The second, and better approach would be to have it setup like cable TV. Websites could join a conglomerate of other websites and charge for a subscription. I suspect things would consolidate fairly quickly and you could get access to thousands of great websites for one monthly subscription fee of say $10.
We already have this for so-called adult sites. You pay $X per month (the one I signed up for was 15USD/year) to one adult verification service and get access to a whole syndicate of sites. The one whose link to the AVS you clicked gets a commission. --
Tolkien, in his works, did not strive to create anything new. His themes, creatures, symbols and narratives mostly derive from the vast mythological artwork of pre- and post-christian europe and mainly their revival in the national movements of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Wagner for one example among many.
Tolkien himself didn't approve of such a comparison. As he said, "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ended."
The vendor agrees to put a copy of the source code in escrow with a law firm or CPA firm that handles such situations, to be release to the customer if the vendor ceases to be a going concern (or in some cases if they terminate the product line), at which point the terms automatically change from license to ownership....
Now, has anyone ever made actual USE of such an agreement? That I can't tell you.
My company received copies of source code when a vendor went out of business sometime in the 1970s. The vendor or the product line may have been called SNAP; sorry but these details are dim in my memory.:-)
Check it out... in the e-mail they send to members, they don't even tell you what the new agreement is that you're agreeing to, you have to go to a web page (which can be changed w/o your knowledge).
That's once you finally get to the web page!
Apparently Ebay thinks that Opera is some sort of cell phone, so when I clicked on the link in the letter, they transmitted a 4-line search form instead of the promised policy page. I had to fire up Bloatscape just to find out what is going on.
This is probably the most re-branded OS the world has or will ever see SOME of the names it has had over the years are "OS" "OS/MFT" "OS/MVT" "OS/VS" "OS/VSE" "XA" "OS/390" and now "zOS".
You've got a few different lines of descent mixed together there.
DOS -> DOS/VS -> DOS/VSE -> VSE/XA and maybe some other things starting with VSE. For smaller systems (that's a relative term, of course).
OS/MFT -> OS/VS1 -> dead end. Limited number of processes could run at the same time.
Actually, these machines need (at least) one hour downtime per year, in the fall, when they turn back the clocks... Indeed, the system clock is kept in local time rather than GMT, and thus the double occurrence of that hour when turning back the clock would hopelessly confuse the OS, which might then start some batch jobs twice. Easy solution: turn off the machine for an hour...
I used to look at statistics of the average engineer writing 10-20 lines of code a day as a sign that the world was populated by idiots. Now that I manage a group of engineers, I see exactly why that number is (roughly) correct. Coding really is the very last step in a 100-step process.
Remind me not to buy software from your company until you add step 101...
testing!
Re:Mild spelling flame: it's TANSTAAFL (nt)
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Juno And Privacy
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· Score: 1
What's the origin of TANSTAAFL? The first place I saw it was a Heinlein book... Maybe the Cat Who Walks Through Walls?
Earlier than that -- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
However, in the US the junk mailers get a better rate than everyone else since the 1st class mail subsidizes the junk mail.
Wrong, wring, wrong! The USPS is required by law to recover the costs for each class of mail from the postage rates for that class.
The reasons bulk mail costs less are:
The mailer does a lot of the work beforehand by presorting, applying barcodes, facing all the envelopes in a bundle the same way, using permit imprints rather than postage stamps that have to be canceled.
Bulk mail doens't get free forwarding or return service like first clas mail does.
There is no service standard for bulk mail like there is for first class (X% to be delivered within Y days, and so on).
Honor the requests from people who ask to be removed from the list - and actually remove them - don't just set a flag saying they were removed. Don't build up a second list, either.
I work in direct marketing (mostly the paper variety), and we would never do it that way. We always maintain a separate list of people who have opted out, to guard against somehow getting them back into the main database.
