> The ISP doesn't pay more, the ISP has a fixed pipe for a fixed cost from their ISP, and so on up the chain. > At the top of the chain, the backbones have a peering agreement at either fixed cost or no cost.
Despite your low UID it is clear you don't know shit about the Internet game. Lemme break it down for you.
Imagine you are a cable company in a small rural town of 10,000 and for some reason are just now adding Internet service. So you have installed a fiber backbone in town and some boxes on the poles to segment the town into a dozen segments. You just paid one Metric Shitload for a 1GB fiber from your plant to an upstream provider. Now you are ready for customers. 10Mb service for $50 sounds in the ballpark so you advertise it. The first batch of customners are raving filehogs. 10Mb per customer for 100 customers... your pipe is running at capacity.... or would be if you could actually deliver that to them with the segments you put in place. So after adding a lot more segments you have em all happy. And your outbound pipe is running at 100%. So when the next 100 customers show up you have some decisions to make.
1. Just oversubscribe em until everyone complains.
2. Buy a bigger pipe. But that is just losing money at a faster rate because the $50 monthly charge x 100 isn't even in the same ballpark as just the 1MS (Metric Shitload) you are paying for bandwidth and you have to maintain the rest of the plant, pay the bank note on the original hardware investment, pay tech support, etc.
3. Cap their asses.
The current 'unlimited' retail Internet only works if you can oversubscribe and that is only possible if the filehogs are a small minority of users. Netflix, YouTube and other bandwidth eating apps are quickly changing that assumption.
> If I use more bandwidth I deserve to pay more because it costs my ISP more to cater to me..
Exactly. Meter bandwidth and the whole argument changes to a much saner ground.
Blocking P2P becomes a non-issue with ISPs if they can charge the filehogs enough to make a profit from them. Especially since if they have to pay most filehogs aren't going to be downloading nearly as much and if seeding actually has a monetary cost it really gets cut back. The p2p problem mostly goes away.
Then there are the VOIP and Netflix (more generally the Video on Demand) problems. Those also cease to be massive threats to the ISPs business model. Since most ISPs are government monopolies also involved in the video and dialtone markets they do need some regulatory thwacking to make sure they don't compete unfairly. Better still would be splitting the monopoly parts from the dialtone, IP and TV delivery industries from the content/value add. See my earlier post here and many in the past flogging this horse.
> Que the standard partisan trolls screaming about how the government should "keep their hands off of the free market".
No, que me saying we should MAKE the Internet a free market.
> Remember folks, before posting make sure to conveniently forget that the current state of affairs is anything but a free market..
No, most folks get to pick government regulated monopoly telco A or government regulated monopoly cable company B with a government regulated but hopelessly out of the running because spectrum isn't nearly as bountiful as wires/fiber, wireless carrier as option C. Break the monopolies one last time, but do it smart unlike the AT&T fiasco. Regulated utility in control of the physical plant running on right of way monopolies selling access to unregulated entities providing TV, dialtone or IP.
>..and that telephone companies have been common carriers for years without the foundations of freedom this country was supposedly built on crumbling. (well, at least not because of that...)
Yes. And you can call anyone at regulated rates..... so I can call California cheaper than the town next door because of it. Oh God bless the wisdom of the regulators, they brought sanity to the telephone game! And I get to pay $11/month for AT&T to tell their switch to NOT supress the Caller ID stream. Oh joy of joys. If you want the same insane, capricious bullcrap on the Internet, give control to the FCC. And thst is before the political cleansing that is the real reason they want to get involved starts.
And why do I believe the want the control for political reasons? Because I listened to their words and did something I'm not supposed to do. I believed they intend to do exactly what they say for once.
> The browser vendors' fetishistic obsession with Javascript speed is most irritating.
Amen. Don't know 'bout everyone else but I'm about to ditch FF as primary browser and it isn't because of speed. Just running into too many damned websites that FF won't work with. Used to be I'd just bitch and moan about web developers testing on IE and calling it done but I don't have IE (Fedora) and do have Konq and Chromium and when they can render the pages FF can't it tells me the problem is with FF.
> George, give us the original release on Blu-Ray please, alongside the molested version.
Amen. I own the last VHS box set edition and the bootleg laserdisc rips burned onto TDK armor plated scratchproof blanks. I didn't buy[1] the official DVDs because the one edition the included an original version print it was basically a DVD-9 version of the laserdisc print. Basic two channel sound with old Dolby matrixed surround and not anamorphic. Not enough value since I have no intention of ever playing the 'special edition' version. And if the BD is 'special' only then George can keep the damned things.
[1] I'm not some uberpirate that wouldn't buy anyway. For example I have all forty ST:TOS original issue DVDs on the shelf, all six B5 box sets + Crusade, and so on.
> As for "needing to jailbreak an iPhone to enable basic functionality"? That's > a stretch, don't you think? Just how do you define "basic functionality" of a smartphone?
Depends on your perspective now doesn't it. You see a smartphone and I see a small computer with a cell modem. Any computer I can't program and or install any third party program I want onto is defective and must be repaired or replaced.
No, you would never get reliable video from that one. But keep looking, there are a few SoC products still in production that has NTSC video as an option along with the LCD drivers that are all but universal.
The design is truly lame. Yes bitbanging ntsc video out of an AVR is neat but if you are really trying to build a mass produced device this design is about as stupid as possible. Bitbang video and bitbang USB via yet another AVR with a third as the CPU? Oh. My. God.
Use a single chip ARM or MIPS with a real framebuffer with video out and USB on chip. Can't cost more than the three AVRs in quantity and will do so much more.
And another benefit is that they are also pitching it as a computer but it isn't. I love the AVR line as an embedded colution but the Harvard arch is a killer in that you can't run programs from RAM and the program flash is only good for 10K writes.
> Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator...
