Flash sucks because the users make it suck? So it is my fucking fault some jackass who bought a Flash for Dummies book is wasting my bandwidth because he felt the need for artistic expression requiring text to jump all over the fucking screen? Not likely. How long am I supposed to wait for Flash's gimmick features to wear away pray tell? It's been out for YEARS and people are still doing the same shit with it they were doing four years ago. Before you do defending Flash because you think it is cool look around at how many shitty jobs people have done building Flash stuff. I don't like Flash because people can't seem to figure out what colours work together. Yellow text on a blue background just hurts my eyes. If your HTML website looks like that I just override display settings on my browser. Flash doesn't give me the ability to filter out lack of style or forethought. At least with HTML pages I can turn off JavaScript and CSS cock jockery.
Transmeta hedged their entire business model on getting partners early on after the release of the Crusoe and hope Intel or AMD didn't eat their lunch. Intel and AMD did just that, not only did they eat their lunch but they kicked their ass for their lunch money. Duh. I mean come on did Transmeta SERIOUSLY think AMD and Intel weren't working on really low power chips and probably had prototypes working already? Shit yes. They just didn't have a reason to release them as there was no third party competition for the lower power x86 chip market until Transmeta came along.
You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.
You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.
DoCoMo used to, of course this has probably changed being as I don't as a matter of course keep up with their wheelings and dealings, be the only one to offer i-mode service in Japan. At least that is how I understood it which maybe I'm flat wrong on that.
As for SMS in the US I'm skeptical as to whether is even has the possibility of catching on. Because landlines are so prevelant here I think there is a natural prejudice towards phones as being voice communication devices. Along with crappy phones and sparse availability I think that has kept data services largely off American phones. Looking around and cell phone offers the majority of deals areh aving to do with oodles of talk time, wireless internet and whatnot are pretty rare. My phone has internet access but I don't know anyone else whose got wireless internet as well. If providers wanted to make SMS big here I think they'd have to use Blackberry type devices instead of adding the functionality to cell phones. Maybe I'm misjudging the market for SMS service but I don't see kids running around pecking away like mad on their cell phones OR Blackberries here.
So I don't live in Japan, I'm too tall for that country anyways. As I understand it WAP penetration on i-mode is still relatively sparse compared to the overall number of i-mode users. As for the access control and whatnot through the WAP gateway I sort of got it right, in spirit if nothing else. The point is NTT controls all access to i-mode, the WAP gateways are run by NTT and thus everyone (the katte sites) who wants to offer i-mode service has got to clear it through NTT and then the access if it is billed gets billed to the users i-mode account.
Moore's law does NOT take car of the transistor problem in devices like DVD players. DVD manufacturers don't throw specially designed chips at DVD decoding, they just throw a larger number of dumber chips at the problem. A more complex CODEC means a much larger increase is silicon required which means more heat and power draw which eventually leads to lower reliability and customer dissatisfaction. You'll notice the manufacturers are the ones pushing for the blue laser, they are the ones eventually eating the cost of adding more complex silicon to DVD players. The content producers wanting to use lower bitrates is just plain cock jockery. They want to bitch slap the consumers more and more by giving them as little as possible in terms of quality. The less video information the consumer gets on the disk the lower quality the image is going to be as it is blown up onto larger monitors. If I fork over the money for a big screen TV that will display progressive scan video I don't want my fancy new DVD to look like shit on it because a cheap ass CODEC is being used.
I think 99% of people are missing the point as to what i-mode is. It is not an internet phone although there are portals so users can get on the internet. While i-mode sites use a heavily tweaked version of HTML they are housed on a proprietary network much like online services used to be in the US before connections to the internet were the big thing. Most of the pay content on the service is hosted either by NNT DoCoMo themselves or by third parties that charge fees to your phone's account.
