Or Norma Rae or more nauseatingly, Erin Brockovitch. Nauseating to know that a business deliberately dumped poison into a community and then lied about it.
Re:MS can release whenever they like...
on
No X Box for Xmas?
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· Score: 1
- MS have well over 100 developers developing games for X-Box, theres gonna be a flood of games (like the PS1) and most likely they'll all be of an unprecedented quality as far as console systems go
Isn't the Xbox reported to run a bastardized Win32 OS to begin with? I would imagine that not only will they have Xbox-specific games they'll have existing DirectX games ported with little effort..
A banana-shaped screwdriver? The only way this makes sense is that the shafts in the case the screws are accessable from are curved. I think Home Depot sells a flexible shaft for extending drill or screwdriver bits into wall voids. If they don't, I know that any decent electrical supply vendor does.
More clever would be to design a custom screwdriver bit *and* a curved shaft. It still wouldn't prevent a determined hacker with a flex-shaft drill bit from drilling it out completely, but it'd be a mofo to put back together..
I think the current framework is good, it's just poorly executed. ICANN needs a constitution of sorts that would mandate sunshine laws, so everyone would know what they were doing and what deals they were striking, as well as to ensure that the ICANN board represents the interests of everyone fairly equally.
I think it's pretty obvious that the TLD system needs oversight, and that oversight should be in the form of a representative board which sets the policies for the TLDs.
I think the better question is, why doesn't ICANN work?
Is it possible for MS to lock the hardware to prevent alternative OS images from running on it? Obviously there's a limit as to how much they can prevent the determined screwdriver and soldering iron weilding hardware hacker from subverting the hardware, but I'm thinking of some kind of integrated componentry that would power the machine off or otherwise cripple it unless an MS-approved OS or application was running on it.
Such a lock might fall short of someone really talented, but the vast majority of dilettantes looking for a low budget server box (including people who want farms) may be totally stuck with a games-only machine.
If Mathematica is that good and popular, then its likely that Wolfram won't be going out of business anytime soon.
If Mathematica is that good and popular but Wolfram manages to go out of business, then someone would buy the rights to it and likely continue supporting it, including providing key management.
With that said, Mastercard probably could not bring a successful cause of action against RHF...
How the hell do you sue a USENET newsgroup?
Do you sue a moderator, who makes no claim of ownership over what gets posted? Do you sue every ISP who chooses to carry it? Do you sue every user who has chosen to read it?
I can see the idea behind suing the author, and maybe even the moderator, but a newsgroup?
A bit harsh, but it's kind of hard to see what the p2p "revolution" is other than Napster. I mean, where else has "p2p" been a success? And even in that case, is Napster *really* a p2p application, with its centralized catalog server? It strikes me as more of a distributed system than a true p2p system with no center.
OT: Do they answer their own questions?
on
Ask Robert Young
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· Score: 1
I'm curious about some of the high-level Slashdot interviews. Do they even answer their own questions, or do their PR flaks do it for them and they just review "their" answers? Or is it the other way around, they just dictate answers to the questions directly and then the PR people submit the "answers" based upon their filtering of the original replies.
It strikes me that a senior executive travelling in a foreign country wouldn't really spend the time to fsck around with an Ask-Slashdot interview.
Or is it MS is just too big? One of MS biggest successes is its ability to present itself as a Borgian entity with a collective consciousness capable of delivering a united front across hundreds of business units encompassing tens of thousands of employees.
I suspect that MS is reaching the point where the Gates/Ballmer micromanagement of MS and its public image is reaching a point where it doesn't work as well, and internal understanding among line management of the "MS Party Line" may be weakening.
Or perhaps the opposite, MS line management has only accepted the "Everything we do is legit" attitude and has forgotten how to act properly..
In that case it would be tempting. I'm currently paying about $50 for 640k/256k DSL. 2 static IPs, 2 mailboxes, shell access w/SSH to provider boxen, reverse DNS, no service restrictions and outstanding customer service.
Your price point buys the same service but 640k/640k.
