunately, it can't work in a modern economy in which workers are specialists. Rather than reducing unemployment, it reduced economic activity across the board. Unemployment in France is now at 12%, and it's rising. Same in Germany.
(child labor laws)
In Iceland, children can work part-time at 8. Yes, 8. 50% of the money earned must be put aside for education. But Iceland has higher literacy and lower crime than the vast majority of Western nations, as well as excellent health and almost full employment. Certainly, you'd have to provide some pretty strong evidence to refute the Icelandic approach.
The main problem is that the American 50 hour work week (Americans take less days of in a year than the *Japanese*) is destroying the social structure. You've suddenly got a whole bunch of children who effectively grow up with part-time parents, and it really shows
In other countries, such as the UK and US, unemployment is 2-4%. Sure, we work longer hours, but the social effects of mass unemployment are worse. France has weekly mass strikes these days, the government has realized that reform is needed, but the people who do have jobs don't want to see the market deregulated... they're heading for a fiscal meltdown.
What was that program, by the way? (Just out of interest) I'd never heard of this before.
The company was Symbolics, they were former AI lab members. From '83 to '85, Stallman devoted himself to cloning every feature in their software and giving it away to their rivals. This was written up in Forbes and Wired, but I can't find links to those online.
Stallman has ideas on economics that make perfect sense if you can assume that everyone in the world writing software has academic tenure or is supported by a philanthropic foundation - but the real world doesn't work like that.
If you read the article, you'd know the whole thing is supervised by human operators. It isn't a case that a machine automatically matches faces and raises an alarm. Presumably one of them would simply ask.
The only excuse some individuals have for not listening to Richard is personal prejudice against Richard's way of life.
Yes, I am prejudiced against a man supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant and the facilities of MIT who devotes his life to attempts to thwart the efforts of those who invest their own money in software development.
Perhaps you are not familiar with a story from the early days of the MIT AI Lab? A group of RMS' colleagues left to set up a company. Everytime they released a new feature in their software, RMS, from the financial safety of MIT, reverse engineered it and released a free version. He drove them out of business, for no other reason than resentment that they had quit the lab.
I think OpenOffice is the biggest threat to MS. Two-thirds of MS's profits come from MSOffice. Any Office replacement is a big threat even without desktop Linux threatening the other one-third of MS's profits (MSWindows). If all the major companies switched to OpenOffice on Windows, which seems possible once v2 is released, then MS loses most of their income. That must be considered a major threat to MS.
I'll believe that when OpenOffice is a feature-complete competitor. Sure, the word processor component is fine for smallish documents (what I consider a large document is hundreds of pages long, so that isn't a flame). But frankly, the spreadsheet isn't anywhere near Excel, and Excel is far more firmly entrenched than Word is. There are people who've been using it their entire careers and have a whole arsenal of tricks and macros that only work in Excel, and they'll never give it up.
If a company only accepts resume submissions in OpenOffice format, then home users will need to install it to do their resume.
Isn't that the same technique that you're upset that Microsoft uses?
MS has used this process for the last 10 years to force everybody to upgrade to the latest version of MSOffice.
Word has plateau'd as a word processor, but Excel does offer compelling reasons to upgrade. It's getting ever closer to high-end statistics packages that cost tens of thousands of dollars a seat, but costs a hundred dollars or so if you buy it in a bundle. And a lot of Slashbots like to criticize Access and Powerpoint too, but a lot of people rely on them far more than they rely on Word.
Sun has to compete more closely with free-software systems than Microsoft does... but Sun can also benefit much more easily from free-software innovation than Microsoft can.
That is an excellent point.
One of the planks of Fundamentalist Gatesism is that free software doesn't do anyone any good. And they call us fanatics?
Oh, Gates has no problems with "free as in beer" - look at IE, for example.
Frequently as this BS is put out I find it hard to believe. Why should Linux be a threat to Unix. Let's take Solaris. Why would someone buy a Sun system? 'cos many folks write s/w for it - great CAD/CAM s/w, telco s/w, graphics etc..... there's a lot of stuff avbl for Solaris on a cafeteria basis. Same with IRIX (film and video) and HP-UX.