Yes, I'm posting two replies to yours. Had more thoughts..
First, there IS no Al Franken. He doesn't exist as anything other than a stage name. The man's legal name is Stuart Smalley. That makes him Senator Stuart Smalley. It is only because the House is under the misrule of a congenital idiot that he was allowed to be seated under a stage name. If we allow this new custom to get established don't come bitchin' in a generation when half of Congress is operating under made up names. After all they have the same reasons as Hollywood types plus even more nutjobs who would like to blow them or their family away. Yup, Senator Awesome will be debating Captain Wonderful.
And yes, he started off as middling quality comedian but has 'graduated' to full blown national joke.
> t would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".
Well go Google it. See hwo often the legacy media refers to Gov. Schwarzenagger as the Governator or Pres. Reagan as a "Former B movie actor" or refers to Bonzo in stories about him.
> Then came things like MTV and extra tiers. Now customers where PAYING to see commercials!
And now the circle is complete. MY cable bill (and probably yours) now has a separate line item for "local channel fee". So now we are officially paying for the TBS/MTV crap with a surcharge for the local channels the cable companies initially formed to provide.
The "free market" really means "the system that best maximizes corporate profits." Usually that means as little > regulation on corporations as is possible, except when it comes to regulations that create a barrier to entry.
Lemme guess, your econ prof gave you that bullpoop. What you are thinking of isn't a free market. It is fascism. Go look it up. Socialism is where the government seizes the 'means of production' which always means the large corps even if the serfs get to keep small shops. Fascism is where the big corps and the government get in bed with each other. The government gives the corps the regulations and such it wants to eliminate competition while they give the government the power it seeks to accomplish their social engineering (usually socialist) goals. And it is here. Now. The government controls (with the assent, willing or otherwise) the financial industry (banks, insurance, etc.) the auto industry and the medical industry. If left unchecked it will control the rest of the Fortune 500 soon.
How did they do it? Why did the Mighty Captains of Industry roll over? Because they are mostly dead, replaced with Harvard and Yale educated MBA types who imbibed socialist theory with their mother's milk.
> "But they fuck up everything, what makes you think they can get this right???"
Exactly. They screw up everything they touch. The answer is to get them to STOP screwing up by taking things away from them until their load drops to a point where they can kinda get the few responsibilities they were supposed to have right.
I am amazed by how many people get this one totally wrong when it comes to the government yet see it on a smaller scale. If you have a perpetual screwup at work you wouldn't be begging the boss to give him additional responsibilities, you would be trying to minimize your pain by ensuring he only got jobs that wouldn't matter much when he screwed them up or ones where you and the other clueful workers could fix his mistakes at minimal effort to yourselves. Assuming of course he is related to the boss (or worse a her blowing the boss) who you couldn't just get fired. Well it is no different with the government except it has a monopoly on the use of force and of late isn't afraid of reminding us of it.
> We should at least TRY to get things under control. The "free market" theory is > obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.
Yes. And let us be bold enough to ask WHY? Think it might have something to do with the fact that the so called free market consists of government granted/sponsored/subsidized/regulated monopoly telco A vs government granted/regulated monopoly cable company B? Spotting the free market in the ISP game makes finding Waldo(tm) child's play. Perhaps if we removed some of the existing government and replaced it with some free market competition we would know if the Free Market can solve our problem? The historical track record for the Free Market is a lot better than Government's unending string of miserable failure after disaster.
Split the monopolies one more time, only without the stupid. Make one part a government regulated monopoly holding the physical plant and the rights of way since those are a natural monopoly but forbid it from providing service to an end point. Make them lease access to the wires and CO to all comers at a fixed price that will allow them to maintain the plant and produce steady utility type dividends to their shareholders. The other half leases access and competes evenly with any new entrants. No need for government to meddle again for network neutrality or any other reason.
No, copyright should only be available for source. Binaries should only be copyrighted as a derived work of the source. Remember the purpose of copyright is NOT to make the author wealthy, it is to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences" and so source should eb required to be disclosed as part of the exchange for the copyright.
This would allow others to study the work, patch the program and adapt it as time went by and the original author lost interest in maintaining it. Note that redistribution of the source would be just as much a copyright violation as leeching the binaries from Pirate Bay is now.
And yes, extending a perpetual copyright[1] to software is daft, as fast as this industry is moving a decade would be more than enough.
[1] Every time Steamboat Willie nears the public domain the House of Mouse is going to buy another copyright extension bill from Congress, thus all copyrights post Steamboat Willie that are still currently in effect will remain in effect for the duration of our current form of government.
> Even with a user-friendly package manager you are still faced with a huge noise to signal ratio > created by the large amount of applications that might do what you want, none of which are the > application you've heard of.
So? Stop thinking in the Windows box. Do what I do in such a situation and just install every app that might do what I want and spend an hour or two playing with them. Once I pick one I remove the others. Doing that sort of promiscuous software installation on Windows would lead to disaster so people quickly learn not to do that, as you apparently have internalized. With Linux's superior package management and the lack of much malware 'in the field', the 'install em all' tactic is rational.
> AFAIK there should be a training requirement for operating anything other than a kiosk-mode system. _Especially_ basic security.
Not really, this thinking is a result of internalizing the "Microsoft Lie" that all computers (by definition) must be as unreliable and insecure as Windows. Which is forgivable since they have spend Sagans of dollars in subtle campaigns to make this assumption almost universal. But it is indeed a lie. However it is the single most important key to their success. So long as a critical mass believe it they can thrive but should it ever come to be questioned they will fail faster than Enron or Worldcom, two other corporations which became predicated on a lie.