Greedy for 800 numbers just like for domain names
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ACLU Takes on ICANN
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· Score: 1
URL's are somewhat like phone numbers, especially since one can dial a letter string. Yet, we don't see companies suiing each other over 1-800-4-AMAZON or 1-800-PHONE-SEX.
When North America's 800 area code for tollfree telephone numbers got full and the 888 area code was introduced, there was indeed threatened legal action over similar numbers. 1-800-FLOWERS was a prominent case. Many companies rushed to reserve the same number in the 888 area code that they already had in the 800 area code. This is just like companies registering their domains in.com,.org, and.net. All it accomplished was to use up another area code.
Currently, with cable, you pay a monthly fee to get a few pretty good stations and a bunch of other junk you never watch (at least that's how it has been for me and friends:). You can't subscribe to just CNN for $3/month. You have to take CNN and 25 other stations for $30/month.
So perhaps web content services will move in that direction. For $30/month, you get Yahoo, Slashdot, CNN, Salon, and 200 other web pages you don't care about.
We already have that with the, um, adult verification services. I pay $15 per year for access to one, um, image-laden site that I visit frequently and twenty others that I never look at.
Here on/. the ads are the one thing that is not editorially controlled, i.e., the Slashdot community has no say as to what ads appear up there. Now see, that's wrong. Sure we understand the reason for it, and since advertisers here probably desperately want to appeal to the/. community,/. ads are better than 99% of the ads out there. But we are here for the community, and since the ads are not a part of the community, there is a significant disconnect going on.
Give the Slashdot community the power to rate the ads as Informative, Offtopic, Flamebait, etc.!
Many people wanted them to add a new area code for pagers/cellphones, but instead they just overlayed the area codes. Instead of dialing a different area code to reach someone on a cell phone, (which would be really easy to remember!!) now my dad has a new area code to dial his friend down the street. Even his two lines in his house have different area codes.
The FCC ruled out separate area codes for services such as cell phones and pagers. It would have been biased against new companies getting into those markets. The traditional local telephone monopoly would have gotten to keep the old familiar area code while the competitors would have been stuck with the strange new code.
Most AOL users rarely venture out of the Disney-esque safe for family AOL net so their addresses don't get picked up and they don't understand what we're complaining about.
I get more spam at my AOL address than anywhere else, and the only place it's exposed to the world is in my AOL profile.
My company has had moderate success. We contract out routine enhancements to some existing systems. These are large databases with a lot of inputs coming from outside our company. Whenever we form a new partnership, the outside data has to be massaged to fit into our way of doing things.
The contractors do well at this because they always have examples of similar code in front of them. Often it's just a matter of snapping together some of the same reusable components in a different order.
Requirements analysis and integration testing is always done onsite. The contractors are only responsible for coding, unit testing, and detail design documentation.
Email, conference calls, status tracking tools are all a must. Seeing each other in person now and then helps too, especially for training.
Sure, outsourcers will take longer to do the job than you would. But they will free up time for you to do things that contractors couldn't do at all.
Lets take this little bit of humor into meatspace.. You open the biggest door to your house to get in, and leave it open. You settle in for a day, and then go out to party... but you leave the door open still. You are robbed blind and silly, and theres not even a broken window, because *you* left the door open.
Who is at fault? (Other than the robber)
1. The person who built your house
2. The bank, for owning your house
3. The company that made the lock
4. Your sorry ass for leaving the door open
I vote 4. Who's with me?
5. The insurance company, for publicizing a case just like this that happened in the neighborhood, but implying that only Open Source houses were vulnerable.
This line of thought leads to the same question as SETI -- namely, "Where Are They?" If any intelligent species can create AI with vastly superior capabilities, then any such species with a few hundred thousand years' head start on us would have already done so. And their AIs would be exploring the universe and should have shown up here on Earth. What can we conclude then? A particularly arrogant version of the anthropic principle -- we are already as smart as it's possible to be?
Slashdot Mirror
Funky javascript causes Opera 4 under Winblows to crash.
