My favorite was from a group president of one of the telcos (that I worked with), who said that any object-oriented project could be written in six months.
This was immediately followed by them cancelling all vacation.
Read the rest of his thoughts. He doesn't believe in unauthorized copying or sharing, and believes that the "information wants to be free" crowd are "ignorant juvenile delinquents (who don't, as a rule, even have the excuse of being juveniles)." Not that I'm totally in favor of abandoning copyright, but demonizing people with that belief should disqualify him from being a Slashdot idol.
...Take technical books/papers - how cool would it be to just "grep" the doc for the keywords you want instead
In most DRM approaches, you can't get to the raw data with another program without cracking the DRM. If you could use grep, you could use cp, and then their precious "IP" won't be protected any more.
1) The book hasn't really seen any substantial discounts, as far as I know. Being a 400 page hardcover book, it's somewhat expensive to begin with, and I'm sure some people won't buy it just for that reason. We've requested that the next printing be done in soft cover, but I don't think that's going to happen, unfortunately
It's on for a 15% discount at Readme.Doc right now.
We already are...there's already a "tax" on the sale of blank media, AFAIK, which goes to the RIAA. Its paid for by the blank media producers, so it inflates your cost, but you don't see it as a line item when you purchase the products.
Part of the reason for having a law like this is that the tax is there to compensate content producers for people copying their stuff. If that's the purpose of the fees, copying shouldn't be counted as being wrong, and they shouldn't prevent you from making copies.
It depends on who's doing the buying. Right now, the people with money to spend on PCs are largely the small to mid-size businesses, and they aren't spending $1500. Power gamers and 3d editors aren't the ones that will keep Windows going -- if they were enough, Apple would have been/stayed on top from the late 80s onwards.
Microsoft's dominance has never come from the big spenders, but from the rank and file, and the assertion of the article is that they may lose those people -- even if they keep the niche of the big spenders.
That's the point of the article -- if you buy a PC bundled with Windows and all, the people selling it have to pay for Windows and for the hardware. So far, when PC prices have dropped, the hardware manufacturers have taken the cuts -- Microsoft's prices haven't changed.
The article assumes that microsoft's prices will continue to be inelastic in the face of price pressure -- which is one of the many definitions of monopoly pricing -- and that hardware distributors will respond by dropping Windows.
The counter argument, made in numerous threads and by the story editor above, is that before that would happen, Microsoft would actually start responding to price pressure. Sure, that would kill their financials, and start forcing them into negative revenue growth, but it won't "kill Windows on the Desktop".
The article doesn't have to do with people buying/selling the OS separately.
Two problems with that --
1. They expedite your account if you give them a bank account, as well as a credit card #. In those cases, your credit card can't do anything.
2. Your credit card wasn't used for anything fraudulent. You agree to give your money to paypal, paypal gives it to the third party. The credit card isn't liable for problems with the second part. You have to prove that Paypal did something fraudulent. Since its almost impossible to get them to recognize your existence, this is hard to do.
I paid to a "verified" seller, and PayPal refused to make good when he stiffed me. They took two months to even investigate my claim, and when they did, they responded that the bank account they had verified no longer existed. (Gee, no kidding). Since then, they've continued to send me spam, but won't do anything about the money.
I look at using PayPal as being a step better than sending cash through the mail, but definitely several steps below using an actual credit card or even a check (since you can place holds on checks, and they take time to clear). I don't plan on using them ever again, and I steer clear of businesses that use PayPal as their only method of credit card payment.
Here's one, if you'll forgive the Amazon link, that actually works, and is designed for hacking. Stiquitos are really cheap robots that can be used for all sorts of useful scientific applications -- like freaking out your significant other or allowing you to do a remake of a movie that no one but true geeks remember.
I live in the DC area, and around here, none of the sites are a hundred percent useful. This is mainly because most good houses sell in a matter of hours, just in time for the picture to be getting on the net.
In my case, though, the net did provide a great deal of help. I looked through a ton of houses on line, and found four that met my criteria. Then, my wife called the agents and asked what they had that was similar to those homes (which had, of course, long since sold). We picked the second realtor we talked to, and found a house with him the first afternoon we went out.
