The problem with the situation is; too many people put up with it. too many people tolerate it. Companies would not engage in spam, if they did not believe it was profitable.
If the spam armageddon described in this article *does* come (and I'm feverishly praying it will) - then a critical mass of people will finally get fed up and do something about it.
Not something ineffective like the national do not call list, or the can-spam act.
If the PATRIOT Act is too onerous, the critics have the obligation of suggesting how we might better balance the needs to protect the safety of our nation while maintaining civil rights.
They HAVE. Repeatedly. Over and over and over again until they are blue in the face. 1. Increase funding for border patrols (decreased under Bush). 2. Increase funding for port inspections (decreased under Bush). 3. Increase cooperation with other nations to form a coalition to eliminate international money laundering which funds terrorists. (halted entirely under Bush). 4. Lean on nations with known ties to terrorism, or specifically Al Qaeda or the Taliban. (ie. Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. . . under Bush?). 5. Develop a national energy policy which eliminates dependence on foreign oil, with it's attendant unsavory political entanglements. 6. Stop dealing with white-collar criminals and Iranian spies like Ahmed Chalabi. 7. eliminate from the Civillian Pentagon staff, dangerous pro-Likud radicals like Richard Pearle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith. 8. Do not allow felons like Abrams and Poindexter, who are known to have lied to congress, and have illegally dealt with international arms traders like Ghorbanifar, to have any part in policy decisions or government work. 9. Stop trying to covertly topple legitimately elected third world governments like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Lebannon, etc. etc. ad nauseum. 10. Re-establish REAL accounting oversight to expenditures in the reconstruction effort in Iraq (instead of handing TENS OF BILLIONS over to fraudsters and schemers with NO oversight, no paper trail, and no hope of ever recovering the lost BILLIONS, which could have been spent on - I don't know, maybe something like DOMESTIC SECURITY?!)
Japanese population growth is pretty flat compared to the US.
They don't have hundreds of thousands of H1-B's flooding their country, or a significant population of religious fundamentalists who believe that they can breed their way into heaven, or millions of mexican illegals crossing the border each year. The US has all three.
The original Bondi-blue iMac didn't have firewire.
Neither did the follow-on 3-color model (I still have a 223 MHz Indigo). It was the next generation that introduced Firewire with the iMac DV model. (one of which I also still have - my kids use them daily).
We owe it to our children to not force them to owe so many millions in the name of the ownership of ideas. . . . actually, if the patents were as the framers of the constitution intended, "For a limited time" - then frankly, I wouldn't really give a crap, and neither would my children. Patent the curly hair on my ass for seven years, no longer, I don't give a crap.
So long as people keep having people, there will be a demand for housing,
. . . one other factor, which nobody else has mentioned. . . is that if you are one to buy into the Peak Oil theory, (and recent oil price, supply/demand curves seem to support this) - then as we see petroleum prices rise, that equates to a rise in transportation costs. People will be less willing to spend $1000 a month on gasoline to commute to a job in the city. (on the other hand, with less people able to commute, the commute will become more bearable, as the infrastructure was built to handle high volumes, low volumes of cars will FLY on the freeways). Expect city and suburb real-estate to shoot up even higher. Expect exurbs and rural real estate to crap out. You might expect businesses to relocate to find people who will work for reasonable pay. But then it's the business that will have to bear the added transportation costs in their B2B transactions. (so business will tend to stay put in the city, and just scale back on personnel). In other words, hyperinflation for those lucky enough to find work in the cities. Exurbs and rural dwellers? Maybe a black market will arise? Soldiers guarding farm crops? Invasions of oil-rich Canada and Mexico?
Nobody NEEDS to have money invested in Yahoo.com. EVERYBODY NEEDS a roof over their heads. It's supply and demand. And until there's a significant drop in population growth, or a significant drop in the amount of banks willing to sign people into slavery for 20, 30, or even 50 years it takes em to pay off a mortgage, count on demand to keep increasing.
The important thing is: Is an Apple computer, running Linux, a good price/performance ratio?