That used to be the case, but it's less so now. There are many Slashdot stories, for example, on movie FX houses replacing SGIs with Linux render farms. Or take Oracle, for a long time Sun was their preferred platform, but now Ellison is pushing 9i RAC running on Linux running on blades in preference to big Suns. If you want an X workstation for your developers or engineers, do you buy everyone a Sun, or do you give everyone a cheap PC running Linux and buy one Sun to compile and test on?
OTOH Windoze users present Linux/Open Source coders with a single large market to go after.
A vendor can port an app from Solaris to Linux far easier than from Linux to Windows. That is a fact.
Microsoft has officially moved Linux up to the Number 2 Risk to the company (With Economic Environment at No. 1). Bill Gates has taken the threat very seriously, and has identified Linux and non-commercial software
What he actually said was "Linux and non-commercial software" (emphasis mine). The question is, what is the greatest threat to MS - Linux vs Windows? Or maybe it's NetBSD versus WinCE. Or SAP/DB vs SQL 2000. Or Java vs.NET. I don't think he meant Open Office vs MS Office, tho'.
There's a lot more to "non commercial software" than just one OS kernel, you know. Also remember that Linux is a bigger threat to Unix vendors than it is to MS, because the barriers to migration are lower. I would be very surprised if Sun didn't consider "Lintel" to be its #1 threat.
Which is why i don't like the BSD license. Code released under it is essentally ending up as work done for free for corporations. So while the code may now be better, it doesn't benifit everyone, it simply benifits the company.
And that is different how from working on Linux on behalf of IBM?
Ask yourself what your ideology actually is... BSD people want to get useful code into the hands of as many people as possible and want those people to use the code in as many ways as possible, GPL people want to convert people to their way of thinking and use the code as a vector for that. That's not trolling, it's a fact, and I think even RMS would have to agree with me.
For the "The most disastrous business decision you ever witnessed" I would have to say IBM's decision to license DOS from Microsoft.
That's second.. the first would be Digital Research not taking IBM's calls, thus forcing them to go see MS in the first place:-)
Another particularly stupid thing IBM did was ignoring the RDBMS market for as long as they did, and letting Oracle get such a huge headstart. But it makes you think... IBM accidentally created two huge industries, PCs and databases, and gave them away, and it's still one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
So, saying one made a trip in x parsecs (which is silly sounding and undoubtably resulted from George Lucas not knowing a thing about physics or the units he was tossing about) isn't really as silly as one would think.
That may or may not be true - but the explanation you will get from a hardcore fan involves Solo being such a skillful pilot that he was able to fly closer to debris fields or black holes or something than any other pilot in the galaxy, so in fact flew from A to B by a shorter route. That's why I mean about obsessively retrofitting details - they had to invent a route, places, hazards, etc in their "universe" to make all that plausible. In other worse, one Han Solo sentence created vast swathes of cartography that are far beyond the scope of "canon".
Other scifi fans - for example, Babylon 5 fans - simply don't think like that.
Star Wars is junk science fiction. It's really fantasy and religious myth. Mind you, it's all good fun, and the muppet characters like Yoda are cute.
Star Wars fans have a peculiar attitude to the universe. George Lucas decided, probably after no more than a second's thought, to call an imaginary spaceship the "X-wing". Possibly the shape of it even came after he'd come up with the futuristic-sounding name. But the fans seized on it and decided that there must therefore be a spaceship for every other letter of the alphabet. It's like Lucas said "turbo" as in "turbo laser" because he just wanted a word that in the popular imagination meant "powerful", and he said "parsec" because he thought it sounded like a space-second and the fans obsessively retrofit details onto these tiny, trivial things to make them of vast importance. Ask a Star Wars fan about how Han Solo made a voyage in however many parsecs and prepare to boggle at the convoluted thought process behind the explanation.
The reason I mention it is because I haven't seen this type of behavior in other sci-fi fans... Star Trek fans don't flesh out throwaway comments into things of vast significance in the Star Trek universe. Like, they didn't decided that because there was something called "dilithium" that there must also be "quadlithium", "pentalithium" and so on. Babylon 5 fans don't extrapolate the existance of the "Maxbari" from the "Minbari". But this is what Star Wars fans do!