I agree that the current DSL market is going south from a business perspective, but that seems to be a CLEC problem not an ILEC problem. It's not ISPs using ILEC DSL having the problem its the CLEC DSL providers with too much debt being undermined by ISPs with bad financials.
I've had several ISPs pitch me DSL, but in a downtown area it's simpler for them to put a small DSLAM in the building because our building has ILEC muxes (well, not muxes, but our T1s, etc originate in the basement not at the CO).
DSL, especially SDSL over dedicated pairs, is a compelling technology because its capable of bypassing telco tarrifs on DS1-based transport. Same ISP is charging $430/mo for 1.2Mbit DSL and $1150/mo for 1.5Mbit T1. 80% of the speed of T1 for only 40% of the price. The ISP is strong and the CLEC ain't going out of business.
An alternative to using a geographical hierarchy might be to use families. For example, I've been thinking of registering a domain for my family, but it's already taken and I don't have enough resources to set up a mailserver anyway.
So is the problem that you lack resources to run a mailserver on your familyname domain or is the problem that you can't think of another name or variant? Like detroitzapfs or michzapfs or whatever.
On the same note, notice that I don't have my own domain for my website. I don't need my own stinking domain. What's wrong with being identified as a member of some larger organization?
It's about control and identity. I don't want to be known as or controlled like a subidentity. The other major flaw with regional designations (or should I say the.us domain), is lack of geographic portability.
Say my root domain name is foo.minneapolis.mn.us and I move the grand total of 1 block it would take to put me in another city? Do I have to screw around with the known-as-slow.us people to re-register my "new" domain name in foo.richfield.mn.us ? That micromanaged lack of portability kind of stinks.
I'd go for being foo.org.us or something else, but the librarian-esque level of specificity in US is rather idiotic. Why not just use X.500 then?
More expensive doesn't generally bother me, but $100+ is more than I'm willing to spend. That kind of money (well, maybe a tad more but not much more) buys a business-grade DSL line.
In the consumer marketplace, I can get the same level of service (at lesser bandwidth) for the same money.
It's not enough for the CATV people to offer a more expensive service that's friendly to users, they have to be cost-competitive, too.
It's sad to see cable vs DSL degrade into a rather stupid bragging match about bandwidth per dollar. I don't see it as being about technology, it's all about terms of service. I seldom hear about a cablemodem provider that's static-IP and server friendly. Most are cold at best, and openly hostile at worst (DHCP-delivered RFC1918 addresses, NAT, port scanning, "registered" MAC addresses and so on).
DSL on the other hand, generally has easy (albeit often more expensive) access to static IPs and I have yet to hear of a DSL provider with "no services" rules. Basically it's IP dialtone that you can do with what you like.
Generally speaking, the DSL providers are interested in providing common-carrier style communications connectivity while the cable people seem more oriented towards their traditional business model -- providing a one-way conduit of entertainment. If the cable model fits you, then use it, but I suspect that most people with more than a web-centric interest in computers/internet would prefer a service that wasn't as rigid and one-dimensional as cablemodem seems to be.
I don't have a gripe with the technology. Based upon what I've read, cablemodem users generally enjoy higher bandwidth than DSL and without as many of the tech limitations. If cablemodem could deliver the *service* I get from DSL -- static IP, no server limits, reverse DNS for my IPs -- at the usual cable bandwidths, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.
The original poster has a valid point -- compared to contemporary PCs, many Cisco routers, for simply forwarding packets (I'm excluding specelized compression/encryption cards, which aren't likely to be used in a nationwide backbone anyway) are really weakly powered and highly priced.
Why does a Cisco router with the equivilent of an Athlon and 512MB of RAM cost $50k or more? I'm sure the I/O engine of a Cisco router is actually better designed than a PC with PCI slots full of four-port hundred megabit NICs, but has anyone ever done any test to determine just how fast such a PC could be?
Some buildings aren't short of roof space, but the taller buildings are in high demand, at least here in Minneapolis.
When I first started here, one of our clients was an ag business that advertised on DTN and another sat-delivered weather info station. The guy in charge of the account had a station installed in his office and said getting the dish onto the roof was a major hassle.