Pull out the "value adds" of the apple hardware functionality, that may not be available under Linux (sleep, keyboard volume controls, eject key (I'm guessing here), the free apple software (most of which is also available free on a decent Linux distro, so I don't count this as much), the system integration, services (.Mac), and application compatability (for which there may not be a linux-compatible alternative) - and weigh the value of the system alone.
I guess it also depends on how much custom AltiVec code you've got in your Linux distro. (If I were Linus, I'd do a lot of that).
Given the price paid for Apple desktop hardware (IMNSHO, well-worth it, at that "level") - is it still worth it without those other things? I agree with Linus.
Meanwhile the best MS can do is the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" That's not (very good) marketing.
You may think that - and I may even agree with you. But you and I are obviously out of step with mainstream.
(Not only that - what I referred to as "marketing" - includes all the backroom scheming and conniving Microsoft has done to position themselves into the position where "where do you want to go today?" becomes more effective than "the network is the computer" etc. Ask my mother in law if "where do you want to go today?" works. She thinks Bill Gates is some kind of high-tech genius guru. Rush Limbaugh listeners are convinced that Bill Gates is a True American Hero for his enterpreneurial savvy, and his genius at inventing the "great Windows Operating System" - that rescued computing from the jaws of the techno-elite, and delivered it to the "common people". This is the mind frame of the majority. You and I are clearly out of step with that.)
When it comes down to it, the battle here is "Engineers versus Marketers". "Inventors versus Salesmen".
Neither can survive without the others. They tend to hate eachother. The Inventors make the Salesmen far richer, more often, than Salesmen make Inventors.
Bill Gates, for all his technical reputation, is a Salesman, a Marketer. He got where he is through contacts, privilege, and family money. It's likely that without those advantages he was born with, he would have ended up a relatively unknown, and probably low-level programmer.
However, the technology he exploited, the vast majority of it, probably would have gone NOWHERE, without his, and Ballmer's marketing. . . . (searching for the word). . . talent?
In any case, this is the eternal struggle. Dilbert versus the Pointy-haired boss. Gallileo versus the Vatican. DaVinci versus his Patrons, even the Medici. It's the end result of the FACT that a long time ago, it was decided that MONEY, and the skill (or connections) to manipulate it, is more important than ingenuity.
Imagine if a company like Dow or DuPont had patented fire back at the dawn of humanity. . . They'd be DAMN rich. And we'd all be living in the dark.
My employer holds regular training sessions for all employess on computer security, with a strong focus on resistance to social engineering methods. There are also several levels of the training, a basic course for the rank-and-file, a higher level course for those higher-ups and engineers who have to protect subcontractors and customers proprietary data, and a more intense set of courses for the IT and security folks. (We manage both physical and information security).
Have we had information stolen? Yes. We've had unscrupulous employees go to work for competitors and give them proprietary data, we've had subsidiaries sell controlled technology to foreign powers (and got bitchslapped for it too!).
Point is, machines are easy to secure. More often than not, theyll protect what you tell them to, especially if you have competent engineers. But the weak link is ALWAYS the human one. The most careful companies can apply careful policy, process, and training, like my employer does, and they can also hire tons of babysitters, big brothers, and such. And the information still flies out the door.
I don't understand why it's okay to: Let children watch violent sporting events which idolize violence and aggression as a means of conflict-resolution and ego gratification (Pro-everything). Encourage children to idolize rapists (Kobi Bryant), murderers (OJ Simpson), wife-beaters (Mike Tyson) drug abusers (Strawberry), gangsters (the NBA), and cheaters (Canseco, et. al). Encourage children to become enamored of a system which transferrs public funding (for stadium construction) into private hands (team owners) on the threat of leaving for another city (extortion). Encourage children to become involved in a government-regulated monopoly, similar to many Soviet bureaucracies. Encourage children to watch cheerleaders shake their scantily-clad privates into the camera, promoting the objectification of women as sexual property. Yet it's not okay for a parent to use the remote control to prevent them from seeing 5-seconds of nipple.
Unless it's not really about "protecting the children", and it's really about "controlling the lives of others".
Bill Gates getting Knighthood is about roughly the same as Yassir Arafat getting a Nobel Prize. These things are all rigged to be handouts for cronies now.