I admin for a public library. We have had Linux deployed in our patron labs now for twelve years. Other than basic *NIX permissions and recently SELinux support in our current load we give the general public the full unlocked *NIX experience. Individual accounts with NFS homes, totally unrestricted desktops, etc. GCC is available, not that many (one or two have apparently done it) of our patrons use it, but just as a statement that this is FULL user level access. The only additional lockdown needed was adding a script to nuke processes like eggdrop bots remaining active after a user logs off. Care to guess how many security incidents we have had in a dozen years with thirty desktops that see heavy use, including teens who google up ways to get em to do all sorts of things? One, the aforementioned eggdrop bot.
Care to bet how long a similarly unlocked Windows (or Mac) workstation would last before needing a wipe and reimage? The only responsible course would be to completely reimage between users to stop keyloggers. And that is the difference.
> you should remember that Gnome was started because KDE didn't meet the definition of "free software" due to Qt's licensing.
It wasn't an obscure technical thing, it just wasn't Free by any stretch of the word, period. But there probably won't be a merge to one desktop anytime soon because the two developed two different philosophies as to what a graphical desktop should be and how the internals should work. KDE wants to look like Windows while having OO/Qt based guts. GNOME wants to look like a Mac and import it's "Steve knows best and YOU are an idiot" design philosophy while having more Windows like plumbing, right down to making everything internal as complex and user hostile (Gconf2 anyone?) as possible. It is good we have both of those and the small fry all existing, furiously evolving and competing for hearts and minds. In the end we will get better tech.
Over the last decade we have witnessed the Free Desktop come from behind and achieve rough parity with the best efforts of Win/Mac. Now we are ready to talk about world domination.
> Most people don't want or need to be using Linux and it's asinine to continue to push it on them.
So help me understand you disfunction. It is perfectly OK for Microsoft to, by illegal means even, expend great effort to push their inferior but more widely deployed product but it is somehow wrong for us to promote our 100% Free alternative. Why?
Bring a new new user up on Linux and they really can't use Windows. It really is that simple, I have witnessed it. It is all about what you know and having problems with the 'different.'
> Most people don't want or need to be using Linux and it's asinine to continue to push it on them.
Most people don't want or need to be using Windows and it's asinine to continue to push it on them. Unless you enjoy helping your friends and relatives clean the malware off every few months as a way to have a reason to interact with people or something, then I guess it might be understandable. Windows is twenty years old now and it ain't likely to get better next time anymore than it got fixed any of the other times Microsoft promised "the next version won't be a roach motel." Really, people are spending BILLIONS on licensing Windows, Office, etc. then spending BILLIONS more on various malware scanning/cleaning programs then spending BILLIONS more to clean up the damage when those defenses fail. Explain why that isn't insane?
> And please don't say "shop online" because normal folks simply won't. They want to see it, read the box, > look at other models, and THEN buy. Out of all the customers that have come through my shop I can count > those that shop online with both hands and have fingers left over.
You probably don't want me saying it this bluntly but.... you don't see the customers who shop online because they aren't customers anymore. I know I haven't been in one of my local chop shops in years. Got tired of hearing em say "I don't have that but I can have it in a couple of days." To which I replied on my last visit, "So can I, but I hoped to actually buy one today."
Realized there really wasn't a problem they could actually fix that I couldn't with a bit of help from Google and I can build a machine from parts as good as they can, and I pick out better parts.
> You only get a year and a half on non LTS releases..
That is because Ubuntu doesn't understand the term 'long term release'. Put Centos on and see the difference. Way beyond what you will be supporting the hardware for, probably longer than the original buyer will own the hardware.
> Their answer to "update foo broke my hardware" was to simply disable all updates.
I dunno, Ubuntu is about as bad as Fedora in that dept, so I can see why Dell did it. On this Fedora install I'm about one regression away from nuking the install with a fresh load from the F12[1] DVD, taking the most recent Firefox that doesn't start dragging in a crapload of deps and then just raising the IPtables shields to max and hoping for the best.
[1] F13 isn't an option because of a regression in the kernel that breaks docking on this Thinkpad. Hope that one gets fixed before F12 goes dead in the fall or I'll have no choice but to hunker down and run without updates.
> Fox News was designed to appeal to the American right wing . It doesn't necessarily > correspond with Murdoch's personal politics, which are often opportunist.
Ding! We have a winner. If I had to bet I'd put my money on Murdoch being an Obama supporter. But he is smart enough to spot an under served media market and fill it. Polling has shown the American populace to be about 60% conservative for decades. That is the mother of market niches and he still pretty much has it to himself.
CNN's fall from uncontested #1 in news to their current woes of coming in behind CNN Headline News is entirely their own own stupidity. I grew up watching them. Can't stand em anymore. MSNBC is a joke, even with GE, Comcast and Microsoft's money behind them. Can't see how even a lefty can take those clowns seriously. Hell, they aren't even 24 hour, half their schedule is old reruns of Dateline and documentaries about queers in prison. With that competition is it any wonder that Fox News is running up the score in the ratings, often beating CNN+CNNHN+MSNBC? Do you expect em to do it lefty 'everyone is a winner and gets a trophy' style and slack off until the other guys catch up? Oh, and I hate FNS's primetime schedule too. The fricking Scientologist is the only one there that can actually conduct a decent interview.
> When you spit on the "unwashed masses" don't be surprised when they spit back.
More importantly, when so called scientists[1] behave like arrogant elitist pricks they shouldn't be suprised when those unwashed masses refuse to cede unprecedented political power to them when they cry 'DOOM!'
Because even though we aren't all scientists we do know scoundrels when we hear em and too many of these scientists sound like common con artists because they are playing in an area they are ill equipped for, politics. Even worse they let real crooked politicians hitch their wagons to their theory for their own political AND financial gain. And they are telling us we are all DOOMED unless we dismantle our entire civilization. Those are the most extraordinary claims men of science have ever made and they are doing it on some of the most incomplete evidence ever presented.