He said that the entire roof space was actually leased out by the building to a third party whose business was renting roof space for communications. They actually did the installation and placement of the dish, and of course collect a healthy fee for the square footage.
I think it mostly depends on the building, ours is 38 stories with excellent southbound LOS. I notice that some buildings that are ~20 and surrounded by much taller buildings have one or two DirectTV dishes but nothing else, just acres of tar...
No problem installing over FTP at all. I typically do half my installations this way.
However, each additional installation method adds some complexity to the application. Since application complexity is proportional to application size, and size is limited, it takes away from the ability of the user utilities to be coherent.
/stand/sysinstall on FreeBSD needs to be whacked with an ugly stick. It works for installation, but its been stretched beyond imagination to encompass all weird manner of install schemes (cd, nfs, ftp, etc etc) and the huge collection of hardware.
Unfortunately its often used for other things, like some post-install configs (which can be done another way, but are done in a menu-driven, easy-to-understand fashion from sysinstall).
I'd like to see sysinstall modernized -- not graphical, necessarily -- but made more coherent and reliable. It'd probably drive FreeBSD to three install disks, but I think it'd be worth it from an end-user usability perspective.
Yes, they can refuse to take cash. They cannot refuse to take cash as payment once debt has been accrued, but they do not have to enter into an agreement that stipulates cash.
"Legal tender for all debts public and private" implies an existing debt. If you just come up to me and say "I want to rent a car and will be paying cash" I can say "I only rent cars to credit-card holders." Since there's no debt, I don't have to accept cash.
If I rented a car to you and you decided to pay cash at the end of the rental, I would have no choice but to accept it. However, it's still possible that they might not accept a cash payment since they have no way to process it and guarantee payment was accepted -- would you give $150 in cash to the $8/hr employee at the airport rental return lot?
They really do -- each transaction generates a 2% or so transaction fee. Of course they'd prefer if you would carry a balance month-to-month so they could charge interest, too.
The people they hate the most are no-balance, light users. They're the ones that create administrative overhead without generating profits. Some card issuers have actually started charging a monthly fee in addition to the annual fee for people who have less than $N in charges. I think some even tried to charge if you didn't have a *balance* (ie, weren't paying interest), but I haven't heard since then.
Then again, they hate the people that don't pay the bills, too, but since they managed to change the bankruptcy laws to legalize debtor prison, these people aren't so far up on their hate list.
Or we'll just spend the money elsewhere. I chaised the tail of MS OS updates because the hardware improvements needed to get the most out of them were beneficial for other software, and the hardware was cheap relative to the performance increases I was experiencing.
But if I need to make the nut on $200 OS updates every six months to stay somewhat current, it's going to start to cut into what I spend my money on otherwise -- ski trips, woodworking stuff, and all the other expensive things I do. I may decide that those things are more benficial than some minor change in the Windows start menu.
When was the last time you ran unknown programs (as root) on your machine, then manually copied them (and ran as root) on another machine as well?
Considering most people who run Windows run as root by default (9x, ME) or by choice (Administrator-equiv user on NT or 2k), it's not hard to conceive of them running as root on a workstation-based linux machine.
I definitely see less-sophisticated users running a Windows and Linux combo trying out a "cool win/linux app!" that their friends sent them. God knows that a major portion of morons where I work, in SPITE of the long history of trojans/viruses/general maliciousness via email will without question run.exes they get in the mail, especially if there's any chance of seeing a little skin or some cuss-filled animation.
The explanation I've always accepted was Chinese complacency led to a lack of expansion which in turn led to a lack of conflict. With no conflict you have no military advancement, hence British frigates easily sink the Junks and any hope of Chinese military power and political independence.
Arguing that critcism of China perpetuates Chinese abuses is a little specious, like arguing that critcism of Stalin is responsible for his purges. While perhaps it may enable Chinese propaganda, it neither justifies Chinese repression and corruption nor explains away their own responsibility for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Or Norma Rae or more nauseatingly, Erin Brockovitch. Nauseating to know that a business deliberately dumped poison into a community and then lied about it.