Disclaimer - I work for a company that has done real estate internet development, so take it for what its worth.
Here is something I keep considering. A friend of mine used one of their lower-end models to build a car-mounted mp3 player.
For the link-challenged, their product costs under $300, and includes a PC meant to be mounted in a home-theater environment, with wireless keyboard, optical sound in/out, a DVD player, sound card, and various provided drivers for using it as a DVD player/MP3 player. You need to supply the hard drives, processor, and memory, but that's all fairly cheap right now if you don't try to make it a game machine.
Two things stop you from having the "borg box" today - software, and the.us service-based economy. One is fixable by hackers, the other is a bigger problem.
The software isn't there yet to fulfill the vision, but even if it was, you couldn't do the full Tivo thing without cooperating with cable and satellite box providers. The latter means challenging their revenue stream - remember, they don't view time-shifting as legal for pay channels, so they aren't likely to cooperate with your visions.
You might be able to make the cable/satellite box irrelevant by doing it in software, but that gets into illegal territory real quick. The satellite people know what the DVDCCA never figured out, that doing things in software means an end to security, so I imagine they would shout DMCA. The computer illiterate masses would be treated to more pictures of hackers "stealing" programming, and all that software would have to be traded on Gnutella.
Unless someone can tackle the related problem - service-based industries with legislative protection - I don't see us having converged boxes in everyone's home entertainment center.
Bzzt! That trust should never have been there in the first place. The only thing you should be trusting Verisign for is that they should produce only one certificate for each domain name. The corporate name in the certificate should never be a matter of trust, since it implies that only one company or individual will ever have the same name.
This may not be clear in the case of Microsoft - there's only one, right? But think about something a little less clear. For example, there are a number of companies that do business as AMS - there's American Management Systems and AMS.Net to name two. They are completely unrelated, but either one could justifiably order up a certificate from Verisign with a corporate name of AMS. When the little window comes up to ask you if you trust them, just going by the name won't help you in the least, and that isn't Verisign's fault.
Even with Microsoft, there's nothing that guarantees that another company can't use that name. If they are commercial and operate in the US, they'd be sued into oblivion, but that doesn't mean they couldn't legally incorporate under that name. You could open Microsoft.org, for example, a non-profit that doesn't compete with Microsoft or use their mark for commercial purpose, and I don't think they could do much to you.
All of the preceeding is just to say that trusting the corporate name is bunk. Verisign does not and cannot guarantee that the corporate name portion of a cert will equate to the company you think it does, even if they could guarantee that it was accurate.
You're making the assumption that this is all the parent's choice, and that somehow the kid would be happiest in public school or otherwise with people their own age. I know, in my case, that I was happiest getting as far away from public school as possible. I didn't start developing social skills until I jumped from 6th grade to college in one year. Its pretty hard to have a healthy, normal life with kids who are being taught to crush non-conformists, or to convince yourself to get up in the morning in order to practice penmanship.
My advice would be to check out some of the programs that are built for gifted youth. Northwestern University used to have a summer program for people 11-13, and there are plenty of others. This way, you get the social aspect with other people that are interested in jumping ahead.
Adapted from The Motley Fool:
1. What are you doing about the terrible kidney removal problem in our nation's bars?
2. Will the DOJ take action against Nieman Marcus' cookie selling regime?
3. Have you considered using funds from forwarding Bill Gates' emails to fund the Social Security trust fund?
4. Should the FDA regulate Pop Rocks after the terrible accident with Little Mikey?
5. Do Walt Disney's copyrights count from the time he was frozen, or from when he is thawed out and actually dies?
And, of course:
6. Will you veto bill 602P if it passes Congress?
IIRC, the theoretical limit is actually four times your bandwidth, depending on the signal to noise ratio. For example, on a phone line that barely meets the 7.5Khz standard, you can get about 30Kbps. Most phone lines these days are better than 7.5Khz, but not all are - which is why many people living in old neighborhoods can't connect faster than 28.8. This doesn't count data compression, just raw data transfer.
Granted AOL/TW have denied 75%. But look at who does what, and is 75% unreasonable? It sure sounds usurious, but who provides what service?