I work for a technology company that makes stock options available to its employees. Assuming there is a correlation between employee title/rank and the number of options awarded; what do hi-tech professionals consider a 'fair' stock offering to be? What would be a 'generous' offering?
If your company is publicly quoted, you can work out the value of the options for yourself. Get the historical data for the share price and crunch it through the Black-Scholes algorithm (any derivatives textbook will cover this).
Then, and only then, can you decide what is "fair" or "generous", by thinking about how likely it is you will ever convert them into cash. Also think about the non-cash value... do you want to be a shareholder in your company? You might be surprised how little stock one actually needs to own in even the largest companies to be entitled to attend AGMs and ask questions of the board. If you plan to stay with this company long term, that might be a nice privilege.
One word to the wise: I saw many people in the dotcom era who spent the money they expected to make from their options before said options had vested. Yeah, they lost a lot of money that way. Think about options as a perk or a bonus, not part of your salary and benefits. Some companies like Microsoft are granting actual stock now instead of options. That's good and bad. Good because if the market falls you'll still have some value, bad because you will still have to pay tax, whereas options are tax-neutral unless you exercise.
I had a funny problem with my Netgear ME102 at home. The connection gradually got less and less reliable over distance, finally it could sustain a connection (to a Netgear MA401 802.11b PC card) for no more than a couple of minutes at a time. But the status lights on the WAP itself were showing it was fine. The problem was the power supply - it had failed in such a way that the ME102 could still power up, yet it could not run the radio link. It took 6 weeks or so dealing with Netgear's frankly useless tech support organization to diagnose this. I don't just mean that their people are clueless (altho' they are) and that they barely speak English. Their call centre technology is poor - for example, every time I called, I gave the ticket number the last one had given me, but it wasn't recognized and I had to almost start again from scratch each time. There also appears to be no link between their email and phone tech support groups.
What needs to happen is a tax on ALL code done outside the country.
What, including the Linux kernel?
I'm not trolling, just pointing out a contradiction in many arguments on the subject. You cannot simultaneously advocate "free" (as in beer) code and yet complain about other people looking for cheaper code. There is hypocrisy here - many people seem to be saying "all code should be free except the code I write to earn a living".
Good question. The average executive compensation has been creeping up towards 500 - 600 times the average employee compensation
Let's say that the average salary in the US is $30,000. By your reckoning, the average executive would be on $18M/year. That simply isn't the case. Very few executives even make it into the low millions, and they're the top players at the largest corporations. In fact, I'm not even sure, if we're comparing averages, that the average manager even makes 10x the average employee. I don't know where you got that figure, but it's complete and utter nonsense.
Don't let the wealth of people like Larry Ellison and Michael Dell confuse you - they get paid what they get paid because they own large chunks of their respective companies, and there are very very few people in their bracket.
Really, those extra songs that aren't as good as your favourite songs on an album are not filler. Bands spend time and effort on those songs and want you to hear them, and just because they're not instantly catchy pop songs doesn't mean they're not good.
That's not quite accurate. The band cares less about whether I hear them and more about whether I buy them. Seriously - if all they cared about was people listening to their music, they'd just give it away. Some artists do that, but they are a minority. Now, say on Album X, I like songs 1-5, 7 and 9, and another fan likes 2-5, and 7-10, we can both buy the same album and be more-or-less happy. But that's a limitation of the format... very few bands make integrated albums, i.e. unified pieces of work that are an hour long. The vast majority make self-contained individual songs. There's no inherent reason, other than the limitations of the technology used for the delivery mechanism, for most albums to exist as they do.
What I have built is simple and functional. We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
Firstly, I would like to say that this isn't intended as a slur on your musicians.
You must understand where the album came from, why it exists. It is an example of technology leading art. When the technology existed to fit n minutes of music onto a record, musicians started to produce works that were n minutes long. This is why first there were singles, then albums. This has meant that much of what is on an album is filler. I'm looking at my rack of CDs now, and most of them I bought for a few (3-5) great tracks out of a total of roughly 10. The MP3s I have online to listen to aren't complete albums, just the good somgs from each album. There are plenty of albums I can put on as background music, but few that I'd actually want to listen to. Some vendors (like Apple) are starting to understand that the album is an artificial construct... what people really want are individual songs, delivered efficiently. You can't do that so easily on CD, because there isn't so much of a price differential for a retailer to stock a CD album as a CD single (i.e. transportation costs, staff costs, etc are all the same). But now you can, with the network and the MP3 format.