- MS have well over 100 developers developing games for X-Box, theres gonna be a flood of games (like the PS1) and most likely they'll all be of an unprecedented quality as far as console systems go
Isn't the Xbox reported to run a bastardized Win32 OS to begin with? I would imagine that not only will they have Xbox-specific games they'll have existing DirectX games ported with little effort..
A banana-shaped screwdriver? The only way this makes sense is that the shafts in the case the screws are accessable from are curved. I think Home Depot sells a flexible shaft for extending drill or screwdriver bits into wall voids. If they don't, I know that any decent electrical supply vendor does.
More clever would be to design a custom screwdriver bit *and* a curved shaft. It still wouldn't prevent a determined hacker with a flex-shaft drill bit from drilling it out completely, but it'd be a mofo to put back together..
I think the current framework is good, it's just poorly executed. ICANN needs a constitution of sorts that would mandate sunshine laws, so everyone would know what they were doing and what deals they were striking, as well as to ensure that the ICANN board represents the interests of everyone fairly equally.
I think it's pretty obvious that the TLD system needs oversight, and that oversight should be in the form of a representative board which sets the policies for the TLDs.
I think the better question is, why doesn't ICANN work?
Is it possible for MS to lock the hardware to prevent alternative OS images from running on it? Obviously there's a limit as to how much they can prevent the determined screwdriver and soldering iron weilding hardware hacker from subverting the hardware, but I'm thinking of some kind of integrated componentry that would power the machine off or otherwise cripple it unless an MS-approved OS or application was running on it.
Such a lock might fall short of someone really talented, but the vast majority of dilettantes looking for a low budget server box (including people who want farms) may be totally stuck with a games-only machine.
If Mathematica is that good and popular, then its likely that Wolfram won't be going out of business anytime soon.
If Mathematica is that good and popular but Wolfram manages to go out of business, then someone would buy the rights to it and likely continue supporting it, including providing key management.
With that said, Mastercard probably could not bring a successful cause of action against RHF...
How the hell do you sue a USENET newsgroup?
Do you sue a moderator, who makes no claim of ownership over what gets posted? Do you sue every ISP who chooses to carry it? Do you sue every user who has chosen to read it?
I can see the idea behind suing the author, and maybe even the moderator, but a newsgroup?
A bit harsh, but it's kind of hard to see what the p2p "revolution" is other than Napster. I mean, where else has "p2p" been a success? And even in that case, is Napster *really* a p2p application, with its centralized catalog server? It strikes me as more of a distributed system than a true p2p system with no center.
I'm curious about some of the high-level Slashdot interviews. Do they even answer their own questions, or do their PR flaks do it for them and they just review "their" answers? Or is it the other way around, they just dictate answers to the questions directly and then the PR people submit the "answers" based upon their filtering of the original replies.
It strikes me that a senior executive travelling in a foreign country wouldn't really spend the time to fsck around with an Ask-Slashdot interview.
Or is it MS is just too big? One of MS biggest successes is its ability to present itself as a Borgian entity with a collective consciousness capable of delivering a united front across hundreds of business units encompassing tens of thousands of employees.
I suspect that MS is reaching the point where the Gates/Ballmer micromanagement of MS and its public image is reaching a point where it doesn't work as well, and internal understanding among line management of the "MS Party Line" may be weakening.
Or perhaps the opposite, MS line management has only accepted the "Everything we do is legit" attitude and has forgotten how to act properly..
In that case it would be tempting. I'm currently paying about $50 for 640k/256k DSL. 2 static IPs, 2 mailboxes, shell access w/SSH to provider boxen, reverse DNS, no service restrictions and outstanding customer service.
Your price point buys the same service but 640k/640k.
I agree that the current DSL market is going south from a business perspective, but that seems to be a CLEC problem not an ILEC problem. It's not ISPs using ILEC DSL having the problem its the CLEC DSL providers with too much debt being undermined by ISPs with bad financials.