You are making an implicit assumption that an ISP will only provide identical services to what TW would provide, and also making an assumption that 75% of an acceptable cost of bandwidth is a break-even price.
I would disagree with both of those assumptions. Good DSL providers offer a number of special services, even though they generally resell ILEC connectivity - static IPs, domain name registration, quality of service monitoring, on-site support, special hardware/OS support, and so on. They will charge money - which means more revenue - for these services. Why should TW get a dime of the money they charge for these things?
The other question is - what do these companies spend their money on, anyway? My impression is that, once the infrastructure is in place, most of the variable cost is from advertising, marketing, and first-tier customer support. Do those things really cost less than 25% of your annual fee? I wouldn't think so, but TW apparently does.
I am frankly tired of all these fascistic restrictions on free markets that Slashdot implicitly endorses over and over again.
I might agree, if all such restrictions were removed, and the government stopped helping build monopolies in the first place.
Right now, American Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers - the Bells - are heavily regulated as to the prices they can charge their competitors. Does it make sense for them to be regulated, but not AT&T or TW? Right now, right of ways to run new cable in established areas are incredibly expensive, and you often need to apply political pressure to put in the bandwidth you need.
Right now, government pork bills help big companies to grow bigger, giving them tax incentives every time they grow faster.
If you are going to demand that the government stay out of business, you have to be fair about it and get rid of the rules already in place - you can't just ask them not to regulate poor old TW.
The problem is that 75% is on revenues, not on profits. Any percentage of revenue is a bad thing to refer to, as it disincents competition. In order to make more profit, you have to increase your price without increasing your costs. Since you can't do that in this model, you can't value-add without increasing the proportion of your revenue that is cost.
The ISPs might, in theory, do value-added services. For example, when using Bell Atlantic DSL resold through other companies, you can get static IP addresses, extra shell accounts, linux-friendly utilities for managing your DSL, and domain names registered - all things that BA won't do for you, and which cost money.
Because BA resells DSL at a wholesale rate, their customers can choose to eat into their profit margins to offer these services at the same price as BA, or can choose to increase their cost and compete on things other than price.
If you take that approach, then why go to school? If you don't have a right to desseminate and use the information distributed during that class, what use is it?
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite was from a group president of one of the telcos (that I worked with), who said that any object-oriented project could be written in six months.
This was immediately followed by them cancelling all vacation.
Read the rest of his thoughts. He doesn't believe in unauthorized copying or sharing, and believes that the "information wants to be free" crowd are "ignorant juvenile delinquents (who don't, as a rule, even have the excuse of being juveniles)." Not that I'm totally in favor of abandoning copyright, but demonizing people with that belief should disqualify him from being a Slashdot idol.
I thought the only people on IRC were FBI agents pretending to be 14 year old girls. There are hackers there, too?
...Take technical books/papers - how cool would it be to just "grep" the doc for the keywords you want instead
In most DRM approaches, you can't get to the raw data with another program without cracking the DRM. If you could use grep, you could use cp, and then their precious "IP" won't be protected any more.
1) The book hasn't really seen any substantial discounts, as far as I know. Being a 400 page hardcover book, it's somewhat expensive to begin with, and I'm sure some people won't buy it just for that reason. We've requested that the next printing be done in soft cover, but I don't think that's going to happen, unfortunately
It's on for a 15% discount at Readme.Doc right now.
We already are...there's already a "tax" on the sale of blank media, AFAIK, which goes to the RIAA. Its paid for by the blank media producers, so it inflates your cost, but you don't see it as a line item when you purchase the products.
Part of the reason for having a law like this is that the tax is there to compensate content producers for people copying their stuff. If that's the purpose of the fees, copying shouldn't be counted as being wrong, and they shouldn't prevent you from making copies.
Microsoft's dominance has never come from the big spenders, but from the rank and file, and the assertion of the article is that they may lose those people -- even if they keep the niche of the big spenders.
The article assumes that microsoft's prices will continue to be inelastic in the face of price pressure -- which is one of the many definitions of monopoly pricing -- and that hardware distributors will respond by dropping Windows.
The counter argument, made in numerous threads and by the story editor above, is that before that would happen, Microsoft would actually start responding to price pressure. Sure, that would kill their financials, and start forcing them into negative revenue growth, but it won't "kill Windows on the Desktop".