I really don't think i-mode is going to take off in the US for the simple reason that it doesn't offer its target market, teenagers, anything they don't already have enough of. In Japan i-mode is THE means of communicado for teens, in Europe SMS services on phones is widely popular. In the US however more teens are using PCs and landline telephones. In the US local phone calls cost little more than a line fee which puts the net cost of internet access at the cost of the phone line plus the twenty bucks or so for an ISP. Cellular service on the other hand costs us an arm and a leg and there's no one standard that all phones here use. US based cellular providers also charge differently than their European and Japanese counterparts. Landlines in Europe and Japan are much more expensive then those in the US. One market has cheap landlines while the other has cheap wireless. This is specifically why i-mode isn't going to take off in the US. Almost everyone that wants one has a PC with internet access and most teenagers have at least one e-mail address and talk to at least a fraction of their friends over the internet. It is highly doubtful they're going to get their parents to fork over them oney for an expensive cell phone that costs extra to use the i-mode or SMS service on. With only a handful of people using the service it becomes a Catch-22, no one uses the service so no one wants to get it because their freidns don't have it. If NNT changed i-mode's structure to better fit in the US it would be little better than the shitty services we already have. Part of i-mode's success is its homogeneous nature. Most pay services on it are cleared by NNT just like AOL used to clear companies to offer services on their network. The other aspect of its success is the fact NNT has had exclusive license over i-mode for the past couple years and will continue to for a few more. Nobody can come in and break i-mode's style quite yet by offering a different type of service. This is detrimental to the industry as we've seen in the US. We're lucky to use our phones for anything more than yelling at one another over the din of our surroundings. NNT might pull off i-mode here but I really don't think they will or can. The market is just too different here than it is in Japan and if i-mode becomes remotely popular a competitor is going to come out with an incompatible i-mode knock off which will fragment the market and this will repeat ad infinitum any time someone innovates in the market.
A while back in G&A I think I saw an article about stun gloves which took the components of a stun gun and housed them inside a leather glove. You pressed down on a trigger and the electrodes were in the cuff of your hand between your index finger and thumb. All you had to do was grab somebody and they were in for a shock.
MSN has a NNTP server but it is down so often it is almost like they don't have one. MSN customers can use netnews.msn.com IIRC to grab newsgroups. Earthlink has a news server but it sucks almost as bad at MSN's. It drops messages all the time and is down at least one day of the week every week.
Broadband changes the way people use the net, lacking a killer app was not what killed @Home or broadband in general. The ability to just open a browser and be on the web is a killer app in itself. Dial-up is and always has been a fucking hassle, v.92 would have gone a ways to alliviating that hassle but it's implimentation is virtually nil. There wasn't a broadband revolution anyways, that is just a flawed argument. Like most everything else broadband internet access is just a technological progression whose hype level rises and falls according to economic figures. PCs didn't appear in everyone's homes overnight, it took several years for it to happen. Same with internet access and now broadband internet access. I hate flash animations and trying to watch streaming video, my cable modem saves me time downloading the stuff my modem used to choke on. Downloading 300 newsgroup headers or 200 e-mails over a 28.8 is a bitch no matter how patient you are.
You'd think that people would be smart enough to think that anything with a Free moniker would be a scam. That is just how life is, shit ain't free. Hay wait isn't that Linux thing labeled as fre...*sounds of being flogged by Linux zealots*
I don't think some of you understand what happens if people are made liable for their software. If say there's a law passed that you're liable for security holes in your software, are you going you REALLY go ahead and develop it? I think not. If I find a root exploit in the Linux kernel lets say and some company gets turbo fucked because of it can they sue Linus for billions of dollars in damages? Would that be fair? Should I be able to sue the Apache group if a nexploit is found which leads to me losing megabucks? The clause in software licesnes saying "this software is provided AS IS with no garentee it won't turn around and fuck you" is there for a reason, specifically so the software vendor whoever they may be can't be held responsible for what happens with their software.
The comparisons to the automotive or aviation industries is inherently flawed because both markets deal SPECIFICALLY with the preservation of the life of the operators. A car is responsible for not killing you and that car's manufacturer tacitly agrees that their car won't kill you for anything under their direct control. Same with airplanes and buildings. Business software on the otherhand does not directly effect whether or not someone is going to die (generally) due to some part of its use. Software controlling medical or aviation equipment has to pass stringent testing to ensure it isn't going to go batshit on a trivial error. Software released in these industries do not have "we're not responsible for batshitery which occurs due to our software" clauses. It is the liability and responsibility of the USERS of software for the results of security holes or just inherent flaws in the implimentation even if they aren't directly responsible (they didn't write it) for its creation. They did make a conscious choise to use said software thus the onus is on them. If Nimda caused you millions of dollars in damages it is your own damn fault because you used software that you were not overly confident in in terms of security. If you were overly confident you learned your lesson that shit happens and life ain't fair. No one protects businesses from dumbfuck business plans, they ought not protect them from information technology jackassery either.