The Power Macs that would run Windows NT PPC, were not what you or I would recognize today, as Open Firmware. Open Firmware was in a VERY primative form. And from what I recall, NT PPC wouldn't run on Macs. It ran on very expensive Motorola boxes. Hardware hackery was required for any other system. This was due to Motorola's sabotage of CHiRP.
"pushing" and "evangelizing" are all fine and dandy.
Having talented people, with enough free time, and funding for hardware, actually DO it, is another thing altogether. I sure as hell don't have the skill for that.
I love the idea. And I'll certainly rah-rah it on slashdot. But that and 5 bucks will buy the people actually DOING the work a cup of coffee.
I don't think the cylons are really religious. My take on it was that the bimbo used religion as a weapon, same way she uses her sexuality. To "hack" poor, demented Gyes Baltar. He is so pwned.
However, since they sent the suicide bomber to blow up his "project" - I suspect that they haven't fully succeeded in pwning him.
I personally think that mass piracy of Quark is what made it the industry standard in the first place.
There's an argument to be made that tacit permitting of piracy is roughly equivalent to "dumping". (or selling a product below cost to gain marketshare). The difference is - since copying software is essentially FREE, it's technically not selling the product below cost. Now. Can anybody tell me why successful software companies are among the most profitable businesses known in the history of mankind? Or why the market has consolidated faster than any other industry in the history of business?
Actually, Visual Studio is already too difficult to install. What, you mean not only do I need an OS, I need to install some obscure service pack, THEN a web server, THEN SQL Server? To develop code? Are you fucking insane? The install process is 3 fucking hours!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the situation is;
too many people put up with it. too many people tolerate it. Companies would not engage in spam, if they did not believe it was profitable.
If the spam armageddon described in this article *does* come (and I'm feverishly praying it will) - then a critical mass of people will finally get fed up and do something about it.
Not something ineffective like the national do not call list, or the can-spam act.
Something effective.
Blood will flow.
It will be glorious.
If the PATRIOT Act is too onerous, the critics have the obligation of suggesting how we might better balance the needs to protect the safety of our nation while maintaining civil rights.
They HAVE. Repeatedly. Over and over and over again until they are blue in the face.
1. Increase funding for border patrols (decreased under Bush).
2. Increase funding for port inspections (decreased under Bush).
3. Increase cooperation with other nations to form a coalition to eliminate international money laundering which funds terrorists. (halted entirely under Bush).
4. Lean on nations with known ties to terrorism, or specifically Al Qaeda or the Taliban. (ie. Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. . . under Bush?).
5. Develop a national energy policy which eliminates dependence on foreign oil, with it's attendant unsavory political entanglements.
6. Stop dealing with white-collar criminals and Iranian spies like Ahmed Chalabi.
7. eliminate from the Civillian Pentagon staff, dangerous pro-Likud radicals like Richard Pearle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith.
8. Do not allow felons like Abrams and Poindexter, who are known to have lied to congress, and have illegally dealt with international arms traders like Ghorbanifar, to have any part in policy decisions or government work.
9. Stop trying to covertly topple legitimately elected third world governments like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, Lebannon, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
10. Re-establish REAL accounting oversight to expenditures in the reconstruction effort in Iraq (instead of handing TENS OF BILLIONS over to fraudsters and schemers with NO oversight, no paper trail, and no hope of ever recovering the lost BILLIONS, which could have been spent on - I don't know, maybe something like DOMESTIC SECURITY?!)
Japanese population growth is pretty flat compared to the US.
They don't have hundreds of thousands of H1-B's flooding their country, or a significant population of religious fundamentalists who believe that they can breed their way into heaven, or millions of mexican illegals crossing the border each year. The US has all three.
The original Bondi-blue iMac didn't have firewire.
Neither did the follow-on 3-color model (I still have a 223 MHz Indigo). It was the next generation that introduced Firewire with the iMac DV model. (one of which I also still have - my kids use them daily).
We owe it to our children to not force them to owe so many millions in the name of the ownership of ideas.
. . . actually, if the patents were as the framers of the constitution intended, "For a limited time" - then frankly, I wouldn't really give a crap, and neither would my children. Patent the curly hair on my ass for seven years, no longer, I don't give a crap.