The article doesn't have to do with people buying/selling the OS separately.
- Spiking Ted Kennedy's lunchtime beverage with gin and vermouth
Not to mention...Two problems with that -- 1. They expedite your account if you give them a bank account, as well as a credit card #. In those cases, your credit card can't do anything. 2. Your credit card wasn't used for anything fraudulent. You agree to give your money to paypal, paypal gives it to the third party. The credit card isn't liable for problems with the second part. You have to prove that Paypal did something fraudulent. Since its almost impossible to get them to recognize your existence, this is hard to do.
I paid to a "verified" seller, and PayPal refused to make good when he stiffed me. They took two months to even investigate my claim, and when they did, they responded that the bank account they had verified no longer existed. (Gee, no kidding). Since then, they've continued to send me spam, but won't do anything about the money. I look at using PayPal as being a step better than sending cash through the mail, but definitely several steps below using an actual credit card or even a check (since you can place holds on checks, and they take time to clear). I don't plan on using them ever again, and I steer clear of businesses that use PayPal as their only method of credit card payment.
That, and plenty of cat-5, should make my dream home a reality.
Total cost - $3 mill or so.
Here's one, if you'll forgive the Amazon link, that actually works, and is designed for hacking. Stiquitos are really cheap robots that can be used for all sorts of useful scientific applications -- like freaking out your significant other or allowing you to do a remake of a movie that no one but true geeks remember.
I live in the DC area, and around here, none of the sites are a hundred percent useful. This is mainly because most good houses sell in a matter of hours, just in time for the picture to be getting on the net. In my case, though, the net did provide a great deal of help. I looked through a ton of houses on line, and found four that met my criteria. Then, my wife called the agents and asked what they had that was similar to those homes (which had, of course, long since sold). We picked the second realtor we talked to, and found a house with him the first afternoon we went out. Disclaimer - I work for a company that has done real estate internet development, so take it for what its worth.
We actually figured out how to solve this problem at one company I worked for. It consists of a single one-line VBScript:
MsgBox "You're Fired. Clean out your desk and leave within thirty minutes."
We didn't actually implement it, but we feel that if we had, we could count on people learning not to click on random VBScripts.
Here is something I keep considering. A friend of mine used one of their lower-end models to build a car-mounted mp3 player.
.us service-based economy. One is fixable by hackers, the other is a bigger problem.
For the link-challenged, their product costs under $300, and includes a PC meant to be mounted in a home-theater environment, with wireless keyboard, optical sound in/out, a DVD player, sound card, and various provided drivers for using it as a DVD player/MP3 player. You need to supply the hard drives, processor, and memory, but that's all fairly cheap right now if you don't try to make it a game machine.
Two things stop you from having the "borg box" today - software, and the
The software isn't there yet to fulfill the vision, but even if it was, you couldn't do the full Tivo thing without cooperating with cable and satellite box providers. The latter means challenging their revenue stream - remember, they don't view time-shifting as legal for pay channels, so they aren't likely to cooperate with your visions.
You might be able to make the cable/satellite box irrelevant by doing it in software, but that gets into illegal territory real quick. The satellite people know what the DVDCCA never figured out, that doing things in software means an end to security, so I imagine they would shout DMCA. The computer illiterate masses would be treated to more pictures of hackers "stealing" programming, and all that software would have to be traded on Gnutella.
Unless someone can tackle the related problem - service-based industries with legislative protection - I don't see us having converged boxes in everyone's home entertainment center.
Well, are they the ones who thought it was smart to have the "Do you trust this company?" screen emphasize the name of the company?
Bzzt! That trust should never have been there in the first place. The only thing you should be trusting Verisign for is that they should produce only one certificate for each domain name. The corporate name in the certificate should never be a matter of trust, since it implies that only one company or individual will ever have the same name.
This may not be clear in the case of Microsoft - there's only one, right? But think about something a little less clear. For example, there are a number of companies that do business as AMS - there's American Management Systems and AMS.Net to name two. They are completely unrelated, but either one could justifiably order up a certificate from Verisign with a corporate name of AMS. When the little window comes up to ask you if you trust them, just going by the name won't help you in the least, and that isn't Verisign's fault.