What do you think a EULA is if not a statement pertaining to the redistribution of software? An EULA is a contract saying you will abide by the terms of the licensing agreement of the software, just like the installation of GPL software is a tacit agreement to the license. Look up tacit agreements in a law dictionary, the EULA is your subsciption to the terms of the software's license. Clicking OK means you agree to its terms. If you use a hex editor to switch around the OK and Cancel buttons you gain no legal protection from a EULA. That is just a bad faith agreement (which is a no no) just as clicking through (thus accepting) the terms of the EULA and proceding to violate them. Subscribing to the terms of a contract in bad faith will get you little but the disdain of the courts.
Fuck freeloaders. I've made plenty of things and given them away and I've spent a good deal of time helping people for no charge. However I have a right to be compensated for my work if I so please. The point is not all information wants to be free, especially something I worked my ass off to create. You don't have any right to get that for free if I decide you ought to have to pay me for it. What the poster doesn't seem to get is not everything is free and assuming it should be without warrant is ridiculous. The original poster is just a fucking freeloader and I know they've never really put effort into something and created something other people actually wanted. If they had they wouldn't be so quit to decide that the creator of some form of content ought not have the right to be compensated. That's the Linux ethic though, people don't fucking contribute most of them don't even pay for a fraction of what they receive. It's just bitchery to use a freely available service without ever paying someone back for it. Most times the offer of repayment is payment enough, it shows appriciation for the time and effort spent.
Are you daft? It's been proven time and again that by installing software by clicking through a EULA means you agreed to it. While you may not in spirit agree to it you're contractually bound to the terms set forth by the license. You merely bought the media, the actual content is licenced (buying a piece of paper with a copyrighted work printed on it doesn't mean you've bought the rights to that work) and you either agree to the license or can't install it. You'd have a shit fest if I released modified versions of GPL software without the source for the modifications yet you seem to think a software company can't obligate you to the terms of a license even though you went ahead and subscribed with the agreement. I think you are daft.
Micropayments are a shit idea. Do you know how much it costs to conduct a credit card transaction? It certainly isn't free. With that you can't have a micropayment system charging a credit line for a nickel or dime (pun intended) every time you viewed a web page. With something like Paypal where your account is charge whatever micropayment amount and then you pay in a single credit line transaction later the cost of the micropayment transaction has to be far less than the amount transacted. Say for every transaction you're charged a penny service fee. If all of your transactions are a penny thats a 100% surcharge! paypal's example situation is inherently flawed because they don't take into account the cost of the one penny transaction you're sending to your friends. The penny per view revenue scheme just isn't going to work. Small transactions cost the most. That is where micropayments went, no one has figured out how to do them with a transaction overhead that is smaller than the amount of the transaction. A penny per transaction on a penny transaction just isn't going to fly.
Have you not been paying attention in class? Advertising revenues amounts to dick. Information SHOULD be free, what a crock of shit. You've obviously never created anything of value to others. Why should I go through the effort and spend the time to make something if all I get back out of it is the satisfaction of knowing I just wasted a couple hours/days/weeks of my life I'm not going to get back. If you're tired of being nickel and dimed to death that is one thing, to suggest that everything ought to be free because you're a cheap fucking bastard is entirely different.