So, the thing that would make me buy online is being able to construct my own "greatest hits" album from a musicians entire catalogue, and get it sent to me on SACD or DVD/A. I'm not even worried about buying compilations of different artists - I can do those myself on my HD after all.
This model is bad for some "artists" because it means they can't make money from filler, but it's good for real artists and their fans, because the percentage of an album that's worth listening to (and hence buying) is so much higher. And it's bad for record labels either way...
"Grid Computing" is directed at large-scale, secure resource sharing. An ordinary surfer will have little interest in this.
Yes and no. Consider business models. At present, there are web sites supported by corporations who wish to display advertising. What about a model in which a corporation pays for your ADSL connection, in return for n workunits/day of their distributed computing job run on your PC? More units, faster connection. Remember the average user's processor is idle most of the time, so it wouldn't have a real impact on their own use of their PC. If the job was like folding@home which uses processor but not much bandwidth, the user would get all the benefit of the connection for themselves. This could radically change the domestic bandwidth industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably something to do with English being mostly made up of foreign words
That is not a weakness of English, tho', but one of its greatest strengths - it can freely adapt to whatever use is required for it. That's why English is the universal language of commerce - the de facto lingua franca - you can just learn it and speak it and if you make something up and it's useful enough, everyone else will start using your new vocabulary too. No other language is as practical and useful in the real world as English.
Actually, I don't think this is a bad idea. I don't know if we should be regulating it as such, but its not exactly without precedence .
The idea was that if you restrict the numbers of hours people worked, the companies would be forced to hire more people. That might work in an economy where people are interchangeable - for example, unskilled or semi-skilled labourers can move freely from farm to factory. Unfortunately, it can't work in a modern economy in which workers are specialists. Rather than reducing unemployment, it reduced economic activity across the board. Unemployment in France is now at 12%, and it's rising. Same in Germany.
(child labor laws)
In Iceland, children can work part-time at 8. Yes, 8. 50% of the money earned must be put aside for education. But Iceland has higher literacy and lower crime than the vast majority of Western nations, as well as excellent health and almost full employment. Certainly, you'd have to provide some pretty strong evidence to refute the Icelandic approach.
The main problem is that the American 50 hour work week (Americans take less days of in a year than the *Japanese*) is destroying the social structure. You've suddenly got a whole bunch of children who effectively grow up with part-time parents, and it really shows
In other countries, such as the UK and US, unemployment is 2-4%. Sure, we work longer hours, but the social effects of mass unemployment are worse. France has weekly mass strikes these days, the government has realized that reform is needed, but the people who do have jobs don't want to see the market deregulated... they're heading for a fiscal meltdown.
What was that program, by the way? (Just out of interest) I'd never heard of this before.
The company was Symbolics, they were former AI lab members. From '83 to '85, Stallman devoted himself to cloning every feature in their software and giving it away to their rivals. This was written up in Forbes and Wired, but I can't find links to those online.
Stallman has ideas on economics that make perfect sense if you can assume that everyone in the world writing software has academic tenure or is supported by a philanthropic foundation - but the real world doesn't work like that.
What happens now?
If you read the article, you'd know the whole thing is supervised by human operators. It isn't a case that a machine automatically matches faces and raises an alarm. Presumably one of them would simply ask.
Considering this, can the BitKeeper license really forbid reverse-engineering, and still be allowed to use the GNU C Library ?
In other words, you want Larry to respect the GPL, but you don't see any reason for the FSF to respect Larry's license?
The only excuse some individuals have for not listening to Richard is personal prejudice against Richard's way of life.
Yes, I am prejudiced against a man supported by a MacArthur Foundation grant and the facilities of MIT who devotes his life to attempts to thwart the efforts of those who invest their own money in software development.
Perhaps you are not familiar with a story from the early days of the MIT AI Lab? A group of RMS' colleagues left to set up a company. Everytime they released a new feature in their software, RMS, from the financial safety of MIT, reverse engineered it and released a free version. He drove them out of business, for no other reason than resentment that they had quit the lab.