Even with Microsoft, there's nothing that guarantees that another company can't use that name. If they are commercial and operate in the US, they'd be sued into oblivion, but that doesn't mean they couldn't legally incorporate under that name. You could open Microsoft.org, for example, a non-profit that doesn't compete with Microsoft or use their mark for commercial purpose, and I don't think they could do much to you.
All of the preceeding is just to say that trusting the corporate name is bunk. Verisign does not and cannot guarantee that the corporate name portion of a cert will equate to the company you think it does, even if they could guarantee that it was accurate.
You're making the assumption that this is all the parent's choice, and that somehow the kid would be happiest in public school or otherwise with people their own age. I know, in my case, that I was happiest getting as far away from public school as possible.
I didn't start developing social skills until I jumped from 6th grade to college in one year. Its pretty hard to have a healthy, normal life with kids who are being taught to crush non-conformists, or to convince yourself to get up in the morning in order to practice penmanship.
My advice would be to check out some of the programs that are built for gifted youth. Northwestern University used to have a summer program for people 11-13, and there are plenty of others. This way, you get the social aspect with other people that are interested in jumping ahead.
Adapted from The Motley Fool:
1. What are you doing about the terrible kidney removal problem in our nation's bars? 2. Will the DOJ take action against Nieman Marcus' cookie selling regime? 3. Have you considered using funds from forwarding Bill Gates' emails to fund the Social Security trust fund? 4. Should the FDA regulate Pop Rocks after the terrible accident with Little Mikey? 5. Do Walt Disney's copyrights count from the time he was frozen, or from when he is thawed out and actually dies? And, of course: 6. Will you veto bill 602P if it passes Congress?
IIRC, the theoretical limit is actually four times your bandwidth, depending on the signal to noise ratio. For example, on a phone line that barely meets the 7.5Khz standard, you can get about 30Kbps. Most phone lines these days are better than 7.5Khz, but not all are - which is why many people living in old neighborhoods can't connect faster than 28.8. This doesn't count data compression, just raw data transfer.
Granted AOL/TW have denied 75%. But look at who does what, and is 75% unreasonable? It sure sounds usurious, but who provides what service?
You are making an implicit assumption that an ISP will only provide identical services to what TW would provide, and also making an assumption that 75% of an acceptable cost of bandwidth is a break-even price.I would disagree with both of those assumptions. Good DSL providers offer a number of special services, even though they generally resell ILEC connectivity - static IPs, domain name registration, quality of service monitoring, on-site support, special hardware/OS support, and so on. They will charge money - which means more revenue - for these services. Why should TW get a dime of the money they charge for these things?
The other question is - what do these companies spend their money on, anyway? My impression is that, once the infrastructure is in place, most of the variable cost is from advertising, marketing, and first-tier customer support. Do those things really cost less than 25% of your annual fee? I wouldn't think so, but TW apparently does.
I am frankly tired of all these fascistic restrictions on free markets that Slashdot implicitly endorses over and over again.
I might agree, if all such restrictions were removed, and the government stopped helping build monopolies in the first place.Right now, American Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers - the Bells - are heavily regulated as to the prices they can charge their competitors. Does it make sense for them to be regulated, but not AT&T or TW? Right now, right of ways to run new cable in established areas are incredibly expensive, and you often need to apply political pressure to put in the bandwidth you need.
Right now, government pork bills help big companies to grow bigger, giving them tax incentives every time they grow faster.
If you are going to demand that the government stay out of business, you have to be fair about it and get rid of the rules already in place - you can't just ask them not to regulate poor old TW.
The ISPs might, in theory, do value-added services. For example, when using Bell Atlantic DSL resold through other companies, you can get static IP addresses, extra shell accounts, linux-friendly utilities for managing your DSL, and domain names registered - all things that BA won't do for you, and which cost money.
Because BA resells DSL at a wholesale rate, their customers can choose to eat into their profit margins to offer these services at the same price as BA, or can choose to increase their cost and compete on things other than price.
If you take that approach, then why go to school? If you don't have a right to desseminate and use the information distributed during that class, what use is it?