Not allowing copyrights is not condusive to a capitalist society. Without legal protections for business conducted in your sovereign state you have one of two options 1) unrestricted market or 2) a highly restricted market. In countries with inadequate copyright laws there is nothing to stop anyone from using the intellectual property of others for personal gain. Part of personal freedom is the freedom NOT to have personal works be public domain. It is a tenet of modern society that you ought to be able to make money if you so choose on something you personally created. In an unrestricted market there is no control of anything thus the little guy ALWAYS gets fucked, there is no maybe. In a highly restrictive market the little guy is still getting fucked because he has no right to pursue his perogative. In our system the little guy does have a say in the form of the courts. A lasse faire attitude regarding copyrights denies the liberty of individuals to choose how their personal creation controlled. Because the system of copyrights is abused by the saavy few is no reason to conclude the system is without its uses.
Lots of people "can't" afford it but they don't have the T3 connection to their bedroom that lets them download an ISO of a video game in less than an hour or a file sharing network within the campus network where they can grab ISOs and zip files of games at 100Mbps. The ones with the fat pipes just about anywhere are going to do more than their share of warezing simply because they can download for free overnight an ISO or hacked image rather than go pay upwards of 60$ for a game. I know people that have a cable modem specifically so they can grab zip images of games from warez IRC channels. They could easily afford the game but chose instead to get an illegal copy of it.
That's what I was saying. The people with the fattest pipes and least money are going to be the biggest pirates. I would bet that most people who've ever complained about bandwidth caps on their internet connection do so not because they supposedly can't browse the net at high speed but have less bandwidth for warez, mp3s, and porn.
A blown pilot light or dirty range causes carbon monoxide buildup in residences which is the job of the local gas utility to come out and fix. You don't think the gas being piped to your house is pure do you? Before YOU go around telling people they are rong you should check your facts first.
Back when the network was owned by Ricochet I was this close to subscribing because at the time my apartment's phone lines were snafu and I couldn't get a 24k dial-up connection let alone get DSL service. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't go with it because I'd be out a few hundred bucks and stuck with the modem. However as the service might pick back up I'm going to weigh the option again.
The sort of stuff that would entice me to be a customer wouild be support for more than just Windows. Office Mac support and maybe unofficial Linux support at the least I would think. Far too often I'm SOL because I have a Powerbook. No one seems to want to support MacOS which seems odd for wireless networking equipment considering you'd figure Powerbook/iBook users would be a pretty big market considering the sort of people who buy them. I've been looking for a means to connect my Samsung 3500 phone to my Powerbook but my only option is a mess of cables and converter boxes that would cost as much as the wireless modem that I don't want to get suckered into buying since I can't figure if the Mac support is shitty or non-existant. Linux support at least on slashdot seems pretty obvious. I think the sort of people who'd pay 50$/mo for wireless internet service are the same types who'd also jam Linux on their laptop. They'd also need to move service into areas who'd actually use it. In their Southern California coverage area Ricochet covered the cities I would have deemed least likely to need or want wireless internet. The most likely parts of Orange, LA, and Riverside counties didn't have coverage at all or in some cases had sparse slow coverage. Maybe it is just a regional thing but down here we're wary as can be if we're toting electronics, in the Bay Area people have got LCD screens and antennas up the wazoo.
I think you need to have the local gas company come out to check your utilities because I think your house is fucking filled with carbon monoxide. The headline SPECIFICALLY tells that this is not a new processor but merely a semiconductor circuit that can switch at 110GHz. The primary use of fast circuits like this is not in CPUs but in switching fabrics and telecom equipment. There's nothing saying this is going to be in the next Pentium XX chip released in 2003. Considering the information FUD based on a lack of technical information is also ridiculous because FUD is corporate propoganda used to undermine the market for competing services or products. A lack of technical documentation or physical prototypes is known as vapour.
Where did I say everything that's bad for Blizzard ought to be illegal? Maybe it is just my reading comprehension skills or something but I gleamed from rereading my post that I was providing a counterpoint to the claim of the original poster. It seems you like far too many slashdot readers think everything is free. Blizzard used the DMCA to shut down b.net clones, it is a shitty law and it is sad they had to resort to using it. However they're protecting their property by means of law. If you're so fucking worried about the DMCA nuking Samba out of existance donate some money and write some letters so people do some lobbying to strike down the DMCA so companies have to protect their property by more geek favorable means.