And yes, dismantling civilization as we understand it is the only solution. No 'green' energy source has ever went into large scale production (i.e. make a profit without government subsidy) without the greens turning on it. None ever will because that is the point. It isn't a question of finally finding the right engineering solution, greens object to any source of energy that will enable our current civilization to continue because IT is what they truly object to. And far too many 'scientists' are more concerned with green religion than the rational ways of science.
[1] so called because real scientists don't hide their data and they aren't afraid of somebody finding errors in their work, it is called peer review.' In the climate scam they managed to short circuit all of that, carefully rigging things so that the definition of 'climatoligist' became 'one who studies the effects of man caused global warming' and could thus ensure all potential reviewers already agreed with their central belief and was invested in preventing any break in the wall of certitude. I.e. "The science is settled. It is now time to act."
> I think a situation where a patent holder treats someone discussing a means to replicate patented > technology as though they where handing out trade secrets is pretty interesting, certainly./ worthy.
In a sane world making such an admission in a legal filing would be grounds for voiding the patent since patent law requires dislosure of everything a person skilled in that field would need to know to implement the patented tech. The idea of patents is to trade full disclosure for a limited monopoly on commercial exploitation of the idea. However as soon as a patent is filed others may begin using your patented tech as a base to build their own innovations on. Of course they will need to license your original tech to sell theirs and you will have to license theirs if you want to incorporate it, etc. Of this are vast portfolios built of cross licensed codependent patents.
This line means you are either very young or a troll. Go back to before Vista released. It was everywhere that Microsoft was raising their take of a new PC, pretty sure it even made it here on/. But the story was even widespread in the non-tech legacy media.
> Most corporate customers have Enterprise agreements, so what OS comes with the box is utterly irrelevant.
Ever read an Enterprise license agreement? The contract clearly specifies you can only apply those licenses to hardware that already includes a sticker. In other words corporate America is paying twice just to get the right to image the machines and the crap the OEMs ship on a machine makes em feel like they are getting a bargain.
> To say nothing of the price difference between a machine with and without an OEM Windows license > (let's say, $50) wouldn't even count as a rounding error when compared to the TCO of that box > over its lifetime.
Perfect example of being correct but missing the point. Imagine a new storage device that got shut out of the OEM market by the illegal tactics Microsoft has been using for two decades. To make the analogy work, imagine Seagate had run everyone else out for example, and had been forcing OEMs to ship a Seagate drive in every machine sold or pay extra for over a decade. How far would the argument go if you told potential customers to just go ahead and buy the Dell, yank the hard drive (destroying it in the process)[1] and install your new device. Yea, that would sell. You are asking customers to toss something they see as servicable gear that they have already paid for. And something that 99 1/2 of other people use, even if they bitch about it's qualities.
No, we won't have actual competition in the OS market until computers are commonly offered without an operating system and then with a non-negative price displayed for the various OS and/or support options offered.
[1] No, removing a hard drive doesn't destroy it, but removing OEM Windows does destroy it's value since you can't sell it separate from the original hardware. Often you only get a recovery partition that would be getting nuked when you blew off Windows. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine hard drives crippled in a similar manner if a monopoly of the strength of Microsoft's emerged.
> To reply more thoroughly to your argument, what exactly do you think would happen if Microsoft added 25% to the > price of Windows OS's? 50%? 100%? At each step up, Linux (and Apple, and other) market share would increase substantially.
They did that with Vista. 100% of consumer PCs shipped with XP (the previous product) and 100% shipped with Vista and now Win7. Increasing the price didn't cost them one sale. That my friend is a monopoly.
Corporate desktops? Close enough to 100% before and after as to cause one to ignore the change. Why? Because even corporate customers generally can't buy a PC without a bundled Windows license. Sure you can buy a Dell N series but most of the time the same machine with Windows either comes at the same price or even a few bux less. Or worse, the Windows version comes with extra stuff (RAM or HDD) for the same price.
Servers are a different story, the penguin is making great strides in that market.
> I love developing in.NET on Windows, but shit if they started charging me more for OS's and tools I'd be fine moving over to Java on Linux.
Not unless your customers switch. And see above. Switching requires paying for Windows and tossing it. That is a hard sell.
> The vast majority of people could switch to Linux or MacOS if they weren't lazy.
No, buying a Mac requires you have more money than good sense. Besides they are all but useless in a corporate environment, even Linux is a better fit for most.
I had been foretelling the coming Xboxing of Windows for most of the last decade. So instead we are to get the iPhoning of Windows.... oooh big difference. Same chains though.
> From what I can tell (roughly) at least half of/. is civil libertarian, and at least half of/. is against spam.
Those two viewpoints can be held by the same person without conflict. Spam requires theft of service. You have the right to speak. You have the right to buy a billboard. You don't have the right to spray graffiti on a wall you don't own the rights to. You don't have the right to spew spam into my mail server.
Lets have a little intellectual rigor around here, k? Something that appears alien to pregressives like Kagan and her patron. That U of C allowed an intellectual lightweight like Obama to teach (even if it wasn't a full staff position) law devalues every degree they have issued.
> The code was engineered to be cross-platform from the start, built on libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/libvorbis, freetype, etc.
That basic level of avoiding Microsoft only tech makes a port plausible, it doesn't make your code cross platform. I noted the distinct lack of a mention of an explicit cross platform layer such as SDL. The article doesn't say what the original development environment was but I'd put more money on Microsoft Visual Studio than emacs/autoconf/gnu make, etc. Weeks getting a SDL app that builds on Windows to one running on Linux would imply they hit some sort of obscure glitch, the sort they probably would have mentioned.
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> The ISP doesn't pay more, the ISP has a fixed pipe for a fixed cost from their ISP, and so on up the chain.
> At the top of the chain, the backbones have a peering agreement at either fixed cost or no cost.