So long as people keep having people, there will be a demand for housing,
. . . one other factor, which nobody else has mentioned. . . is that if you are one to buy into the Peak Oil theory, (and recent oil price, supply/demand curves seem to support this) - then as we see petroleum prices rise, that equates to a rise in transportation costs. People will be less willing to spend $1000 a month on gasoline to commute to a job in the city. (on the other hand, with less people able to commute, the commute will become more bearable, as the infrastructure was built to handle high volumes, low volumes of cars will FLY on the freeways). Expect city and suburb real-estate to shoot up even higher. Expect exurbs and rural real estate to crap out. You might expect businesses to relocate to find people who will work for reasonable pay. But then it's the business that will have to bear the added transportation costs in their B2B transactions. (so business will tend to stay put in the city, and just scale back on personnel). In other words, hyperinflation for those lucky enough to find work in the cities. Exurbs and rural dwellers? Maybe a black market will arise? Soldiers guarding farm crops? Invasions of oil-rich Canada and Mexico?
One day, they'll understand that they have to work for what they own...
. . . or be born into a wealthy family.
Odd, yes.
But housing is DIFFERENT.
Nobody NEEDS to have money invested in Yahoo.com.
EVERYBODY NEEDS a roof over their heads.
It's supply and demand. And until there's a significant drop in population growth, or a significant drop in the amount of banks willing to sign people into slavery for 20, 30, or even 50 years it takes em to pay off a mortgage, count on demand to keep increasing.
. . . that would probably be because when I sold my dotcom stock at the start of the crash, I bought real estate with the profits.
I'm guessing I wasn't the only genius to think of this.
Who cares how much apple makes on the sale?
The important thing is:
Is an Apple computer, running Linux, a good price/performance ratio?
Pull out the "value adds" of the apple hardware functionality, that may not be available under Linux (sleep, keyboard volume controls, eject key (I'm guessing here), the free apple software (most of which is also available free on a decent Linux distro, so I don't count this as much), the system integration, services (.Mac), and application compatability (for which there may not be a linux-compatible alternative) - and weigh the value of the system alone.
I guess it also depends on how much custom AltiVec code you've got in your Linux distro. (If I were Linus, I'd do a lot of that).
Given the price paid for Apple desktop hardware (IMNSHO, well-worth it, at that "level") - is it still worth it without those other things? I agree with Linus.
Meanwhile the best MS can do is the slogan "Where do you want to go today?" That's not (very good) marketing.
You may think that - and I may even agree with you. But you and I are obviously out of step with mainstream.
(Not only that - what I referred to as "marketing" - includes all the backroom scheming and conniving Microsoft has done to position themselves into the position where "where do you want to go today?" becomes more effective than "the network is the computer" etc. Ask my mother in law if "where do you want to go today?" works. She thinks Bill Gates is some kind of high-tech genius guru. Rush Limbaugh listeners are convinced that Bill Gates is a True American Hero for his enterpreneurial savvy, and his genius at inventing the "great Windows Operating System" - that rescued computing from the jaws of the techno-elite, and delivered it to the "common people". This is the mind frame of the majority. You and I are clearly out of step with that.)
yes, but who audits the auditors?
When it comes down to it, the battle here is "Engineers versus Marketers". "Inventors versus Salesmen".
Neither can survive without the others. They tend to hate eachother. The Inventors make the Salesmen far richer, more often, than Salesmen make Inventors.
Bill Gates, for all his technical reputation, is a Salesman, a Marketer. He got where he is through contacts, privilege, and family money. It's likely that without those advantages he was born with, he would have ended up a relatively unknown, and probably low-level programmer.
However, the technology he exploited, the vast majority of it, probably would have gone NOWHERE, without his, and Ballmer's marketing. . . . (searching for the word). . . talent?
In any case, this is the eternal struggle. Dilbert versus the Pointy-haired boss. Gallileo versus the Vatican. DaVinci versus his Patrons, even the Medici. It's the end result of the FACT that a long time ago, it was decided that MONEY, and the skill (or connections) to manipulate it, is more important than ingenuity.