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Flash sucks because the users make it suck? So it is my fucking fault some jackass who bought a Flash for Dummies book is wasting my bandwidth because he felt the need for artistic expression requiring text to jump all over the fucking screen? Not likely. How long am I supposed to wait for Flash's gimmick features to wear away pray tell? It's been out for YEARS and people are still doing the same shit with it they were doing four years ago. Before you do defending Flash because you think it is cool look around at how many shitty jobs people have done building Flash stuff. I don't like Flash because people can't seem to figure out what colours work together. Yellow text on a blue background just hurts my eyes. If your HTML website looks like that I just override display settings on my browser. Flash doesn't give me the ability to filter out lack of style or forethought. At least with HTML pages I can turn off JavaScript and CSS cock jockery.
Transmeta hedged their entire business model on getting partners early on after the release of the Crusoe and hope Intel or AMD didn't eat their lunch. Intel and AMD did just that, not only did they eat their lunch but they kicked their ass for their lunch money. Duh. I mean come on did Transmeta SERIOUSLY think AMD and Intel weren't working on really low power chips and probably had prototypes working already? Shit yes. They just didn't have a reason to release them as there was no third party competition for the lower power x86 chip market until Transmeta came along.
You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.
You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.
DoCoMo used to, of course this has probably changed being as I don't as a matter of course keep up with their wheelings and dealings, be the only one to offer i-mode service in Japan. At least that is how I understood it which maybe I'm flat wrong on that.
As for SMS in the US I'm skeptical as to whether is even has the possibility of catching on. Because landlines are so prevelant here I think there is a natural prejudice towards phones as being voice communication devices. Along with crappy phones and sparse availability I think that has kept data services largely off American phones. Looking around and cell phone offers the majority of deals areh aving to do with oodles of talk time, wireless internet and whatnot are pretty rare. My phone has internet access but I don't know anyone else whose got wireless internet as well. If providers wanted to make SMS big here I think they'd have to use Blackberry type devices instead of adding the functionality to cell phones. Maybe I'm misjudging the market for SMS service but I don't see kids running around pecking away like mad on their cell phones OR Blackberries here.
So I don't live in Japan, I'm too tall for that country anyways. As I understand it WAP penetration on i-mode is still relatively sparse compared to the overall number of i-mode users. As for the access control and whatnot through the WAP gateway I sort of got it right, in spirit if nothing else. The point is NTT controls all access to i-mode, the WAP gateways are run by NTT and thus everyone (the katte sites) who wants to offer i-mode service has got to clear it through NTT and then the access if it is billed gets billed to the users i-mode account.
Moore's law does NOT take car of the transistor problem in devices like DVD players. DVD manufacturers don't throw specially designed chips at DVD decoding, they just throw a larger number of dumber chips at the problem. A more complex CODEC means a much larger increase is silicon required which means more heat and power draw which eventually leads to lower reliability and customer dissatisfaction. You'll notice the manufacturers are the ones pushing for the blue laser, they are the ones eventually eating the cost of adding more complex silicon to DVD players. The content producers wanting to use lower bitrates is just plain cock jockery. They want to bitch slap the consumers more and more by giving them as little as possible in terms of quality. The less video information the consumer gets on the disk the lower quality the image is going to be as it is blown up onto larger monitors. If I fork over the money for a big screen TV that will display progressive scan video I don't want my fancy new DVD to look like shit on it because a cheap ass CODEC is being used.
I think 99% of people are missing the point as to what i-mode is. It is not an internet phone although there are portals so users can get on the internet. While i-mode sites use a heavily tweaked version of HTML they are housed on a proprietary network much like online services used to be in the US before connections to the internet were the big thing. Most of the pay content on the service is hosted either by NNT DoCoMo themselves or by third parties that charge fees to your phone's account.