Despite your low UID it is clear you don't know shit about the Internet game. Lemme break it down for you.
Imagine you are a cable company in a small rural town of 10,000 and for some reason are just now adding Internet service. So you have installed a fiber backbone in town and some boxes on the poles to segment the town into a dozen segments. You just paid one Metric Shitload for a 1GB fiber from your plant to an upstream provider. Now you are ready for customers. 10Mb service for $50 sounds in the ballpark so you advertise it. The first batch of customners are raving filehogs. 10Mb per customer for 100 customers... your pipe is running at capacity.... or would be if you could actually deliver that to them with the segments you put in place. So after adding a lot more segments you have em all happy. And your outbound pipe is running at 100%. So when the next 100 customers show up you have some decisions to make.
1. Just oversubscribe em until everyone complains.
2. Buy a bigger pipe. But that is just losing money at a faster rate because the $50 monthly charge x 100 isn't even in the same ballpark as just the 1MS (Metric Shitload) you are paying for bandwidth and you have to maintain the rest of the plant, pay the bank note on the original hardware investment, pay tech support, etc.
3. Cap their asses.
The current 'unlimited' retail Internet only works if you can oversubscribe and that is only possible if the filehogs are a small minority of users. Netflix, YouTube and other bandwidth eating apps are quickly changing that assumption.
> If I use more bandwidth I deserve to pay more because it costs my ISP more to cater to me..
Exactly. Meter bandwidth and the whole argument changes to a much saner ground.
Blocking P2P becomes a non-issue with ISPs if they can charge the filehogs enough to make a profit from them. Especially since if they have to pay most filehogs aren't going to be downloading nearly as much and if seeding actually has a monetary cost it really gets cut back. The p2p problem mostly goes away.
Then there are the VOIP and Netflix (more generally the Video on Demand) problems. Those also cease to be massive threats to the ISPs business model. Since most ISPs are government monopolies also involved in the video and dialtone markets they do need some regulatory thwacking to make sure they don't compete unfairly. Better still would be splitting the monopoly parts from the dialtone, IP and TV delivery industries from the content/value add. See my earlier post here and many in the past flogging this horse.
> Que the standard partisan trolls screaming about how the government should "keep their hands off of the free market".
No, que me saying we should MAKE the Internet a free market.
> Remember folks, before posting make sure to conveniently forget that the current state of affairs is anything but a free market..
No, most folks get to pick government regulated monopoly telco A or government regulated monopoly cable company B with a government regulated but hopelessly out of the running because spectrum isn't nearly as bountiful as wires/fiber, wireless carrier as option C. Break the monopolies one last time, but do it smart unlike the AT&T fiasco. Regulated utility in control of the physical plant running on right of way monopolies selling access to unregulated entities providing TV, dialtone or IP.
> ..and that telephone companies have been common carriers for years without the foundations of freedom this country was supposedly built on crumbling. (well, at least not because of that...)
Yes. And you can call anyone at regulated rates..... so I can call California cheaper than the town next door because of it. Oh God bless the wisdom of the regulators, they brought sanity to the telephone game! And I get to pay $11/month for AT&T to tell their switch to NOT supress the Caller ID stream. Oh joy of joys. If you want the same insane, capricious bullcrap on the Internet, give control to the FCC. And thst is before the political cleansing that is the real reason they want to get involved starts.
And why do I believe the want the control for political reasons? Because I listened to their words and did something I'm not supposed to do. I believed they intend to do exactly what they say for once.
> The browser vendors' fetishistic obsession with Javascript speed is most irritating.
Amen. Don't know 'bout everyone else but I'm about to ditch FF as primary browser and it isn't because of speed. Just running into too many damned websites that FF won't work with. Used to be I'd just bitch and moan about web developers testing on IE and calling it done but I don't have IE (Fedora) and do have Konq and Chromium and when they can render the pages FF can't it tells me the problem is with FF.
> George, give us the original release on Blu-Ray please, alongside the molested version.
Amen. I own the last VHS box set edition and the bootleg laserdisc rips burned onto TDK armor plated scratchproof blanks. I didn't buy[1] the official DVDs because the one edition the included an original version print it was basically a DVD-9 version of the laserdisc print. Basic two channel sound with old Dolby matrixed surround and not anamorphic. Not enough value since I have no intention of ever playing the 'special edition' version. And if the BD is 'special' only then George can keep the damned things.
[1] I'm not some uberpirate that wouldn't buy anyway. For example I have all forty ST:TOS original issue DVDs on the shelf, all six B5 box sets + Crusade, and so on.
> As for "needing to jailbreak an iPhone to enable basic functionality"? That's
> a stretch, don't you think? Just how do you define "basic functionality" of a smartphone?
Depends on your perspective now doesn't it. You see a smartphone and I see a small computer with a cell modem. Any computer I can't program and or install any third party program I want onto is defective and must be repaired or replaced.
No, you would never get reliable video from that one. But keep looking, there are a few SoC products still in production that has NTSC video as an option along with the LCD drivers that are all but universal.
The design is truly lame. Yes bitbanging ntsc video out of an AVR is neat but if you are really trying to build a mass produced device this design is about as stupid as possible. Bitbang video and bitbang USB via yet another AVR with a third as the CPU? Oh. My. God.
Use a single chip ARM or MIPS with a real framebuffer with video out and USB on chip. Can't cost more than the three AVRs in quantity and will do so much more.
And another benefit is that they are also pitching it as a computer but it isn't. I love the AVR line as an embedded colution but the Harvard arch is a killer in that you can't run programs from RAM and the program flash is only good for 10K writes.
> Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator...
Yes, I'm posting two replies to yours. Had more thoughts..