What's really important is if we see IBM release a real compiler for the 970
You mean a free one? They already sell compilers for POWER4.
I expect IBM will do the same as SGI: sell a high-end compiler to people who need one, let everyone else use GCC.
I think OpenOffice is the biggest threat to MS. Two-thirds of MS's profits come from MSOffice. Any Office replacement is a big threat even without desktop Linux threatening the other one-third of MS's profits (MSWindows). If all the major companies switched to OpenOffice on Windows, which seems possible once v2 is released, then MS loses most of their income. That must be considered a major threat to MS.
I'll believe that when OpenOffice is a feature-complete competitor. Sure, the word processor component is fine for smallish documents (what I consider a large document is hundreds of pages long, so that isn't a flame). But frankly, the spreadsheet isn't anywhere near Excel, and Excel is far more firmly entrenched than Word is. There are people who've been using it their entire careers and have a whole arsenal of tricks and macros that only work in Excel, and they'll never give it up.
If a company only accepts resume submissions in OpenOffice format, then home users will need to install it to do their resume.
Isn't that the same technique that you're upset that Microsoft uses?
MS has used this process for the last 10 years to force everybody to upgrade to the latest version of MSOffice.
Word has plateau'd as a word processor, but Excel does offer compelling reasons to upgrade. It's getting ever closer to high-end statistics packages that cost tens of thousands of dollars a seat, but costs a hundred dollars or so if you buy it in a bundle. And a lot of Slashbots like to criticize Access and Powerpoint too, but a lot of people rely on them far more than they rely on Word.
I predict that very soon MSFT will have to lower substantially the cost of Office, further eroding its margins. Better start cashing in Bill.
Microsoft profit up 26%. No sign of any eroded margins there!
Sun has to compete more closely with free-software systems than Microsoft does ... but Sun can also benefit much more easily from free-software innovation than Microsoft can.
That is an excellent point.
One of the planks of Fundamentalist Gatesism is that free software doesn't do anyone any good. And they call us fanatics?
Oh, Gates has no problems with "free as in beer" - look at IE, for example.
Frequently as this BS is put out I find it hard to believe. Why should Linux be a threat to Unix. Let's take Solaris. Why would someone buy a Sun system? 'cos many folks write s/w for it - great CAD/CAM s/w, telco s/w, graphics etc..... there's a lot of stuff avbl for Solaris on a cafeteria basis. Same with IRIX (film and video) and HP-UX.
That used to be the case, but it's less so now. There are many Slashdot stories, for example, on movie FX houses replacing SGIs with Linux render farms. Or take Oracle, for a long time Sun was their preferred platform, but now Ellison is pushing 9i RAC running on Linux running on blades in preference to big Suns. If you want an X workstation for your developers or engineers, do you buy everyone a Sun, or do you give everyone a cheap PC running Linux and buy one Sun to compile and test on?
OTOH Windoze users present Linux/Open Source coders with a single large market to go after.
A vendor can port an app from Solaris to Linux far easier than from Linux to Windows. That is a fact.
Microsoft has officially moved Linux up to the Number 2 Risk to the company (With Economic Environment at No. 1). Bill Gates has taken the threat very seriously, and has identified Linux and non-commercial software
.NET. I don't think he meant Open Office vs MS Office, tho'.
What he actually said was "Linux and non-commercial software" (emphasis mine). The question is, what is the greatest threat to MS - Linux vs Windows? Or maybe it's NetBSD versus WinCE. Or SAP/DB vs SQL 2000. Or Java vs
There's a lot more to "non commercial software" than just one OS kernel, you know. Also remember that Linux is a bigger threat to Unix vendors than it is to MS, because the barriers to migration are lower. I would be very surprised if Sun didn't consider "Lintel" to be its #1 threat.
Which is why i don't like the BSD license. Code released under it is essentally ending up as work done for free for corporations. So while the code may now be better, it doesn't benifit everyone, it simply benifits the company.
And that is different how from working on Linux on behalf of IBM?
Ask yourself what your ideology actually is... BSD people want to get useful code into the hands of as many people as possible and want those people to use the code in as many ways as possible, GPL people want to convert people to their way of thinking and use the code as a vector for that. That's not trolling, it's a fact, and I think even RMS would have to agree with me.