I really don't think i-mode is going to take off in the US for the simple reason that it doesn't offer its target market, teenagers, anything they don't already have enough of. In Japan i-mode is THE means of communicado for teens, in Europe SMS services on phones is widely popular. In the US however more teens are using PCs and landline telephones. In the US local phone calls cost little more than a line fee which puts the net cost of internet access at the cost of the phone line plus the twenty bucks or so for an ISP. Cellular service on the other hand costs us an arm and a leg and there's no one standard that all phones here use. US based cellular providers also charge differently than their European and Japanese counterparts. Landlines in Europe and Japan are much more expensive then those in the US. One market has cheap landlines while the other has cheap wireless. This is specifically why i-mode isn't going to take off in the US. Almost everyone that wants one has a PC with internet access and most teenagers have at least one e-mail address and talk to at least a fraction of their friends over the internet. It is highly doubtful they're going to get their parents to fork over them oney for an expensive cell phone that costs extra to use the i-mode or SMS service on. With only a handful of people using the service it becomes a Catch-22, no one uses the service so no one wants to get it because their freidns don't have it. If NNT changed i-mode's structure to better fit in the US it would be little better than the shitty services we already have. Part of i-mode's success is its homogeneous nature. Most pay services on it are cleared by NNT just like AOL used to clear companies to offer services on their network. The other aspect of its success is the fact NNT has had exclusive license over i-mode for the past couple years and will continue to for a few more. Nobody can come in and break i-mode's style quite yet by offering a different type of service. This is detrimental to the industry as we've seen in the US. We're lucky to use our phones for anything more than yelling at one another over the din of our surroundings. NNT might pull off i-mode here but I really don't think they will or can. The market is just too different here than it is in Japan and if i-mode becomes remotely popular a competitor is going to come out with an incompatible i-mode knock off which will fragment the market and this will repeat ad infinitum any time someone innovates in the market.
A while back in G&A I think I saw an article about stun gloves which took the components of a stun gun and housed them inside a leather glove. You pressed down on a trigger and the electrodes were in the cuff of your hand between your index finger and thumb. All you had to do was grab somebody and they were in for a shock.
MSN has a NNTP server but it is down so often it is almost like they don't have one. MSN customers can use netnews.msn.com IIRC to grab newsgroups. Earthlink has a news server but it sucks almost as bad at MSN's. It drops messages all the time and is down at least one day of the week every week.
Broadband changes the way people use the net, lacking a killer app was not what killed @Home or broadband in general. The ability to just open a browser and be on the web is a killer app in itself. Dial-up is and always has been a fucking hassle, v.92 would have gone a ways to alliviating that hassle but it's implimentation is virtually nil. There wasn't a broadband revolution anyways, that is just a flawed argument. Like most everything else broadband internet access is just a technological progression whose hype level rises and falls according to economic figures. PCs didn't appear in everyone's homes overnight, it took several years for it to happen. Same with internet access and now broadband internet access. I hate flash animations and trying to watch streaming video, my cable modem saves me time downloading the stuff my modem used to choke on. Downloading 300 newsgroup headers or 200 e-mails over a 28.8 is a bitch no matter how patient you are.
You'd think that people would be smart enough to think that anything with a Free moniker would be a scam. That is just how life is, shit ain't free. Hay wait isn't that Linux thing labeled as fre...*sounds of being flogged by Linux zealots*
I don't think some of you understand what happens if people are made liable for their software. If say there's a law passed that you're liable for security holes in your software, are you going you REALLY go ahead and develop it? I think not. If I find a root exploit in the Linux kernel lets say and some company gets turbo fucked because of it can they sue Linus for billions of dollars in damages? Would that be fair? Should I be able to sue the Apache group if a nexploit is found which leads to me losing megabucks? The clause in software licesnes saying "this software is provided AS IS with no garentee it won't turn around and fuck you" is there for a reason, specifically so the software vendor whoever they may be can't be held responsible for what happens with their software.
The comparisons to the automotive or aviation industries is inherently flawed because both markets deal SPECIFICALLY with the preservation of the life of the operators. A car is responsible for not killing you and that car's manufacturer tacitly agrees that their car won't kill you for anything under their direct control. Same with airplanes and buildings. Business software on the otherhand does not directly effect whether or not someone is going to die (generally) due to some part of its use. Software controlling medical or aviation equipment has to pass stringent testing to ensure it isn't going to go batshit on a trivial error. Software released in these industries do not have "we're not responsible for batshitery which occurs due to our software" clauses. It is the liability and responsibility of the USERS of software for the results of security holes or just inherent flaws in the implimentation even if they aren't directly responsible (they didn't write it) for its creation. They did make a conscious choise to use said software thus the onus is on them. If Nimda caused you millions of dollars in damages it is your own damn fault because you used software that you were not overly confident in in terms of security. If you were overly confident you learned your lesson that shit happens and life ain't fair. No one protects businesses from dumbfuck business plans, they ought not protect them from information technology jackassery either.