First, there IS no Al Franken. He doesn't exist as anything other than a stage name. The man's legal name is Stuart Smalley. That makes him Senator Stuart Smalley. It is only because the House is under the misrule of a congenital idiot that he was allowed to be seated under a stage name. If we allow this new custom to get established don't come bitchin' in a generation when half of Congress is operating under made up names. After all they have the same reasons as Hollywood types plus even more nutjobs who would like to blow them or their family away. Yup, Senator Awesome will be debating Captain Wonderful.
And yes, he started off as middling quality comedian but has 'graduated' to full blown national joke.
> t would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".
Well go Google it. See hwo often the legacy media refers to Gov. Schwarzenagger as the Governator or Pres. Reagan as a "Former B movie actor" or refers to Bonzo in stories about him.
> Then came things like MTV and extra tiers. Now customers where PAYING to see commercials!
And now the circle is complete. MY cable bill (and probably yours) now has a separate line item for "local channel fee". So now we are officially paying for the TBS/MTV crap with a surcharge for the local channels the cable companies initially formed to provide.
The "free market" really means "the system that best maximizes corporate profits." Usually that means as little
> regulation on corporations as is possible, except when it comes to regulations that create a barrier to entry.
Lemme guess, your econ prof gave you that bullpoop. What you are thinking of isn't a free market. It is fascism. Go look it up. Socialism is where the government seizes the 'means of production' which always means the large corps even if the serfs get to keep small shops. Fascism is where the big corps and the government get in bed with each other. The government gives the corps the regulations and such it wants to eliminate competition while they give the government the power it seeks to accomplish their social engineering (usually socialist) goals. And it is here. Now. The government controls (with the assent, willing or otherwise) the financial industry (banks, insurance, etc.) the auto industry and the medical industry. If left unchecked it will control the rest of the Fortune 500 soon.
How did they do it? Why did the Mighty Captains of Industry roll over? Because they are mostly dead, replaced with Harvard and Yale educated MBA types who imbibed socialist theory with their mother's milk.
> "But they fuck up everything, what makes you think they can get this right???"
Exactly. They screw up everything they touch. The answer is to get them to STOP screwing up by taking things away from them until their load drops to a point where they can kinda get the few responsibilities they were supposed to have right.
I am amazed by how many people get this one totally wrong when it comes to the government yet see it on a smaller scale. If you have a perpetual screwup at work you wouldn't be begging the boss to give him additional responsibilities, you would be trying to minimize your pain by ensuring he only got jobs that wouldn't matter much when he screwed them up or ones where you and the other clueful workers could fix his mistakes at minimal effort to yourselves. Assuming of course he is related to the boss (or worse a her blowing the boss) who you couldn't just get fired. Well it is no different with the government except it has a monopoly on the use of force and of late isn't afraid of reminding us of it.
> We should at least TRY to get things under control. The "free market" theory is
> obviously worth as much as tits on a bull when it comes to ISPs.
Yes. And let us be bold enough to ask WHY? Think it might have something to do with the fact that the so called free market consists of government granted/sponsored/subsidized/regulated monopoly telco A vs government granted/regulated monopoly cable company B? Spotting the free market in the ISP game makes finding Waldo(tm) child's play. Perhaps if we removed some of the existing government and replaced it with some free market competition we would know if the Free Market can solve our problem? The historical track record for the Free Market is a lot better than Government's unending string of miserable failure after disaster.
Split the monopolies one more time, only without the stupid. Make one part a government regulated monopoly holding the physical plant and the rights of way since those are a natural monopoly but forbid it from providing service to an end point. Make them lease access to the wires and CO to all comers at a fixed price that will allow them to maintain the plant and produce steady utility type dividends to their shareholders. The other half leases access and competes evenly with any new entrants. No need for government to meddle again for network neutrality or any other reason.
> What *should* be happening...
Nah, that doesn't get to the root of the problem.
No, copyright should only be available for source. Binaries should only be copyrighted as a derived work of the source. Remember the purpose of copyright is NOT to make the author wealthy, it is to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences" and so source should eb required to be disclosed as part of the exchange for the copyright.
This would allow others to study the work, patch the program and adapt it as time went by and the original author lost interest in maintaining it. Note that redistribution of the source would be just as much a copyright violation as leeching the binaries from Pirate Bay is now.
And yes, extending a perpetual copyright[1] to software is daft, as fast as this industry is moving a decade would be more than enough.
[1] Every time Steamboat Willie nears the public domain the House of Mouse is going to buy another copyright extension bill from Congress, thus all copyrights post Steamboat Willie that are still currently in effect will remain in effect for the duration of our current form of government.
> Even with a user-friendly package manager you are still faced with a huge noise to signal ratio
> created by the large amount of applications that might do what you want, none of which are the
> application you've heard of.
So? Stop thinking in the Windows box. Do what I do in such a situation and just install every app that might do what I want and spend an hour or two playing with them. Once I pick one I remove the others. Doing that sort of promiscuous software installation on Windows would lead to disaster so people quickly learn not to do that, as you apparently have internalized. With Linux's superior package management and the lack of much malware 'in the field', the 'install em all' tactic is rational.
> AFAIK there should be a training requirement for operating anything other than a kiosk-mode system. _Especially_ basic security.
Not really, this thinking is a result of internalizing the "Microsoft Lie" that all computers (by definition) must be as unreliable and insecure as Windows. Which is forgivable since they have spend Sagans of dollars in subtle campaigns to make this assumption almost universal. But it is indeed a lie. However it is the single most important key to their success. So long as a critical mass believe it they can thrive but should it ever come to be questioned they will fail faster than Enron or Worldcom, two other corporations which became predicated on a lie.