For the "The most disastrous business decision you ever witnessed" I would have to say IBM's decision to license DOS from Microsoft.
:-)
That's second.. the first would be Digital Research not taking IBM's calls, thus forcing them to go see MS in the first place
Another particularly stupid thing IBM did was ignoring the RDBMS market for as long as they did, and letting Oracle get such a huge headstart. But it makes you think... IBM accidentally created two huge industries, PCs and databases, and gave them away, and it's still one of the most powerful corporations in the world.
So, saying one made a trip in x parsecs (which is silly sounding and undoubtably resulted from George Lucas not knowing a thing about physics or the units he was tossing about) isn't really as silly as one would think.
That may or may not be true - but the explanation you will get from a hardcore fan involves Solo being such a skillful pilot that he was able to fly closer to debris fields or black holes or something than any other pilot in the galaxy, so in fact flew from A to B by a shorter route. That's why I mean about obsessively retrofitting details - they had to invent a route, places, hazards, etc in their "universe" to make all that plausible. In other worse, one Han Solo sentence created vast swathes of cartography that are far beyond the scope of "canon".
Other scifi fans - for example, Babylon 5 fans - simply don't think like that.
Star Wars is junk science fiction. It's really fantasy and religious myth. Mind you, it's all good fun, and the muppet characters like Yoda are cute.
Star Wars fans have a peculiar attitude to the universe. George Lucas decided, probably after no more than a second's thought, to call an imaginary spaceship the "X-wing". Possibly the shape of it even came after he'd come up with the futuristic-sounding name. But the fans seized on it and decided that there must therefore be a spaceship for every other letter of the alphabet. It's like Lucas said "turbo" as in "turbo laser" because he just wanted a word that in the popular imagination meant "powerful", and he said "parsec" because he thought it sounded like a space-second and the fans obsessively retrofit details onto these tiny, trivial things to make them of vast importance. Ask a Star Wars fan about how Han Solo made a voyage in however many parsecs and prepare to boggle at the convoluted thought process behind the explanation.
The reason I mention it is because I haven't seen this type of behavior in other sci-fi fans... Star Trek fans don't flesh out throwaway comments into things of vast significance in the Star Trek universe. Like, they didn't decided that because there was something called "dilithium" that there must also be "quadlithium", "pentalithium" and so on. Babylon 5 fans don't extrapolate the existance of the "Maxbari" from the "Minbari". But this is what Star Wars fans do!
I work for a technology company that makes stock options available to its employees. Assuming there is a correlation between employee title/rank and the number of options awarded; what do hi-tech professionals consider a 'fair' stock offering to be? What would be a 'generous' offering?
If your company is publicly quoted, you can work out the value of the options for yourself. Get the historical data for the share price and crunch it through the Black-Scholes algorithm (any derivatives textbook will cover this).
Then, and only then, can you decide what is "fair" or "generous", by thinking about how likely it is you will ever convert them into cash. Also think about the non-cash value... do you want to be a shareholder in your company? You might be surprised how little stock one actually needs to own in even the largest companies to be entitled to attend AGMs and ask questions of the board. If you plan to stay with this company long term, that might be a nice privilege.
One word to the wise: I saw many people in the dotcom era who spent the money they expected to make from their options before said options had vested. Yeah, they lost a lot of money that way. Think about options as a perk or a bonus, not part of your salary and benefits. Some companies like Microsoft are granting actual stock now instead of options. That's good and bad. Good because if the market falls you'll still have some value, bad because you will still have to pay tax, whereas options are tax-neutral unless you exercise.
I had a funny problem with my Netgear ME102 at home. The connection gradually got less and less reliable over distance, finally it could sustain a connection (to a Netgear MA401 802.11b PC card) for no more than a couple of minutes at a time. But the status lights on the WAP itself were showing it was fine. The problem was the power supply - it had failed in such a way that the ME102 could still power up, yet it could not run the radio link. It took 6 weeks or so dealing with Netgear's frankly useless tech support organization to diagnose this. I don't just mean that their people are clueless (altho' they are) and that they barely speak English. Their call centre technology is poor - for example, every time I called, I gave the ticket number the last one had given me, but it wasn't recognized and I had to almost start again from scratch each time. There also appears to be no link between their email and phone tech support groups.