--
We already have this for so-called adult sites. You pay $X per month (the one I signed up for was 15USD/year) to one adult verification service and get access to a whole syndicate of sites. The one whose link to the AVS you clicked gets a commission.
--
That's just the free version. The paid version is still ad-free.
--
Tolkien himself didn't approve of such a comparison. As he said, "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ended."
My company received copies of source code when a vendor went out of business sometime in the 1970s. The vendor or the product line may have been called SNAP; sorry but these details are dim in my memory. :-)
Of course that's internet years.
That's once you finally get to the web page!
Apparently Ebay thinks that Opera is some sort of cell phone, so when I clicked on the link in the letter, they transmitted a 4-line search form instead of the promised policy page. I had to fire up Bloatscape just to find out what is going on.
(No, I haven't used Ebay in quite a while.)
You've got a few different lines of descent mixed together there.
Only the lazy operators do it that way. The official way is to keep the system clock in GMT and just change the local time offset twice a year--no reboot required. See bit.listerv.ibm-main where this gets rehashed twice a year.
Remind me not to buy software from your company until you add step 101...
testing!
Earlier than that -- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
Okay, fella, we get the point.
Wrong, wring, wrong! The USPS is required by law to recover the costs for each class of mail from the postage rates for that class.
The reasons bulk mail costs less are:
I work in direct marketing (mostly the paper variety), and we would never do it that way. We always maintain a separate list of people who have opted out, to guard against somehow getting them back into the main database.
When North America's 800 area code for tollfree telephone numbers got full and the 888 area code was introduced, there was indeed threatened legal action over similar numbers. 1-800-FLOWERS was a prominent case. Many companies rushed to reserve the same number in the 888 area code that they already had in the 800 area code. This is just like companies registering their domains in .com, .org, and .net. All it accomplished was to use up another area code.
So perhaps web content services will move in that direction. For $30/month, you get Yahoo, Slashdot, CNN, Salon, and 200 other web pages you don't care about.
We already have that with the, um, adult verification services. I pay $15 per year for access to one, um, image-laden site that I visit frequently and twenty others that I never look at.
Give the Slashdot community the power to rate the ads as Informative, Offtopic, Flamebait, etc.!
The FCC ruled out separate area codes for services such as cell phones and pagers. It would have been biased against new companies getting into those markets. The traditional local telephone monopoly would have gotten to keep the old familiar area code while the competitors would have been stuck with the strange new code.
For the authoritative site on area code issues, see the North American Numbering Plan Administration.
I get more spam at my AOL address than anywhere else, and the only place it's exposed to the world is in my AOL profile.
My company has had moderate success. We contract out routine enhancements to some existing systems. These are large databases with a lot of inputs coming from outside our company. Whenever we form a new partnership, the outside data has to be massaged to fit into our way of doing things.
The contractors do well at this because they always have examples of similar code in front of them. Often it's just a matter of snapping together some of the same reusable components in a different order.
Requirements analysis and integration testing is always done onsite. The contractors are only responsible for coding, unit testing, and detail design documentation.
Email, conference calls, status tracking tools are all a must. Seeing each other in person now and then helps too, especially for training.
Sure, outsourcers will take longer to do the job than you would. But they will free up time for you to do things that contractors couldn't do at all.
5. The insurance company, for publicizing a case just like this that happened in the neighborhood, but implying that only Open Source houses were vulnerable.
The story is the travelogue.
The plot line is the beginning, history, and end of intelligent life in the universe.
If it took you 24 hours to find a missing comma, that must have been several internet centuries ago.
This line of thought leads to the same question as SETI -- namely, "Where Are They?" If any intelligent species can create AI with vastly superior capabilities, then any such species with a few hundred thousand years' head start on us would have already done so. And their AIs would be exploring the universe and should have shown up here on Earth. What can we conclude then? A particularly arrogant version of the anthropic principle -- we are already as smart as it's possible to be?