I admin for a public library. We have had Linux deployed in our patron labs now for twelve years. Other than basic *NIX permissions and recently SELinux support in our current load we give the general public the full unlocked *NIX experience. Individual accounts with NFS homes, totally unrestricted desktops, etc. GCC is available, not that many (one or two have apparently done it) of our patrons use it, but just as a statement that this is FULL user level access. The only additional lockdown needed was adding a script to nuke processes like eggdrop bots remaining active after a user logs off. Care to guess how many security incidents we have had in a dozen years with thirty desktops that see heavy use, including teens who google up ways to get em to do all sorts of things? One, the aforementioned eggdrop bot.
Care to bet how long a similarly unlocked Windows (or Mac) workstation would last before needing a wipe and reimage? The only responsible course would be to completely reimage between users to stop keyloggers. And that is the difference.
> you should remember that Gnome was started because KDE didn't meet the definition of "free software" due to Qt's licensing.
It wasn't an obscure technical thing, it just wasn't Free by any stretch of the word, period. But there probably won't be a merge to one desktop anytime soon because the two developed two different philosophies as to what a graphical desktop should be and how the internals should work. KDE wants to look like Windows while having OO/Qt based guts. GNOME wants to look like a Mac and import it's "Steve knows best and YOU are an idiot" design philosophy while having more Windows like plumbing, right down to making everything internal as complex and user hostile (Gconf2 anyone?) as possible. It is good we have both of those and the small fry all existing, furiously evolving and competing for hearts and minds. In the end we will get better tech.
Over the last decade we have witnessed the Free Desktop come from behind and achieve rough parity with the best efforts of Win/Mac. Now we are ready to talk about world domination.
> Most people don't want or need to be using Linux and it's asinine to continue to push it on them.
So help me understand you disfunction. It is perfectly OK for Microsoft to, by illegal means even, expend great effort to push their inferior but more widely deployed product but it is somehow wrong for us to promote our 100% Free alternative. Why?
Bring a new new user up on Linux and they really can't use Windows. It really is that simple, I have witnessed it. It is all about what you know and having problems with the 'different.'
> Most people don't want or need to be using Linux and it's asinine to continue to push it on them.
Most people don't want or need to be using Windows and it's asinine to continue to push it on them. Unless you enjoy helping your friends and relatives clean the malware off every few months as a way to have a reason to interact with people or something, then I guess it might be understandable. Windows is twenty years old now and it ain't likely to get better next time anymore than it got fixed any of the other times Microsoft promised "the next version won't be a roach motel." Really, people are spending BILLIONS on licensing Windows, Office, etc. then spending BILLIONS more on various malware scanning/cleaning programs then spending BILLIONS more to clean up the damage when those defenses fail. Explain why that isn't insane?
> And please don't say "shop online" because normal folks simply won't. They want to see it, read the box,
> look at other models, and THEN buy. Out of all the customers that have come through my shop I can count
> those that shop online with both hands and have fingers left over.
You probably don't want me saying it this bluntly but.... you don't see the customers who shop online because they aren't customers anymore. I know I haven't been in one of my local chop shops in years. Got tired of hearing em say "I don't have that but I can have it in a couple of days." To which I replied on my last visit, "So can I, but I hoped to actually buy one today."
Realized there really wasn't a problem they could actually fix that I couldn't with a bit of help from Google and I can build a machine from parts as good as they can, and I pick out better parts.
> You only get a year and a half on non LTS releases..
That is because Ubuntu doesn't understand the term 'long term release'. Put Centos on and see the difference. Way beyond what you will be supporting the hardware for, probably longer than the original buyer will own the hardware.
> Their answer to "update foo broke my hardware" was to simply disable all updates.
I dunno, Ubuntu is about as bad as Fedora in that dept, so I can see why Dell did it. On this Fedora install I'm about one regression away from nuking the install with a fresh load from the F12[1] DVD, taking the most recent Firefox that doesn't start dragging in a crapload of deps and then just raising the IPtables shields to max and hoping for the best.
[1] F13 isn't an option because of a regression in the kernel that breaks docking on this Thinkpad. Hope that one gets fixed before F12 goes dead in the fall or I'll have no choice but to hunker down and run without updates.
> Fox News was designed to appeal to the American right wing . It doesn't necessarily
> correspond with Murdoch's personal politics, which are often opportunist.
Ding! We have a winner. If I had to bet I'd put my money on Murdoch being an Obama supporter. But he is smart enough to spot an under served media market and fill it. Polling has shown the American populace to be about 60% conservative for decades. That is the mother of market niches and he still pretty much has it to himself.
CNN's fall from uncontested #1 in news to their current woes of coming in behind CNN Headline News is entirely their own own stupidity. I grew up watching them. Can't stand em anymore. MSNBC is a joke, even with GE, Comcast and Microsoft's money behind them. Can't see how even a lefty can take those clowns seriously. Hell, they aren't even 24 hour, half their schedule is old reruns of Dateline and documentaries about queers in prison. With that competition is it any wonder that Fox News is running up the score in the ratings, often beating CNN+CNNHN+MSNBC? Do you expect em to do it lefty 'everyone is a winner and gets a trophy' style and slack off until the other guys catch up? Oh, and I hate FNS's primetime schedule too. The fricking Scientologist is the only one there that can actually conduct a decent interview.
Ok, I'm done ranting now.
> When you spit on the "unwashed masses" don't be surprised when they spit back.
More importantly, when so called scientists[1] behave like arrogant elitist pricks they shouldn't be suprised when those unwashed masses refuse to cede unprecedented political power to them when they cry 'DOOM!'
Because even though we aren't all scientists we do know scoundrels when we hear em and too many of these scientists sound like common con artists because they are playing in an area they are ill equipped for, politics. Even worse they let real crooked politicians hitch their wagons to their theory for their own political AND financial gain. And they are telling us we are all DOOMED unless we dismantle our entire civilization. Those are the most extraordinary claims men of science have ever made and they are doing it on some of the most incomplete evidence ever presented.