Nezt time, I'll pay the extra money for Cisco.
What needs to happen is a tax on ALL code done outside the country.
What, including the Linux kernel?
I'm not trolling, just pointing out a contradiction in many arguments on the subject. You cannot simultaneously advocate "free" (as in beer) code and yet complain about other people looking for cheaper code. There is hypocrisy here - many people seem to be saying "all code should be free except the code I write to earn a living".
Bill Gates, the New Ghandi?.....(choke, gasp, cough)
I suggest you read this to see exactly what Bill Gates spends his money on.
Good question. The average executive compensation has been creeping up towards 500 - 600 times the average employee compensation
Let's say that the average salary in the US is $30,000. By your reckoning, the average executive would be on $18M/year. That simply isn't the case. Very few executives even make it into the low millions, and they're the top players at the largest corporations. In fact, I'm not even sure, if we're comparing averages, that the average manager even makes 10x the average employee. I don't know where you got that figure, but it's complete and utter nonsense.
Don't let the wealth of people like Larry Ellison and Michael Dell confuse you - they get paid what they get paid because they own large chunks of their respective companies, and there are very very few people in their bracket.
Really, those extra songs that aren't as good as your favourite songs on an album are not filler. Bands spend time and effort on those songs and want you to hear them, and just because they're not instantly catchy pop songs doesn't mean they're not good.
That's not quite accurate. The band cares less about whether I hear them and more about whether I buy them. Seriously - if all they cared about was people listening to their music, they'd just give it away. Some artists do that, but they are a minority. Now, say on Album X, I like songs 1-5, 7 and 9, and another fan likes 2-5, and 7-10, we can both buy the same album and be more-or-less happy. But that's a limitation of the format... very few bands make integrated albums, i.e. unified pieces of work that are an hour long. The vast majority make self-contained individual songs. There's no inherent reason, other than the limitations of the technology used for the delivery mechanism, for most albums to exist as they do.
What I have built is simple and functional. We are trying to add value to the MP3 albums we sell by including quality artwork that can be printed onto CD labels and jewel case inserts (so you aren't just getting a 'bunch of files'). What would make you want to buy music in this way?
Firstly, I would like to say that this isn't intended as a slur on your musicians.
You must understand where the album came from, why it exists. It is an example of technology leading art. When the technology existed to fit n minutes of music onto a record, musicians started to produce works that were n minutes long. This is why first there were singles, then albums. This has meant that much of what is on an album is filler. I'm looking at my rack of CDs now, and most of them I bought for a few (3-5) great tracks out of a total of roughly 10. The MP3s I have online to listen to aren't complete albums, just the good somgs from each album. There are plenty of albums I can put on as background music, but few that I'd actually want to listen to. Some vendors (like Apple) are starting to understand that the album is an artificial construct... what people really want are individual songs, delivered efficiently. You can't do that so easily on CD, because there isn't so much of a price differential for a retailer to stock a CD album as a CD single (i.e. transportation costs, staff costs, etc are all the same). But now you can, with the network and the MP3 format.
So, the thing that would make me buy online is being able to construct my own "greatest hits" album from a musicians entire catalogue, and get it sent to me on SACD or DVD/A. I'm not even worried about buying compilations of different artists - I can do those myself on my HD after all.
This model is bad for some "artists" because it means they can't make money from filler, but it's good for real artists and their fans, because the percentage of an album that's worth listening to (and hence buying) is so much higher. And it's bad for record labels either way...
"Grid Computing" is directed at large-scale, secure resource sharing. An ordinary surfer will have little interest in this.
Yes and no. Consider business models. At present, there are web sites supported by corporations who wish to display advertising. What about a model in which a corporation pays for your ADSL connection, in return for n workunits/day of their distributed computing job run on your PC? More units, faster connection. Remember the average user's processor is idle most of the time, so it wouldn't have a real impact on their own use of their PC. If the job was like folding@home which uses processor but not much bandwidth, the user would get all the benefit of the connection for themselves. This could radically change the domestic bandwidth industry.
Someone remind me... do we hate the MPAA today, or what?