I've had several ISPs pitch me DSL, but in a downtown area it's simpler for them to put a small DSLAM in the building because our building has ILEC muxes (well, not muxes, but our T1s, etc originate in the basement not at the CO).
DSL, especially SDSL over dedicated pairs, is a compelling technology because its capable of bypassing telco tarrifs on DS1-based transport. Same ISP is charging $430/mo for 1.2Mbit DSL and $1150/mo for 1.5Mbit T1. 80% of the speed of T1 for only 40% of the price. The ISP is strong and the CLEC ain't going out of business.
An alternative to using a geographical hierarchy might be to use families. For example, I've been thinking of registering a domain for my family, but it's already taken and I don't have enough resources to set up a mailserver anyway.
.us domain), is lack of geographic portability.
.us people to re-register my "new" domain name in foo.richfield.mn.us ? That micromanaged lack of portability kind of stinks.
So is the problem that you lack resources to run a mailserver on your familyname domain or is the problem that you can't think of another name or variant? Like detroitzapfs or michzapfs or whatever.
On the same note, notice that I don't have my own domain for my website. I don't need my own stinking domain. What's wrong with being identified as a member of some larger organization?
It's about control and identity. I don't want to be known as or controlled like a subidentity. The other major flaw with regional designations (or should I say the
Say my root domain name is foo.minneapolis.mn.us and I move the grand total of 1 block it would take to put me in another city? Do I have to screw around with the known-as-slow
I'd go for being foo.org.us or something else, but the librarian-esque level of specificity in US is rather idiotic. Why not just use X.500 then?
Bah, who wants to be user@foo.bar.city.zz.us?
.com registration. Ickyfoo.
I'm tempted to do it because it's free, but I'd never want it as a replacement for my existing
More expensive doesn't generally bother me, but $100+ is more than I'm willing to spend. That kind of money (well, maybe a tad more but not much more) buys a business-grade DSL line.
In the consumer marketplace, I can get the same level of service (at lesser bandwidth) for the same money.
It's not enough for the CATV people to offer a more expensive service that's friendly to users, they have to be cost-competitive, too.
It's sad to see cable vs DSL degrade into a rather stupid bragging match about bandwidth per dollar. I don't see it as being about technology, it's all about terms of service. I seldom hear about a cablemodem provider that's static-IP and server friendly. Most are cold at best, and openly hostile at worst (DHCP-delivered RFC1918 addresses, NAT, port scanning, "registered" MAC addresses and so on).
DSL on the other hand, generally has easy (albeit often more expensive) access to static IPs and I have yet to hear of a DSL provider with "no services" rules. Basically it's IP dialtone that you can do with what you like.
Generally speaking, the DSL providers are interested in providing common-carrier style communications connectivity while the cable people seem more oriented towards their traditional business model -- providing a one-way conduit of entertainment. If the cable model fits you, then use it, but I suspect that most people with more than a web-centric interest in computers/internet would prefer a service that wasn't as rigid and one-dimensional as cablemodem seems to be.
I don't have a gripe with the technology. Based upon what I've read, cablemodem users generally enjoy higher bandwidth than DSL and without as many of the tech limitations. If cablemodem could deliver the *service* I get from DSL -- static IP, no server limits, reverse DNS for my IPs -- at the usual cable bandwidths, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.
The original poster has a valid point -- compared to contemporary PCs, many Cisco routers, for simply forwarding packets (I'm excluding specelized compression/encryption cards, which aren't likely to be used in a nationwide backbone anyway) are really weakly powered and highly priced.
Why does a Cisco router with the equivilent of an Athlon and 512MB of RAM cost $50k or more? I'm sure the I/O engine of a Cisco router is actually better designed than a PC with PCI slots full of four-port hundred megabit NICs, but has anyone ever done any test to determine just how fast such a PC could be?
Some buildings aren't short of roof space, but the taller buildings are in high demand, at least here in Minneapolis.
When I first started here, one of our clients was an ag business that advertised on DTN and another sat-delivered weather info station. The guy in charge of the account had a station installed in his office and said getting the dish onto the roof was a major hassle.