What do you think a EULA is if not a statement pertaining to the redistribution of software? An EULA is a contract saying you will abide by the terms of the licensing agreement of the software, just like the installation of GPL software is a tacit agreement to the license. Look up tacit agreements in a law dictionary, the EULA is your subsciption to the terms of the software's license. Clicking OK means you agree to its terms. If you use a hex editor to switch around the OK and Cancel buttons you gain no legal protection from a EULA. That is just a bad faith agreement (which is a no no) just as clicking through (thus accepting) the terms of the EULA and proceding to violate them. Subscribing to the terms of a contract in bad faith will get you little but the disdain of the courts.
Fuck freeloaders. I've made plenty of things and given them away and I've spent a good deal of time helping people for no charge. However I have a right to be compensated for my work if I so please. The point is not all information wants to be free, especially something I worked my ass off to create. You don't have any right to get that for free if I decide you ought to have to pay me for it. What the poster doesn't seem to get is not everything is free and assuming it should be without warrant is ridiculous. The original poster is just a fucking freeloader and I know they've never really put effort into something and created something other people actually wanted. If they had they wouldn't be so quit to decide that the creator of some form of content ought not have the right to be compensated. That's the Linux ethic though, people don't fucking contribute most of them don't even pay for a fraction of what they receive. It's just bitchery to use a freely available service without ever paying someone back for it. Most times the offer of repayment is payment enough, it shows appriciation for the time and effort spent.
Are you daft? It's been proven time and again that by installing software by clicking through a EULA means you agreed to it. While you may not in spirit agree to it you're contractually bound to the terms set forth by the license. You merely bought the media, the actual content is licenced (buying a piece of paper with a copyrighted work printed on it doesn't mean you've bought the rights to that work) and you either agree to the license or can't install it. You'd have a shit fest if I released modified versions of GPL software without the source for the modifications yet you seem to think a software company can't obligate you to the terms of a license even though you went ahead and subscribed with the agreement. I think you are daft.
Micropayments are a shit idea. Do you know how much it costs to conduct a credit card transaction? It certainly isn't free. With that you can't have a micropayment system charging a credit line for a nickel or dime (pun intended) every time you viewed a web page. With something like Paypal where your account is charge whatever micropayment amount and then you pay in a single credit line transaction later the cost of the micropayment transaction has to be far less than the amount transacted. Say for every transaction you're charged a penny service fee. If all of your transactions are a penny thats a 100% surcharge! paypal's example situation is inherently flawed because they don't take into account the cost of the one penny transaction you're sending to your friends. The penny per view revenue scheme just isn't going to work. Small transactions cost the most. That is where micropayments went, no one has figured out how to do them with a transaction overhead that is smaller than the amount of the transaction. A penny per transaction on a penny transaction just isn't going to fly.
Have you not been paying attention in class? Advertising revenues amounts to dick. Information SHOULD be free, what a crock of shit. You've obviously never created anything of value to others. Why should I go through the effort and spend the time to make something if all I get back out of it is the satisfaction of knowing I just wasted a couple hours/days/weeks of my life I'm not going to get back. If you're tired of being nickel and dimed to death that is one thing, to suggest that everything ought to be free because you're a cheap fucking bastard is entirely different.
Not allowing copyrights is not condusive to a capitalist society. Without legal protections for business conducted in your sovereign state you have one of two options 1) unrestricted market or 2) a highly restricted market. In countries with inadequate copyright laws there is nothing to stop anyone from using the intellectual property of others for personal gain. Part of personal freedom is the freedom NOT to have personal works be public domain. It is a tenet of modern society that you ought to be able to make money if you so choose on something you personally created. In an unrestricted market there is no control of anything thus the little guy ALWAYS gets fucked, there is no maybe. In a highly restrictive market the little guy is still getting fucked because he has no right to pursue his perogative. In our system the little guy does have a say in the form of the courts. A lasse faire attitude regarding copyrights denies the liberty of individuals to choose how their personal creation controlled. Because the system of copyrights is abused by the saavy few is no reason to conclude the system is without its uses.