And yes, dismantling civilization as we understand it is the only solution. No 'green' energy source has ever went into large scale production (i.e. make a profit without government subsidy) without the greens turning on it. None ever will because that is the point. It isn't a question of finally finding the right engineering solution, greens object to any source of energy that will enable our current civilization to continue because IT is what they truly object to. And far too many 'scientists' are more concerned with green religion than the rational ways of science.
[1] so called because real scientists don't hide their data and they aren't afraid of somebody finding errors in their work, it is called peer review.' In the climate scam they managed to short circuit all of that, carefully rigging things so that the definition of 'climatoligist' became 'one who studies the effects of man caused global warming' and could thus ensure all potential reviewers already agreed with their central belief and was invested in preventing any break in the wall of certitude. I.e. "The science is settled. It is now time to act."
> I think a situation where a patent holder treats someone discussing a means to replicate patented ./ worthy.
> technology as though they where handing out trade secrets is pretty interesting, certainly
In a sane world making such an admission in a legal filing would be grounds for voiding the patent since patent law requires dislosure of everything a person skilled in that field would need to know to implement the patented tech. The idea of patents is to trade full disclosure for a limited monopoly on commercial exploitation of the idea. However as soon as a patent is filed others may begin using your patented tech as a base to build their own innovations on. Of course they will need to license your original tech to sell theirs and you will have to license theirs if you want to incorporate it, etc. Of this are vast portfolios built of cross licensed codependent patents.
But we live in bizarro world. Sucks don't it.
> What price increase ?
This line means you are either very young or a troll. Go back to before Vista released. It was everywhere that Microsoft was raising their take of a new PC, pretty sure it even made it here on /. But the story was even widespread in the non-tech legacy media.
> Most corporate customers have Enterprise agreements, so what OS comes with the box is utterly irrelevant.
Ever read an Enterprise license agreement? The contract clearly specifies you can only apply those licenses to hardware that already includes a sticker. In other words corporate America is paying twice just to get the right to image the machines and the crap the OEMs ship on a machine makes em feel like they are getting a bargain.
> To say nothing of the price difference between a machine with and without an OEM Windows license
> (let's say, $50) wouldn't even count as a rounding error when compared to the TCO of that box
> over its lifetime.
Perfect example of being correct but missing the point. Imagine a new storage device that got shut out of the OEM market by the illegal tactics Microsoft has been using for two decades. To make the analogy work, imagine Seagate had run everyone else out for example, and had been forcing OEMs to ship a Seagate drive in every machine sold or pay extra for over a decade. How far would the argument go if you told potential customers to just go ahead and buy the Dell, yank the hard drive (destroying it in the process)[1] and install your new device. Yea, that would sell. You are asking customers to toss something they see as servicable gear that they have already paid for. And something that 99 1/2 of other people use, even if they bitch about it's qualities.
No, we won't have actual competition in the OS market until computers are commonly offered without an operating system and then with a non-negative price displayed for the various OS and/or support options offered.
[1] No, removing a hard drive doesn't destroy it, but removing OEM Windows does destroy it's value since you can't sell it separate from the original hardware. Often you only get a recovery partition that would be getting nuked when you blew off Windows. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine hard drives crippled in a similar manner if a monopoly of the strength of Microsoft's emerged.
> To reply more thoroughly to your argument, what exactly do you think would happen if Microsoft added 25% to the
> price of Windows OS's? 50%? 100%? At each step up, Linux (and Apple, and other) market share would increase substantially.
They did that with Vista. 100% of consumer PCs shipped with XP (the previous product) and 100% shipped with Vista and now Win7. Increasing the price didn't cost them one sale. That my friend is a monopoly.
Corporate desktops? Close enough to 100% before and after as to cause one to ignore the change. Why? Because even corporate customers generally can't buy a PC without a bundled Windows license. Sure you can buy a Dell N series but most of the time the same machine with Windows either comes at the same price or even a few bux less. Or worse, the Windows version comes with extra stuff (RAM or HDD) for the same price.
Servers are a different story, the penguin is making great strides in that market.
> I love developing in .NET on Windows, but shit if they started charging me more for OS's and tools I'd be fine moving over to Java on Linux.
Not unless your customers switch. And see above. Switching requires paying for Windows and tossing it. That is a hard sell.
> The vast majority of people could switch to Linux or MacOS if they weren't lazy.
No, buying a Mac requires you have more money than good sense. Besides they are all but useless in a corporate environment, even Linux is a better fit for most.
I had been foretelling the coming Xboxing of Windows for most of the last decade. So instead we are to get the iPhoning of Windows.... oooh big difference. Same chains though.
> From what I can tell (roughly) at least half of /. is civil libertarian, and at least half of /. is against spam.
Those two viewpoints can be held by the same person without conflict. Spam requires theft of service. You have the right to speak. You have the right to buy a billboard. You don't have the right to spray graffiti on a wall you don't own the rights to. You don't have the right to spew spam into my mail server.
Lets have a little intellectual rigor around here, k? Something that appears alien to pregressives like Kagan and her patron. That U of C allowed an intellectual lightweight like Obama to teach (even if it wasn't a full staff position) law devalues every degree they have issued.
> Quote TFA:
> The code was engineered to be cross-platform from the start, built on libraries like OpenGL, OpenAL, libogg/libvorbis, freetype, etc.
That basic level of avoiding Microsoft only tech makes a port plausible, it doesn't make your code cross platform. I noted the distinct lack of a mention of an explicit cross platform layer such as SDL. The article doesn't say what the original development environment was but I'd put more money on Microsoft Visual Studio than emacs/autoconf/gnu make, etc. Weeks getting a SDL app that builds on Windows to one running on Linux would imply they hit some sort of obscure glitch, the sort they probably would have mentioned.