Imagine if a company like Dow or DuPont had patented fire back at the dawn of humanity. . . They'd be DAMN rich. And we'd all be living in the dark.
My employer holds regular training sessions for all employess on computer security, with a strong focus on resistance to social engineering methods. There are also several levels of the training, a basic course for the rank-and-file, a higher level course for those higher-ups and engineers who have to protect subcontractors and customers proprietary data, and a more intense set of courses for the IT and security folks. (We manage both physical and information security).
Have we had information stolen? Yes. We've had unscrupulous employees go to work for competitors and give them proprietary data, we've had subsidiaries sell controlled technology to foreign powers (and got bitchslapped for it too!).
Point is, machines are easy to secure. More often than not, theyll protect what you tell them to, especially if you have competent engineers. But the weak link is ALWAYS the human one. The most careful companies can apply careful policy, process, and training, like my employer does, and they can also hire tons of babysitters, big brothers, and such. And the information still flies out the door.
I don't understand why it's okay to:
Let children watch violent sporting events which idolize violence and aggression as a means of conflict-resolution and ego gratification (Pro-everything).
Encourage children to idolize rapists (Kobi Bryant), murderers (OJ Simpson), wife-beaters (Mike Tyson) drug abusers (Strawberry), gangsters (the NBA), and cheaters (Canseco, et. al).
Encourage children to become enamored of a system which transferrs public funding (for stadium construction) into private hands (team owners) on the threat of leaving for another city (extortion).
Encourage children to become involved in a government-regulated monopoly, similar to many Soviet bureaucracies.
Encourage children to watch cheerleaders shake their scantily-clad privates into the camera, promoting the objectification of women as sexual property.
Yet it's not okay for a parent to use the remote control to prevent them from seeing 5-seconds of nipple.
Unless it's not really about "protecting the children", and it's really about "controlling the lives of others".
Bill Gates getting Knighthood is about roughly the same as Yassir Arafat getting a Nobel Prize. These things are all rigged to be handouts for cronies now.
Personally, I feel like I should CHARGE everyone around me $2-$3 every time I'm subjected to their obnoxious ringtones.
It's called VIBRATE mode, people!
But SOME industries require a great deal of technical insight on the part of management, in order to be successful at what they do.
Some industries, however, rely on connections, cronyism, and sleaze, on the part of management. A different kind of expertise.
In many ways, the Software industry has changed from the former, into the latter. Mostly in the past 10 years.
The Power Macs that would run Windows NT PPC, were not what you or I would recognize today, as Open Firmware. Open Firmware was in a VERY primative form. And from what I recall, NT PPC wouldn't run on Macs. It ran on very expensive Motorola boxes. Hardware hackery was required for any other system. This was due to Motorola's sabotage of CHiRP.
"pushing" and "evangelizing" are all fine and dandy.
Having talented people, with enough free time, and funding for hardware, actually DO it, is another thing altogether. I sure as hell don't have the skill for that.
I love the idea. And I'll certainly rah-rah it on slashdot. But that and 5 bucks will buy the people actually DOING the work a cup of coffee.
I don't think the cylons are really religious. My take on it was that the bimbo used religion as a weapon, same way she uses her sexuality. To "hack" poor, demented Gyes Baltar. He is so pwned.
However, since they sent the suicide bomber to blow up his "project" - I suspect that they haven't fully succeeded in pwning him.
Lieberman is no Democrat.
Lieberman is loyal only to the Likud-wing of the Republican Party.
I personally think that mass piracy of Quark is what made it the industry standard in the first place.
There's an argument to be made that tacit permitting of piracy is roughly equivalent to "dumping". (or selling a product below cost to gain marketshare). The difference is - since copying software is essentially FREE, it's technically not selling the product below cost. Now. Can anybody tell me why successful software companies are among the most profitable businesses known in the history of mankind? Or why the market has consolidated faster than any other industry in the history of business?
Dongles.
I know they can be cracked.
But they've been pretty much very effective. Especially now, with the arrival of USB.
Actually, Visual Studio is already too difficult to install.
What, you mean not only do I need an OS, I need to install some obscure service pack, THEN a web server, THEN SQL Server? To develop code? Are you fucking insane? The install process is 3 fucking hours!