Lots of people "can't" afford it but they don't have the T3 connection to their bedroom that lets them download an ISO of a video game in less than an hour or a file sharing network within the campus network where they can grab ISOs and zip files of games at 100Mbps. The ones with the fat pipes just about anywhere are going to do more than their share of warezing simply because they can download for free overnight an ISO or hacked image rather than go pay upwards of 60$ for a game. I know people that have a cable modem specifically so they can grab zip images of games from warez IRC channels. They could easily afford the game but chose instead to get an illegal copy of it.
That's what I was saying. The people with the fattest pipes and least money are going to be the biggest pirates. I would bet that most people who've ever complained about bandwidth caps on their internet connection do so not because they supposedly can't browse the net at high speed but have less bandwidth for warez, mp3s, and porn.
A blown pilot light or dirty range causes carbon monoxide buildup in residences which is the job of the local gas utility to come out and fix. You don't think the gas being piped to your house is pure do you? Before YOU go around telling people they are rong you should check your facts first.
Do they not specifically mention those chips will be in switching fabric and not in microprocessors? Man that was fucking difficult.
Back when the network was owned by Ricochet I was this close to subscribing because at the time my apartment's phone lines were snafu and I couldn't get a 24k dial-up connection let alone get DSL service. In retrospect I'm glad I didn't go with it because I'd be out a few hundred bucks and stuck with the modem. However as the service might pick back up I'm going to weigh the option again.
The sort of stuff that would entice me to be a customer wouild be support for more than just Windows. Office Mac support and maybe unofficial Linux support at the least I would think. Far too often I'm SOL because I have a Powerbook. No one seems to want to support MacOS which seems odd for wireless networking equipment considering you'd figure Powerbook/iBook users would be a pretty big market considering the sort of people who buy them. I've been looking for a means to connect my Samsung 3500 phone to my Powerbook but my only option is a mess of cables and converter boxes that would cost as much as the wireless modem that I don't want to get suckered into buying since I can't figure if the Mac support is shitty or non-existant. Linux support at least on slashdot seems pretty obvious. I think the sort of people who'd pay 50$/mo for wireless internet service are the same types who'd also jam Linux on their laptop. They'd also need to move service into areas who'd actually use it. In their Southern California coverage area Ricochet covered the cities I would have deemed least likely to need or want wireless internet. The most likely parts of Orange, LA, and Riverside counties didn't have coverage at all or in some cases had sparse slow coverage. Maybe it is just a regional thing but down here we're wary as can be if we're toting electronics, in the Bay Area people have got LCD screens and antennas up the wazoo.
It's too flat so the poletops would get far too much range. They'd be shit out of luck if they provided a decent coverage area.
I think you need to have the local gas company come out to check your utilities because I think your house is fucking filled with carbon monoxide. The headline SPECIFICALLY tells that this is not a new processor but merely a semiconductor circuit that can switch at 110GHz. The primary use of fast circuits like this is not in CPUs but in switching fabrics and telecom equipment. There's nothing saying this is going to be in the next Pentium XX chip released in 2003. Considering the information FUD based on a lack of technical information is also ridiculous because FUD is corporate propoganda used to undermine the market for competing services or products. A lack of technical documentation or physical prototypes is known as vapour.
Where did I say everything that's bad for Blizzard ought to be illegal? Maybe it is just my reading comprehension skills or something but I gleamed from rereading my post that I was providing a counterpoint to the claim of the original poster. It seems you like far too many slashdot readers think everything is free. Blizzard used the DMCA to shut down b.net clones, it is a shitty law and it is sad they had to resort to using it. However they're protecting their property by means of law. If you're so fucking worried about the DMCA nuking Samba out of existance donate some money and write some letters so people do some lobbying to strike down the DMCA so companies have to protect their property by more geek favorable means.