He said that the entire roof space was actually leased out by the building to a third party whose business was renting roof space for communications. They actually did the installation and placement of the dish, and of course collect a healthy fee for the square footage.
I think it mostly depends on the building, ours is 38 stories with excellent southbound LOS. I notice that some buildings that are ~20 and surrounded by much taller buildings have one or two DirectTV dishes but nothing else, just acres of tar...
No problem installing over FTP at all. I typically do half my installations this way.
However, each additional installation method adds some complexity to the application. Since application complexity is proportional to application size, and size is limited, it takes away from the ability of the user utilities to be coherent.
/stand/sysinstall on FreeBSD needs to be whacked with an ugly stick. It works for installation, but its been stretched beyond imagination to encompass all weird manner of install schemes (cd, nfs, ftp, etc etc) and the huge collection of hardware.
Unfortunately its often used for other things, like some post-install configs (which can be done another way, but are done in a menu-driven, easy-to-understand fashion from sysinstall).
I'd like to see sysinstall modernized -- not graphical, necessarily -- but made more coherent and reliable. It'd probably drive FreeBSD to three install disks, but I think it'd be worth it from an end-user usability perspective.
Yes, they can refuse to take cash. They cannot refuse to take cash as payment once debt has been accrued, but they do not have to enter into an agreement that stipulates cash.
"Legal tender for all debts public and private" implies an existing debt. If you just come up to me and say "I want to rent a car and will be paying cash" I can say "I only rent cars to credit-card holders." Since there's no debt, I don't have to accept cash.
If I rented a car to you and you decided to pay cash at the end of the rental, I would have no choice but to accept it. However, it's still possible that they might not accept a cash payment since they have no way to process it and guarantee payment was accepted -- would you give $150 in cash to the $8/hr employee at the airport rental return lot?
They really do -- each transaction generates a 2% or so transaction fee. Of course they'd prefer if you would carry a balance month-to-month so they could charge interest, too.
The people they hate the most are no-balance, light users. They're the ones that create administrative overhead without generating profits. Some card issuers have actually started charging a monthly fee in addition to the annual fee for people who have less than $N in charges. I think some even tried to charge if you didn't have a *balance* (ie, weren't paying interest), but I haven't heard since then.
Then again, they hate the people that don't pay the bills, too, but since they managed to change the bankruptcy laws to legalize debtor prison, these people aren't so far up on their hate list.
There's no Win2K Pro version of TS. I wish there was a single-user version of this, it would make a LOT of things much more simple.
Or we'll just spend the money elsewhere. I chaised the tail of MS OS updates because the hardware improvements needed to get the most out of them were beneficial for other software, and the hardware was cheap relative to the performance increases I was experiencing.
But if I need to make the nut on $200 OS updates every six months to stay somewhat current, it's going to start to cut into what I spend my money on otherwise -- ski trips, woodworking stuff, and all the other expensive things I do. I may decide that those things are more benficial than some minor change in the Windows start menu.
When was the last time you ran unknown programs (as root) on your machine, then manually copied them (and ran as root) on another machine as well?
.exes they get in the mail, especially if there's any chance of seeing a little skin or some cuss-filled animation.
Considering most people who run Windows run as root by default (9x, ME) or by choice (Administrator-equiv user on NT or 2k), it's not hard to conceive of them running as root on a workstation-based linux machine.
I definitely see less-sophisticated users running a Windows and Linux combo trying out a "cool win/linux app!" that their friends sent them. God knows that a major portion of morons where I work, in SPITE of the long history of trojans/viruses/general maliciousness via email will without question run
The explanation I've always accepted was Chinese complacency led to a lack of expansion which in turn led to a lack of conflict. With no conflict you have no military advancement, hence British frigates easily sink the Junks and any hope of Chinese military power and political independence.
Arguing that critcism of China perpetuates Chinese abuses is a little specious, like arguing that critcism of Stalin is responsible for his purges. While perhaps it may enable Chinese propaganda, it neither justifies Chinese repression and corruption nor explains away their own responsibility for it.